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[scamtank]

Arrows, spears and knife stabs don't have a uniform contact profile. Ignoring potential issues in bodypart sizes and weapon properties, it's common sense that an arrow just doesn't strike an arm so exactly straight that it neatly bisects the bone without any change in its trajectory, especially not at a reliable pace. No, aside from an astronomical fluke it'd either miss the bone entirely, wounding only the muscle, or graze it in such a way that it glances off and only harms the surrounding tissues.

Ditto for stabbing attacks. Wound size is an important property for bleeding and balancing weapons that have minuscule contact areas is miserable business, so CONTACT_AREA:1 for everything is out. However, increasing it just makes them chop off smaller bodyparts as if the tip was a flat edge, like a sharpened chisel. This is dumb and shouldn't be happening.

Enter the [PIERCING] token. Attacks with this property have certain handicaps against specific bodyparts (those with the [LIMB] token? ones with a special [DEFLECTS] token to account for weird targets outside human anatomy?). When a [PIERCING] attack hits something like an arm or a leg, the penetration depth first decreases sharply with the striking plane and is capped at 80-90% - grazing hits would be especially shallow cuts, better ones would still stick nasty wounds in the flesh and a perfect shot would split a kneecap and disable the target, but never actually cut the leg off. Stick them in the chest and the head for results, leave the choppy-choppy action to swords and axes.

Of course, sometimes the spearpoints are just so huge compared to the target that they really would cleave them apart. An attack with a contact area many times the size of the target bit and enough momentum to fully penetrate it several times over would be subject to the current rules. It's only natural that a ballista projectile straight to the gut would bisect a man.

[NW_Kohaku]

While I certainly agree that the bodypart physics in this game are hilariously inadequate, you should recognize that the game used to have "piercing" as a type, and Toady deliberately removed it in favor of the system we have now.

The game certainly needs a better understanding of the body, and especially more gradients between an organ being unaffected or completely destroyed (pain in particular is problematic, as a mosquito bite that pierces skin is equivalent to stripping the flesh off your whole back). It's possible (or at least was in previous versions, but I never heard of this getting fixed) for an arrow to hit the second upper right rib, bounce to hit the lowest right false rib, then hit the first upper left rib and the spine, all while missing internal organs and the intervening ribs. 

That said, there's no reason a piercing tag would help this, and it makes more sense to keep the current system, but modify bodies to make them have more sane relative locational connections and angles of attack that can miss the bone. 

What you're proposing is throwing things into arbitrary ("gamey") definitions, rather than sliding gradients, and Toady has deliberately been trying to move into the sliding gradients direction.  I seriously doubt he'd suddenly reverse course now.

[Putnam]

The arrow thing was fixed way back in the 0.34 versions.

Also, I don't really see how the suggested system is much different from the existing one. It's more important that there be some sense of body parts reacting to attacks instead of every single attack being treated as being caught between a sword and the ground anyway.