Why don't more RPGs allow you to get dismembered and prosthetic limbs?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Sandbox simulators Kenshi, Rimworld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, etc, allow your playable characters get different bits of their body blown off permanently, and so they have to hobble around as cripples or get carried or get replacement parts. But no regular RPGs seem to allow this to happen. The Banner Saga has a character's arm get chopped off and in TBS 3 a character's eye gets destroyed, and in FF15 a character gets blinded, but this happens as part of the hardcoded main story. Some MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 allow you to transmog prosthetics, but ofcourse they do not actually affect your character's physical capabilities and are not acknowledged in the story.

[rusty_shackleford]

Worth pointing out cyberpunk and similar RPGs with prosthetics e.g., Shadowrun games.

I suspect in a lot of grounded settings it would probably just be a massive hindrance. Most sci-fi game should have it tho.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Worth pointing out cyberpunk and similar RPGs with prosthetics e.g., Shadowrun games.

I suspect in a lot of grounded settings it would probably just be a massive hindrance. Most sci-fi game should have it tho.

I sorta remember that they might have been in Dragonfall and Hong Kong, but IIRC they just amounted to invisible stat stick equipment. I think the cybernetic brain implants might have had more of a detriment.

[Acrux]

I guess in some of the cyberpunk games it's okay and makes sense in the setting, but I generally don't like it in a game.

In Kenshi and Rimworld I just think it's pretty gross. It pretty much turned me off of those games, and a lot of mods really get into it. I'd rather have some that block that kind of harvesting (some probably exist, I'm sure).

[Valter]

Sandbox simulators Kenshi, Rimworld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, etc, allow your playable characters get different bits of their body blown off permanently, and so they have to hobble around as cripples or get carried or get replacement parts. But no regular RPGs seem to allow this to happen. The Banner Saga has a character's arm get chopped off and in TBS 3 a character's eye gets destroyed, and in FF15 a character gets blinded, but this happens as part of the hardcoded main story. Some MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 allow you to transmog prosthetics, but ofcourse they do not actually affect your character's physical capabilities and are not acknowledged in the story.

Same reason people don't like equipment with durability that breaks. Too much of a hassle.

I like that kind of hassle tho. Fear & Hunger has limb loss as well, though very few ways to regain them in any shape. This forced me to seriously take into account enemy behavior, because you won't get very far if you win a battle but lose a limb.

[rusty_shackleford]

re: dismemberment,
From a technical standpoint: The need for one-handed animations for every animation variant that can't be easily overlaid with an arm disabled animation blending.

[J1M]

Not a lot of Horror RPGs.

[Norfleet]

Sandbox simulators Kenshi, Rimworld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, etc, allow your playable characters get different bits of their body blown off permanently, and so they have to hobble around as cripples or get carried or get replacement parts. But no regular RPGs seem to allow this to happen.

Well, for starters, a large number of RPGs are based around preexisting rulesets, so we can effectively treat these as one RPG. The D&D/D20 ruleset games, for instance, are effectively the same, and there's no system for this because this ruleset does not contain anything to enable it: Damage is too abstracted and doesn't even include rules for maiming and dismemberment. Since the appeal of these games is typically drawn from following a known ruleset, deviations from this ruleset would undermine the selling point. So that pretty much reduces the pool of games attempting this to original properties, which are far fewer in number. Such games are going to lean much more heavily into the simulationist than the narrativist elements. Note how none of the games you listed contain a story. They're all simulation-driven games. There's no main character that is being led through a story. You're playing as a totally directionless group or individual rando. It's hard to have a story arc when the "main character" can get turned into a nugget 5 minutes into the game. In contrast, Ribaorld has people purposefully playing as a human nugget from the beginning the game just to see how far they can get as a limbless cripple, because there's no story, what happens is just what you make of it yourself.

[TKVNC]

Sandbox simulators Kenshi, Rimworld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, etc, allow your playable characters get different bits of their body blown off permanently, and so they have to hobble around as cripples or get carried or get replacement parts. But no regular RPGs seem to allow this to happen. The Banner Saga has a character's arm get chopped off and in TBS 3 a character's eye gets destroyed, and in FF15 a character gets blinded, but this happens as part of the hardcoded main story. Some MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 allow you to transmog prosthetics, but ofcourse they do not actually affect your character's physical capabilities and are not acknowledged in the story.

