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Old 06-20-2013, 09:29 AM   #21
Icelander
 
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
It was made to arm people for whom there weren't better alternatives. In real life sentry removal with a knife is quieter, it is also significantly riskier than just shooting someone.

The RAW for this is based on measurable quantities (decibel levels) and seems reasonable.

What isn't realistic here is the high damage for melee weapons.
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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Really? The penetration of melee weapons is commonly criticized, but this is a matter of wounding.
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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Fair enough.
I think the "unrealistic" part here is that more or less every PC in a game with significant combat is part of that rare fraternity of fighting men who are reliably capable of ruthless, decisive action and can even carry out fairly technically demanding tasks under extremely stressful circumstances without having their performance suffer.

Sneaking up to someone and holding them immobile and fairly quiet for the 30 seconds to 2 minutes it takes them to lose consciousness after you mortally wound them with a melee weapon, feeling their lessening pulse with the waning of the geyser of arterial blood they spray you with as they are dying, is not something most people are good at or enjoy doing.

Even if someone is a veteran soldier and theoretically able to kill people; there is a world of difference between impersonally shooting at someone whose face you can hardly see while in a group of people doing the same, and sneaking off alone in the dark to kill someone in a very intimate way, with no companions or moral support except your victim.

While sentry removal is not physically any more difficult than any moderately challening athletic feat, it's made extremely challenging by the stress involved. And even a small mistake usually means a lot of noise, in that sentries with rifles who are stabbed non-fatally will tend to scream like stuck pigs, fire those rifles and generally make an infernal nuisance of themselves.

Realistic suppressors don't allow you to kill sentries without alerting anyone. Then again, neither does anything else, really, because anyone even remotely close to the struggle of a dying man trying to scream through a severed windpipe is probably going to hear something odd.

What realistic suppressors allow you to do is reduce the odds of hostiles inside a building hearing you engage a pair of sentries in a guard tower a couple of hundred yards away. Or something like that.

It's not going to allow you to kill one sentry in mid-conversation and have his opposite number only realise it as he fails to respond to his next quip.
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Old 06-20-2013, 09:40 AM   #22
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
I think the "unrealistic" part here is that more or less every PC in a game with significant combat is part of that rare fraternity of fighting men who are reliably capable of ruthless, decisive action and can even carry out fairly technically demanding tasks under extremely stressful circumstances without having their performance suffer.

Sneaking up to someone and holding them immobile and fairly quiet for the 30 seconds to 2 minutes it takes them to lose consciousness after you mortally wound them with a melee weapon, feeling their lessening pulse with the waning of the geyser of arterial blood they spray you with as they are dying, is not something most people are good at or enjoy doing.

Even if someone is a veteran soldier and theoretically able to kill people; there is a world of difference between impersonally shooting at someone whose face you can hardly see while in a group of people doing the same, and sneaking off alone in the dark to kill someone in a very intimate way, with no companions or moral support except your victim.

While sentry removal is not physically any more difficult than any moderately challening athletic feat, it's made extremely challenging by the stress involved. And even a small mistake usually means a lot of noise, in that sentries with rifles who are stabbed non-fatally will tend to scream like stuck pigs, fire those rifles and generally make an infernal nuisance of themselves.
If killing a sentry with a knife entails holding onto them for at least 30 seconds, that's another unrealistic thing here...in GURPS you can have your sentry very definitely dead and unable to cause further trouble much quicker than that.

It would seem somewhat obvious to stick a fright check into the 'you've just stabbed a guy in the neck while close enough to taste him' situation. But I'm not seeing a rule for that assuming the victim is an enemy.
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Old 06-20-2013, 09:53 AM   #23
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
If killing a sentry with a knife entails holding onto them for at least 30 seconds, that's another unrealistic thing here...in GURPS you can have your sentry very definitely dead and unable to cause further trouble much quicker than that.
Kromm has said in the past that GURPS damage is deliberately front-loaded for ease of play. Few groups want combats where fatally wounded foes nevertheless stay up for a while, continuing to fight/scream/activate the device.
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Old 06-20-2013, 11:20 AM   #24
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
If killing a sentry with a knife entails holding onto them for at least 30 seconds, that's another unrealistic thing here...in GURPS you can have your sentry very definitely dead and unable to cause further trouble much quicker than that.
As noted by another poster, GURPS damage is front-loaded in the sense that it more-or-less includes a lot of the effects of blood loss and shock, that realistically only occur over a slightly longer timeframe.

Even with that concession to playability in effect, though, I note that even a fairly mundane sentry with ST 11, all other Attributes at 10 and the Fit Advantage can still require a deal of killing.

The odds of him successfully making a death check or four are not all that bad, so you might have to deal 66 points of damage until he's truly dead. Over half the time, you're going to have to deal at least 33 points of damage before he "dies", and a lot of the time that actually means a mortal wound and not instant death.

Even a strong man with a Fine combat knife will not be doing much over 1d imp or cut per attack, at most 1d+2 in a properly made sentry removal attack. That means that between 3-5 successful attacks on the neck with a knife are required to kill a more or less average sentry and even then, he's probably just mortally wounded and bleeding to death. If you want to be sure that he doesn't make too much noise while doing that, you don't let him go until you're sure he's completely dead.

And nowhere in the rules does it state that a foe that fails a HT check after being reduced to below 0 HP is rendered completely silent or even still. As long as he's not taking effective actions in the form of Combat Maneuvers; he could easily be struggling ineffectually in the grasp of our "hero" while trying to scream through a torn throat.

