Do you think the concept of critical hits apply in real life?

Sn1p3r187

Sn1p3r187

Carolinian Shaolin Monk
http://www.giantbomb.com/critical-hit/3015-97/

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CriticalHit

Do you think the concept of critical hits apply in real life? Where as if you shoot or hit someone in a specific spot based on how lucky you are you may incapacitate them, break a bone, cause exsanguition, knock the air out of em, or kill them in one shot? I thought about this after playing Fallout and Silent Storm with combat messages ranging from their arm being pulverized, knocked unconscious by a bullet wound to the head that didn't kill them, their childbearing days being in trouble from a groin shot and bleeding and deafness. I kinda think it does apply in real life in a way, my ASI once told me that if I'm shot and I'm still moving around and can function well enough and I'm still fighting then it's likely the bullet wound I get from .45 ACP or 5.56x45mm won't kill me. But it'd still need to be tended to in case the wound bites me in the ass 20 years later when I die of lead poisoning. Another thing. Heard about this lady who got shot in the head, but the bullet split apart once it reached her cranium and fragments went straight through her frontal lobe and into the back. And she perfectly fine, hurt like hell but she was alive and functioning, and she lived. What do you think about the concept of critical hits to real life? And do you think that critical hits happen way more often than we think irl?
 
Well yeah, putting the bullet in some spots does more damage than in other spots.
A shot to the head, coming from the front but to the side of the head can easily lead to the bullet just scraping off, while a shot to the eye from the same position is more often fatal.
A shot to the leg, not hitting any arteries, can leave you pretty much in fighting shape (depending on the bullet and adrenaline level), a shot to the testicles might knock you out immediately.
Same with body shots. Sometimes a bullet might go right through, not even hitting critical blood vessels, and sometimes it can hit a vital organ, killing you within minutes.
 
Personally, the way I look at it, and from a realistic standpoint. If I shot you in the hand say with a 9mm firearm, your hand will now be useless. If I shot you in any part of the leg, you will be limping. Thus making any hit as a critical hit.
 
illuminvti said:
Personally, the way I look at it, and from a realistic standpoint. If I shot you in the hand say with a 9mm firearm, your hand will now be useless. If I shot you in any part of the leg, you will be limping. Thus making any hit as a critical hit.
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But what about what Hassknecht said?
 
If it isn't deflected outright by your own defences (natural or otherwise), then unless you have legendary toughness any hit from somebody intending to kill you is probably a critical hit.
 
It's a justifiable abstraction of "hitting people in certain places or in certain ways is going to do a lot more damage than hitting them in other places in other ways" combined with the idea that combat is pretty hectic and you can't always plan out what you're going to do, so you express it as a random happening.

I mean, if you shoot someone in the eye, or your sword slides in between the joints in the armor you're going to hurt them a whole lot more than if you shoot them in the foot or your sword hits somewhere that's heavily armored. I think the real issue is that games let characters absorb significantly more punishment than is to be expected. Like in Dungeons & Dragons a level 7 fighter with a 16 con will have about 56 HP, whereas an arrow shot from a longbow will do on average about 4.5 HP worth of damage. The unrealistic thing is not that some arrows will hurt that guy a lot more than than others, it's that you can shoot 11 arrows in the guy without killing him.

The other thing that games don't really do a good job modeling is just "severely painful, but likely nonfatal injuries tend to take people out of the fight."
 
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PossibleCabbage said:
The other thing that games don't really do a good job modeling is just "severely painful, but likely nonfatal injuries tend to take people out of the fight."
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I actually wish this would be modelled better in more games, but I'm not sure how fun these games would be. Then again, combat in real life isn't fun unless you're mentally deranged.
 
Critical hits are less unrealistic than normal hits.
Normal hit is many games are : The opponement has 100 hp. My bullets deliver 20 damage in the chest, so i have to shoot a guy five time in the chest to make him die. If i only shoot him 4 times, he would have 20/100hp, but he will still be able to fight as well as he had 100/100 hp, and he would still be able to fight for hours as long as you don't shoot him a fifth time. Try to imagine how anyone would be able to fight back if they had 4 bullets in the chest.
 
