Knowing Your Own Strength - Tank Smasher

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Of course, if you do that, you have to restat most weapons out there. It was a bigger project than a single article

So this is something to add to the GURPS 5e wishlist?

[naloth]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

Speaking of knowing strength, Palladium has something called 'pull punch' you roll to see if you can reduce damage from attacks, is there a maneuver like this somewhere in GURPS' advanced combat rules? Can't remember seeing it in Hellboy. High-strength guys like him and Roger trying not to punch holes through kids stealing their wallets comes to mind.

With Innate Attack you have to purchase variable, but with any ST based attack you can just choose to attack with less force (ST). We've already treated that as less dice up to your maximum (like how IA works).

[Leynok]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

So this is something to add to the GURPS 5e wishlist?

As far as I'm aware, there is no sign of 5e coming any time remotely soon. I would rather add it to a wishlist for a 4e book.

[naloth]

I could get behind the ST adjustment, but DR and ranged weaponry would have to be lowered in a similar fashion. This helps DR and innate attack to stay at reasonable levels.

If DR was compressed such that:
Old ST/DR 10 = New ST/DR 10
Old ST/DR 100 = New ST/DR 30
Old ST/DR 1000 = New ST/DR 50

And existing non ST powered weaponry was adjusted:
Old 1d = New 1d
Old 2d = New 2d
Old 3d = New 3d
Old 6d = New 4d
Old 12d = New 5d
edit: each x2 adds +1d.
(Obviously another progression could be used.)

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I really like the Knowing Your Own Strength article, but when I poke about at high-level supers type characters with it, it's giving some unexpected results at higher levels.

Terms of Engagement:

• the High Tech stats for the T-27A's front armor
• the Knowing Your Own Strength damage table and Basic Lift table
• a character with Karate at least DX+1 (Getting the full +2/die)
• making an All Out Attack: Strong on the front armor for another +1/die
• using a punch (-1 damage, use thrust not swing)

You need a ST of 720 to have your average damage equal the DR of the front armor, which is the yardstick used for "proofed" armor.

With Knowing Your Own Strength, your BL is 2E+72 (or 2 followed by 72 zeroes). The Earth weighs 1.317E+25 lbs - at ST 720 you can carry almost three Earths without being encumbered at all.

And yet you glance off the front of a T-72A tank 50% of the time.

You could push the required ST down by allowing Mighty Blows to stack with AoA:Strong (or allowing the perk that allows that). That works well enough for super strong brawler characters IMO.

You can also push it down with Blunt Claws (No Signature) - you "just" have hands that tough. That again works well enough IMO.

Using both of those, it takes required ST down to 552, and gives a BL of 3.17E + 55 - you can still juggle two Earths, even though you bounce off that tank 50% of the time even when you really push yourself.

You can also do shenanigans like adding armor piercing fists with Enhancing ST-Based Damage, tripling ST Power Blow-40, and I'm pretty sure there's some others but IMO that's doing an end-run around the idea of a character who's just plain old strong enough to punch a tank. I know fluff is just fluff and can be rewritten, but there's a limit to how much I'm comfortable with drifting off mechanics that simply embody the concept of "Captain Erzatz, who punches tanks". It also starts crowding into the space occupied by The Mustelid, who really does carve through tanks with armor piercing claws, or super (sayan) martial artists who use chi instead of grunt. These other characters use these kinds of "tricks" because their concept isn't "raw strength".

There's always buying a split ST - Striking ST ~720 and a Lifting ST somewhere much more modest (in the 100-200 range?). I'd personally like a default option that produces something more like that without having to split everything up.

Any suggestions for a BL calculation that produces reasonable results in the 6-16 range while having things up in the tank-punching range work out perhaps a little more restrained?

I'm not sure there's a smooth way to do this. I've seen the suggestion of calculating BL off of ST^3 which would allow a tank punching character that doesn't juggle planets. That was based in part on the notion that ST based damage increases too fast under standard rules. Damage and lift are pretty tightly tied under the standard GURPS system and things can get a little weird when you take an Attribute with a real 0 and switch to a logarithmic scale.

Honestly, if you want to use log ST with GURPS you'd really need to rework the damage system as well to make it work. Some thoughts on how to do that.

Absolute damage doubles for every +1d or so of damage, not for every *1.4 d. That is to say in standard quadratic GURPS, 7d is about twice the absolute kinetic energy of 5d, 14d is twice the ke of 10 d and 140d is twice the ke of 100d. In log GURPS, +1d is double the ke whether the base damage is 1d or 10d or 100d. So you'd probably want to tweak a few things.

1. Rather than rolling more and more dice, it might make more sense to roll just 1 or 2d for damage and further damage would be a straight ad.

2. You'd probably want to drastically rework hit points. Maybe go with a damage threshold system a la FUDGE or TORG. If damage rolled doesn't beat threshold, it was too insignificant to matter. If it exceeds it does damage but either everyone has a straight 10 HP or you have hit points equal to HT. Again, logarithmic - if the attack does 6 or 7 points past what it takes to injure the target at all, that's maybe four times the impact just to scratch the target and should reasonably cause a serious wound regardless of the target's durability.

