Sales and Dungeons: Thermal printer TTRPG utility

A few thoughts:

- Combat is a stupid thing to do or get involved in. The chance of getting permanently injured is really high. It would be good if our games reflected that. That fight with the kobold back at level 1 where it shoved a rusty dagger into your thigh and the priest only just saved your leg - it still hurts on cold days, and you still can't run properly. These are more interesting stories than "you take 3 points of damage". In my ideal system every point of damage is an actual injury, at a specific location on the body, and has effects. You cannot shoot a bow if you've just been stabbed in the arm. If you get shot in the leg with a goblin arrow then you're not going to run anywhere. Or do much except swear, scream, and try and deal with the dirty lump of wood sticking out of you. If you cut a giant rat in half with a longaxe then there's going to be blood and half-digested shit spread over the area and most of the player. Make combat more visceral, make the players more acutely aware of what they're actually doing and risking.

- It's not random. There's an element of luck involved, in that everything has to go the way you thought it would go, like most things. But you get the chance to react when things go wrong, too. If injuries have more consequences, then getting injured needs to be a multi-stage process. Like "the orc swings at your shoulder! You move your shield to block it! The orc twists their wrist and the cleaver is heading down towards your leg! You move your leg! Not quite fast enough! The cleaver hits your knee! Your knee explodes in pain and you see stars for a second but you manage to stay upright! The orc grins and growls but doesn't take advantage of your agony. You try to stab it in the neck with your sword! It reacts badly, tries to block with the cleaver, knocks the blade up and you slice most of its left ear off! Green orc-blood drips down its face. It howls and tries to use it's free hand to hold its face, obviously in a lot of pain. You do take advantage of its agony and stab it in the stomach. It doesn't react, too busy trying to keep its ear on. Your thrust goes deep into its stomach, perforating intestines and grating off its spine. The orc screams and drops its cleaver, clutching itself in agony as ruptured intestines spill from the open wound. The smell is unbelievable, you gag but hold your breakfast. It's clearly out of the fight. You turn to check on the rest of the group, but your knee is not working properly and something is definitely wrong with it."

- You're right, it's about stories and outcomes. But I think the mechanism should help tell the actual story rather than the story being subsumed by the mechanism. Getting players to roll to hit - what are they actually trying to do? How are you going to hit the orc? Where? What's the effect of that going to be if you roll well? How does the orc react to that? What's the effect of that reaction going to be? Rather than abstract "you roll a 14, which overcomes its AC of 10, and then you roll a 4 for damage, so it takes 4 points of damage. It rolls to hit you..." which doesn't really tell any story at all.

- There are/were systems (ICE comes to mind) that modelled this better, usually with endless tables of hit locations, but still it was all about the system not the story.

- I keep thinking of cards as a system. Players have cards, which represent moves or attacks, and they play a card as an attack. The DM plays a card for the monster. The cards interact and produce a result (or non-result). The cards play out a story like the one above. As the players get different weapons, they get different cards. As they go up levels and get better at combat, they get different cards. Just a very crude idea at the moment, but I keep thinking about it.

Anyway, that's more than I meant to write ;)