So, I have an idea of how maybe RPGs could handle trauma and wounding to be realistic, but also to get away from anything having to do with any sort of hitpoint system, or anything resembly a hitpoint system. I think this is mandated by the fact that you have some situations where a person is shot once and dies or is incapacitated immediately (like Brandon Lee), but there are also many situations where a person is shot a whole bunch of times and is not incapacitated (for some reason I immediately think of the pirate Blackbeard, or was it Bluebeard?), and in many cases it seems like luck is the key factor deciding the way things turn out. Using any system that tallies prior trauma and results in an incapacitation when some total is reached, like hitpoints or a Condition Monitor, it's really hard to account for the rare cases where someone takes a huge amount of trauma but isn't stopped.

I propose a RPG system where any time someone is shot, there's a certain probability that the person is incapacitated, and a certain probability that the person is dead, but we don't keep track of prior trauma in reference to a certain total where incapacitation is certain. Instead, we just rely on the fact that if the person rolls the dice for getting wounded many times it becomes more and more likely that we'll get a result of incapacitation or dead.

We could handle things like calibers and hollow points and other things that affect deadliness of weapons by adjusting the probabilities of a kill or an incapacitation. For example, 9x19mm FMJ would have a smaller chance of killing or incapacitating you with any given hit than .45 ACP FMJ, but either would have a probability of doing so. For something like .50 BMG the probability could get very large, perhaps taking up the majority of possible results.

Called shots would be handled by giving the shooter a difficult initial to-hit, but once he does hit the wounding "table" he rolls on has probabilities greatly adjusted towards a more likely kill or incapacitation, i.e. a headshot table.

Armor would "cover up" certain possible results representing how vital organs are protected, so that if you rolled certain results that would otherwise kill or incapacitate, but the target were wearing armor and the NIJ level of the armor were high enough, you'd instead get a result of no trauma.

You'd still keep track of total amount of wounding for the purpose of blood loss, healing, disability, or whatever, later on.

Sort of a Call of Duty 4 principle then. But Call of Duty doesn't have the bleeding bit, which means you either die or it's like you were never shot.

That's actually a neat idea. I do think you'd want to account for blood loss somehow, not necessarily in the form of hit points, but just keeping a note of how many times the character has taken significant trauma previously and each one shifts the table one or two boxes up (into the incapacitate area). This idea is neat in that it can either be very complex (a real table, maybe 1d100, with fine granularity and results from damage) or very simple (something akin to Paranoia, which has only 3 levels of wounding, if memory serves, and assuming you don't bleed out quickly, none have any real impact on future damage).

Have you looked at the RoleMaster system at all? I believe the RM cyberpunk game, Cyberspace is most germane.

This vaguely reminds me of Bushido Blade for some reason. (Probably the lack of Hit Points.) I always wanted to see something like that in another game. Maybe I'll check out CoD4...

-paws

hmm. so just to start coming up with numbers off the top of my head:

say the threshhold for death is your Body attribute. a 5.56mm pistol would be...2d6. 7.62mm 4d6, 9mm 5d6, 12mm...7d6?

burst fire adds +1d6 per round fired. hollowpoint gives a +1d6. Platelete Factories give a -1d6 to wound rolls. consecutive hits taken during the course of battle give +1d6 per wound?

probably have to make it Body x(variable) for your death threshhold, where the variable is dependant on your metatype, since getting killed would be pretty dang easy, and would reflect the difference in 'robustness' of the metatypes. although...trolls orcs and dwarfs already have high Body attributes to begin with...

(Body)/2 +2? gives an average human a threshhold of 4. able to take a .22 burst or a couple .45 rounds.

Positive Quality Toughness: +1 to your death threshhold

The worry here is the possible effect of, "I'm still walking around, but I'll be in the hospital for a long, long time." When someone takes a bunch of small wounds, their wound total gets very high, but none of the small wounds are enough to incapacitate. But when it comes time to figure out how long it will take to heal, all those small wounds will really draw things out.

That problem would seemingly be easily solved with a cap on hospital stay length? Perhaps several caps for different categories of injuries?

I think Steve Kenson might have beat you guys to the punch on this. The Mutants & Masterminds/True20 system basically has saving throws anytime you're hit (this is basically a soak roll). The amount you fail the save by determines the level of your injury/trauma, and the number of times you fail is recorded and affects the outcome of future soak rolls.

No hitpoints, very little bookkeeping.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/beta/doc/1G1-158733704.html

Check it out. An article on 5.56 lethality and wounding in CQB.