Why aren't attack and damage related?

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Gudiomen

Take two fighters of equal strength and equal weapons. They hit block of wood. One is much more skilled than the other, who just knows how to do simple attacks. Both will damage the block of wood in a very similar ammount (or will on average, after lots of attacks are accounted for).

So all the chopping competitions for professional lumberjacks are based more on strength than on skill?

I have no beef with how GURPS does damage, but if you say skill doesn't allow for harder, better placed, and more effective hits I disagree. Body mechanics matter, muscle memory matters, etc. As the OP said, there a thirty seven odd ways it models this. As other posters have said, redoing the system completely do make this more explicit would be more trouble than it was worth.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by martinl

So all the chopping competitions for professional lumberjacks are based more on strength than on skill?

I have no beef with how GURPS does damage, but if you say skill doesn't allow for harder, better placed, and more effective hits I disagree. Body mechanics matter, muscle memory matters, etc. As the OP said, there a thirty seven odd ways it models this. As other posters have said, redoing the system completely do make this more explicit would be more trouble than it was worth.

Having weapon skill at DX or DX+1 give +1/die damage, and at DX+1 to DX+3 give +2/die damage, like unarmed combat skills, would do nicely. Allowing a Perk like "Strongbow" to allow high skill to reduce the minST for a weapon (and thus the threshold for 1H use of a 2H weapon, as well as unreadiness) would also be interesting.

Personally, I like my rules to be pretty universal. Having a generic thing like on HTH skills, an E skill gets +1/die (only) at DX+2, A skills get +1/die at DX, H skills get +1/die at DX, and +2/die at DX+2 (or whatever's the right thing to match Karate) across ALL muscle powered skills works. Having a Perk like Strongbow or Strongarm allowing effectively lowering MinST for a weapon by 1 or 2 is also pretty cool.

[Gudiomen]

Originally Posted by martinl

So all the chopping competitions for professional lumberjacks are based more on strength than on skill?

Note that none of the competitions here are like the example I gave. Damage of a single blow does not matter in these, but only damage over time... in wich case skill does affect damage in GURPS as you will land blows more often, be more prone to criticals and manage to hit the exact same spot over and over again (hence, less wood to cut).
Skill will also determine cadence of blows (in real life), ability to judge on how to better chip the bits off (simple line through the wood? "cone"?), etc...
The actual single blows are still rolled randomly, and this is probably why competitions aren't done like this... in order to effectively gauge skill you need sufficient blows over a certain time.
I also doubt very much that all the competitors have the same ST, and yes that's a big factor in the damage.

Mind you, I wouldn't give lumberjacks the skill Axe/Mace... as that's a combat skill, not just the skill of landing blows, it also involves an ammount of tactics, how to defend effectively, and so on... lumberjacks are not martial artists (although that's a fun concept). Something like Axe/Mace (Tool)... probably defaulting with -3 to actual Axe/Mace... much like Combat Sport or Combat Art... and even that's generous.

All in all what I'm saying is that skill is not the mechanical GURPS part responsible for damage, and in a large part, it shouldn't any way.

Let's say your a boat captain... your Shiphandling skill will not directly determine your speed. Certainly it helps to do everything necessary, but the bigger part depends on ship, wind, crew strength at the oars, your engine, currents, and other factors out of your control. After the basics are covered, more skill won't make the engine run faster... unless you're doing a cinematic game.
The same applies for damage, it's determined on the larger part by a group of random factors (or normaly uncontrollable factors).

You're not forced to agree with me, but this is how I view it.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Gudiomen

You're not forced to agree with me, but this is how I view it.

Then what are these burly men wearing "Agree with Guido" T-shirts doing lurking around my office?

[Gudiomen]

Originally Posted by martinl

Then what are these burly men wearing "Agree with Guido" T-shirts doing lurking around my office?

Some guy named Guido must have sent them... *grin*

[Saint23Molotov]

Maybe this calls for a Power Blow-esque mechanic?

Say two samurai are fighting. One samurai, a boastful nub nub, hardly knows how to hold a sword, and so his blows are more careful and less powerful as he expends his energy controlling the weapon rather than striking with it. On the other hand, his experienced foe expends his energy weaving his weapon around his opponent's (Deceptive Attacks), hitting where it hurts (Targeted Attacks), and channeling more power into his attack (Power Attack).

