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Old 12-31-2012, 03:20 PM   #1
JCurwen3
 
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Default Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

In this recent thread, the subject of muscle-powered damage being unrealistically high was raised, and I posted a link to a post by Douglas Cole from a similar much older thread, here:

Rescaling Melee Weapons

I use these rules in all of the GURPS games I GM and one in which I play (specifically, the realistic option of thr dmg as ST/20 dice and sw dmg as ST/10 dice). They work beautifully. I've shared below a sort of very informal generalized description of my playtest experiences with them, for Douglas Cole and for anyone interested in using them.

To clarify, the campaigns include very high magic DF (converted from AD&D), hard sci-fi with a smidgeon of space opera, low tech medieval low fantasy, modern horror with a bit of MH and Lovecraft, and post-modern zombie apocalypse. They all use these ST damage rules, as well as all of the harsh, gritty realism rules for armour, combat, and injury in Martial Arts and other places. There is magic and superscience in some of these, sometimes a lot, but the idea is that the laws of physics and biology are otherwise in play and work accordingly.

Treating the "adds" as the power of the lever arm being applied (as recommended in these rules) gives greater differentiation in weapon effectiveness, encourages use of larger and more powerful weapons, and also scales really nicely for very small (and weak) and very large (and strong) combatants. I highly recommend it... even if you don't take anything else from Douglas Cole's rules. In the DF campaign, where many weapons had "pluses", we counted those as the same as regular weapon "adds", making magical weapons vastly superior and a lot more threatening since this meant higher effective ST.

One thing that emerges is that well-armoured combatants (for instance, in plate mail) are generally safe from most attacks from swords and other melee weapons with the exception of critical hits and the super strong. This meshes well with historical accounts. This strongly encourages attacks to unarmoured areas, targeting chinks in armour, and taking advantage of armour damage and any armour divisors you can exploit from selected weapons (eg, picks and spears). You can't really defeat an opponent in full plate mail by just randomly swinging at them, hoping to wear them down - you need to fight smart and strategically. Committed and even All-Out Attacks (Strong) become more common and less suicidal for such combatants as well.

On the other hand, lower ST-based damage makes fist fights much less deadly. It also makes it more survivable to fight without much or any armour protection vs melee weapons, so you see less armoured "tank" characters as it becomes less dangerous to go with a less encumbered light or not armoured swashbuckler type. Grappling also becomes more important (we're all eagerly awaiting Technical Grappling!), as does any attempt to disarm or subdue an opponent rather than beat them to death.

Magical attacks, firearms, and powered ranged weapons end up favoured much more, because muscle-powered damage scales realistically with firearms, with a character even in the upper end of the human realistic ST range unable to match the damage of most firearms. Admittedly, this somewhat discourages certain character types (pure melee warriors) over others, but not enough so you don't see people choosing to play them anyway. In the campaigns where firearms exist (and are effective vs the selected targets), they'll be used realistically in preference to melee weapons, as one would do in real life if one were aiming to inflict lethal damage.

I don't charge Douglas Cole's lower value for ST - it's still the same for Striking ST, and a total [10] for ST. Buying up ST was still attractive, and in DF we still see many warriors buying it up to near their respective racial upper limits.

I might be forgetting aspects of my experience using these rules, so please ask if curious. I'm also curious to hear the experiences of anyone else using them in their games.
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Old 12-31-2012, 03:43 PM   #2
DouglasCole
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

Thanks for this!

I will link to it from Gaming Ballistic if you dont mind?
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Old 12-31-2012, 04:08 PM   #3
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
Thanks for this!

I will link to it from Gaming Ballistic if you dont mind?
Oh no, of course that's fine.

