4E's hit point philosophy

[Gnome]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

I question your use of the term "disease-inducing"; the closest thing I've said is "break out in hives," and that's my opinion of strict simulationism, not a company statement. I believe my previous post is pretty clear in that regard.

I also think "blame the customer for playing wrong" is awfully harsh; what I've said is that I don't think GURPS is the best tool for some kinds of encounters, and trying to shoehorn those encounters into GURPS as written is going to lead to frustration and difficulties. (As this thread demonstrates!)

What I will say -- in my capacity as a gamer, not as a company spokesperson -- is that I think the more rules you load onto GURPS to make it a better simulation engine, the more daunting you make the game for casual players, and the more likely it is that those players will abandon the entire game in favor of something that chooses gameplay over realism. I don't think that's a desirable outcome for the line, for the company, OR for the fans.

Edited to add: I'm not in the least opposed to the creation of such rules for the players who want them. I do not think they should be the default, and I certainly don't think that the lack of those rules is a flaw of a system designed to appeal to as wide a base as possible.

I'm about as far from a simulationist as possible. I'm not looking for simulationism or even realism. I'm interested in good gameplay and that's pretty much it, but I don't want to use rules that totally break my suspension of disbelief due to ridiculous outcomes, like the previously mentioned musket fire taking down a ship.
In my experience, GURPS has worked for almost every adventuring encounter I've tried to game out. After all, "universal" is right in the name! But it fell flat when I wanted to play a pirates game and model ship damage. I don't think it's unreasonable for me to want a playable set of rules for ship damage.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by robkelk

This is an intriguing discussion... that, to me, appears to be based on a faulty premise provided in the original post



But do hit points actually scale with the cube of the weight? I was under the impression that it was possible to have two characters with the same height, mass, and build, but different hit points.

If I've missed some optional rule somewhere, well... it wouldn't be the first time. (Optional rules are optional, after all.)

Object Hit Points Table (GURPS Basic, pg 558) and the paragraph underneath it.

Characters have variable ST/HP as regards their mass due to it being a game and it not wanting to penalize the player who wants to play a tough but small character; such is the same reason female characters don't have lower ST attributes, that weight doesn't mandate a certain Basic Move and that height also doesn't mandate a certain Ground Move. (GURPS Basic, pg 19)

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by hal

Comments?

One thing to consider is that the key function of GURPS' damage model is to handle human-like-beings shooting, clubbing and stabbing each other. Damage to living things is incredibly hard to model. So it is not surprising that it has problems as a model for large wood or steel vessels shooting at each other. That is not what is was designed for. (I think that if you search these forums, you can find a Kromm or Pulver post explaining what problems with human-scale-combat in 3e the 4e rules were meant to solve. I think it was an issue with fights between two giants or two small creatures).

GURPS is not the best engine for vehicle combat, but designing a damage model which is just as good for vehicle combat as it is for human-like-beings fighting each other would be very difficult. And using one model for living things, and another for buildings and ships and aircraft, would be more complicated.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Gnome

After all, "universal" is right in the name!

Yep, right before "RolePlaying." It's not the Generic Universal Vehicle Combat System.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by Gnome

I don't think it's unreasonable for me to want a playable set of rules for ship damage.

May I suggest writing said playable set of rules for ship damage and then either posting them online somewhere or submitting them as a Pyramid article? Admittedly, thats' my first reaction to most of these things: "So ... write it and see if they'll publish it?"

SJG can't publish articles and books no one writes. :)

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

GURPS is a roleplaying game, not a vehicle combat simulator. It emulates (not simulates) vehicle combat to the degree necessary to faciliate roleplaying, and no more.

I disagree as well; RAW GURPS doesn't emulate vehicular combat to facilitate roleplaying at all when it comes to larger vehicles. Instead, its vehicular emulation is notably inferior to not using any rules at all, as the kinds of things that it facilitates are the opposite of good roleplaying.

That said, optional rules published in Pyramid and on the forums do wonders for making things work out properly. Namely, the alternative HP scaling rules and giving everyone DR equal to 10% of their HP and/or ignoring any hit smaller than 10% of their HP. The vehicular combat system also seems to work fine for more normal sized vehicles, like cars; it's just the big things like ships that are an issue.

[gilbertocarlos]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

Yep, right before "RolePlaying." It's not the Generic Universal Vehicle Combat System.

So the universal include everything but only when played with humans? If in my games one of the players wants to play a car, I should say no? So much for universal.

Actually, even for humans we have some problems, such as Swing damage, where a strong human can cut through armor with a cheap knife as if it was butter.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

Yep, right before "RolePlaying." It's not the Generic Universal Vehicle Combat System.

There is no need to be so defensive. We aren't calling your children ugly, for goodness' sake.
The game isn't perfect, and has its flaws. Pretending they don't exist is actually rather disrespectful to the areas that it excels in.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

May I suggest writing said playable set of rules for ship damage and then either posting them online somewhere or submitting them as a Pyramid article? Admittedly, thats' my first reaction to most of these things: "So ... write it and see if they'll publish it?"

SJG can't publish articles and books no one writes. :)

Plenty of ideas for articles and books have come up in forum discussions and in later years, are increasingly leading to publication.

So it's more than a little disconcerting to see SJ Games staff responding to discussions on an area where new rules are desired with hostility and criticism.

