Basic Damage too High?

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Getting through the armor with a stab might be an option,

Though this gets into another issue: thrusts are not very good for this sort of thing. Sure, they get the impaling type, but only AFTER you get through armor. And thrusting is, well, thrust-based, yielding 50% lower basic damage (though occasionally modified up or down based on weapon stats. Swords usually go from sw+n to thr+n+1).

In short: in order to properly mimic a thrust being a go-to option as an armor penetrator, you need to apply a (2) armor divisor to such moves.

[Kraydak]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Though this gets into another issue: thrusts are not very good for this sort of thing. Sure, they get the impaling type, but only AFTER you get through armor. And thrusting is, well, thrust-based, yielding 50% lower basic damage (though occasionally modified up or down based on weapon stats. Swords usually go from sw+n to thr+n+1).

In short: in order to properly mimic a thrust being a go-to option as an armor penetrator, you need to apply a (2) armor divisor to such moves.

Or drop the swing category as unrealistic. An overhand thrust and an overhand swing are pretty similar motions, so if done with similar weight objects at similar speeds (I think human muscle outputs more force at lower speeds?), will have similar energies. Further, you can align bodyweight behind a thrust better than behind a swing.

[apoc527]

Seems to me that "putting your weight behind a thrust" is really just an AOA Strong...that +2 goes a long way on thrusting damage!

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Nah. The GURPS rules are, as you say, better than most. But they do allow strong men (even realistically stong; nothing's out of whack with ST 14 and the 2d thus derived) to punch through DR7 50% of the time. Depending on the quality of the metal, that's 2.5-3mm thick plate. It gives that man a non-zero chance of putting penetrating injury through DR 11, which is 4mm of RHA.

That's about 3d+1, or a pretty powerful handgun bullet - a bit stronger than a 125gr .357M (about 3d). And this guy can do this or more with a SWORD. Technically, the way the game is written, he can do it with a club, too. If we treat handheld weapon "damage" a "some generic combination of blunt trauma and penetration" then this might not even be too bad. But when you look at guns, which explicitly separate the penetration scale from the injury scale, things get a little odd. When you put muscle-powered RANGED weapons on the same scale as melee weapons, things get downright bizarre.

The LT edge protection rules, as controversial during the playtest as I'm sure they were :-), do seem to help a lot here, though. To actually penetrate DR 7 plate requires 15 basic swing damage to cut through. Not quite as bad, right? :-)

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by apoc527

The LT edge protection rules, as controversial during the playtest as I'm sure they were :-), do seem to help a lot here, though. To actually penetrate DR 7 plate requires 15 basic swing damage to cut through. Not quite as bad, right? :-)

Not quite as bad, though that applies equally to an axe (questionable) as a sword (much less so).

Note I agree with you that the game as-is is fun, playable, and better than many other games out there.

I would just like it to have the option to be fun, playable, better than many games out there, and ACCURATE. :-)

[vierasmarius]

Doug, out of curiosity, does the upcoming Technical Grappling do much with the current rules for damage inflicted by grappling techniques like throws, locks and wrenches? I'm especially interested in margin-based damage, like that inflicted by Arm Lock, which as-is feels unrealistic and extreme - especially with how "effortless" it is. And if there's anyone I'd trust to bring grappling damage down-to-earth (down-to-mat?) it would be you.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Doug, out of curiosity, does the upcoming Technical Grappling do much with the current rules for damage inflicted by grappling techniques like throws, locks and wrenches? I'm especially interested in margin-based damage, like that inflicted by Arm Lock, which as-is feels unrealistic and extreme - especially with how "effortless" it is. And if there's anyone I'd trust to bring grappling damage down-to-earth (down-to-mat?) it would be you.

Damage is capped by how good your grapple is, which is a quantity based on a mechanic that everyone who plays GURPS will be familiar with.

The margin-based contests are still there, but to get extreme results, you'll need to build up extreme control, which will either take one really lucky roll (like a crit) or several successive marginal ones, and your foe can fight back.

We had a fairly productive series of threads more-or-less entitled "Is the Arm Lock Reign of Terror over?" and I think we came down on the side of locks being very effective if you can set them up properly AND stay out of the other guy's range. To repost what I stuck in the Google+ GURPS group:

We pitted a 90-point Boxer against a 90-point Submission Wrestler. The first time the wrestler tried the parry/arm-lock move, it succeeded, but then the Boxer, whose OTHER arm wasn't penalized very much at all, did a punch to the face, and "walked off with the wrestler's girlfriend, while sipping on his stolen milkshake" or something like that.