Say for every -2 to skill, you get +1 to damage. Rough draft.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Saint23Molotov

Maybe this calls for a Power Blow-esque mechanic?Say two samurai are fighting. One samurai, a boastful nub nub, hardly knows how to hold a sword, and so his blows are more careful and less powerful as he expends his energy controlling the weapon rather than striking with it. On the other hand, his experienced foe expends his energy weaving his weapon around his opponent's (Deceptive Attacks), hitting where it hurts (Targeted Attacks), and channeling more power into his attack (Power Attack). Say for every -2 to skill, you get +1 to damage. Rough draft.

Also note that a high skilled warrior trains a lot to make more damage when he strikes... Like my sensei says: "If strength really didn't have any importance in fighting, why would every martial art have so much muscle-building exercises?"

So a very skilled warrior character spends some of his begining/earned points in hiking ST rather than again and again in his skill.

Brief, remember that, in GURPS, the skill is just one part of the training. Attribute improvement and advantages is the other part... And several advantages let you deal more damage when you hurt someone. They also make you more "skilled" with your weapon...

[NineDaysDead]

Victim
HP 10; Dodge 8; DR 0

Strong Character
ST 20; DX 10; Skill 12: total [108]
Broadsword Thrusting: 2d
Target torso; WM X2
Effective skill 12
Probability of successfully hitting: 55.35%

Average damage output: 7.79 HP

Skilled Character
ST 10; DX 10; Skill 25; TA Broadsword thrust/vitals: total [63]
Broadsword Thrusting: 1d-1
Deceptive Attack 8 reduces victim’s dodge to 4
Target vitals (-1) for X3 WM
Effective skill 16
Probability of successfully hitting: 96.50%

Average damage output: 7.84 HP

Average damage output = Average damage X probability of hitting (And accounts for crits).

[Crispythemighty]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

It's not "margin of success" based like you want, but:

Skilled people get damage bonuses when they focus on unarmed combat skills. This doesn't carry over to weapons (a good question would be "why not," and "what could we do about it?"), but if you have Karate at DX you get +1 damage, and DX+1 you get +2. So you do get a more solid blow with more skill.

Second, more skill, through the use of deceptive attack, DOES have a significantly improved chance of landing an effective blow, by virtue of reducing the target's defenses.

Third, high skill does allow things like striking more vulnerable targets, like vitals, chinks in armor, the head, veins and arteries. The damage multipliers and extra effects you get from these target locations are exactly how skilled practitioners do more damage - they hit you where it hurts most.

High skill people can also, now that Martial Arts is out, perform Committed Attacks, multiple strikes, and other goodies that low-skill people can't, increasing the damage per exchange effectively, while retaining a good defense level.

So, as the spaghetti sauce commercial says, "It's in there," but not in the way you say.

I don't know if it would hugely break the system to say that MoS of, say, 3 or 4 would give you +1/die damage, and MoS of 6 or 8 gives you +2/die, but levelling off there, and you'd need to strip away the existing skill-based damage bonuses.

This would mean that vs an average roll on the Torso, someone with Skill-14 and Skill 18 would get +1 and +2/die; targeting the Vitals (for example) you'd need Skill 17 and 21 to get the bonus on a typical roll.

Don't think it would break anything, but I may be missing something; it's also not necessary, since there are plenty of ways currently to trade skill for damage multipiers and extra hit efficiency.

I like this... reminds me of Atlernity MoS system.

[Jeminai]

To complicate matters a bit more...

What about from the other side of things? If you roll to hit and succeed by 8 then by your logic the hit should do more damage. The system seems set up that way because the lower you roll under your skill the closer one gets to a critical success. I'm a huge fan of shades of gray in just about every aspect of gaming so it makes some sense to me and I might even consider making a house rule of it.

The problem I see is when my players say that my orc may have made his skill roll by 8 to hit their character but the character only missed thier defence by 1. Shouldn't that count for something, also?

An orc hits by 1 but the defender misses a defence by 8. Is that the same as the orc hitting by 8 and the defender missing by 1. It breaks down, though when the orc hits by 0. If the defender makes their defence "on the numbers" then it still a succesful defense.

I like the initial idea, but to use it, I think that how much someone misses a defence by would also have to count and that seems to be A LOT of bookeeping.

Very interesting idea though...