I just hope this was helpful. Having never approached using your rules as "playtesting", nor having any experience playtesting or documenting such, if there's any need for further clarification or questions, feel free to ask. I will say using them just seemed natural. More natural and realistic seeming than the standard GURPS ST-based damage values.
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Old 12-31-2012, 11:29 PM   #4
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

Not sure if I should post this here or the other thread, but I'm assuming someone will take note of it here:

If someone were interested in these rules but did NOT want to fiddle with fractional dice (table lookups...yuck...the math isn't too bad, but I wouldn't want to scare away players either), how would you recommend things be rescaled? Seems like you'd need to do something to DR and something to firearms damage...that's perhaps more yucky than fractional dice.

I like the idea that armor matters more, but don't really care much about the differences between firearms damage and hand-to-hand damage simply because they so rarely co-exist in our games (and if they did co-exist, it's probably gonna be low tech firearms anyway, meaning that you get 1 shot in all likelihood before "switching to knives").

It seems to me that the edge protection rule from Low Tech is the "official stance" on "fixing" this issue--what if one wanted to go a bit further, but not as far as Mr. Cole's fractional dice and rescaling of melee weapons? What would you recommend?
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Old 01-01-2013, 12:44 AM   #5
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

Quote:
Originally Posted by apoc527 View Post
If someone were interested in these rules but did NOT want to fiddle with fractional dice (table lookups...yuck...the math isn't too bad, but I wouldn't want to scare away players either), how would you recommend things be rescaled? Seems like you'd need to do something to DR and something to firearms damage...that's perhaps more yucky than fractional dice.
The fractional dice, and associated calculations or look-up table, are the main thing stopping me from using this (admittedly more realistic) houserule. I think the only alternative to make a houserule like this work would be to increase the granularity of the damage results, either by doubling HP and DR and shifting damage accordingly, or allowing decimal damage totals (ie, 0.7d becomes 1d*0.7, giving results of 0.7, 1.4, 2.1, etc.) The former would probably be simpler to use in-play, and not terribly difficult to modify existing stats for. The latter would have some advantages for representing truly tiny creatures (ST ≤3) but that's only rarely going to matter in most games anyways.

Quote:
It seems to me that the edge protection rule from Low Tech is the "official stance" on "fixing" this issue--what if one wanted to go a bit further, but not as far as Mr. Cole's fractional dice and rescaling of melee weapons? What would you recommend?
You could further boost all armor DR and give firearms an inherent armor divisor. I've also seen the suggestion of giving melee attacks (including cutting blades and unarmed strikes) an armor multiplier. But again, there just doesn't seem to be the granularity necessary to accurately represent differences in ST-based damage without exaggerating its effects.
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Old 01-01-2013, 09:41 AM   #6
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

I used fractional dice in order to give some bite to each extra point of ST.

the truly EASY way to do this is to realize:

+1 is 0.28 dice
+2 is 0.56 dice
+1d-1 (so from 1d+2 to 2d-1) is 0.71 dice
+3 is 0.86 dice

So, using 2d to 3d as an example

2.0 to 2.2 dice = 2d
2.3 to 2.5 dice = 2d+1
2.6 to 2.7 dice = 2d+2
2.8 to 2.9 dice = 3d-1 or 2d+3, your choice
3.0 dice = 3d

that means there are "dead" regions, but you might not care.
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Old 01-01-2013, 10:18 AM   #7
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

Douglas, what do you think about melee weapons giving a multiplier?

Example:
The formula for damage is (ST*weapon multiplier)/10.
A shortsword have multiplier 1, and a dueling halberd have multiplier 1.8.
And three warriors, one with ST10, one with ST15 and one with ST20.
The ST10 warrior will do 1d(1) damage with the shortsword and 2d-1(1.8) with the halberd.
The ST15 warrior will do 1d+1(1.5) with the shortsword and 2d+2(2.7) with the halberd
The ST20 warrior will do 2d(2) with the shortsword and 3d+2(3.6) with the halberd.
As you see, this makes the difference between weapons considerable even for high ST warriors.

