06-20-2013, 09:29 AM | #21 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
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Sneaking up to someone and holding them immobile and fairly quiet for the 30 seconds to 2 minutes it takes them to lose consciousness after you mortally wound them with a melee weapon, feeling their lessening pulse with the waning of the geyser of arterial blood they spray you with as they are dying, is not something most people are good at or enjoy doing. Even if someone is a veteran soldier and theoretically able to kill people; there is a world of difference between impersonally shooting at someone whose face you can hardly see while in a group of people doing the same, and sneaking off alone in the dark to kill someone in a very intimate way, with no companions or moral support except your victim. While sentry removal is not physically any more difficult than any moderately challening athletic feat, it's made extremely challenging by the stress involved. And even a small mistake usually means a lot of noise, in that sentries with rifles who are stabbed non-fatally will tend to scream like stuck pigs, fire those rifles and generally make an infernal nuisance of themselves. Realistic suppressors don't allow you to kill sentries without alerting anyone. Then again, neither does anything else, really, because anyone even remotely close to the struggle of a dying man trying to scream through a severed windpipe is probably going to hear something odd. What realistic suppressors allow you to do is reduce the odds of hostiles inside a building hearing you engage a pair of sentries in a guard tower a couple of hundred yards away. Or something like that. It's not going to allow you to kill one sentry in mid-conversation and have his opposite number only realise it as he fails to respond to his next quip.
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06-20-2013, 09:40 AM | #22 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
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It would seem somewhat obvious to stick a fright check into the 'you've just stabbed a guy in the neck while close enough to taste him' situation. But I'm not seeing a rule for that assuming the victim is an enemy.
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06-20-2013, 09:53 AM | #23 |
Join Date: Apr 2006
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
Kromm has said in the past that GURPS damage is deliberately front-loaded for ease of play. Few groups want combats where fatally wounded foes nevertheless stay up for a while, continuing to fight/scream/activate the device.
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06-20-2013, 11:20 AM | #24 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
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Even with that concession to playability in effect, though, I note that even a fairly mundane sentry with ST 11, all other Attributes at 10 and the Fit Advantage can still require a deal of killing. The odds of him successfully making a death check or four are not all that bad, so you might have to deal 66 points of damage until he's truly dead. Over half the time, you're going to have to deal at least 33 points of damage before he "dies", and a lot of the time that actually means a mortal wound and not instant death. Even a strong man with a Fine combat knife will not be doing much over 1d imp or cut per attack, at most 1d+2 in a properly made sentry removal attack. That means that between 3-5 successful attacks on the neck with a knife are required to kill a more or less average sentry and even then, he's probably just mortally wounded and bleeding to death. If you want to be sure that he doesn't make too much noise while doing that, you don't let him go until you're sure he's completely dead. And nowhere in the rules does it state that a foe that fails a HT check after being reduced to below 0 HP is rendered completely silent or even still. As long as he's not taking effective actions in the form of Combat Maneuvers; he could easily be struggling ineffectually in the grasp of our "hero" while trying to scream through a torn throat. Quote:
Less common, but easily implemented by interested GMs, is requiring Will checks or Will-based skill checks in order to accomplish tasks that not every person can convince themselves to go through with. In 3e, there was a mechanism for having the margin of failure of a Will check provide a penalty to shooting rolls and while the specific mechanic was perhaps not perfect, the idea is sound.
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06-20-2013, 11:35 AM | #25 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
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...Also, if you're holding on until he's completely dead, just holding on is a ridiculous course under GURPS rules. You'll be waiting several minutes before bleeding carries your subject away. You'd save a serious amount of time by finishing them off. Quote:
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06-20-2013, 11:56 AM | #26 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
All RPGs are front-loaded. Realistically, when they say someone "died instantly", they mean "in less than one minute", and someone is able to thrash around noisily even after being unconscious.
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06-20-2013, 11:56 AM | #27 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
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First you grapple the Neck and/or Face from a position behind him. Then you kill him. And as soon as you can, you stop moving your knife arm around and instead use it (with the knife embedded in the neck of the sentry) to assist your grapple. Because that's your best bet of preventing the dying sentry from making too much noise. Quote:
I'll grant that I still use the bleeding rules for veins/arteries from GURPS 3e, where it's possible to cause 1 HP / second bleeding by either surgically opening either carotid artery or by doing enough trauma to the general jugular/carotid area. With those rules, it makes sense that once you have caused sufficient bleeding, you don't need to take the risk of releasing one arm from your grapple to do more HP damage and can instead wait for blood loss to do your work for you. Even without that, though, it makes perfect sense that once the opponent appears unconscious, you continue to hold him until you are sufficiently certain that he is neither faking nor temporarily stunned. Which is more or less true. Which is one of the reasons sentry removal is rarely clean and simple. Pretty much the only way to be absolutely certain that someone won't make a noise is to grapple him in such a way to minimise his ability to move or shout and hold him like that while you make absolutely sure that he's no longer living.
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06-20-2013, 12:02 PM | #28 |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
This. A gunshot, even a suppressed one, is noisier than a stabbing. But it is a lot more likely to go unheard, or at least unrecognized, than a lengthy wrestling match.
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06-20-2013, 12:17 PM | #29 |
Join Date: Jun 2010
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
I think Martial Arts did clarify what kind of wounds (to the neck, I think?) would cause a person to be unable to speak/shout?
Either way, should there be some sort of "crippling injury threshold" for the neck, or something, to represent wounds that damaged a character's ability to speak? Similar to how a crippled hand can't hold onto stuff? Also, do characters getting choked or strangled (or even just without breathable air or exhaling smoke) lose the ability to speak? |
06-20-2013, 12:22 PM | #30 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [HT][TS]Tactics for realistic suppressors
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I'd say so. They may not be completely silent, but they certainly lose the ability to vocalise at anything close to full volume.
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Tags |
guns, sentry removal, suppressor |
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