Should Plate Armor be Harder to Penetrate?

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by afnord

If you use the rules from Low Tech then Plate Armour becomes almost impossible to penetrate. You need 13 cut or 10 imp to penetrate DR 6 plate. But it protects you less from the blunt trauma. This means a guy with ST 12 or less is never going to penetrate unless he aims for gaps or rolls a critical hit.

Well only if you insist on using cutting weapons, and well cutting edges are a pretty awful way to try and beat plate armour.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

The second seems very 'working as intended', though I'm not convinced that the large amounts of 'blunt trauma' pass-through before true penetration is reasonable.

Yes I agree, Edge protection is a quick fix that solves the problem (and was probably limited by the scope of the of the remit) but I think just having split DR vs different damage types is the way to go. It is more complicated, but is already an established part of the system.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by mr beer

There are several fixes to make armour harder to penetrate. Any of these prevent the problem of plate penetration.

There's at least one fix to stop damage scaling so rapidly in the human scale, which also solves the problem from a different angle.

GURPS plate is excellent protection against ST 10 opponents, probably within a reasonable game simulation of reality. Real world plate wearers probably didn't have to contend with multiple ST 15 opponents but you can easily have such an encounter in GURPS.
.

Yes exactly, Armour as it exists works fine against ST10. The problem is in the Characters, Campaign, and Low Tech. ST based weapons damage inherently increases with ST, but DR doesn't really. Because whereas a Broadsword is SW+1, meaning it could be anything from 1d+1 avg for ST10 to 3d+1 avg 11.5 for ST18, plate in LT comes in 3, 6 or 9 flavours (with an option here or there to adjust it by 1).


For me the simplest move is to use the Armour design articles that allow you to create thicker more protective armour that a stronger wearer could wear. (even if they are facing ahistorical threats to thick armour)

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Well only is you instsnt on using cutting weapons, adn well cutting egdes are a pretty awful way to try and beat plate armour.

An axe shouldn't be too bad - the force of the blow in concentrated on a small area and they have their weight right behind the head. Once iron/steel plate has a cut in it it will cut quite readily, too.

[Tomsdad]

I never quite get the complaint, "if you make Plate too good no one can swing a sword through it" as in that's an inherently bad thing.


We never seem to have an issue accepting that hand guns can't penetrate certain modern body armours. We simply go and get Ap rounds, or a rifle, or shoot where the armour isn't depending on the situation


I don't know if this is a clash of fantasy/historical troupe expectation* vs. modern day troupe expectations* or what.

Armour often did and does it's job, and sometimes you have to come up with a cunning plan or a special tool to get around it or past it. And that was as true in the C12, C16th as it is now.

There has always been a balance point between the hand weapons of the day's ability to penetrate the armour of the day. The balance point isn't always the same and it changes as developments on either side changes, as do combat doctrines etc. 60-70 years ago it was generally thought that infantry couldn't wear torso armour that could stop the bullets of the gus they were firing, and operate successfully. Now it's not so much of an issue (although still a compromise). Plate armour stopped the majority of arrows fired at it. But gunpowder came along and plate had to get thicker and/or better to stop it. Ultimately limiting factors on how much you can do that and still use it individually and deploy it as part of an army as firearms also improved kicked in.




*now of course if we do want a game that allows that than yeah it's all good. It's more the an observation that what seems to cause complaints in one generally seems to be just accepted in the other.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Rupert

An axe shouldn't be too bad - the force of the blow in concentrated on a small area and they have their weight right behind the head. Once iron/steel plate has a cut in it it will cut quite readily, too.

Well axes tend to get a damage bonus so it's kind of shown in the system, but I don't think axes have that much more advantage than that*. Even out of combat we don't use hand powered swung blades to cut metal, it's just not a very good way to cut through any but the weakest of metal plates.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by once it has a cut in it, do your mean repeated blows in the same cut, that would be quite hard to achieve in combat?

Or if you mean once your cut has made the initial nick in the metal the rest goes readily in the same (ongoing) blow?




*a couple of slightly esoteric points might be to say since axes are 0U the balance of pro's and cons regarding committed attacks differ for them as opposed to swords. Not to mention fine axes are a damn sight cheaper than a fine broad sword.

