Balancing thrusts in the future

[Bobob]

I had an interesting thought regarding thrusting attacks.
In the game, if you use a sharp weapon (say the expert longsword) you still need a couple of hits to take down the first novice arena dude, even though he wears no armor. In real life, he would probably be incapacitated after one good hit. In the game he might even survive a slash to the head and keep fighting.

All of that is fine and it works when you use only slashing attacks and overheads, but when using thrusts I don't know if that works.
Say we stab the novice arena dude with the sword - we clearly see the sword going through his stomach/chest/head and maybe coming out the other side.
I don't think we can say this only takes like 40% hp away, but we can't say it instakills the person immediately either. One for the game feel and realism (I mean if I stabbed the unarmored guy with my longsword I'd expect him to go down. It would look out of place if he just kept walking as if nothing had happened, taking only hp damage), the other for balance.

So I wanted to discuss, how do you think thrusts will be balanced in this game?

I thought maybe they would make it impossible to achieve deep stabs, except maybe as last hits. But they would look more like pokes sometimes.

 

[Bullethead]

So I wanted to discuss, how do you think thrusts will be balanced in this game?

Poking holes in people is usually less instantly incapacitating that laying them open, chopping them up, or smashing them. So IMHO, if the game already lets people keep fighting at full effectiveness despite a massive, blood-splattering, greatsword chop to the cranium that physically spins them around, I have no problem with letting them keep fighting despite having been run through by a sword.

There are plenty of historical accounts of people continuing to fight after being run through even multiple times (and shot full of arrows as well). Now, they might well have died of their wounds later, but these wounds didn't stop the fight immediately. The reason is, the area directly damaged by the penetrating hit (prior to bullets, anyway) is limited by the diameter of the weapon, and there are really only a few places in the body where such a small hole causes instant death. These are primarily the brain and the heart, which are naturally armored by bone to prevent just this sort of damage as much as possible. And in the case of the undead, how much do these organs matter to "unlife" anyway?

It's a lot harder to keep fighting when your brains have been splattered across the wall, your limbs have been severed, broken, or gashed to the bone, or you're tripping over your own intestines, than it is if you've just got a small hole through the muscle or guts. Major slashing and crushing trauma eliminates the ability to move or even stand up due to the physical destruction of the musculoskeletal system and/or its control system. This sort of damage drops people in their tracks. Poke holes, OTOH, mostly are just impediments to motion, not preventers of it, and often the impediment can be overcome by the adrenaline of the situation. Not saying you won't eventually bleed to death or die of infection later, but usually you'll still have the ability to fight for a while longer.

So, IMHO, it's not really a question of thrusts potentially being too powerful, it's more the lack of fight-stopping power of the slashing and crushing weapons.