3. Damage adds from Karate, all out attacks, etc. should be flat adds, not multipliers. A blow from a Karate expert adds +2 per die in GURPS - that's about a 57% increase in damage rolled, or allowing for the quadratic nature of the system, ke is multiplied by 2.46. In a log system, that would be a flat add. As I understand it, log ST is *2 BL for every +4 ST, so I would go with a +1 damage bonus in the old system (4 points in Brawling, Committed Attack, etc) adds +3 ST for calculating damage. A +2 damage bonus (All Out Strong, etc) adds +6 ST for calculating damage.

4. You'd need to rescale the system and make some benchmarks. 500 GURPS St is about 55 GURPS log ST, and and 800 GURPS ST is about 60 log GURPS ST. So whatever damage fits for ST 55-60 should be enough to hurt a tank. GURPS Champions, anyone?

5. There's other not necessarily obvious ways you'd need to tweak things like armor piercing but that would require more detailed thinking. Honestly I think you'd really want another Pyramid article to deal with this.

[Infornific]

I should add one other solution that's been proposed is what you might call reversed log ST. That is, you use the GURPS ST and game mechanics as written but get an exponential increase in ST at a linear cost. So for every roughly 100 points spent on ST, GURPS ST doubles, and every 300 points multiplies ST by 10. GURPS Supers kind of does this in a more roundabout way. The bad news is that you'd need to rework or rethink the cost of some abilities, the good news is that you don't change any game mechanics.

[Ottriman]

My solution was simply to use 3/10/30 etc multipliers for ST over 20.

or a linear increase, whichever was higher.

got this

ST 21: 3d+1/4d-1
ST 22: 3d+2/4d+2
ST 23: 4d-1/5d+1
ST 24: 4d+2/6d
ST 25: 5d+1/7d-1
ST 26: 6d/7d+2
ST 27: 7d-1/8d+1
ST 28: 7d+2/9d
ST 29: 8d+1/10d-1
ST 30: 9d/10d+2

For ST past that find the ST in this line that has the same final digit and multiply by 3 for +10, 10 for +20, 30 for +30 etc etc.

I also multiply hp like this, ST 30 would have 60 hp base. I then price hp as 2 pts for effective +1 ST for hp purposes.

I also use know your own ST scaling for DR and Innate Attacks.

No need to redefine damage itself.

[Leynok]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

If characters are inherently able to control their force for free, is there maybe a limitation that could be applied to powers/strength where you have to roll some kind of check to be able to reduce damage? Like if you're Superman and you don't want to punch off someone's head but maybe you're angry and have trouble holding back... if enraged or disoriented there should be penalties on such a roll.

The problem is that Variable is already a mere +5%, so if you wanted a value that could be applied to both Innate Attacks and ST equally the way other Limitations/Enhancements do, then it would have to be worth less than -5%, since able to lower your power if you want, but with some difficulty is inherently better than unable to lower your power even if you tried. So something like -2% or -3%, and that just annoys me with the fractions it would end up creating. Perhaps just a quirk or something would be easier to apply.

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

If characters are inherently able to control their force for free, is there maybe a limitation that could be applied to powers/strength where you have to roll some kind of check to be able to reduce damage? Like if you're Superman and you don't want to punch off someone's head but maybe you're angry and have trouble holding back... if enraged or disoriented there should be penalties on such a roll.

Or maybe also assessing how strong someone is, whether they can survive a full force punch or not, maybe a skill for this? To avoid accidentally punching off heads like in Infinite Crisis?

Superman being so angry he is having trouble holding back is no different than anyone being so angry they have trouble holding back. That is just a situation specific modifier, and if the GM feels it is relevant he or she might call for a Will roll to make sure you did hold back... unless you have a relevant Disadvantage like Berserk in which case use those rules instead.

If you physically have issues using less than your full ST in day to day life, that would probably be some sort of Physical Disadvantage, a kind of Violent Klutz. Not violent due to anger, but because you have a hard time gauging your ST and controlling it (whether you're beefy or barely able to lift a thing), and as such you constantly are hurting yourself and damaging things, making loud noises etc. as you bang doors open, slam drawers, accidentally "punch" stuff while trying to grab it, etc. It might just need to be a Modifier for Klutz.

[CeeDub]

Are we sure the problem is the ST and not the tank's armour? I think it's extremely difficult to compare and/or balance damage against DR. Maybe the DR is just too high?

Also, depending on how exactly you define "acceptable" breaks from reality, maybe punching a tank is the wrong approach in the first place. Force equals mass times acceleration. No matter how strong you are, you can only punch so fast without super-speed, and without gravity or density manipulation, you can only put so much weight behind a punch.

What I'd consider is using Lifting ST to rip the tank's turret off, then go to town on it's soft and juicy insides. Or pick it up and throw it, let it's own HP kill it with collision damage. The math is probably all wrong, but with the T-72A's weight of ~42 metric tonnes and your BL of 2E+72, you should be able to throw it about 2,520 yards. Even if the tank survives, the crew will not.

From a more game mechanical POV, I'd consider a house rule that says if you can throw it for X amount of collision damage, you can punch it for X-Y amount of damage (throwing is more akin to swing than thrust).