Increasing lethality

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Ji ji

Of course.
3d is used in order to keep a high SD. 9d+1 is rolled as 3d*3+1.

Ok. You was quite clear, actually. I just wanted to be sure to understand your house rule.

[Boge]

Long topic, lots of replies, sorry, but I didn't read them all. But I wanted to comment because this kind of thing has really bothered me in Gurps lately.

Vulnerability is absolutely key to proper role-playing. I've found with the group I play with that a couple of the players don't play in character because they know there isn't really any vulnerability there. They know there is no risk of dying or even getting seriously hurt.

I was reading in the Vampire book something that I'm not sure was meant to be about what I took it for, but here it is:

"Occasionally, characters will fall, and the fear of that occurring is essential to maintaining suspense during the game. If the players are not afraid of their chracters' taking damage from a fall, they will take all sorts of out-of-character risks."

Yeah, it's talking literally about falling, but it's the same message about risk of death. I feel Gurps should be more about the decisions we make as players/characters and less about the results of the dice. When the chances of failure are very very low, as they are with dying, players aren't afraid of taking those risks and often play out of character, doing what the PLAYER wants to do rather than what the CHARACTER would do.

[Rupert]

If the PCs don't feel vulnerable or at risk, that's curable, and fairly simply - use more dakka.

[Tomsdad]

Yep, it pretty easy to threaten and kill PC's because as a GM it''s easy to out gun them or overwhelm them with other threats if you need to.

(in fact if anything threatening without killing is a harder row to hoe at times).

Another aspect of the threat thing for me is having a element of random risk that can't be negated by carefully planned out and accumulated player resources.

A good example of this IMO is the 1 in 6 chance of basic torso hits becoming a vitals hit with all the extra issues that brings.

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

(in fact if anything threatening without killing is harder row to hoe at times).

This is another aspect of realism in GURPS. In D&D enemies are either potentially lethal or just a drain on resources. In GURPS a handful of goblins can get lucky and will actually do real HP damage with real weapons (since GURPS characters don't tend to accumulate HP and DR willy-nilly), and thus they can - potentially - kill a super-experience warrior with a few bad rolls. The same could be said for your SEAL v. Viet-Cong. In fantasy logic the Viet-Cong would be cut down like wheat because Plot Mail, in GURPS a Viet-Cong only needs to hit the SEAL once by pure luck/surprise to get him into a death spiral. The SEAL of course has the odds on his side, but he's not unrealistically immune to injury (unlike D&D characters who can mockingly walk into crossbow fire at level 5, or fall off a 60' cliff and dust his clothes off).

Reality and fictional conventions do not very well fit with one another. As many have observed, real life is nothing at all like stories, where things happen for the convenience of the author and not the immutable laws of physics.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

This is another aspect of realism in GURPS. In D&D enemies are either potentially lethal or just a drain on resources. In GURPS a handful of goblins can get lucky and will actually do real HP damage with real weapons (since GURPS characters don't tend to accumulate HP and DR willy-nilly), and thus they can - potentially - kill a super-experience warrior with a few bad rolls. The same could be said for your SEAL v. Viet-Cong. In fantasy logic the Viet-Cong would be cut down like wheat because Plot Mail, in GURPS a Viet-Cong only needs to hit the SEAL once by pure luck/surprise to get him into a death spiral. The SEAL of course has the odds on his side, but he's not unrealistically immune to injury (unlike D&D characters who can mockingly walk into crossbow fire at level 5, or fall off a 60' cliff and dust his clothes off).

Yep, the original AD&D hit point system was my quintessential example of this, and suffered from the the "I heroically dive on the grenade it's only 5d6 damage and I have 80hp" ism's of the HP system

(yes i know there was all sorts of "but HP don't represent actual damage" justifications, but they were not matched by the system, let alone in play IME)

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

Reality and fictional conventions do not very well fit with one another. As many have observed, real life is nothing at all like stories, where things happen for the convenience of the author and not the immutable laws of physics.

eh, I'd say it depends on the fiction in question, your certainly right about some though! But reality also has all sorts of unlikely events that if we read it in fiction it would stretch our suspension of disbelief! So really all I ask from a "realistic" system is the ability to given likely outcomes most of the time, and unlikely outcomes some of the time.

[Ji ji]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Right OK got it (I think)

How are you getting a Wounding mod of 1.9 on this round?

going from the system you cite would suggest that bullet energy is almost double penetration, but penetration is itself Velocity x Sectional density.

Of course all this depends on how you take real life stats like Velocity and sectional density turn into gamable ones like 'penetration' (I assume round energy here is 1/2m*v^2)

Anyway lets compare to RAW

the lapua .338 is as pointed out 9d+1 pi (avg 32.5)

On basic torso hit it's capped at 10 injury (but bleeds at -6)

by raw a vitals hit would be a 98pt injury (so dead)


net result is increased immediate injury on non vital torso injuries but reduced injury on Vitals, mainly because you've applied the overpenetration cap to vitals.

Damage is obtained with bullet speed * weight * (diameter^-2) multiplying by a constant. The constant makes it comparable to HP, as these are themselves an arbitrary number related to mass.
Notice that the damage formula is used with the alternative HP scaling system, square root of mass in kg multiplied by 1.25.

Then, bullet energy is divided by damage and multiplied by a constant in order to get the wounding mod value.

Yesterday we tried the system. In the end the game session shifted in a Excel session on my iPad Pro - not really the best tool for office. We wrote a sheet to benchmark the values against HP, DR, and the fraction of HP needed to get a vitals hit. We mainly used an average man with HP 10 DR 0, a cape buffalo with HP 35 DR 2, an elephant with HP 97 DR 4, and a triceratops with HP 130 and DR 5. We tried minimum HP fractions for vitals hit of 1/4, 1/3, 1/2.

In the end it works very well, after some tinkering. We added a 0.925 exponent to speed for basic damage, a 1.8 exponent to speed for wounding mod (instead of 2) and a little “premium” for bullet diameter, that is, diameter^0.2. And we sticked to rolling a single dice and multiplying the result by the number of dices.
We juggled with the constant as well, ending up with some intersting number, not perfect, but good enough:

9x19: 2d-1, x1
5.56x45: 4d+2, x0.8
.308 Win: from 5d+1, x1.7, to 6d+2, x1.4
.338 LM: 9d+2, x1.8
.375H&H: 7d+2, x2.3
.44 Mag: 2d+2, x1.9
.500 S&W: 4d+1, x2.6
.500 NE: 6d+1, 3.7
.50 BMG: 11d+1, x4.4
.577 Tyrannosaur: 7d+1, x5.6
12G 2.75” soft lead slug: 1d, x13.8 (using an expanded diameter of 25 mm as value)

Bottom line: if you want to hunt triceratops, use a .577 Tyrannosaur or a .50 BMG with solid bullets.