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Old 12-17-2014, 06:42 AM   #11
Dwarf99
 
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

Sometimes I wish this forum had a +1 button.

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I've seen a lot of people on the forums make blanket statements about what attribute scores "mean" that contradicts what GURPS says they mean in the very first chapter of the Basic set. Statements like "nobody really has IQ 13," "everyone has HT 10 or lower," etc.
I would hit it repeatedly.
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I'd probably take Restricted Diet: Boiled Children
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Old 12-17-2014, 07:47 AM   #12
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

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Originally Posted by Gnome View Post
Where are you getting this idea? B14 defines an attribute of 10 as "average," and goes on to state that "Most humans get by just fine with a score of 10."
How did "average" suddenly turn into an athletic man in his prime? That sounds like a pretty good description of "above average" to me...

In general, I've seen a lot of people on the forums make blanket statements about what attribute scores "mean" that contradicts what GURPS says they mean in the very first chapter of the Basic set. Statements like "nobody really has IQ 13," "everyone has HT 10 or lower," etc.
From all the authors like Kromm. You confuse heroic average for real world average.
Gurps is not meant to be simulationistic at all. It's a game for rough settings, and not meant to illustrate normal people, average or otherwise.

I can one arm curl 60 pounds, am the second strongest person I've met in my limited personal experience, yet according to many here qualify for ST 10 only.
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Old 12-17-2014, 08:15 AM   #13
Gnome
 
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
From all the authors like Kromm. You confuse heroic average for real world average.
Gurps is not meant to be simulationistic at all. It's a game for rough settings, and not meant to illustrate normal people, average or otherwise.
I realize that GURPS is an adventure game, and I am no simulationist. That said, when the book says "average" and specifies "normal human," I take it at its word. The same page makes some concessions to the adventurer archetype:

"8 or 9: Below average. Such scores are limiting, but within the human
norm. The GM may forbid attributes below 8 to active adventurers."

I don't remember Kromm ever saying that 10 isn't an average attribute for a normal person. He does often remind people that point costs, for example, are assessed with the assumption that you're playing an adventure game.
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I can one arm curl 60 pounds, am the second strongest person I've met in my limited personal experience, yet according to many here qualify for ST 10 only.
I don't know of any rules for one arm curls, but if we call that a 2 second one-handed lift, then that gives you a BL of 30 lbs, or a ST of about 12 or 13, somewhere between "above average" and "exceptional." Sounds about right based on your self-description of 2nd strongest person you've met!
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Old 12-17-2014, 09:46 AM   #14
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

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Originally Posted by Gnome View Post
...
I don't know of any rules for one arm curls, but if we call that a 2 second one-handed lift, then that gives you a BL of 30 lbs, or a ST of about 12 or 13, somewhere between "above average" and "exceptional." Sounds about right based on your self-description of 2nd strongest person you've met!
Or that most people I meet, and in normal America, are not ST 10 or adventuring material. Not that I am either, but not for reasons of low strength.
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Old 12-17-2014, 10:42 AM   #15
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

See this thread and a host of others for a more complete discussion of the 'ST 10: human average, human male average, human male-fit-for-military-service average, or what?' question, so we don't continue to derail this thread.

As for the original question: so the armor has to deal with, worst-case, a critical All-Out Jump Kick to the Skull from a character with Karate DX+1 and ST 11.

Base thrust damage: 1d-1
Karate bonus: +2
All-Out Jump kick: +2
Total: 1d+3

The worst outcome on the Critical Head Blow Table is probably 'maximum normal damage that ignores target DR'. So 9 DR-ignoring crushing damage. Also possible is 'triples damage', for 27 crushing, and more commonly 'double damage' for 18 and 'DR Protects at half value'.

A modern Ballistic Helmet from High-Tech is DR 12, DR 10 for the face. This is completely obliterated by even double damage.

Alternatively, we could try a Full Helm of Heavy Plate from GURPS Low-Tech (base DR 9, 9.6 lb), add padding (+1 DR, 1.8 lb), make it lots thicker per Heavy Plate (+5 DR, +24 lb), make it Hardened Steel (+1 DR), and finally apply the High-Tech Low-Tech rule to double DR when low-tech armor is manufactured at a high TL for a total DR 32, 35.4 pound helmet. This will, barely, survive triple damage, at the cost of something that will put 'team Red' into light encumbrance just for the helmet.

