Is limb destruction too easy?

[Koningkrush]

I was looking at damage for some weapons, especially guns, and noticed that a 9mm handgun does 2d+2 Piercing and thought of a scenario.

Joe Average is walking down the street, and Bob wants to try out his new handgun. Bob fires a bullet into Joe's leg. This bullet ends up dealing 12 damage, which is enough to "irrevocably" destroy Joe's leg. Joe's leg is now just as damaged and useless as if it was chopped off.

I just didn't feel like this was remotely close to realistic. Maybe damage needing to at least equal 2.5x or 3x crippling damage as a house rule would be more realistic to destroy a limb beyond easy repair?

[Flyndaran]

That's absolute maximum damage. I expect such a roll to mean a splintered femur. Without advanced surgery and lots of luck, that should cause permanent crippling.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Koningkrush

I was looking at damage for some weapons, especially guns, and noticed that a 9mm handgun does 2d+2 Piercing and thought of a scenario.

Joe Average is walking down the street, and Bob wants to try out his new handgun. Bob fires a bullet into Joe's leg. This bullet ends up dealing 12 damage, which is enough to "irrevocably" destroy Joe's leg. Joe's leg is now just as damaged and useless as if it was chopped off.

I just didn't feel like this was remotely close to realistic. Maybe damage needing to at least equal 2.5x or 3x crippling damage as a house rule would be more realistic to destroy a limb beyond easy repair?

It's not cinematically realistic, because people are always shooting people in the leg in movies and not permanently crippling them. But are you sure it's not actually realistic? As Flyn points out, 12 damage from a pistol is not typical. A shot like that to the brain would be nearly instant death, a shot like that to the vitals is also near instant death and even a shot like that to the body will certainly knock you out and PROBABLY kill you if you don't get medical attention.

A more typical shot would be 9 damage. That's enough to permanently destroy your hand. But I also don't think that's unreasonable. If I put a bullet through your finger, it's certainly gone, and if I put it through your palm, you're not going to be playing piano again.

Bullets aren't a joke!

[Koningkrush]

Well, it's 2 points lower than maximum (6+6+2)=14.
But, I see your point. I looked more into how powerful a 9mm round is exactly, and if a bullet had a direct hit into a bone like the femur, then said bone would be in a very bad shape. A direct hit like this would be rare, but rolling at least a 12 is an 8% chance anyways.

[Tomsdad]

If you finding that bullets are destroying limbs too often, you can just extend the wound multiplier adjustment a bit further

Its currently:

"Arm or Leg (-2): A good way to disable
without killing! Against a living
target, reduce the wounding multiplier
of large piercing, huge piercing, and
impaling damage to x1" (pg399)

if you add on:

Reduce the wounding multiplier of piercing to x1/2

You won't see a lot of difference to actual damage inflicted (as it capped by HP/2 anyway). But you'll get less limbs being permanently destroyed. but more especially less auto destroyed results from 5.56mm carbines, which even at 4d are doing on average 14pts for the limb destruction calculation.

[Anthony]

In general 'destruction' (limb or otherwise) is a bit too easy, there's a big distance between not functioning correctly and complete nonexistence. Certainly, a bullet in the arm might sever a critical nerve or tendon, higher power rounds (this mostly means rifles) might break a bone in enough places that it will be impossible to fix, and infection might mean the limb has to be amputated, but there's still a pretty substantial chance that all it does is take out a chunk of muscle and skin, leaving the limb impaired (quite possibly permanently) but not totally useless.

[NineDaysDead]

High-Tech has some Optional Wounding Rules that may be of interest:

Originally Posted by High-Tech page 162

Limb Hits
While an attack that’s neither cutting nor explosive can dismember (p. B421), the injury threshold is realistically much higher. Notably, bullets are more likely to pass through a limb or an extremity than to blow it off. Optionally, a body part is automatically permanently crippled (p. B422) if it suffers at least twice the injury needed to cripple it – but impaling, piercing, and tight-beam burning attacks must inflict twice that amount to sever the body part.

[evileeyore]

Personally I track wounds to limbs that have exceeded the "crippling" stage separately*. At 5xCrippled it's automatically Permanently Crippled, at 10xCrippled it's Destroyed.

Yes... this is far more difficult to achieve (not really, we see limbs get loped off with fair regularity) but it fits with the general Damage progression.




*I actually track all wounds separately.

[zoncxs]

Remember that the amount of injury they take from a wound to the limbs (legs for this example) is HP/2. all damage beyond that threshold is lost.

so for joe, we assume 10HP, that means he takes only 6 HP of injury. The total is used to determine crippling and dismemberment, and 12 HP is enough to cripple it (the bone was shattered completely on impact) and if you use the High tech optional rule, it is not enough to dismember it, for that the rolled damage would have to be 20+ which is beyond a 9mm pistol.

so for the example given, the leg is crippled permanently in my book, but not shot off.

[malloyd]

All GURPS "totally destroyed" results are too easy if you are interpreting destroyed as reduced to ash, or completely shredded. They're OK for "ruin so completely restoration or repair is impossible", which many dictionaries will even give as the primary meaning of "destroy".

But sure, a "destroyed" limb may still leave quite a lot of flesh attached to your body, and if you were still conscious at when you arrived in surgery and really insisted, maybe you could successfully demand it be left attached.

At low TL this means you unavoidably die of massive infection, but at TL5+ you might live. You'll never be able to move it again, it's probably an ongoing source of pain or discomfort, and of course you can't attach a prosthetic as long as that lump is in the way, but there are probably people with religious manias about their body being whole at the resurrection or something that would see that as worthwhile.