Okay, so there's a lot of FOnline servers out there right now and they all follow the path of F1 and F2 when it comes to combat. I mean yeah, there are different crit settings, different damage values and different movement rules (running allowed on/off in battle mode), but still we seem to be stuck with crit weapons, burst weapons and hitpoints-based damage - the only things that F1/F2 system allows. I wonder if we ever see a server that:
- models suppression - being shot at lowers your CTH, so that we're not stuck with 95% "I see you, you're dead" situations
- models cover, at least to some degree - lowering the CTH if you stand next to cover object and have a certain angle on the shooter
- has a different take on damage, which is unlike GURPS - so that we don't have those terrible "crit or damage" choices to make when building a character; for example, imagine a server where every hit is a critical, bursts have lower CTH and are just a series of criticals and your HP is just a way of portraying your blood loss; you get shot, you lose some every second until someone patches you up or you die;
- takes taking certain positions (crouched, prone, standing) into account when determining CTH.
... and that's just a list o things I'd love to see in a "realistic" setting. We could also go for the arcade mode, why not - I mean as far as I know, the engine is pretty flexible and cvet works with people that want to break new grounds.
The point is, we have an excellent tool (the FOnline engine) which allows for a lot of scripting, yet we're still stuck with a ruleset of a pen and paper RPG game that is more or less dead by now (anyone plays GURPS? please raise your hand). In retrospect, I'm really sad that Black Isle didn't decide to use a superior ruleset like CP2020 or even Shadowrun. What are your thoughts on this? Is the battle system of Fallout "fine as it is", or would you flock to a server that radically replaced them?
To be more provocative: why are we all blindly following Fallout (GURPS) rules, even in the Fallout setting, when we have so much space to build something better? Is it laziness, or just nostalgia? Or maybe just the fact that building a server requires a shitload of work and when it fails because of some innovative mechanics it'd make the devs feel the burn twice as hard?
And yes, this is a purely theorycrafting-based thread.
