Why D&D is more realistic than Call of Duty.
Today I’m going to talk about splash damage in video games. If you enjoyed my article on hitscan mechanics (and even if you didn’t, to be honest), then I hope you’ll enjoy this companion piece.
We briefly mentioned splash damage in our Unreal Tournament article on the iconic Rocket Launcher. It’s not just a UT phenomenon, but common to most shooters.
I’ll start off with a description of what splash damage is and what real-life phenomena it attempts to replicate. Then we’ll look at real life, i.e. blast and fragmentation damage from explosive payloads, and we’ll see how it differs from splash damage. Finally, we’ll examine the underlying reasons that video games use this mechanic, and we’ll ask whether it could be any different.
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What is splash damage?
If you’ve ever played a shooter, you’re aware of splash damage, even if you haven’t heard the term. It refers to the damage dealt by weapons which use an explosive payload, e.g. rocket and grenade launchers. The ammunition doesn’t have to be explosive if there’s some other area effect, e.g. laser “blast,” radiation, or poison. The point is, you don’t have to hit the target directly to get an effect.
Because those big, punchy weapons don’t need to hit their target exactly, the game designer achieves a balance where every weapon has advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, some weapons are still better than others (I’m looking at you, Flak Cannon), but none are so devastating that they make a player unstoppable.
Similarly, splash damage can negate the skill level of adept players. Fire enough rockets in their direction and they will (eventually) die, even if never hit directly. This brings yet more balance to the game, since no-one wants newbies to be completely out of their depth.
Splash damage sits near one apex of the weapon design triangle:
Splash damage is distinct from direct hit damage and other area effects like shotgun or flamethrower damage. Deus Ex, one of my all-time favourite games, has a complicated splash damage mechanic incorporating fall off with distance. The video below is an excellent and detailed explainer of all the damage types in Deus Ex, many of which are common to other shooters (skip to 4:24 to see explosion damage1).
Another complicated splash damage system comes in graphic format from the Star Craft II wiki:
Splash damage mechanics allow players to adopt some tactics which would be unorthodox (to put it politely) in the real world:
- Aiming off. This is where you shoot at the ground near an enemy’s feet, or a wall near where they are standing, because you’re afraid of missing and overshooting them. Hitting a hard target nearby will ensure they get hit by splash damage. In the real world, fuzing will do this job for us. Rocket or gun-fired projectiles will have a timed or (if you’re very fancy) proximity fuze. Slower projectiles such as launched grenades will follow a parabolic arc, so that although you aim at the enemy, the munition will actually hit the ground near them. No need to aim off.
- Grouping projectiles. Many shooters’ area weapons (usually the rocket launcher) allows the player to fire multiple rockets at once. This is usually very inaccurate, but provides a multiple of the splash damage in the overlapping impact areas. Needless to say, real-life rocket launchers (at last man-portable ones) do not and should not have a multi-fire feature! Some examples are in Call of Duty, Titanfall 2, Team Fortress 2, Doom (2016), and Unreal Tournament.
- Rocket-assisted jump. As well as splash damage, many area effect weapons replicate blast loading by throwing the affected character away from the splash zone (while also dealing damage). Players can use this to their advantage, provided they have enough health. By pointing their rocket or grenades at the floor or a wall, and timing their jump just right, they can get a rocket boost at the cost of some splash damage. Funnily enough, this “tactic” does not appear in the real world.
Speaking of the real world, let’s go there next and talk about whether splash damage is a real-life phenomenon.
How “damage” really works
In the real world, for starters, we don’t talk about “damage.” We talk about trauma, injury, and death. Triage nurses can’t do a once-over and give you a damage percent like in video games. This is pretty obvious: I think we can all appreciate that damage to the body is not a straightforward accumulation of incremental damage.
Plenty of weapons in the real world have area effects, but none work in a straightforward splash damage way. Again, this might be obvious, but I think it’s worth going into more detail on how weapons (explosions specifically) really do affect the human body.
Explosive effects
I’ve written here before about Hollywood Vs. real explosions. In short, explosions: 1) Injure ears, lungs, and other internal organs with blast and 2) Cause lacerations from high-speed fragments. The blast effect diminishes with distance, but is by far the less important mechanism of injury.
Fragments cause most of the casualties from explosive ammunition. The level of injury doesn’t diminish predictably with distance, like splash damage. Instead, it follows a statistics distribution. The closer you are to the explosion, the more likely you are to be hit with a dangerous or lethal fragment, but it’s not certain.
You could be standing 10 m from an explosion and be unharmed by fragments, or you could be 20 m away and be killed by one.
Even if you wanted to shoot someone at point-blank range and take the “damage” yourself, this is sadly also impossible in the real world. Most modern munitions have minimum arming distances, which can be anything from 10 to 50 m. This is partially a safety feature for the firer, but also can be due to the actual time it takes the fuze to go through its arming process. So no close-quarter rocket kills like this:
These real-life damage mechanisms are very different from splash damage (especially explosive fragments). They do have one fictional counterpart, however, but it’s not video games. It’s D&D2.
Attack damage (including splash damage) follows a statistical rather than a definite algorithm3:
Comment
byu/Consistent-Lie7928 from discussion
inDnD
This is the case for all types of damage, including splash damage, and it is actually a better fit for the real world. It’s still far from perfect, of course, since D&D uses hitpoints, a similar concept to the damage percentage used in video games. Is there a perfect model which we can apply to video games? Let’s discuss that next.
Conclusion: Could it be different?
We’ve seen above how video games warp the real-life randomness of combat into something predictable for the player, and splash damage is the most blatant expression of this. Is this a good thing? Should we strive for greater accuracy and realism in our video games?
I think there’s a simple answer to this: it could be different, but the video game community is happy with the status quo.
How it could be different
It would be easy to implement D&D style virtual dice rolls into every combat interaction, especially for area effect weapons where randomness is part of reality. In fact, many games do use randomness as a core part of their damage mechanics. The Baldur’s Gate series, which is based on D&D, uses the same mix of modifiers and dice rolls as its tabletop inspiration. Many role-playing games (RPGs) do the same. There’s no reason an element of randomness couldn’t be included in shooters.
Why it probably won’t change
Players like the deterministic model. Even within the likes of D&D, players strive to build their characters and weapons such that their attack prowess is predictable and repeatable, or at least has a minimum base level. In shooters, players expect the see the same outputs for the same inputs. To be fair, enough randomness is in the games due to other human players.
Combat rules such as splash damage are just the means by which players can control their virtual environments. Imagine if you landed a grenade near an enemy and they weren’t hurt. You’d feel betrayed, even if it reflects the kind of thing that can happen in real life.
I guess (and here I’m getting philosophical and straying way outside my lane) the beauty of video games is that they give us a little sandbox which we can control, unlike the great big world outside it. We have very little control over our world, other people, our politics, our economies, or our health. We can’t even control the weather. So it’s nice that we can control a little thing like the amount of a damage a salvo of rockets does to our fake little enemies.
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this return to video games, please let me know in the comments if you have (or have not). Please also share this article with a friend, it would really help me. Finally, if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so using the handy link below.
A final note: I’ll be on travelling for holidays for the next two weeks. I’ll preload something, but it might be a bit shorter than normal.
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- Keep your eyes peeled for our old favourite, ultra-sensitive TNT crates. At least they don’t look like sticks of dynamite, which is always a risk. ↩︎
- Dungeons & Dragons, but please don’t pretend you didn’t know that. You’re reading a blog post about splash damage, for crying out loud. ↩︎
- If you want to sound fancy, you can call it stochastic vs. deterministic. ↩︎
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