The idea is just that, making small weapons do little damage, big weapons do big damage, someone with a polearm is probably deadlier than someone with a shortsword but big ST, with is more realistic.
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Old 01-01-2013, 10:33 AM   #8
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

The problem with just using a new table with flat adds is that then you're going to get wildly different damage at different ST levels, or else I would suggest doing that.

One way to do it is to ditch Douglas's fractional dice idea and use a regular sort of progression (I suggest dropping the 2d-1 switcheroo, since it screws everything up) while keeping the rest of Douglas's idea. You can still have the bonuses multiply the ST score for damage.

It's pretty easy to think of those bonuses as percent increases to ST. So if you were swinging a +4 warhammer that would be an additional 133% to your ST score.

If I wanted to have thrusting damage as 1.5 for ST 10 and 3 for ST 20, then that would be an increase of .15 damage per level. That's not possible to put into d6s. So you do have to use the same dice for when you really want different numbers.

I guess you could round down to the nearest dice that give you the closest to what you want. It would probably be better to do something like 10d6 and 11d6, since those give alternating amounts, where one has the remainder.

If you do something like the following, then you get weird results where you're switching around rolling lots of dice, which do screwy things that Douglas was trying to avoid with the rerolls.


ST - Dice - Average Damage
10 - 1d-2 (1.5)
11 - 1d-2 (1.65)
12 - 1d-2 (1.8)
13 - 1d-2 (1.95)
14 - 2d-5 (2.1)
15 - 2d-5 (2.25)
16 - 2d-5 (2.4)
17 - 1d-1 (2.55)
18 - 1d-1 (2.7)
19 - 1d-1 (2.85)
20 - 2d-4 (3)


It is easy to figure out what you roll for any given number, since damage is always equal to ST times .15.

If you say that each +1 is equal to an additional .3333% ST, and that swinging weapons multiply the final total by 1.5, then you never have any trouble figuring out your damage.

ST 11 with a heavy spear going all-out. That's +6 total ST, which is ST +200%. ST 33. Multiply that times .15 to figure out your final damage and you get 4.95, which is 1d+1. It's really easy.

But it sucks having to roll 2d sometimes for the variability in the numbers. If you only wanted to roll a single die, you could, but then half the time you would be missing out on a half a point of damage. You could round up or down some of the time.
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Old 01-01-2013, 11:12 AM   #9
DouglasCole
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

Quote:
Originally Posted by gilbertocarlos View Post
Douglas, what do you think about melee weapons giving a multiplier?

Example:
The formula for damage is (ST*weapon multiplier)/10.
That's more or less what I suggest in the original article, reading each "+1" as in sw+3, thr+1 equal to an additional 1/3 multiplier. So sw+1 is recast as a x1.33 multiplier. thr+3 would be a x2 multiplier: 1+1x0.33 in the first case, 1+3*0.33 in the second.

But yeah, I agree that the weapon's lever arm and balance should act as a multiplier for ST. it scales beautifully, is both generic and universal. I'd need to check my math, but you might also be able to resolve things like an AoA(Strong) still as +2 PER DIE, but I'd need to see if that works, or not.
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Old 01-01-2013, 11:19 AM   #10
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Default Re: Rescaling Melee Weapons (notes)

Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
That's more or less what I suggest in the original article, reading each "+1" as in sw+3, thr+1 equal to an additional 1/3 multiplier. So sw+1 is recast as a x1.33 multiplier. thr+3 would be a x2 multiplier: 1+1x0.33 in the first case, 1+3*0.33 in the second.

But yeah, I agree that the weapon's lever arm and balance should act as a multiplier for ST. it scales beautifully, is both generic and universal. I'd need to check my math, but you might also be able to resolve things like an AoA(Strong) still as +2 PER DIE, but I'd need to see if that works, or not.

Giving specific multipliers also increases granularity, Making possible to, let's say, giving a katana a smaller loss in thrust than a scimitar would get.
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