Increasing the number of seconds in a round and combining strike/thrust damage

[N.H.Alicia]

Title.

What considerations would have to be made before doing this?

[Rupert]

Increasing the number of seconds in a round need be only cosmetic. If you want to increase movement rates to match, you'll need to consider what this will mean in terms of movement rates vs. rate of fire of missile weapons/guns, and also in terms of how easy it makes run-around attacks.

Combining swing and thrust damage means you'll need to consider all melee and muscle-powered missile weapon damage and redo all the weapon damage.

The thing is, swing weapons tend to have higher base damage from ST, but a slightly smaller bonus from the weapon, and their damage type is usually crushing or cutting - thus they have a fairly high base damage, but it doesn't get improved much by damage type. Thrusting weapons, on the other hand, tend to have lower basic damage, but are often impaling - thus they have low base damage, but a high final damage. This means that swung weapons penetrate armour better, and thrusting weapons do more damage to unarmoured people. Also, swung weapons tend to reward high ST more, and thrusting weapons are often more useable by low ST characters.

If you combine all damage into one progression, you'll need to redo all the weapons' damage bonuses and possibly types to re-balance them. Probably not impossible, but it is a fair bit of work.

[roguebfl]

Have you read the threads?:

• Problem with 1 seconds combat turns
• Longer combat rounds.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by N.H.Alicia

Title.

What considerations would have to be made before doing this?

I guess it's really going to come down to what are looking to achieve by doing these things?

As different desired outcome may well mean different considerations and choices.

[Anaraxes]

What's the intended goal of combining thrust and swing damage?

The only thing that occurs to me is just a desire to make things simpler in combat. Fewer tradeoffs between the advantages and disadvantages of different weapons, fewer choices to make. So, assuming that's the purpose, then for simplicity just declare that characters do damage in combat according to the swing damage column. Ignore their chosen weapon damage modifiers entirely -- it's just fluff text, so use whatever sounds cool and fits the character concept. Treat the damage as crushing damage; that is, an injury modifier of 1, so you just subtract DR from damage rolled.

Though if that kind of simplicity is the goal, you might want to look at Savage Worlds, or FATE, or some other system with lighter and less detailed rules in general. GURPS design likes to use this kind of detail to present the players with some interesting choices whether in or outside of combat. But if that kind of detail isn't fun for you, then it might be easier to start without it than try to excise it while stumbling across all the unintended ripple effects from changing things.

[JMason]

First off, there are no "rounds" in GURPS combat. All action is assumed to be taking place simultaneously and each players' "Turn" overlaps with the others. When your next turn starts, one second has passed since the start of your last turn.

Increasing the length of a "turn" means that more time elapses (and overlaps) for each player, but you can either ignore that and just say that a turn is 2+ seconds but players can still only move up to their move score, attack once, etc.

Otherwise, you will need to readjust each maneuver and determine what can be accomplished, how maneuvers interact. I've seen people give a "movement phase" and an "attack phase", but then you have to figure out if double move is allowed? Can someone still Move and Attack? And basically look at all the maneuvers and see how they work. Check the threads linked above for some thoughts on what will be involved.

As for your second question, what do you mean by "strike"? Is this suppose to be "thrust" damage? If so, then I'll point out that many weapons that use thrust damage are also impaling and get a 2x damage modifier. Weapons that do swing damage tend to be cutting or crushing (and crushing tend to be heavier and do more damage). If you combine these damages, then you may need to rebalance the damage of every weapon, or you'll end up with impaling always being a better option than cutting.

[acrosome]

There was a Pyramid article a while ago that added lulls to combat. That slows it down a bit, presumably for more "drama." In reality, it just results in some characters standing around doing nothing for a while.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by acrosome

There was a Pyramid article a while ago that added lulls to combat. That slows it down a bit, presumably for more "drama." In reality, it just results in some characters standing around doing nothing for a while.

Are you talking about "The Last Gasp"? It does significantly more than that and results IME in characters that feel like they are actually getting tired.

[JoelSammallahti]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Are you talking about "The Last Gasp"? It does significantly more than that and results IME in characters that feel like they are actually getting tired.

It's also a fair bit of extra bookkeeping. (Spoken as a GM who's not using FP anymore because I can't be arsed.)


Here's my suggestions re: OP.

Replace thrust with swing and add -3. That's a simple solution that will give you roughly the same damage in the 8-16 ST range where you'll find most PCs.

For multi-second turns, if you're not using a hex map, just wing it. If you are, double Basic Move. (This will give the added benefit of .5 and .75 fractions of Basic Speed to be worth something.) Don't touch any of the other stuff, but obviously count things like durations in turns rather than seconds, so as not to nerf spells etc. unnecessarily.

[Maz]

Re. longer rounds
In some of the old threads that roguebfl is linking, I made a few suggestions. I have since that used a more refined version.

It is a rules change that makes GURPS combat turns behave more like a lot of other RPGS (D&D in particular).

Anyway. What I did was to allow all character 3 actions per turn. But not just any action. You would have a Standard action, a Move action and a Minor action. Then I divided all of the combat maneuvers into those three types of actions.

Standard actions
All the types of actions that players usually want to do each turn. Specifically Attack-maneuvers (including All Out or Move and Attack, Feints and so on). And then Concentration (important for spell users).

Move actions
The normal Move action. But also, importantly, Aim and Evaluate. also other sort of movement actions such as Change Posture.

Minor Actions
Ready actions.


All actions can be "traded down". So you could exchange a standard action for a Move action. Or be able to take 3 ready actions... if doing nothing else.

---------------------------

This worked really well for a Dungeon Fantasy game. Everyone felt like they could do something each turn and combat became more dynamic as they could move around and still feel like they didn't "waste a turn".




Side note:
One potential problem though was "too much" mobility. Especially with stuff like Heroic charge meaning people could combine a move action with a move and attack. We fixed the problem by simply dropping "facing". So you could move a lot, but wouldn't be able to make "runaround" attacks. Instead we introduced a rule that stated people couldn't "retreat" if fighting two enemies at once. To represent "flanking".