It doesn't really fit into most RPG's, Kenshi does it very well though.

[Oyster Sauce]

Losing a leg is actually a pretty big deal

[wndrbr]

This may actually turn into a new fad. TOW2 had prosthetic limbs as a part of your character customization, which is both really stupid (losing limbs does not affect your character in any way, it's just cosmetics) and gross in a fetishistic way.

I want less games to have this.

[Oyster Sauce]

Vergil's arm was bit in Project Zomboid. We had a mod that allows you to hack off arms to survive. It was a dangerous procedure that left him in a ****** state for quite a while. After recovering, he was able to stick a prosthetic on which had to be adapted to slowly, but even at its peak it was still worse than a real arm.

[Norfleet]

Losing a leg is actually a pretty big deal

Pretty much any major damage represents a mission kill. This is, of course, seriously counterproductive to a heroic setting, if every time someone punctures an organ or a limb, they drop like a sack of potato. A condition that will most likely prove fatal since, as a member of a typical European medieval setting, you have no idea what potato is.

[Norfleet]

Vergil's arm was bit in Project Zomboid. We had a mod that allows you to hack off arms to survive. It was a dangerous procedure that left him in a ****** state for quite a while. After recovering, he was able to stick a prosthetic on which had to be adapted to slowly, but even at its peak it was still worse than a real arm.

You will notice how this works because, once again, Zomboid is not a heroic plot-driven RPG, but an open-world sandbox lacking main characters or plot. If Vergil was the main character and not a random nobody with zero plot relevance (because there's no plot), this could not work. In a genre where even dying is treated as a minor inconvenience resolved by some sort of death tax, permanent maiming and dismemberment just doesn't fit in.

[TKVNC]

This may actually turn into a new fad. TOW2 had prosthetic limbs as a part of your character customization, which is both really stupid (losing limbs does not affect your character in any way, it's just cosmetics) and gross in a fetishistic way.

I want less games to have this.

It fits into Kenshi, perhaps somethings like Warhammer, and other related games where 'body horror' has a thematic point.

Outside of that it's generally unimmersive, and as you say fetishistic.

[maidenhaver]

In a setting where you can replace even your central nervous system, what's the point of a story? You can live forever, just keep your metal bits clean and painted.

"Other people are having a story!"

No, other people are painting their bits, too. Nobody's having stories.

[Bertram_Tung]

This is a good topic. I have a lot to say about it. I'll talk about it in depth later.

[Tangerine]

Regular RPGs are narrative driven. Losing a limb is a significant character moment, not a status effect, so it'd be weird to treat it like the latter.

[Manny V]

Sandbox simulators Kenshi, Rimworld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, etc, allow your playable characters get different bits of their body blown off permanently, and so they have to hobble around as cripples or get carried or get replacement parts. But no regular RPGs seem to allow this to happen. The Banner Saga has a character's arm get chopped off and in TBS 3 a character's eye gets destroyed, and in FF15 a character gets blinded, but this happens as part of the hardcoded main story. Some MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 allow you to transmog prosthetics, but ofcourse they do not actually affect your character's physical capabilities and are not acknowledged in the story.

It doesn't really fit into most RPG's, Kenshi does it very well though.

Although Kenshi is cool, i don't like how they made the prosthetics potentially BETTER than your limbs.
Some dudes i watched started doing some real degenerate **** where they'd intentionally let their guys get captured by fogmen, tied up and slowly eaten until their limbs come off, bonk the fogmen and heal their guy, bring them back and let them heal for days in a bed. All so he could replace his limbs with 'da meta prosthetics'.
The whole 'the flesh is weak' ******** *** mindset

Was very offputting

[TKVNC]

Sandbox simulators Kenshi, Rimworld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, etc, allow your playable characters get different bits of their body blown off permanently, and so they have to hobble around as cripples or get carried or get replacement parts. But no regular RPGs seem to allow this to happen. The Banner Saga has a character's arm get chopped off and in TBS 3 a character's eye gets destroyed, and in FF15 a character gets blinded, but this happens as part of the hardcoded main story. Some MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 allow you to transmog prosthetics, but ofcourse they do not actually affect your character's physical capabilities and are not acknowledged in the story.

