Highest Real Life Striking Strengths

[gibberingmouther]

mainly i'm just curious, but i was also once again thinking of my rules supplement. in that, you can parry up to +15 your strength. so a str of 10 can block one of 25, but not higher. this seems a bit arbitrary - maybe it should be +20? i don't know.

anyway, if we were to stat some of the best athletes or martial artists in history, what would the number be? Mike Tyson for example - in his prime he could knock people out with heavy gloves pretty easily, so his striking strength must have been pretty high. i know there are strong men out there who can lift a lot, but in GURPS terms i would stat them as having a lower absolute strength and a significantly higher lifting strength. some weight lifters can't punch very hard, because their muscles can't generate much speed. then you have someone like Bruce Lee, who was relatively skinny, but had very powerful strikes. Butter Bean is an example of someone who was big but had powerful strikes. hmmmm....

edit: so Francis Ngannou has the record for punching power at 129,161 units. i don't know what "units" are, so that isn't super helpful. he's 6'4" and 262 lbs. his punches are powerful, but still probably blockable just based on my intuition/experience as a martial artist.

elsewhere i've found that boxers and martial artists can range from anywhere from 300-ish pounds of force for non-boxers to over a thousand pounds of force in the upper ranges of boxers and almost 800 in the middle ranges

[mr beer]

By RAW, it should be Strike ST 22 I think.

In reality it's very difficult to say what the real world Strike ST is. For example, it's explicit that skilled martial artists get a damage bonus of +1 or +2 per die. So assuming someone has Strike ST 19 and +2 per die, that's 2d+3 right there and maybe that equates to the top hitting power.

Or maybe no-one really has Strike ST 19 because that's so high. Or maybe the top hitting power includes the effect of an All Out Attack (Strong).

None of these complications take into account that a lot of members here consider that ST-based damage is too large as written.

Really it's probably best to go with what you feel is reasonable. I think anything from 16 to 22 as a human maximum is reasonable.

[gibberingmouther]

i actually like the GURPS strength damage table because it syncs up so well with my ki blast values, and thus gives a pretty balanced set of abilities for my homebrew qi heroes.

i don't think the values are too high if you think of them from a supers standpoint.

edit: thanks Mr Beer, that was a helpful analysis

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by gibberingmouther

edit: so Francis Ngannou has the record for punching power at 129,161 units. i don't know what "units" are, so that isn't super helpful. he's 6'4" and 262 lbs. his punches are powerful, but still probably blockable just based on my intuition/experience as a martial artist.

Apparently, randomly, in franklins. Which makes almost no sense because that is a measurement of electric charge. He punches with a charge of 10^-4 coulombs, or like a slightly stronger than average static electric charge that you get from a cat and a shag carpet. Truly impressive!

I think that the use of totally irrelevant units here and the fact that this record doesn't seem to have much support outside of a promotional video UFC released means this is actually meaningless marketing copy.

elsewhere i've found that boxers and martial artists can range from anywhere from 300-ish pounds of force for non-boxers to over a thousand pounds of force in the upper ranges of boxers and almost 800 in the middle ranges

The Frank Bruno numbers from 1985 are more solidly supported.

[Flyndaran]

Striking Strength lumps together force, penetration, and injury which aren't synonyms but correlated.
I don't think anything but force can be measured well in the real world.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by mr beer

By RAW, it should be Strike ST 22 I think.

.

Power Ups 2:Perks suggests that the GM should limit humans to 2_or_3 levels of Special Exercise Perks if they want them to be "remotely believable".

However, so far only Martial Arts Styles are a known source of such Perks and none offers more than 1 level of Striking ST. There simply is nothing that says whether or not Perks from more than 1 Style can stack together.

There's a Style from Technical Grappling that offers 3 levels of Lifting ST.

Then, as long as you're limiting yourself to punching rather than kicking you need to consider Arm ST. While I could not prove to you that Lift or Striking ST is realistic in a human Arm ST is obviously so. It's even fairly common. Lots of arm wrestlers and handicapped persons as well as archers with heavy bows have it in the real world.

Foot Archery Style definitely permits up to 3 levels of Arm ST.

So a real world Herakles could punch with ST anywhere from 24 to 26 depending on what his GM permits.

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

So a real world Herakles could punch with ST anywhere from 24 to 26 depending on what his GM permits.

Yeah, I missed Arm ST, my bad.

The problem I have with plausible Strike ST significantly exceeding 20 is that the hardest punchers (heavyweight boxers) don't have ST 20 with a bunch of Strike ST and Arm ST layered on top. More likely they are ST 15 at most.

I personally don't care for game purposes, generally I'm not going to stop someone maxing out effective Strike ST if they have enough points. But my feel is that real world maximum might be Strike ST around 20 rather than 25.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by mr beer

Yeah, I missed Arm ST, my bad.

The problem I have with plausible Strike ST significantly exceeding 20 is that the hardest punchers (heavyweight boxers) don't have ST 20 with a bunch of Strike ST and Arm ST layered on top. More likely they are ST 15 at most.

I personally don't care for game purposes, generally I'm not going to stop someone maxing out effective Strike ST if they have enough points. But my feel is that real world maximum might be Strike ST around 20 rather than 25.

I dont know if this helps but you can achieve world lifting records with ST-14 reliably and punch for an average of 14 damage points without using any special rule such as all-out-attack (strong) with ST-15.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

I dont know if this helps but you can achieve world lifting records with ST-14 reliably and punch for an average of 14 damage points without using any special rule such as all-out-attack (strong) with ST-15.

*Karate+2 would increase this to 22 damage points

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

*Karate+2 would increase this to 22 damage points

I double checked the sources and I got this:

ST-15 damage 1d+1, Punching-1, Karate+2 for 5.5

Lethal Strike This turns your punching to 4.5 Damage Points (DP) and lets you use the wounding modifiers for Vitals and Skull.
Rolls at Karate-2 for damage-1 and hurting yourself at DR1+ but turning your crushing blow into piercing.

Vitals Average DP = 13.5, so target will collapse.
Rolls at -3 for a wounding modifier x3.

Neck Average DP = 8.25, so target will be stunned.
Rolls at -5 for a wounding modifier x1.5.

Skull Average DP = 10, so target will collapse, and you receive 2 DP for hurting yourself.
Rolls at -7 with DR2 for a wounding modifier x4.

Now let´s say you go for an all-out-attack "strong":

Vitals average DP = 19.5, target will collapse.
Neck average DP = 9.75, target will be stunned.
Skull average DP = 18, target will collapse.

Now let´s say you got some valuable training from martial arts, specifically iron hands with DR2 and blunt claws. Now you are looking at:

Vitals average DP = 22.5, so target will collapse.
Neck average DP = 11.25, so target will collapse.
Skull average DP = 22, so target will collapse and you receive 2 DP for hurting yourself.

Now these are for averages, you can consider the maximum for every kind of attack/training:

Basic lethal hit
Vitals: DP = 21, collapse.
Neck: DP = 10.5, collapse.
Skull: DP = 20, collapse, you receive 4 DP.

Strong lethal hit
Vitals: DP = 27, target checks HT to avoid death.
Neck: DP = 13.5, collapse.
Skull: DP = 36, target checks HT to avoid death, you receive 7 DP.

Iron hands strong lethal hit
Vitals: DP = 30, target checks HT to avoid death.
Neck: DP = 15, collapse.
Skull: DP = 40, target checks HT twice to avoid death, you receive 6 DP.

So, as I see it, a world class boxer will go for neck or vitals with a strong lethal hit, and will probably have iron hands and no more than ST 13 or 14. What do you think?