True. It would allow me to see my dream of even more complex hit locations and damage done with a minimal amount of screaming by my players.
By the way Vroomfogle. Thanks for harshing on my buzz man. Here I thought I was the only guy in the last 30 years to think of how to code arms law.
hehe - sorry man. BTW here's a screenshot:
Having it a computer does open a wealth of possibilities as you have all pointed out. You could have larger and more variety of crits, that'd be cool. I haven't done that, just use the charts as is, but for me there are a few big advantages such as implementation of some rules that were previously forgotten about because of their general unwieldiness. For instance, breakage is easily implemented as a random internal check with every roll. Forget about Breakage numbers, or Breakage Factors, just have the computer check and notify you if you should make a strength roll.
But for me the real benefit of a program is the wound tracking as you can see in the screenshot. This way the players don't have all the exact info about their wounds. They know their arm hurts a lot but may not know if it's broken until it is examined. They don't know exactly how long they are stunned for, or exactly how many hits they have. I give them general status whenever they ask (i.e. you are down half hits, you are lightly stunned, etc).
My current program that you see above is actually quite simple. I wrote it in VB and it is an amazingly small piece of code because of all the built in controls. I set up the charts as XML data, link the wounds and character data and bind them to the datagrid and voila - VB pretty much handles the rest of it.
As an aside, there is an RMC ruleset coming out for Fantasy Grounds at some point (virtual Table top software) and it will have many of the same features for chart lookup and possibly wound tracking.