Increasing lethality

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

In most cases a sword or axe wound is far worse than a pistol or rifle wound. The major difference is that a pistol or rifle can blow right through someone, and thus has a somewhat higher chance of destroying organs or major blood vessels than a glancing blow from a melee weapon.

This is a slashing/chopping vs piercing weapon thing. Stab wounds seldom put someone out of a fight just from the tissue damage, but they are more likely to kill you over the longer term than a cut. Slashing wounds are more likely to disable parts of the body by cutting muscle and tendons, but are less likely to cause uncontrollable bleeding, etc.

In a system other than GURPS you could replicate this to some extent by using (for example) 1d6+2 for a slashing weapon and 1d10 for a piercing one. Same average damage, but the former is more consistent.

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by Rupert

This is a slashing/chopping vs piercing weapon thing.

If I could be arsed to do it GURPS I would probably decrease the damage of small arms by about half but give them an additional + to their piercing. Superb penetration, mediocre tissue destruction describes them. I think that the GURPS firearm damage was designed without all the optional rules in mind, and that's why it's so high - with the Basic rules firearms aren't lethal enough, with all the optional rules they're too lethal just because of how much base damage they have.

I also think part of the issue here has nothing to do with GURPS per se but in reducing weapons to statistics. IRL damage has to do with convoluted wound paths and neurological responses to them, there is of course no such thing as 'damage'. While modeling firearms damaged on the energetic level of a round has some merit to it it's far too simple - .17 Hornady has an incredible amount of energy concentration but would do pitiful damage to a human being compared to a mace. Of course it's absurd to expect any RPG to have wound-path rules without becoming more convoluted than it's worth.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

Thanks for the run down! I think I've been vastly under-using shots to the vitals so far with my NPCs. I wonder if the difference between a cinematic and a gritty campaign are not so much the difference in optional rules that you apply, but also the difference in what your basic NPC will go for in combat, i.e. "torso hits and out of combat at 0HP" for cinematics vs. "vitals/head/limb hits and more resilience" for gritty?

I think part of the problem is that the vitals are so much harder to hit. Even aiming for the torso, the chances of a vitals hit are rather low. It gets really weird if you're separating the torso into chest (no penalty) and abdomen (-1) as in Low Tech, yet only one in six shots to the chest will hit the 'vital' heart or lungs. It seems to me that a gunshot to the chest would be very likely to hit one of these (Though I understand that decreasing the chance is probably a game-design choice to avoid excessive PC mortality). Worse yet, aiming for the vitals decreases your chance of hitting anything, while in reality, shooters are trained to aim at the center of the chest because it gives the best chance of hitting your target, even if it's not the location you aimed for. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to do it, short of Millennium's End's quirky shot-placement overlay. The "success by three" house-rule mentioned above is probably the best solution (And good enough that I think I'll steal it). Maybe throw in that a roll that hits exactly hits a random location.

Although I also like using the Grazing rules from the Alternate GURPS (Pyramid 34), which also makes us of the success-by-0 roll, so maybe not.

But even barring all of that, yeah, having experienced or trained shooters aim for vitals shots (With random goons or gang-bangers just aiming for the torso or random) is probably a good way of demonstrating higher skill (Though I'd note they shouldn't do this all the time, only when it doesn't decrease their chance of hitting too much).

Why is there a -9 Surgery penalty for the wound here? I don't remember either Basic Set or Martial Arts having such modifiers for that skill?

It's in Martial Arts, under Bandaging Severe Wounds. It's optional (As with all the bleeding rules), but it applies the same penalties you get to bleeding rolls to First-Aid and Surgery rolls to stop the bleeding.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

I find that the lethality in GURPS is, by default, quite low (assuming a non-magic/non-sci-fi setting). It's easy to put a character out of play by having them so injured that they have to spend weeks in the hospital, but it's harder to actually kill them in my experience.

I don't find this to be a problem. Mostly because, in the games I run and play, characters start looking to get out of a fight once they start getting wounded.

For example, in the WWII campaign I was playing today, a lot of the gunfire is rifles and machine gins doing 6d to 7d per hit. Most combatants, on any side, will drop out of a fight after taking a hit like that. They may have made one death check to survive that far, but another hit will involve about two more. Taking cover and not coming out is considered acceptable at that point.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

If I could be arsed to do it GURPS I would probably decrease the damage of small arms by about half but give them an additional + to their piercing. Superb penetration, mediocre tissue destruction describes them. I think that the GURPS firearm damage was designed without all the optional rules in mind, and that's why it's so high - with the Basic rules firearms aren't lethal enough, with all the optional rules they're too lethal just because of how much base damage they have.

