Hockeystaff as a weapon

[Maz]

Originally Posted by Kax

Also: IIRC there's a metal-bladed ice-hockey stick in Running Man.

That's more or less where I got the idea :D

Originally Posted by Kax

The back of a shinty stick or a hurley stick is narrow enough to be equivalent to being hit by the corner of a block of wood, easily concentrated enough to open a bleeding wound. Yes, it won't be cutting damage, but I didn't claim that. :)

In the end GURPS is a game and some things falls below the granularity of the rules, even if it doesn't make sense.

For instance claws. Bears have blunt claws. So they get a bonus to cr. dam instead of dealing cutting dam. But we all know a bears swipe can leave open wounds. But that fine.

However it also result in some more weird situations. For instance when you're a TL:3 adventurer and you wear a chainshirt and the bear swipe you. The chainshirt has DR:4/2* with the lower DR vs. crushing. This means the bear - thanks to it's blunt claws - get a bonus to penetrate your armour.

Example
So a ST:14 black bear can swipe you for 1d cr. Against your chain shirt of an effective DR:2. You are going to lose about 1-2 hp and at most 4.
But now a small ST:14 tiger attacks you as well and swipe you for 1d-1 cut. Against your shirts effective DR:4. You are unlikely to lose any HP and at most 3.

So here the bears blunt claws have better armour penetration than the tigers sharp claws.


Disclaimer: I know this is an extremely arbitrarily constructed example with just the right combination of damage DR and traits to prove my point. And my point is just to say sometimes you get weird results when you go into enough details. And you can always then just handwave a different result.
For instance I would probably say blunt claws do not offer it's bonus vs. a chainshirt. And if the tiger was intelligent or a weretiger or tiger-man or similar they would always choose to punch for cr. damage instead.

[Kromm]

Nothing about the crushing damage type promises it won't leave bloody wounds. A car crusher does crushing damage, but I can assure you it will pop you like a grape and there will be blood all over. Less graphically, I've been punched and had an ordinary human knuckle tear the skin.

Damage types describe what delivers the damage, not how the injury looks once received. Anything with a nearly two-dimensional profile (█) will do crushing damage, and bosses, ridges, or sharp corners increase the damage a little; anything with a nearly one-dimensional profile (│) will do cutting damage, and bosses or teeth increase the damage a little; anything with a nearly zero-dimensional profile (·) will do piercing or impaling damage, depending on its form factor. All could tear a bloody hole in you!

Something similar goes for burns and blisters left by burning and corrosion damage – they would be hard to tell apart. (I've been injured by both hot oil and conc. nitric acid, and I can't say the wounds were any different.) And the same goes for organ failure and systemic damage caused by toxic attacks and fatigue attacks the reduce the victim to negative FP, causing HP; the latter are really just toxic attacks with a safety margin.

This is why really huge claws – and maces bristling with spikes – can be defined as "blunt" and do crushing damage: Overall, they connect with a near-two-dimensional surface, so overall they're prone to smashing an area, possibly deforming armor. They might have bosses or points that increase the damage by +1, +2, or even +1 per die, but they aren't really cutting or impaling.

Tiny little needle claws, like a kitten's, are only not impaling because they're too short, which points up another hidden mechanism in GURPS: Very short versions of things that would otherwise be piercing or impaling get "demoted" to cutting, because they can puncture and slice but not reach vital areas. Something similar happens to blades that deliver surface cuts but can't chop through bone: They get "demoted" to crushing. If you think about it, this is why bosses and ridges generally increase damage rather than change damage type.