Blowing your arms off doesn't really slow you down much

[Vastin]

So, having both your arms blown off while trying to disarm a mine has… surprisingly little effect on your survivor’s day to day life. You can still pretty much craft all the stuff, fight with melee weapons normally, and so on. It DOES say that I am ‘too weak’ to equip my pneumatic rifle with only one arm… but doesn’t penalize me as long as I only use one handed weapons.

Also, having your limbs blown clean off causes no bleeding or any other negative associated effects AFAIK (aside from a remarkable amount of pain). You don’t even need to bandage the stumps - not that you should be able to use much of anything regardless. This should really be pretty much a ‘game over’ moment unless you are some kind of mutant with regrowing tentacles or something, but it’s surprisingly not much of an issue.

[proxiehunter]

I’m not sure it’s possible in the game to have your limbs blown off. Your arms can be broken but they’re still attached to your body and can be fixed with a splint.

[Coolthulhu]

Currently the only way to actually lose a limb is to install fusion blaster CBM, which is pretty much Megaman arm.
And you magically regain said arm if you manage to lose the CBM through a botched install.

Bleeding effect is currently very underused, but that’s partly because it is implemented as a HP loss to affected body part. It doesn’t make much sense for bleeding to cause the kind of damage that requires putting the limb in a splint.

Now that I think about it, the broken limb mechanic is also really bad. Every kind of damage breaks bones and requires a splint and no kind of damage breaks bones while the limb has hp left. You can block a giant slam from a tank-sized monstrosity with your arm and they will only bruise, then go too close to fire and have the temperature instantly snap the bones inside said arm because it has 0 hp now.
It would be better if splints were simply dropped and broken limbs were just considered incapacitated in some way, with that way being abstracted out to avoid wonkiness.
Splints are just an uninteresting detail to manage, a problem for NPCs, a problem for new players and a problem for wilderness survivors. Every penalty of having to wear a splint could be just converted to penalty of having an incapacitated limb instead. This would be cleaner and less demanding on suspension of disbelief.

[KliPeH]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:3, topic:13160”][…]
It would be better if splints were simply dropped and broken limbs were just considered incapacitated in some way, with that way being abstracted out to avoid wonkiness.
Splints are just an uninteresting detail to manage, a problem for NPCs, a problem for new players and a problem for wilderness survivors. Every penalty of having to wear a splint could be just converted to penalty of having an incapacitated limb instead. This would be cleaner and less demanding on suspension of disbelief.[/quote]

How do you propose to deal with an incapacitated limb then? Assuming splints are no longer a thing and instead of being “broken” the limb enters some incapacitated state. Making the effect wear off by itself is even more uninteresting and unrealistic. If the splint system is scrapped I’d rather just have the limb be completely gone and be forced to install a makeshift wooden/metal leg/arm.

Once either set of limbs is gone it’s pretty much game over. Your character becomes highly ineffective - if your arms are gone you can choose to kick or headbutt your enemies but that could be potentially damaging to your other bodyparts (some martial arts would counter that). You can no longer (w)ield weapons, interact with items (picking them up) or use the crafting menu. Maybe some ‘last hope’ item could be introduced, like a self-installing Bionic Arm CBM, but that should be a fairly rare drop.

Similarly, with no legs, you’ll be reduced to crawling. Perhaps even have a UI element just for that - replace the usual [W]alking/[R]unning indicator with [C]rawling]. Moving will take 5 or 6 times as long as it normally would, and driving could (possibly) be unavailable until some special part is installed to help you with your insbility to use the gas pedal/brakes.

This is obviously done to deter players from making their characters take unnecessary risks and shrugging off severe damage with minimal repercussion. Would you try to disarm a mine as a highschool student? Highly doubt that. Wanna try anyway? Suffer the consequences. Furthermore, if you engage enemies who can possibly tear your limbs off like a zombie hulk, you knowingly make a decision that could possibly doom your character to deletion. Unless you’re doing some special scenario, there’s ALWAYS a different option other than engaging the threat directly, and you should always take that into account.

[Vastin]

Ah. Interestingly, there is no ‘broken’ status or indication when your limbs are incapacitated - they simply have no health bars, cannot be operated on with most medical items like bandages or aid kits, and without fore knowledge of the system, the simply appear to be gone, not broken.

I would suggest that broken limbs be called out more explicitly with a ‘broken’ status replacing the health bar, and/or a broken arm/leg status appearing in the character status windows.

Oh, and the penalties for having both your arms broken currently seem quite minor.

[Coolthulhu]

Making the effect wear off by itself is even more uninteresting and unrealistic.

Only on the surface. When you actually consider what is supposed to be happening, it becomes obvious that the “broken” pseudo-status is broken.

Just before it, the limb can be healed normally. It works perfectly fine. Then suddenly it snaps and resists all attempts at helping it. Any “realism” here is far fetched and bullshit.
It doesn’t die, like with head/torso wounds. It just breaks, like an item.

Then you have to wear a splint on it. The splint is cheap to produce (except in total wilderness, where you can’t improvise one) so it doesn’t really add anything here.
What’s worse - the splint still causes penalties even though you aren’t using the limb.

How do you propose to deal with an incapacitated limb then?

Move all splint effects to broken limbs. That is, broken limb would cause an encumbrance comparable to splint, take a while to start healing properly (and lose the penalties) and resist attempts at healing.
It wouldn’t be perfect, but would be closer to perfect than bones snapping due to bruises and tanking giant hulk punches just because they have HP left.
It would also be easy to implement, not requiring a total redesign and special casing everything.

As usual, bad attempts at realism end up being less realistic than just letting it be a game.