Well I immediately thought of something Bethesda RPGs do: sneak attack criticals. I don't very well understand how attacking an enemy that hasn't detected me results in a critical hit solely from the detection factor. Like if I'm going to put an arrow in someone's neck I'm going to do it anyway; it's not like they can realistically react to the thing.
I can appreciate the justification that an unalert enemy is going to be easier to land a well-aimed shot upon, and that an undetected marksman has the time to adopt a good shooting position and aim carefully. Still, it would be nice for locational damage to be a thing instead, like if my shot lands in an unarmoured part of their body, they're injured, and if it hits their armour, probably not a lot happens.
Instead, the matter is decided by some numbers, which one can't necessarily fault an RPG for, but with the combat system's move over the course of the Elder Scrolls series to a more active and skill-based style (compare melee in
Skyrim to
Morrowind), where and how the player lands blows seems to me like it should be more important than whether their sword is +1 or +5. It's like we're in an uncanny valley of gameplay mechanics being number-based but requiring a degree of active input none the less. Maybe that's a happy balance for many players, but I find it quite odd given thought.
Your every day pistol whose bullets can travel way farther than 50 meters.
You ever played STALKER? Ballistics are pretty cool in that. You can shoot a pistol tracer down a road and watch it drop, then ricochet into the sky as it glances the surface. I recall hitting someone round a corner with an AKS-74u after reading how the description says it has a propensity for such things in close quarters due to the large calibre and low muzzle velocity.
This reminds me actually: shotguns and flamethrowers. If I recall correctly, the former should be effective at anything up to 100–200 metres if the barrel is reasonably long, and the latter around 25 metres, but they almost never are.
Halo CE and
Crysis make good examples of shotguns done right. Flamethrowers however never are; they're far more like water guns than aerosols, but always treated as the latter.