Nothing, however, will make a 'max-damage and ignore DR' skull crit survivable. 9 damage, ignoring helmet and skull DR, multiplies to 36, which will instantly force three HT rolls vs. instant death.

This is all ignoring the additional constraint that the armor not trigger Hurting Yourself, which of course makes things a lot more difficult.

The way to do this is probably to have the martial artists pull their punches per Subduing a Foe, p. 401, having them treat their ST as 1.

That gets us:
Base thrust damage: 1d-6
Karate bonus: +2
All-Out Jump kick: +2
Total: 1d-2


That gets our worst case down to either 4 DR-ignoring crushing damage or 12 crushing damage. The DR-ignoring damage will still drop someone with ST 10 or 11 down to negatives, forcing a single HT roll to avoid death. If the Red guy doesn't have ST 12 or HP 12, which some will- say 10% of them. Crits will be about 9.3% of all attacks made, max-damage-DR-ignoring crits at 0.5% of all crits. Assume all of Red Team has HT 10: that means they'll not be killed or mortally wounded 50% of the time, and only instantly killed 16.2% of the time. With good medical attention on hand, mortal wounds are likely to be OK.

So (0.9 * 0.093 * 0.005 * 0.162) = 0.0068% or about one in 14,000 hits of all All-Out (Strong) attacks to the skull will result in instant kills, and (0.9 * 0.093 * 0.005 * (0.5-0.162)) = 0.0141% or about one in 7,000 of all All-Out (Strong) attacks to the skull will result in mortal wounds.

And not all attacks will be All-Out(Strong) Attacks to the skull.

With odds like these, the program is highly unlikely to see a single death, unless it's putting dozens of trainees through hundreds of man-hours of training each.

Self-injury can be avoided with the use of the gear on MA p. 233.

Last edited by Toptomcat; 12-17-2014 at 01:07 PM.
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Old 12-17-2014, 01:27 PM   #16
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

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Originally Posted by Toptomcat View Post
Alternatively, we could try a Full Helm of Heavy Plate from GURPS Low-Tech (base DR 9, 9.6 lb), add padding (+1 DR, 1.8 lb), make it lots thicker per Heavy Plate (+5 DR, +24 lb), make it Hardened Steel (+1 DR), and finally apply the High-Tech Low-Tech rule to double DR when low-tech armor is manufactured at a high TL for a total DR 32, 35.4 pound helmet. This will, barely, survive triple damage, at the cost of something that will put 'team Red' into light encumbrance just for the helmet.
The High-Tech rule was intended to represent that high tech steels are better than low tech steels and that the steel armour as represented in basic was insufficiently protective. I don't think it was designed around actual material properties and so it probably shouldn't be used with Low-Tech armour. The heavy plate option applied to light plate replicates medium and heavy plate so you are probably producing unnecessarily heavy armour if you apply it to heavy plate directly instead.

However, you could wear banded heavy mail below a hardened steel light plate with heavy plate option helmet which itself has a hardened steel light plate with heavy plate option helmet grandguard attached to it. If you wanted to get really extravagant you could make it masterfully tailored with fluted plate armour and duplex plate instead of just hardened steel.
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Old 12-17-2014, 03:19 PM   #17
mr beer
 
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

I think padded cloth helmets which protect the skull, light boxing gloves and a sports cup would be a sensible precaution if you are going to be mixing it up with well motivated convicts and soldiers for training purposes. So DR:2 for skull and groin and DR: 1 for the hands I guess. This should reduce risk without negating it.

You might also add a thin layer of steel to the helmets without greatly increasing weight.

In the real world, you might well pad your knees and elbows as well but maybe it doesn't matter for GURPS. Another consideration are the eyes but protective glasses can be knocked off so then we are back to full helmets.
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Old 12-17-2014, 04:35 PM   #18
BraselC5048
 
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

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Originally Posted by Toptomcat View Post
See this thread and a host of others for a more complete discussion of the 'ST 10: human average, human male average, human male-fit-for-military-service average, or what?' question, so we don't continue to derail this thread.

As for the original question: so the armor has to deal with, worst-case, a critical All-Out Jump Kick to the Skull from a character with Karate DX+1 and ST 11.

Base thrust damage: 1d-1
Karate bonus: +2
All-Out Jump kick: +2
Total: 1d+3

The worst outcome on the Critical Head Blow Table is probably 'maximum normal damage that ignores target DR'. So 9 DR-ignoring crushing damage. Also possible is 'triples damage', for 27 crushing, and more commonly 'double damage' for 18 and 'DR Protects at half value'.