Yeah, realistically the critical hit chance would be around 80% or so.
But that would make games pretty damn boring :D
 
Realistically, NPCs would drop as soon as hit by a bullet - unless extraordinary circumstances

In fact, FoT (on easy) behaves much more like that
 
zegh8578 said:
Realistically, NPCs would drop as soon as hit by a bullet - unless extraordinary circumstances

In fact, FoT (on easy) behaves much more like that
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Fallout Tactics? But what about if you take body armor into account here? Would they still drop? I mean they'd probably survive but they still would've got the wind knocked out of em.
 
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This article was interesting. It basically states that 85% of people shot usually survive. I'm not sure how this blend into critical hits from guns but I'd guess the critical hit didn't do its job of killing the opponent.- http://www.defensivecarry.com/forum...references/124699-85-people-shot-survive.html

http://www.livescience.com/21774-bullet-gunshot-wound-survive.html

So my speculation here after reading these.

1. Medical care has advanced so far along that something normally considered lethal is now survivable

2. The ammunition isn't doing its job whether it's a 9x19mm Parabellum, .45 ACP, or 10mm.

3. People are really tough to kill and shooting someone 10 times with a .45 ACP in the torso area isn't enough to drop them.

But the real question here is- Does this change the chance of critical shots in real life being around 80%?
 
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Sn1p3r187 said:
zegh8578 said:
Realistically, NPCs would drop as soon as hit by a bullet - unless extraordinary circumstances

In fact, FoT (on easy) behaves much more like that
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Fallout Tactics? But what about if you take body armor into account here? Would they still drop? I mean they'd probably survive but they still would've got the wind knocked out of em.
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Of course not, with body armor - especially awesome fictional armors, the damage would be deflected. In a realistic reality, the damage would be successfully and entirely absorbed by the armor and dispersed through the material/bounced back out, depending on how the armor works.

Once armored, a critical would be interpreted as a failure of the armor to protect you, or the bullet hitting a weak spot, thus causing a lot of injury. There is one particular critical, where it is even stated "bypassed your armor", which basically means your body takes the full brunt of the damage. In FoT these often result in the insta-death of the NPC, armor or no armor
 
sea said:
I see critical hits as basically "on target" hits. In real life, most people (even those trained to use weapons, like police and soldiers) are not that accurate. It's reasonable to expect that most bullets might not hit, and many that do might graze the target or inflict surface damage, enough that it won't take the target out of a fight.

Obviously, that's still not "realistic" because people won't be grazed by bullets 90% of the time or whatever, but that's how the abstraction tends to make the most sense in my head.
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Do you think games like Red Dead Redemption, Spec Ops the line, and Far Cry 2 have more realistic combat or rather damage physics in terms of criticals than Fallout or Silent Storm?
 
It all depends on your interpretation of "critical".
If you get shot in the eye with a 9x19mm (head on at close to medium range), you'll pretty much always die. Does that mean it's to be seen as a critical? I don't know.

But in general, the concept holds. If a bullet hits a bone or joint and causes it to shatter, it's a critical. It does more damage than generally expected. If it does the same but glances off the bone instead, it's a normal hit with a normal temporary and permanent wound cavity. Both can still kill you though.

The FBI has a lot of interesting literature on what makes people actually die in combat and about things like "stopping power". In short, stopping power doesn't actually exist, unless you score a critical (take out the brain stem, the heart, etc, which makes humans crumble like a sack o' potatoes).
A human generally stops when he gets hit simply because he lost the will to carry on. With the "right" mindset, mortally wounded humans can continue fighting for a frighteningly long period of time before expiring.
One could say that anything that takes you out of the fight immediately is a critical?

It's more a question of semantics, really.
 
What is a critical hit? I would imagine, that they are defined differently in different games. Is it a (dice roll dmg * crit modifier), or (max dmg * crit modifier), or just (max dmg). Depending on the definition, the real life equivalent will be different.
 
Hassknecht said:
Yeah, realistically the critical hit chance would be around 80% or so.
But that would make games pretty damn boring :D
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No, the problem is games don't have the other factors real life has in preventing people from getting hurt. Not just armor deflection, but tactics, a lack of monsters standing around in field to attack you, a lack of magic fireballs at a rate of a thousand a minute, a lack of dragons. . etc.
 
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