Should Plate Armor be Harder to Penetrate?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Are you really baffled by the proposition that hitting somebody with a bigger, heavier object can be more damaging? Because that's not actually as strange as you're making it out to be.

There is a granularity problem, of course, but muscle mechanics being what they are, a heavier tool winds up with both more momentum and more total energy (and on the minus side, takes longer to deliver a strike, which GURPS also ignores).

[hal]

Phoenix Command had a game mechanic that made rapid strikes do 1/2 damage and full blows did normal damage. Phoenix Command also utilized 2 second per turn time scales.

I wonder What would be the better way to simulate the extra time of a heavier blow?

Just as a telegraphed blow nets the defender a +2 defensive bonus, perhaps a heavier blow could be a telegraphed blow that deals +2 damage just like all out attacks can use either improved bonus to hit or improved damages?

Then, adjust all quick blow damages to inflict 2 points less damage?

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

A ST 5 child can more than double their damage by using All-Out attack (from 1d-4 to 1d-2), while the strongest man in the world notices a much smaller proportional increase from using the same option. That doesn't make any sense.

Getting stabbed is serious business, regardless of who is doing the stabbing, especially when the attacker is completely committed to doing their utmost to succeed in the attack and to injure the victim.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Are you really baffled by the proposition that hitting somebody with a bigger, heavier object can be more damaging?

I'm really baffled by the notion that increasing the mass of an object from 1.8kg to 2.7kg is going to make much difference in the damage done at the velocities humans are capable of delivering thrusts at.

If we look at the lower end of what velocity someone might achieve (call it 4 m/s), then you get 14.4 J (~1.5 GURPS damage) with the lighter spear and 21.76 J (~1.8 GURPS damage) for the heavier spear.

At the high end (the velocity of the punch from a pro boxer, which I suspect is faster than you're going to be thrusting a spear) we're looking at something like 11 m/s, which gives us 108.9 J (~4 GURPS damage) and 164.5 J (~5 GURPS damage)

I suspect what you would run into on the battlefield would be somewhere between those two.

(And maybe I got this all wrong. I'm certainly not an expert at this.)

Yes, that's a meaningful difference when used by someone exceptionally strong. But it's certainly not enough to justify the differences that we see in the game rules. And that's making some perhaps questionable assumptions about how the interaction between the body and the weapons works that, if anything, make the weapons appear more dissimilar than they actually would be.

If these numbers are in the right ballpark, then it's exceptionally unlikely that anyone on the battlefield is going to have their armor pierced by a spear, sword, etc. if they were able to purchase armor. Which makes sense. If you were purchasing armor to wear into battle, you would want to purchase armor that protects you from the attacks you're likely to face on the battlefield.

Now, it is true that those numbers likely were not assigned with 'penetration of armor' as the main metric in mind, even though per GURPS mechanics they really should have been.

The intent seems to be to represent the wounds caused by the weapons, which might be more realistic, though I still find fault with the addition of static modifiers that the weapons give. And I have to wonder why, if the heavy spear, for instance, is given a higher damage value due to its head that is specialized at rending flesh, it is better at penetrating armor rather than worse as it should be with its "extra wide head." Wouldn't a weapon with an extra wide head have much more trouble penetrating armor? Yet paradoxically, it's made better at penetrating armor rather than worse.

Really each weapon needed its own armor penetration statistics, but with the granularity we're stuck with in a system that uses 3d6, I don't know how feasible that would be. I guess you could do it with a table lookup where you look at what it takes for any given weapon to penetrate any given armor.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Shostak

Getting stabbed is serious business, regardless of who is doing the stabbing, especially when the attacker is completely committed to doing their utmost to succeed in the attack and to injure the victim.

That's definitely the case, but what we're talking about here is the bizarre behavior of weapons in GURPS in terms of armor penetration. Picking up a different weapon can triple or quadruple the penetration ability of someone weak, while switching weapons has a much smaller proportional impact on someone average or strong.

If a weapon doubles one person's penetrative ability, why does it barely impact another person's?

[mr beer]

The realism-based solution might be a combination of:

- Slower ST-based damage increases and perhaps a lower starting point for ST 10
- Muscle powered weapons apply damage multipliers instead of set bonus
- All-out damage/Extra Effort is a multiplier as well
- Blunt Trauma-type rules so that non-penetrating hits can damage
- Possibly increase armour DR as well (if ST-based damage adjustments are not sufficient)

Would be irritating to have to calculate on the fly but pre-worked information should be OK.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I'm really baffled by the notion that increasing the mass of an object from 1.8kg to 2.7kg is going to make much difference in the damage done at the velocities humans are capable of delivering thrusts at.

If we look at the lower end of what velocity someone might achieve (call it 4 m/s), then you get 14.4 J (~1.5 GURPS damage) with the lighter spear and 21.76 J (~1.8 GURPS damage) for the heavier spear.

At the high end (the velocity of the punch from a pro boxer, which I suspect is faster than you're going to be thrusting a spear) we're looking at something like 11 m/s, which gives us 108.9 J (~4 GURPS damage) and 164.5 J (~5 GURPS damage)

I suspect what you would run into on the battlefield would be somewhere between those two.

(And maybe I got this all wrong. I'm certainly not an expert at this.)

Yes, that's a meaningful difference when used by someone exceptionally strong. But it's certainly not enough to justify the differences that we see in the game rules. And that's making some perhaps questionable assumptions about how the interaction between the body and the weapons works that, if anything, make the weapons appear more dissimilar than they actually would be.

Okay, there's two different questions. You seem to agree that there's no problem with the fact of the heavy spear doing more damage. That it shouldn't do more damage in the way it does under GURPS RAW, I agree.

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

If these numbers are in the right ballpark, then it's exceptionally unlikely that anyone on the battlefield is going to have their armor pierced by a spear, sword, etc. if they were able to purchase armor. Which makes sense. If you were purchasing armor to wear into battle, you would want to purchase armor that protects you from the attacks you're likely to face on the battlefield.

Stabbing through armor with a spear is probably not good simulation, yeah.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by GODSLAYER

So I've been chatting with a few guys in a Games Design channel lately, and one of their issues with GURPS is that they feel that, historically, armor was much harder to penetrate than what the current rules represent.

Given what we know of the quality of metallurgy from those periods, virtually anything could happen. Plates could shatter, weapons could shatter, and anything in between. Since we don't know what a point of damage represents, and we know that DR stops damage, it's really not all that important. Roll your damage randomly and you have historical results. ;)

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

You seem to agree that there's no problem with the fact of the heavy spear doing more damage. That it shouldn't do more damage in the way it does under GURPS RAW, I agree.

I suspect two things here: the differences are fairly minor in reality, with the difference in most cases being negligible (below the level of resolution that the game is capable of generating) and that GURPS has those differences backwards when they do occur. In GURPS, when a weaker person uses a heavier weapon, they get more of an advantage, whereas the opposite is true in real life; when a stronger person uses the heavier weapon, they should be the ones to gain the advantage.

[DouglasCole]

I'm going to guess that the ST table, which hasn't been altered for quite a while, is simply "ST 10 does 1d damage, and damage increases by one point per point of ST."

It likely predates a sw/thr differentiation even. It certainly predates the assigning of damage/penetration to firearms.