All video game characters are on PCP.

This has been bugging me for awhile and I finally decided to write about it.

Have you ever played a videogame where you are a melee character of some kind and an enemy starts shooting you with a gun or a crossbow or whatever? You know how it's a huge pain in the ass to running over to them so you can hit them while they slowly eat away at your hit points?

Well, this is only possible because your character is on PCP.

There are only a few instances in the real world where someone is shot and then proceeds to run up and murder the shit out of the person who shot them. Generally it's because the shooter only grazed them, or they are some combination of wall-humpingly insane or doped up to their eyebrows.

In real life if you get shot, you don't charge the guy shooting you. If you are still able to move, you charge away from the guy shooting you.
Yes, if you get up close to him you could stab him or beat him with a shoe, but in the time it takes you to get over to him, you are becoming a much easier target to hit.
And with every shot you take, your ability and chances of reaching the shooter go down.

So why the weird logic in videogames?

Well, cause otherwise if you got hit once by anything, you'd be dead.
In videogames your health is graded by a health pool or hit points or whatever. In real life you have one hit point. In videogames you can have millions of hit points.

Ever see a level 1 character try to hit a lvl 90 character in World of Warcraft?
Short version, the lvl 1 character cannot possibly kill the lvl 90. Too many hit points and their passive health regen is higher than the lvl 1 can ever overcome, also the lvl 1 is missing almost all the time. And then the armor of the lvl 90 reduces all damage to 1hp.

So with no health regen and unlimited time (and replacement weapons, cause you'll break your weapons before you ever kill that 90) the lvl 1 could possibly kill the lvl 90. It would just take weeks.

Hit points make combat more complicated than "Who attacks first?".

When you have hit points using a sword to attack a guy with a bazooka makes perfect sense.

But let's look at this from the character's perspective.

Either all weapons are extremely shitty and take forever to even break skin, or everyone is hopped up on PCP so they can keep fighting even though they are rapidly bleeding to death.

That's another thing. "Bleed effects".
Unless someone is hitting you with elemental magic that doesn't create a wound, all attacks should cause you to bleed. Yet for some reason in WoW when I shoot a dude with my poison coated arrow they get the poison but don't bleed from the arrow wound.

Videogame combat mechanics cause the players to behave in a way that is completely opposite from the real world. You don't charge the guy with the bazooka, you run the fuck away and pray that he didn't see you. Cause holy shit bazookas can kill the fuck out of you.