[vicky_molokh]

The thinking cycle for working around this topic is approximately as follows:

• ST 13+ penetrates armour too easily? Let's change that.
• Okay, now ST13 is not really different from ST10, despite costing a whopping [30] to get.
• Now we need to cheapen ST because it's no longer worth the point cost.
• After that, actually high ST (e.g. 20+) becomes affordable, but is no longer as impressive as it used to be.
• You now run into the stat normalisation cult problem, namely that if you still enforce attributes to be in the 8-13 range, you've now made all fighters functionally the same in terms of damage. And in RPGs, it's not a good thing when everyone's the same.
• Fix the above? Fixing it seems to lead back where we started.

[DanHoward]

Plate armour doesn't need to be penetrated. there are plenty of ways to take out someone wearing inpenetrable armour.
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=102258

Instead of a slugfest, the fight becomes far more interesting.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The thinking cycle for working around this topic is approximately as follows:

• ST 13+ penetrates armour too easily? Let's change that.
• Okay, now ST13 is not really different from ST10, despite costing a whopping [30] to get.
• Now we need to cheapen ST because it's no longer worth the point cost.
• After that, actually high ST (e.g. 20+) becomes affordable, but is no longer as impressive as it used to be.
• You now run into the stat normalisation cult problem, namely that if you still enforce attributes to be in the 8-13 range, you've now made all fighters functionally the same in terms of damage. And in RPGs, it's not a good thing when everyone's the same.
• Fix the above?

I don't find the bit in bold is proved to be true. If nothing else by definition 8-13 is still a range and doesn't make everyone the same. Not only in terms of damage or but as a wider point as well

So ST 8 Sw damage is 1d-2 avg 1.5, ST13 Sw damage is 2d-1 avg 6 = 4x difference*.

ST 8 BL is 13lbs, ST 13 BL is 34 = 2.6x difference

So not only is there a range, but in terms of the comparative ability derived from it, it's quite a wide one.

Now if you mean the choice of 8-13 is only a choice of 6 numbers, whereas say 6 - 20 is 15 numbers, than yeah you are right but it's pretty abstract and while yes 15 is more than 6, I'm not sure you can infer therefore 6 is proved inherently 'small' in terms of choice in a RPG, i.e. it's a subjective point.


Then of course we get in to the fact that it's not one stat but actually 4 stats. So say 4 stats at 8-13 is actually a lot of unique combinations, and that's before we start getting into traits that distinguish and vary the stat's individual effects within that stat's wider range of game effects such as lifting ST, and so on.


But look, if that is still too much limitation that's cool, no one is enforcing a strict 8-13 stat range on anyone else's game.


However if you are going to have a human ST range of 5-20 as it says in characters and ST20 is the average for the Polar bear the largest land based carnivore on our planet. Then yeah we shouldn't be too surprised when we don't get realistic results with it. There's also the point that GURPS isn't necessarily set to default "realistic" in all things. A lot of fictional troupes involve chopping through armour! It's designed to give us easy exciting games

Thing is strict human level average** realism isn't necessarily what we are going for anyway, so what does it matter if we don't get it. But if you not going for realism then again we shouldn't be too surprised when we don't get it.


And even than it's easy enough to fix. Do we want to have historically tough but light Plate armor and have everyone swing from the chandeliers with ST20 and swinging ST20 broad swords at it, that's fine triple DR (or give hand held weapons fractional AD) and it's all good. Or even have it have the same DR/thickness and have it three times as thick (ST20 will have no issue wearing it).

I also disagree with your basic premise that having the same stat is a bad thing even in abstract, people have the same stat all the time. On top of this there are plenty of systems out there that have stat range far smaller than GURPS and don't seem to suffer from the implied inherent weakness due to lack of distinction. Equally percentile based games don't somehow shine because they have an abundance of distinction when it comes to stats. IMO what the stat actually means in play is far more important than what range of number it's taken from (and if someone else has the same figure).






*and of course there's also some irony in the house rules for adjusting the ST damage progression so as to allow for a wider range of ST values while reducing the range of their out puts in order to squeeze them into a truncated but believable range!


**I've also noted that stat 10 is a human average seems to take on a different meaning in these threads, becoming more 10 is a minimum! ;-)

[vicky_molokh]

Don't take things out of context. The point that you bolded was a follow-up to the previous points, one of which was explicitly changing the damage curve in reply to complaints about ST13 being too well-penetrating.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Or if you mean once your cut has made the initial nick in the metal the rest goes readily in the same (ongoing) blow?

Yes. Thin sheets of iron actually cut/tear quite readily once the initial cut has been made. Thus an axe could cut it quite effectively, though this would admittedly tend to damage the plate, rather than the wearer.