Increasing lethality

[D10]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

Is this a problem for anybody else? Am I missing something? How can I fix it?

Correct me if im wrong, but I believe the essence of your post can be summed as "how can I make combat more of a deadly/dangerous/punishing experience for PCs"

And in that sense you have answered your own question. There are tons of gritty rules that make dealing with injuries harder, as well as many ways of making combats harder by the use of tactics and etc.

Martial arts has rules for partial/cumulative crippling due to damage, such as losing DX in an injured arm.

Aside from this, I dont use any of these gritty rules and I never felt the lethality thing was a problem... Given that in my table we have people dealing 16-20 dice of damage per hit a headblow will kill almost anyone anyway.

Yet, we had spent the last 3 years without a permanent character death (well, until the last game session at least). And the only reason he died was due to amazing NPC tactics. Ill elaborate.

Its DF campaign heading into its 6th year, we are around 1100 points atm. We were travelling very fast through a gigantic plain, maybe too fast, we used create mount spells to create racing horses, then buffed them with haste 4, and then buffed them with quick march (for those who are wondering, yes we have the skill levels/FP to sustain that). From what I remember, we were travelling at a maximum speed of 44 yards per second.

Then out of nowhere we entered an artificially created no mana, no sanctity, etc. zone. The damage was quite tremendous, with 9 out of 10 PCs + NPC allies needing to make an HT roll for death, some fell so much that they went past the 'void' zone. Only to look up and see themselves surrounded by 18 warriors and an archmage that is the enemy of one of the PCs.

We barely survived, and one of our wizards stuck in the middle of the void zone was cut off from the rest of the group and suffered 15 attacks from 5 dual wielding NPCs. He had a fighter with sacrificial parry and very high skill protecting him, but 6 hits got through and having 13 HP and little armor, that was the end of him.

Despite that, we had a modicum of luck, the evil archmage did not get a critical success on his death spells or in his mass daze attempts, so we slowly killed his cronies, buffed up, healed, and ended up winning the fight (this evil wizard was also pathologically arrogant), and even managed to use sovereign ward to prevent him from running away, killed him and looted his stuff.

50% of our combats are like this, we live on a knifes edge, always having to play to the maximum of our hability or we die. But when you successfully achieve this level of difficulty, theres no need to further hinder the PC's chance of survival/sucess imho. The chance of a critical hit killing someone is already too much of a suspense mechanic to need anything else.

[Tomsdad]

As an aside to all this. When it comes to comparing effects of GSW in the torso in RL to GURPS. There is I think an issue in trying to get a exact* match.

And that is in GURPS terms the torso is made up of either Abstract 'torso flesh' at HP with standard injury mods and bleeding, or vitals x3 injury mod and extra nasty bleeding rules and treatment rules.

I think there's sometimes a bit of a temptation to see wounds in the basic torso that don't hit GURPS vitals as just being 'poking holes in meat' and we start to think hang on why is my PC rolling to die from holes poked in their 'non vital meat'.

Ultimately in RL hits to the torso that don't hit heart, lung, liver or kidneys, can actually be more than just poking holes in meat, and I do think that HP loss even on locations without extra rules can represent a lot of things other than just amount of flesh immediately interrupted

Of course this is just an RPG system, we're not trying to write a medial text or wound simulator here!


And of course some wounds to the torso do amount to just poking holes in meat, which is half my point about grazing rules!






*well Ok there's lots of issue, but I think this is a biggish one

[mhd]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

[...]Assuming ST 10 and HT 12 (a common combination for a Call-Of-Cthulhu-type character in GURPS)[...]

Don't let common CoC characters have HT 12 in the first place is a good start.

Require Surgery to stop bleeding for vital hits and/or major wounds (and while you're at it, make vital hits more common, either by a Gygaxian/LT version of 1 in d6, or on a torso hit with a margin >= 3).

[tbone]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

I can think of a solution that involves a mix of optional rules and combat scene design changes:

That all sounds good, and largely answers the question.

But if you want to get more death using just the standard rules, without dipping into more complex bleeding rules and Martial Arts options and all that, I'd suggest two things:

1) Make the HT roll vs death tougher as HP go further negative – a commonly suggested house rule, and a helpful remedy for high-HT types that just won't die. Simplest method: -1 on the HT roll at -HP, -2 on the HT roll at -2xHP, etc. - dead simple to remember. (That's tougher than RAW from the start, as even the first death roll is at a penalty – but I think that's the goal here...)

2) Whether you make "instant death" rolls harder or leave them unchanged, rework things so a mortal wound result becomes far more likely. I think that'd work well: it makes trauma care much more valuable, and makes falling to negative HP far deadlier if that care isn't there. Which means PCs will still tend to survive, but often only through harrowing surgery. Monsters and bad guys, meanwhile, who don't typically adventure with life-saving buddies, will usually just plain die of their mortal wounds.

I don't know if those changes would do all you want, but they are nice and simple.

[Ji ji]

Mortality is totally fine. People don’t die for a 9mm bullet which doesn’t damage vitals or major arteries. If we choose to use only basic rules, then we are playing an arcade game. If we want realism, hit locations and bleeding are there. Of course, we still need a good vitals hit to kill a person with a 9mm. A 300 WM is another thing.

The only real problem is the habit to have HT 12 as a minimum. Its main goal is to actually reduce mortality, so it’s a feature more than a issue. Just limit HT+hard/easy to kill to 10 or 11 and you’ll avoid the problem of PGs that never die until at -5xHP.

