[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I'm not okay with the GM's judgement defining an arbitrary duration after losing consciousness in which a character is not actually unconscious.

Houserule maybe, but you seem to prefer to define the duration as exactly long enough to make not doing things the way you prefer into a disaster.

GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns, p. 423 actually contains a rule to the effect that neither death nor unconsciousness means dropping instantly and silently. What I'm doing is applying the GM's judgment given as the rule there within the constraints of a realistic setting, by using the guidelines established for people who do this in reality.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

If you need BL 80 to do it with one arm, you need BL 40 to do it with two, don't you? Sentry removal is an ST 15 minimum activity? Also, you should evidently freely allow anyone to automatically escape most grapples by falling over.

What you can do with your whole body is BLx8 while one arm is BLx2. That means that an average person with ST 10 can hold someone with their whole body and both arms, but only a superstrong person could do it with one arm.

And if someone is willing to go prone, the grappler has a choice between letting go, following him down or keeping him upright using a multiple of BL.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Or we could suppose that holding someone uprght when they're collapsing doesn't actually require enough ST to pick them up in two seconds...

Regardless of the specific multiple of BL we pick, the weight characters can handle with one arm is 1/4th of what they can handle with both arms and whole body.

Meaning that any normal human will have trouble holding a heavy, potentially resisting human up with one arm while making a series of Attacks with the other. Which is why it's better to make the attacks before he knows you're there and switch to holding him up after you've thrust your knife into the side of his neck and cut forward, a total of 2-3 attacks in GURPS terms.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I have no idea why you think this is relevant. My strategy avoids more uncertainty...if you only make the first thrust and then hold on, as you say, you don't know how much damage you've done, and maybe it's not enough. If you keep on stabbing, you don't know how much damage you've done but it's rapidly increasing to the point where sufficiency is assured.

One stab, maybe the guy's not even seriously injured. Stab a dozen or so times and the guy is pretty definitely below zero HP. Don't trust that either, you can always keep stabbing.

Any damage above HP means that a struggling sentry will succumb to unconsciousness within a few seconds. Damage above that doesn't actually matter much to you.

Remember, the rules don't say that death comes silently, so even doing 60+ HP of damage is no guarantee that the last turn of life for the sentry won't be loud.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

In that case, you can't pull it off at all, can you? In the first second, you certainly need to assume the sentry is dangerous, but you can't use both hands to grapple unless you're planning to rip out his throat with your teeth.

Mentally stunned people can't elect to drop prone until they recover, so the first second is All-Out Attack (Double) Grapple + Thrust before the opponent gets a turn and then All-Out Attack (Double) Thrust + Cut while he's mentally stunned.

Even if he has Combat Reflexes, this happens before he can try to break free, shout, drop or fire his weapon. Obviously, this only works if you successfully sneak up to him, but that's pretty much a given. If the sentry detects you as you move into position, it's probably not going to work and your backup will have to shoot him.

Which is marginally less catastrophic if your backup has a suppressed firearm; actually making this post on topic!

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I'm not sure how, at this point, you could not get that I'm not proposing to drop the sentry before making sure, or without restraining them at all.

After the first two seconds of All-Out Attack, if you release one hand of the sentry, he's probably going to drop whether you want to or not. Not certainly, no, but the odds are too great for you to risk it.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

You can't wait until the sentry is definitely dead without the arterial bleeding houserule, because the sentry is very unlikely to die while you wait.

Fair enough. Even in GURPS RAW, though, the sentry will become unconscious at some point during your wait and he'll eventually bleed out in his coma. For your purposes, it really doesn't matter at what point he was medically dead.

I agree it's more realistic to have a rule for arterial bleeding, but it's not needed to model the fact that characters need to wait after they stab the sentry in order to be certain that they are truly incapable of making noise.

Since you were restraining him as he lost consciousness and prevented him from crying out, his death was as silent as you could make it. Killing him harder, with more HPs of damage, wouldn't accomplish that.