"Less-lethal" Gurps

[Not]

That would be Unkillable 1, no?

[Peaches]

Originally Posted by Not

That would be Unkillable 1, no?

Off the top of my head, Unkillable 1 is -10xHP, not -5xHP.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by SteampengMK-1

I thought about allowing PC extra HP from the beginning, at the cost of -HP
(Instead of an average of 10HP and -50HP, allow 30HP and -30HP)

It's simpler just to say you don't need to make HT checks not to die - that's all that amounts to really, since you still auto-die after the same 60 points of damage.

In a lot of ways it makes combat *more* lethal, because you can be a lot closer to automatic death before you start rolling for unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is a lethality reduction rule - it forces you to stop fighting before you are dead, and PCs are really bad at choosing other options for that like surrender or run away. If you are trying to avoid character deaths, do not make it easy to avoid unconsciousness.

And try to encourage surrender or run away as options - have the NPCs do it to demonstrate the option exists, let it work even if it isn't strictly logical, have lots stories and rumors about prisoners or NPCs who have been prisoners and been ransomed, give your cultures a formal ransom system (worked for Runequest) and/or a market for enslaved warriors, have even the villains react with disgust to PCs that kill prisoners. RPG fights are often to the death for lack of other options, so the more of them you have the better.

[Mr_Sandman]

If you want unarmored, non-super characters to reliably survive attacks with weapons that can bring them to -5xHP, they have to not get hit, or negate the damage somehow. To do that, you can use rules like Flesh Wounds and TV Action Violence, or allow buying successes on defense (with character points, or see Impulse Buys).

[GM Joe]

Lots of great suggestions so far.

I'd also add that making sure the bad guys retreat when appropriate lowers lethality. Rarely does anything in real life continue fighting in the face of certain defeat. Keeping in mind that the original meaning of "decimate" was to take out 1/10 of the enemy forces helps me.

[DanHoward]

We find that it is pretty hard to die in GURPS already - PC death is a lot rarer than any other system we've played. Incapacitation is fairly common but not death. The simplest way to make it even harder to die is to not use the bleeding rules.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by SteampengMK-1

I was wondering, is there a way to make gurps less-lethal, as in how to lower the damage of weapons so it isn't a grantee insta kill if it was aimed at a PC?

Are you mostly thinking about guns? What sort of setting are you playing in?

Most important, what sort of things do you want the PCs to be able to do? Ignore snipers? Charge into machine-gun fire?

[somecallmetim]

The "second wind" rules options can allow characters to survive multiple damaging scenes as long as they have enough character points (or a pool of "drama points" that can only be spent for second wind uses or Luck-style rerolls). It helps with those post-Die Hard style action scenarios, where the characters keep going after multiple highly damaging scenes. Ignoring crippling wound results and critical hits on PCs works well too.

[Propjock]

Do you want PCs to be able to survive point blank shots?

Personally, I favour Action Point type saves where PCs can buy modifiers to rolls that allow them to successfully block/dodge/parry. Another thing I've considered (but never tried) was that anything that would blow through your all your positive HP in one round (including hits from multiple attackers) just takes you to zero. Damage taken beyond zero happens as normal.

None of this is particularly "realistic" but it does give PCs a chance to re-evaluate their life choices when things go wrong.

[Lord Azagthoth]

Large damage does not always mean the PC takes all damage. A tight beam energy weapon could do several dicex6 of damage while a human only takes a small portion of it. he has a small hole through his muscles but the excess damage is still in the beam that passed through him and hit another target behind him.