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
It would seem somewhat obvious to stick a fright check into the 'you've just stabbed a guy in the neck while close enough to taste him' situation. But I'm not seeing a rule for that assuming the victim is an enemy.
From the first GURPS Horror I read, there's been some provision for "Oh, dear God, what have I done?" type of Fright Checks.

Less common, but easily implemented by interested GMs, is requiring Will checks or Will-based skill checks in order to accomplish tasks that not every person can convince themselves to go through with.

In 3e, there was a mechanism for having the margin of failure of a Will check provide a penalty to shooting rolls and while the specific mechanic was perhaps not perfect, the idea is sound.
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Old 06-20-2013, 11:35 AM   #25
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Even a strong man with a Fine combat knife will not be doing much over 1d imp or cut per attack, at most 1d+2 in a properly made sentry removal attack. That means that between 3-5 successful attacks on the neck with a knife are required to kill a more or less average sentry and even then, he's probably just mortally wounded and bleeding to death. If you want to be sure that he doesn't make too much noise while doing that, you don't let him go until you're sure he's completely dead.
3-5, or even a bunch more to be sure, takes a lot less than 30 seconds, though, which was the point.

...Also, if you're holding on until he's completely dead, just holding on is a ridiculous course under GURPS rules. You'll be waiting several minutes before bleeding carries your subject away. You'd save a serious amount of time by finishing them off.
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And nowhere in the rules does it state that a foe that fails a HT check after being reduced to below 0 HP is rendered completely silent or even still. As long as he's not taking effective actions in the form of Combat Maneuvers; he could easily be struggling ineffectually in the grasp of our "hero" while trying to scream through a torn throat.
If you apply that generally, we must conclude that GURPS has no rules for injury rendering a living person no longer capable of communication.
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Old 06-20-2013, 11:56 AM   #26
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by Xplo View Post
Kromm has said in the past that GURPS damage is deliberately front-loaded for ease of play.
All RPGs are front-loaded. Realistically, when they say someone "died instantly", they mean "in less than one minute", and someone is able to thrash around noisily even after being unconscious.
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Old 06-20-2013, 11:56 AM   #27
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
3-5, or even a bunch more to be sure, takes a lot less than 30 seconds, though, which was the point.
Unless you're cool with the sentry raising the alarm by shouting or firing a weapon, you can't just make attacks until he's dead. You need to start by establishing a grapple that makes it hard, or ideally impossible, for him to alert anyone else.

First you grapple the Neck and/or Face from a position behind him. Then you kill him.

And as soon as you can, you stop moving your knife arm around and instead use it (with the knife embedded in the neck of the sentry) to assist your grapple. Because that's your best bet of preventing the dying sentry from making too much noise.

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
...Also, if you're holding on until he's completely dead, just holding on is a ridiculous course under GURPS rules. You'll be waiting several minutes before bleeding carries your subject away. You'd save a serious amount of time by finishing them off.
How does a player know that an enemy is finished off? In the dark, Diagnosis checks are not all that easy, particularly not if you try to make them in 1-2 seconds.

I'll grant that I still use the bleeding rules for veins/arteries from GURPS 3e, where it's possible to cause 1 HP / second bleeding by either surgically opening either carotid artery or by doing enough trauma to the general jugular/carotid area. With those rules, it makes sense that once you have caused sufficient bleeding, you don't need to take the risk of releasing one arm from your grapple to do more HP damage and can instead wait for blood loss to do your work for you.

Even without that, though, it makes perfect sense that once the opponent appears unconscious, you continue to hold him until you are sufficiently certain that he is neither faking nor temporarily stunned.

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
If you apply that generally, we must conclude that GURPS has no rules for injury rendering a living person no longer capable of communication.
Which is more or less true. Which is one of the reasons sentry removal is rarely clean and simple. Pretty much the only way to be absolutely certain that someone won't make a noise is to grapple him in such a way to minimise his ability to move or shout and hold him like that while you make absolutely sure that he's no longer living.
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Old 06-20-2013, 12:02 PM   #28
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Unless you're cool with the sentry raising the alarm by shouting or firing a weapon, you can't just make attacks until he's dead.
This. A gunshot, even a suppressed one, is noisier than a stabbing. But it is a lot more likely to go unheard, or at least unrecognized, than a lengthy wrestling match.
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Old 06-20-2013, 12:17 PM   #29
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

I think Martial Arts did clarify what kind of wounds (to the neck, I think?) would cause a person to be unable to speak/shout?

Either way, should there be some sort of "crippling injury threshold" for the neck, or something, to represent wounds that damaged a character's ability to speak? Similar to how a crippled hand can't hold onto stuff?

Also, do characters getting choked or strangled (or even just without breathable air or exhaling smoke) lose the ability to speak?
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Old 06-20-2013, 12:22 PM   #30
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Default Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors

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I think Martial Arts did clarify what kind of wounds (to the neck, I think?) would cause a person to be unable to speak/shout?

Either way, should there be some sort of "crippling injury threshold" for the neck, or something, to represent wounds that damaged a character's ability to speak? Similar to how a crippled hand can't hold onto stuff?
I don't recall a hard and fast rule, but I don't have a problem with ruling that once someone has suffered damage to the Neck in excess of their HP, they are unable to speak or shout normally, though they may still (at the GM's discretion) be able to whisper, croak or spray a mixture of air and blood from their severed windpipe, all of which might make some noise.

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Also, do characters getting choked or strangled (or even just without breathable air or exhaling smoke) lose the ability to speak?
I'd say so. They may not be completely silent, but they certainly lose the ability to vocalise at anything close to full volume.
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