It doesn't really fit into most RPG's, Kenshi does it very well though.

Although Kenshi is cool, i don't like how they made the prosthetics potentially BETTER than your limbs.
Some dudes i watched started doing some real degenerate **** where they'd intentionally let their guys get captured by fogmen, tied up and slowly eaten until their limbs come off, bonk the fogmen and heal their guy, bring them back and let them heal for days in a bed. All so he could replace his limbs with 'da meta prosthetics'.
The whole 'the flesh is weak' ******** *** mindset

Was very offputting

I feel you.

Prosthetics are a little overpowered, but wearing them generally stops you going into Holy Nation territory.

The problem really is that it's too easy to get masterwork prosthetics. That, and Scout legs are simply the superior choice of legs.

[asf]

just put the ******* in that meat grinder thing to remove all limbs, then install op skeleton stuff

[Tweed]

Sandbox simulators Kenshi, Rimworld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, etc, allow your playable characters get different bits of their body blown off permanently, and so they have to hobble around as cripples or get carried or get replacement parts. But no regular RPGs seem to allow this to happen. The Banner Saga has a character's arm get chopped off and in TBS 3 a character's eye gets destroyed, and in FF15 a character gets blinded, but this happens as part of the hardcoded main story. Some MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 allow you to transmog prosthetics, but ofcourse they do not actually affect your character's physical capabilities and are not acknowledged in the story.

It doesn't really fit into most RPG's, Kenshi does it very well though.

Although Kenshi is cool, i don't like how they made the prosthetics potentially BETTER than your limbs.
Some dudes i watched started doing some real degenerate **** where they'd intentionally let their guys get captured by fogmen, tied up and slowly eaten until their limbs come off, bonk the fogmen and heal their guy, bring them back and let them heal for days in a bed. All so he could replace his limbs with 'da meta prosthetics'.
The whole 'the flesh is weak' ******** *** mindset

Was very offputting

That's terribly offputting!

There's a much more efficient way to do this.

[Tweed]

There's a mod for XCOM 2 that forces you to use prosthetics when your soldiers take severe injuries. The first ones are crappy, but you can research ones that are better than weak, pathetic flesh. It actually pairs well with the mod that brings back MEC Troopers.

[stormvermin]

You can lose an arm in Tainted Grail but it's from the player getting their arm bitten off by a frog rather than dismembered in combat. It comes across as trailer bait instead of something seriously impactful and I can't imagine anyone who fell for it actually stuck with it besides reddit goobers farming updoots. If they were going to tease it as a proper feature, it should have been part of a quest with some serious tradeoffs instead of an overworld encounter that's a quickload away from being remedied.

[Tweed]

You can get your ear bitten off in Fallout 2.

[maidenhaver]

You can get your ear bitten off in Fallout 2.

Which fight does it happen? Every boxer looks like Mike Tyson.

[Tweed]

You can get your ear bitten off in Fallout 2.

Which fight does it happen? Every boxer looks like Mike Tyson.

The Masticator can bite your ear off under certain circumstances. You can also bite his ear off if you're good enough.

[Dorateen]

In Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan, a character can lose a hand and visit a merchant to get it replaced with a gremlin hand.

[UltraFan123]

Regular RPGs are narrative driven. Losing a limb is a significant character moment, not a status effect, so it'd be weird to treat it like the latter.

Though not an RPG, Nero losing his arm in DMC 5 is one of the biggest and most important plot points that both deeply affect the in-setting story and affects the gameplay at the same time.

If any videogame - RPG or not - wants to use limb loss and prosthetics, it should be incredibly significant with overreaching consequences.

[Manny V]

It doesn't really fit into most RPG's, Kenshi does it very well though.

Although Kenshi is cool, i don't like how they made the prosthetics potentially BETTER than your limbs.
Some dudes i watched started doing some real degenerate **** where they'd intentionally let their guys get captured by fogmen, tied up and slowly eaten until their limbs come off, bonk the fogmen and heal their guy, bring them back and let them heal for days in a bed. All so he could replace his limbs with 'da meta prosthetics'.
The whole 'the flesh is weak' ******** *** mindset

Was very offputting

That's terribly offputting!

There's a much more efficient way to do this.

yeah i forgot about that, i think one of them used em as well

nasty stuff