Nothing, however, will make a 'max-damage and ignore DR' skull crit survivable. 9 damage, ignoring helmet and skull DR, multiplies to 36, which will instantly force three HT rolls vs. instant death.

This is all ignoring the additional constraint that the armor not trigger Hurting Yourself, which of course makes things a lot more difficult.

The way to do this is probably to have the martial artists pull their punches per Subduing a Foe, p. 401, having them treat their ST as 1.

That gets us:
Base thrust damage: 1d-6
Karate bonus: +2
All-Out Jump kick: +2
Total: 1d-2


That gets our worst case down to either 4 DR-ignoring crushing damage or 12 crushing damage. The DR-ignoring damage will still drop someone with ST 10 or 11 down to negatives, forcing a single HT roll to avoid death. If the Red guy doesn't have ST 12 or HP 12, which some will- say 10% of them. Crits will be about 9.3% of all attacks made, max-damage-DR-ignoring crits at 0.5% of all crits. Assume all of Red Team has HT 10: that means they'll not be killed or mortally wounded 50% of the time, and only instantly killed 16.2% of the time. With good medical attention on hand, mortal wounds are likely to be OK.

So (0.9 * 0.093 * 0.005 * 0.162) = 0.0068% or about one in 14,000 hits of all All-Out (Strong) attacks to the skull will result in instant kills, and (0.9 * 0.093 * 0.005 * (0.5-0.162)) = 0.0141% or about one in 7,000 of all All-Out (Strong) attacks to the skull will result in mortal wounds.

And not all attacks will be All-Out(Strong) Attacks to the skull.

With odds like these, the program is highly unlikely to see a single death, unless it's putting dozens of trainees through hundreds of man-hours of training each.

Self-injury can be avoided with the use of the gear on MA p. 233.
There's a bit of an error there. 4 DR ignoring crushing damage to the skull is only 16 HP - enough to trigger Bleeding by my rules, but not enough to force a death check. And an Jump Kick is +2 on it's own, so likely no need to go all out, which seems counterproductive when also pulling your punches.

The training starts out with something like 4000 trainees a year, rapidly dropping over a 3-4 year period to maybe 40-50 or perhaps 100 or so (the ones without sufficiently extremely high stats don't take very long to weed out, and there's a lot of "chaff with the wheat," so to speak, although they still would make powerful adventurers, they're just not incredibly good enough). Or perhaps less. Advanced training lasts for 5 years after that, with the final graduation number not being a fixed number or percentile, but rather standards based. The number of trainees in each class roughly follows the curve for exponential decay, with most of the failing happening early on. The average number is 6. They can have training that lasts that long since the martial arts portion of the training starts age 6-7, with graduation at age 15. Most of the actual martial arts portion occurs in advanced training, skewed toward the ones farthest along, and most likely to graduate.

An active career lasts 10 years in theory, and the typical number on active service is 30, with the distribution heavily skewed toward the younger end. The biggest cause of end of career is serious injury or simple wear and tear on the body; it's simply not up to a lifetime of doing this, with what would be considered twisting you arm off bad landings from Acrobatic Dodges being both routine and intentional. That's why everybody is ST 10-11; any larger and the forces on your joints are simply too much, and you won't last long.

Still, a lot of trainees, but most of the training is concentrated on an increasingly small number of them, so total fights would likely be lower. Likely an acceptable risk, especially considering ST 11 is in the minority, and much of it will be happening when they've yet to grow to full ST, so damage will be lower. There's a fatality rate among the trainees, in this case with most of it happened farther along. There's plenty of inherently dangerous activity, and occasionally it's done without normal safety gear as a confidence building exercise, since they won't get it when it comes to the real thing. The graduates are expected to have Luck (15 pts), and those who aren't pretty lucky will get washed out eventually. Not many have it, but they're picky, and can afford to be.