Once upon a time (in the 3e days) my solution was to double all hit points, leaving bullet damage and DR the same. DR was then doubled vs melee attacks (and ST-based missile, maybe?), and ST based damage got one extra dice. Thus ST10 swing damage stayed proportionally the same, ST10 thrust damage was slightly stronger, and all ST-based damage scaled from there at half the original rate.

I might have intended to change melee weapon damages a bit as well, probably by turning the damage bonuses for weapon into 'per die' bonuses of some sort, but I certainly never got round to it.

[tbone]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

Unless you were talking about something else, the "miss vitals by 1, hit the torso" is not an optional rule, it's from the Basic Set

Is it? I'd expect it to be on p399, but I don't see it there or anywhere.

I thought it was in Martial Arts, but checking now, I don't see it there either, including on p137, where I don't see anything in the vitals notes about a miss by 1 hitting the torso instead. (However, that page does inform us that a miss by 1 against an ear hits the torso...)

Huh. Is this "miss vitals by 1, hit the torso" rule somewhere in GURPS, or is it my imagination? I think I'm just failing to see it somewhere...

As for the chance that a torso shot gets lucky and hits the vitals, that is indeed in MA, as you say, on p137. Though, for the record, it's only a 1 in 6 chance. (I like 2 in 6, myself; a torso packs a lot of vitals.)

Originally Posted by lordabdul

Indeed, but what makes the torso vs. vitals thing make some kind of sense, is that vitals are inside the torso. The head isn't.

Yes, as noted in a later post.

For a sub-part that on the "edge" of a larger part - head atop body, ear attached to head, etc. – it makes sense to game a general "attack on the sub-part hits the larger part on a miss by 1", or something like that.

If the subpart is in the center of the larger part – vitals in torso, or even ear in head if attacked from the side – it makes sense for a miss against the small part to have a high chance of hitting the larger part, even as high as if the attacker had aimed at the larger part to begin with (my bullseye in archery target example).

[Dalzig]

Originally Posted by tbone

Is it? I'd expect it to be on p399, but I don't see it there or anywhere.

It's note [1] in the hit location table on page 552. It is slightly odd and confusing that the rules on page 399 don't mention it.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by tbone

Is it? I'd expect it to be on p399, but I don't see it there or anywhere.

I thought it was in Martial Arts, but checking now, I don't see it there either, including on p137, where I don't see anything in the vitals notes about a miss by 1 hitting the torso instead. (However, that page does inform us that a miss by 1 against an ear hits the torso...)

Huh. Is this "miss vitals by 1, hit the torso" rule somewhere in GURPS, or is it my imagination? I think I'm just failing to see it somewhere...

I think it might have been in a fairly early issue of Roleplayer... it's been a house rule (also for the head etc) that was almost always known and used in the groups I played with since at least 1990...

Seems to me that really there should always be some chance of hitting an unintended random body part, too.

Originally Posted by Dalzig

It's note [1] in the hit location table on page 552. It is slightly odd and confusing that the rules on page 399 don't mention it.

Aha! Right, there you go! Yeah, it would be good if it were mentioned in the rules text not just a note on the hit location table!

[tbone]

Originally Posted by Dalzig

It's note [1] in the hit location table on page 552. It is slightly odd and confusing that the rules on page 399 don't mention it.

Ah, thanks!

(Yeah, GURPS is generally very good about thorough cross-referencing and indexing, but with 500+ pages in Basic Set alone, a few little things are bound to fall through...)

[Polydamas]

Its also worth saying that dying slowly of blood loss, infection, and fevers over weeks to months (I think that one of Magellan's crew took three weeks to die after a mutiny that ended in a knife fight) is not the kind of thing that most stories focus on. Neither is 'yeah, you are technically still alive and could be saved by a dentist's assistant or army cook at TL 7+, but in this setting nobody has any idea and they strip you naked and dump you in the pit with the other 37 corpses.' If you enforce the bleeding rules with all modifiers, and the rules for infections, and a setting does not have magic or high-tech medicine, wounds are scary.

It would help to have a version of the bleeding rules which does not require so many rolls.