I very much want systems for vehicle combat that actually functions to emulate vehicle combat for popular genres; like naval combat with wooden ships and iron men or dogfighting knights of the sky.

I don't really have the time to commit to writing one, though. And I don't have any writing creds either. I'm willing to playtest GURPS Seadogs, Sails and Shiverin' Timbers*, contribute material or even co-write it with one or two others, but I won't do it all myself.

I do have to eat and that requires spending more time on writing legal briefs than game supplements, official or unofficial.

I'm hoping David Pulver will, if he sees interest, come up with an adaptation of his Spaceships system, though, incorporating his fixes from Pyramid for large, more-or-less homogenous things. That has potential to be elegant, playable and realistic enough to be useful.

*Alternate names would be considered, if reluctantly.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

My understand is that HP represent the damage necessary to break/kill/shatter/disable a creature/object/device, not to vaporise it. At that is best represented by the cube root function, as used by gurps.

Your example in the OP is specifically something that gurps HP isn't intended to model.

I suspect that there need to be a couple of additional "creature/object composition" types to account for this. Perhaps "homogeneous" could be renamed to "animated", and be a square root function, and a new homogeneous trait (for when it truly is a bulk object with no breakable parts) work on a linear function.

The thing is, GURPS sets about modeling certain behaviors, of which "absolute limit" of functionality (aka automatic kill/destruction), which - while not 100% accurate, is along the lines of actual physics knowledge. How much damage can an inanimate object absorb until it is no longer deemed to be there - even as a pile of debris?

In the end? It appears that vehicles in general, relative to the scaling of damage - is flawed in the sense that vehicles have too little hit points for realism.

Having said that? What precisely are "Hit points"? It is an abstraction to a degree (heck, a MAJOR degree) that states in effect "This much damage is required to make the body non-functional, this much damage is required to render the body unlivable, and this much damage is required to render the body into itty bitty parts that are disconnected from each other." That we utilize dice in the process is to give a relatively random element to the process because we can't account for everything that IS possible to happen in real life. Place a .44 cal. gun 2 inches from the heart and pull the trigger, one would expect that all of the energy available within the cartridge will dump into the heart - not some random 2d6+1 (or what ever is determined to be the range of damage for a .44 cal. slug) die roll.

If someone really wanted to have fun? They could start an investigation on just how many bullets are lodged within a body after being fired from a gun. For GURPS, if any given bullet does damage in excess of a body's HP level (or for limbs, the max damage that can be inflicted upon a limb) the bullet blows through. Yet...

It seems to me that various accounts have bullets lodged within the body (Often times in bone or adjacent to bone) indicating that the bullet did not have sufficient energy to exit the body. Taking damage to the rib bone first, and then having the bullet go through the body means what in GURPS terms? These things are "hyper-realistic" demands for a hard core simulationist, that may NOT be desirable by the main body of players (Phoenix Command anyone?!!!). But at least it is an abstraction that people are willing to accept in their suspension of disbelief.

Therein lies a problem I believe.

When you have a level of abstraction, and people can agree that it is in the right ball-park as far as "realism" is concerned, whether it is SUPER simulationist to the point of requiring extra time to play out the game, or whether it is marginally simulationist and plays fast is relatively immaterial. The purpose of rules is to facilitate a game - correct? The purpose of rules in a role playing game is to facilitate a story and to some degree, permit people to avoid worrying about whether or not what they're portraying is realistic or not (suspension of disbelief). Case in point? My 18 year old daughter was in LOVE with the original FAST AND FURIOUS movie franchise. We had the pleasure of watching FAST AND FURIOUS 6 (SPOILER ALERT for those who haven't seen it)


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Where the hero leaps out of a vehicle moving at high speed, collides in mid-air with the love object (A delectably lovely love interest I might add!) then slams into the windshield of a moving vehicle with his back while she's atop his chest, cushioning her landing like an overgrown teddybear cushion. Meanwhile, we have another woman who is moving a similar speeds, falling from a car to the ground from a similar height, who is mourned for being lost in the heat of battle. Lack of consistency was an issue in this movie. What was even worse? There were a lot of things that were "over the top" to which my daughter muttered "Bull<censored>" over and over (fortunately, we were at a showing where we were the only customers at the tail end of the movie run). In the end? The same thing holds true with any rules system. Some people might find the fast and playable reason for play, worth the while. Some like the cinematic style of play (Heck, how many people remember the JAMES BOND role playing game?) to where the cinematic approach is the primary reason for its popularity. Then, there are some who like uber-realistic rules. That is why we have a diverse market of role playing systems instead of one rules set to rule them all.

In the end? I don't mind abstractions. I don't even really mind rules systems that have a little more meat to them. It may very well be, that the reason for this is that I grew to love wargames first, then role playing games and think nothing of spending a day recreating the Battle of Gettysburg via TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD by SPI instead of playing the one page BATTLE OF THE BULGE games ;)

What I do mind however, is when a rules set allows for unrealistic results while attempting to simulate realistic parameters in game - be it vehicular simulations set in the age of Heroes (biremes and pentakonters) or chariots or castles or wooden ships and iron men, or even space patrol characters in space ships. If one has a belief that the game system models reality reasonably well for the known things, then such confidence can extend to totally imaginary things (like spaceships!).