My character's class was an oddball lot, with my character being incredibly gifted in nearly everything, but helpless in a few important fields, one who's an incredibly good shot, but has all the personality of a brick when it comes to social skills, and one who's just as good with throwing knives instead of guns. (At least makes for reliable (although short) ranged and silent sentry elimination. If you can reliably put it Extra Effort AoA (strong) into the skull, then it works pretty well.)
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Old 12-17-2014, 07:47 PM   #19
Toptomcat
 
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

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Originally Posted by Sindri View Post
The High-Tech rule was intended to represent that high tech steels are better than low tech steels and that the steel armour as represented in basic was insufficiently protective. I don't think it was designed around actual material properties and so it probably shouldn't be used with Low-Tech armour. The heavy plate option applied to light plate replicates medium and heavy plate so you are probably producing unnecessarily heavy armour if you apply it to heavy plate directly instead.
Yeah, I knew there were a few likely problems. In addition to your objection, there's the fact that it probably isn't kosher to stack the Hardened Steel DR modifier, intended to represent improved metallurgy with advance in TL, with the High-Tech Low-Tech Armor doubling, which was meant to represent the same thing. I was going for a reductio ad absurdium rather than trying to present a practical armor- 'look, even if you do all this questionably legal stuff to get an enormous, utterly impractical helmet, there's still an entry on the critical-hit table that'll nail ya.'

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Originally Posted by mr beer View Post
In the real world, you might well pad your knees and elbows as well...
Generally speaking, you don't. No one's figured out how to make knee/elbow pads that will stay on, won't slip, provide adequate impact protection, and don't unduly affect the movement of the joint. People training with elbows either put on specialized headgear or just go really light.

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Originally Posted by BraselC5048 View Post
There's a bit of an error there. 4 DR ignoring crushing damage to the skull is only 16 HP - enough to trigger Bleeding by my rules, but not enough to force a death check.
I'm sorry, you're quite correct. I confused the unconciousness check for being below 0 HP with the death check for falling below -1xHP.

Quote:
And an Jump Kick is +2 on it's own, so likely no need to go all out, which seems counterproductive when also pulling your punches.
Jump Kick is, itself, a special option for Committed and All-Out Attack per the rules for the technique: it's not possible to make a Jump Kick that isn't at least Committed, and I assumed All-Out because I wanted to get the worst case for people pulling their punches.

Quote:
The training starts out with something like 4000 trainees a year, rapidly dropping over a 3-4 year period to maybe 40-50 or perhaps 100 or so...
Ah, okay. So in all likelihood, the program *has* had a few serious injuries, maybe even a freak death or two among the training partners of those who don't like pulling their punches.

Quote:
They can have training that lasts that long since the martial arts portion of the training starts age 6-7, with graduation at age 15.
That does account well for the 'typical ST 10-11' bit.

Quote:
There's a fatality rate among the trainees, in this case with most of it happened farther along. There's plenty of inherently dangerous activity, and occasionally it's done without normal safety gear as a confidence building exercise...
Okay, then it sounds like the occasional freak injury or fatality among the training partners would be tolerated as well.

Out of curiosity, what's created this astoundingly pressing need for an elite corps of asskickers?

Last edited by Toptomcat; 12-17-2014 at 07:59 PM.
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Old 12-18-2014, 12:14 AM   #20
Tomsdad
 
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Default Re: Martial Arts training armor for a combat skill?

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Originally Posted by Gnome View Post
Where are you getting this idea? B14 defines an attribute of 10 as "average," and goes on to state that "Most humans get by just fine with a score of 10."
How did "average" suddenly turn into an athletic man in his prime? That sounds like a pretty good description of "above average" to me...


I think it's more that there's a tendency to treat 10 as the are minimum for people, Were as 10 actually encompasses the majority of people. And 9 is as common as 11.

So yes the majority of 18 year olds going for enlistment will be ST10 because that's what the majority of people are. However I've no issue with this that complete a training regime design din increases ST to come out of training with higher ST (pack training and marching alone will increase lift ST I'd have thought).

I also don't mind stricter enrolment criteria for specific groups being higher then 10, but you will be reducing your intake markedly by doing so. (but such group existed in the real world, they just we'rent relatively big compared to there general population).




Quote:
Originally Posted by Gnome View Post
In general, I've seen a lot of people on the forums make blanket statements about what attribute scores "mean" that contradicts what GURPS says they mean in the very first chapter of the Basic set. Statements like "nobody really has IQ 13," "everyone has HT 10 or lower," etc.
That seems to be overstating what people say IMO, it's just the majority of people have HT10, and only a tiny number of people have had IQ13.

There is no problem with the 1st chapter* of basic and this reading, its just when most PC's have at least one area of above average aptitude, attribute creep in order to stand out is a natural effect. And so 10's become quickly seen as weak or low.

Call it the "need to have ST18/00 to play a fighter" effect.


*well except human ST going up to polar bear ST20, but that's not what we're talking about here!
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