In order for that move to be effective you had to parry, lock, and then use a new movement option to get into the boxer's side or rear arc, denying him the face punch. Just like the self-defense moves work in real life. The other 'what I learned' was that if you do a JP-Arm Lock and you wind up with a bad lock (there is now DEFINITELY such a thing!), you are probably better off letting go unless you can get good positioning.

Anyway, the new rules led to emergent tactics that mimicked what happens in real life. There are also cinematic switches available for those who WANT to have their heroines be Black Widow, capable of putting Happy in crippling pain through a boxing glove with a simple lock.

[Anaraxes]

Well, the thread has moved on, but

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Why would we care about watts?

Because a watt is a joule per second. If the question is how much energy you can put into something, it's useful to know how much power you can generate and how long you've got to add that energy to your weapon.

The biker or the sprinter aren't doing anything we can use in terms of melee damage.

They're generating power. (You do believe you use more than just your arms to launch a real melee attack?) If there's a question as to whether or not a human could ever put 500 J into some object, then one place to start is whether or not they can produce 500 watts for one second. If humans could only produce 100 watts as a burst peak, then it'd be an easy "no" -- but that's not the case.

That still fits well within the house rules I came up with.

The various suggestions early are all actually fairly close to the standard damage, and certainly within the errors in these rough estimates.

My objection was to the categorization of the bullet damage as requiring "superhuman" amounts of energy. Actually, putting the energy you cite into an object isn't risibly beyond human capacity, much less having to move to a Supers scale.

Maybe it would add not very much, since they're already spinning around.

This is where the power, as opposed to energy, comes in again. I expecte that one reason there's more energy in that shotput compared to the baseball is that the shotputter gets to spend more time with it. (The other factor is the factor of 50 increase in mass, of course.)

If you keep the same angular velocity, but increase your reach with a stick or string (sling, atlatl, sword), the linear velocity of your damage point increases proportionately (until you hit a physiological torque cap). And increasing velocity is a good way to increase energy (joules). This is probably why those jai alai balls get clocked at 188 mph whereas the major leaguers only pitch at 100.

The actual biomechanics are no doubt really complex. Once you start comparing very different penetration and damage mechanisms (swords versus bullets), yet more complexity arises.

As has been mentioned, the GURPS model for being able to reach internal organs is damage type, not base damage. It's not obvious to me that bullets cause lots of damage because they have lots more energy than axes -- but perhaps they're just better at getting to vital organs. If so, the discussion shouldn't be focused on ST base damage, but the injury multipliers.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

A ST 10 person with a regular axe in two hands does 1d+5 damage. More than a .38. That's 420 joules!

A ST 11 person with a mace in two hands does 1d+7. The same as a .357 Magnum. 750 joules! Who are these supermen?!


I don't see how those are okay.

IMO this is an error in concept. It isn't just about joules. The manner in which the joules are applied matters, too, and GURPS necessarily must generalize this.

For instance, imagine holding a .44 magnum derringer against your sternum (pointed outward!) and firing it. The recoil energy that your sternum absorbs is exactly the same that the target has applied to it by the bullet- or at least close enough (accounting for the mass of the derringer, etc) as to be effectively identical. Now, would you rather do that, or let me smack you as hard as I can in the sternum with an axe? Or a mace? Or would you rather be the target of the bullet?

I know which one I would choose.

Another way to think of it is this: If you are shot your body will absorb the same number of joules whether you are wearing sufficient body armor or not. (Ignoring trivial factors such as heat lost to friction in the armor, etc.)

Unless I'm having some sort of Physics skill critical fail regarding energy vs force or something.

If not then something like J/cm^3 might be a better metric, perhaps.

But another problem is simply how you model damage to a human body. Any system based on "points" is going to be inexact. In real life what really matters is whether or not your weapon penetrates to a vital structure, not how many joules it delivers. Well, until you get to ridiculously large amounts of joules and start simply vaporizing targets. FWIW, compared to the competition I feel that GURPS has a remarkably good injury model, especially when all the optional rules such as bleeding etc are used. (I'm an experienced war surgeon.)

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Bruno

That's not a problem with unreasonably strong characters - that's a problem with GURPS assigning too much damage to quite reasonably strong characters. If it takesc ST 14/Lifting ST 22/HP 22 to make an olympic athlete, things are REALLY out of whack

The solution I toy with is doubling base HP and firearms damage. Possibly continue the progression from 20-30 past 30, instead of capping at Swing being +2d over Thrust, and just be done with it.

It has the advantage of being easy to use existing GURPS material :)

I like this a lot. I might adapt this to my game. Thanks!