[JoelSammallahti]

One idea I've been toying with is exploding damage dice (for every 6 you roll, you get an extra die). Exploding on 5 and 6 for Vitals hits might also be fun.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

One idea I've been toying with is exploding damage dice (for every 6 you roll, you get an extra die). Exploding on 5 and 6 for Vitals hits might also be fun.

Exploding on a 6 is a 1.2x increase in average result.
5-6 is a 1.5x increase
4-6 is just shy of 2x
3-6 is just more than 2.5x
2-6 is a lot of exploding! It's about 3.6x

[temp]

Shots to Torso Vitals default down to Torso shots -ie if you miss a torso vitals shot by 1 (including the -3 strike penalty for a vitals shot), you still hit the torso. Either adjust this value to -2 or -3, and have your NPC's start shooting at vitals (note that this is realistic firearms training - they teach you to shoot the center of mass, with the associated vital organs and major blood vessels) or allow the reverse effect - if you make a generic torso shot by 3 or more, it counts as a vitals hit.

All of a sudden vitals hits become much more common, and the resultant triple damage hits + surgery needed to stop bleeding rules should result in much more lethality...

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

I think you have to be careful when citing anecdotes of people surviving multiple gun shots in chest and head, yes it can happen but they tend to be well known and noteworthy anecdotes for a reason!

In reality most people who get shot and arrive at hospital and survive don't arrive with that many GSW's. IIRC the average is 1.5 (possibly side effect of the fact that in RL people aren't as accurate in combat situations as hollywood portrays).

However such anecdotes do demonstrate that such things can happen. But to me so long as the system allows for it to happen that's good enough, I don't think we need to adjust the system so that it can reliably happen.

Oh, I don't disagree. Such things are quite rare, and survival is pretty strongly correlated with medical treatment received in short order. Very few people get blasted seven times and survive without intense medical care, unlike Rambo.

Ultimately I think using random hit locations*, the occasional low damage rolls and "last wounds" the system does allow for such results as is.

Yes, I think with a lot of the optional rules from Basic Set's Tactical Combat, Martial Arts, Tactical Shooting and Bio-Tech you can get these results just fine.

I would say that guns often automatically cripple limbs too much, so I'd apply a house rule there (e.g double the cripple threshold for Pi-, Pi & Pi+).

In general small arms (especially pistols) do too much damage but they should have good chances of hitting vitals (often through random luck). The 1-2 vitals hit for torso shots goes a good way towards this.

Also I think a graze rule could be useful. A lot of gun damage rating in GURPS is designed around penetrative power and a pronounced bell curve distribution is reasonable as such penetration does tend around a median line. But rating penetrative power against various default homogenous materials is not very much like the incredibly wide range of bullet wounds in a living target. On top of this the way the rating is converted into dice and pluses can significantly effects minimum damage.

What interesting here is with the overpenetration rule the system recognises this at the upper end immediately inflicted injury. but it doesn't for the lower end.

For instance most 7.62x51mm out of a full length barrel end up at 7d for an avg 24.5, min 7 & max 42.

Fire that at a ST10 torso and apply the over penetration rules and the immediate damage is capped at 10. But the minimum damage of 7 is only 3 point less than that, and given the distribution of 7d6 you are exceptionally unlikely to roll 7-9.

Yeah, minimum damage is a bit of a problem. It's basically impossible to take the 1-2 points of damage that real life handguns and even rifles sometimes deal, even on a solid hit. If a bullet passes straight through fat and muscle without severing the tendons or breaking a bone or destroying a major blood vessel it can actually be a pretty trivial wound. Not pleasant, and it could still possibly get infected, but it's about as bad as stepping on a nail. In GURPS it's still going to do around 3-5 damage even with a handgun. The same can be said for head/skull shots - getting shot in the head is the worst place to get shot by far, but sometimes it just scratches you. This isn't really possible in GURPS because of damage math.

*for instance with 50 cent shooting he did indeed receive GSWs in the chest and face, but a lot of the shots hit limbs. FWIW my take is that he was was lucky that despite being shot so many times none of the shots proved fatal. For example the face shot was a shot that entered through his left cheek and on into his tongue and teeth (not front to back into more sensitive tissues), as the shooter pulled up to him and shot him side on while he was in his car.

This actually not wound that works with the GURPS face location (other than getting a very low roll from a hand gun)!

Yes, as above very minimal damage ought to be possible (though not particularly likely). GURPS models the mid-range and critical damage well, but not the (uncommon but not that uncommon) minor flesh wounds that often happen in firefights. Basically all hits are 'good hits', whereas many hits in real life are scrapes or bruises. The same can be said for melee weapons, which have a ridiculous ability to penetrate heavy medieval armor just because the user is strong. That's one reason I cap ST at 15 (lifting ST at 21+). Gothic plate armor is incredibly good at preventing serious injury from light weapons, and unless your assailant is Captain America he's not going to do much to you with a sword swing (a stab is a different issue, it can go through chinks).

[Brandy]

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

Simply limiting the CP and attribute maximums will make combat a lot more lethal. Characters with 150 CP, a max 15 in all attributes, no cinematic or exotic traits and a limit of ~20 in any skill...

As an addendum to this, if you're of a mind to tinker with costs of things, the cost of HT is lower than it probably ought to be for the benefits it provides. HT is as cheap as it is because it aids PC survival; if that troubles you, increase its cost.