Stating Kong...

[Juca]

I was watching Kong: Skull Island some days ago, and it got me thinking: GURPS is my favored RPG system, but it combat system always let me down when it comes to a party of adventurers fighting a giant monster... Let me try to show you what my grip is:

Kong, in the new movie, is 17x bigger than a "common" gorilla from GURPS, considering that a gorilla heights at 1.8m, and kong has 31m (about 100 feet).
Extrapolating from the formula on GURPS Fantasy, pg. 51, it should be a little more than 3,200 times as heavy as an gorilla, which has 400lbs, so Kong clocks at 1280000lbs, but I think we can round it up to 1300000, which give us a estimated ST of 217 (but I think we can round it up too to 220).
There is nothing mentioning its Damage Resistance, but I remember someone talking in the forums about giving +1 DR per SM increase, so I will consider it that way. It has SM +8 (a common gorilla has +1), DR 7 and 220 hit points.

A standard, vietnam-era, full size M16 does 5d pi, and has a 1/2Dam range of 500. Since the soldiers in the movie insist in shooting big K from almost point blank, there is no reduction in damage from range, so, ignoring things like the M60 firing at full rate of fire, a single soldier shooting at it with his trusty rifle does about 17,5 points of piercing damage, reduced to 10 points because of fur DR, right?
They are veteran soldiers, I think that we can give then Guns: Rifle at 12, and they can hit about 2 bullets from each burst that they shoot (and they seem to always go for full-auto)... a single soldier reduces Kong to 0 hit points in about 10-11 seconds...

How can this be "corrected"? I don't think that a big friggin monkey can simply ignore 5.56mm bullets being fired at it, but taking 10 points of damage seems too much. "Realistically" (yes, I know that reality has gone screaming through the window with a 100ft ape, but, considering that it's possible, and with its proportions...), I think that there is many layers of flesh, muscle and fat between its fur and its vital organs for such small projectiles to damage it that much, and, at the same time, it shouldn't simply ignore it with high DR.

There is some kind of meta-trait that divides damage, as "unliving" does?
How does GURPS portraits huge animals like blue whales?

[Mathulhu]

1. Change the rules for example use Survivable Guns from Pyramid 3/44.
2. Increase it's ability to soak damage; give Kong Injury Tolerance vs the appropriate damage types.
3. Accept that tear holes in things with high velocity pieces of metal breaks them.

[cdru]

Some things need to be tougher that realistic for the sake of drama and challenge. You could give it better DR, Injury Tolerance and other things

[ericthered]

The Gurps hit point system often suffers when you apply it to very large objects. The most common place this happens is musket fire vs. a ship.

I generally either really beef up DR or use a wounding system of some sort. This one is one of my favorites. If you beef up DR its also helpful to use a hit point progression based on the square root rather than on the cube root.

[Seneschal]

Kong: Skull Island is basically a kaiju movie, so you can definitely activate some cinematic switches. It seems like the M60s didn't do much more than make Kong angry. The only things that harmed him were a helicopter rotor clipping his arm, stepping into a lake full of napalm and attacks from the Skullcrawlers. I'd give him at least DR 15 and Damage Reduction x10.

[Maz]

Or just give him really high DR but have it be flexible (which it should be anyway). This way he only take some blunt trauma damage.

[Humabout]

You could look up the difference in SM between the person/vehicle typically firing the gun (this takes GM common sense - a .50 on an Abrams is not 'bigger' than a .50 on a tripod fired by a soldier) and the target. Look up this difference, minus 2, on the 'Size' column of the Speed/Range table and read the Linear Measurement column. Divide piercing and impaling damage to the target by this number; this replaces injury modifiers. Optionally, the GM may round fractional injury down to zero.

This is what Luke Campbell basically does with his houserule. It fixes the musket vs ship problem handily, but it is slightly more bookkeeping. You can also apply this to tight beam burning damage, as he does for laser rifles shooting ships.

So a SM +7 Kong vs. SM 0 M16. Kong enjoys IT:DR 20 against this. An average damage of 17.5 is divided by 20, which is optionally rounded down to 0 injury. Kong takes the occasional 1 HP of injury when a round penetrates DR with 20 damage left, but mostly he just ignores gunfire. Now HEAT rounds from an Apache will make him bleed, still...

[Seneschal]

Originally Posted by Humabout

You could look up the difference in SM between the person/vehicle typically firing the gun (this takes GM common sense - a .50 on an Abrams is not 'bigger' than a .50 on a tripod fired by a soldier) and the target. Look up this difference, minus 2, on the 'Size' column of the Speed/Range table and read the Linear Measurement column. Divide piercing and impaling damage to the target by this number; this replaces injury modifiers. Optionally, the GM may round fractional injury down to zero.

This is what Luke Campbell basically does with his houserule. It fixes the musket vs ship problem handily, but it is slightly more bookkeeping. You can also apply this to tight beam burning damage, as he does for laser rifles shooting ships.

So a SM +7 Kong vs. SM 0 M16. Kong enjoys IT:DR 20 against this. An average damage of 17.5 is divided by 20, which is optionally rounded down to 0 injury. Kong takes the occasional 1 HP of injury when a round penetrates DR with 20 damage left, but mostly he just ignores gunfire. Now HEAT rounds from an Apache will make him bleed, still...

...This is good stuff! Solves a lot of scaling problems. Do you have a more detailed writeup of the houserule, or is this all there is?

[Juca]

Originally Posted by Humabout

You could look up the difference in SM between the person/vehicle typically firing the gun (this takes GM common sense - a .50 on an Abrams is not 'bigger' than a .50 on a tripod fired by a soldier) and the target. Look up this difference, minus 2, on the 'Size' column of the Speed/Range table and read the Linear Measurement column. Divide piercing and impaling damage to the target by this number; this replaces injury modifiers. Optionally, the GM may round fractional injury down to zero.

This is what Luke Campbell basically does with his houserule. It fixes the musket vs ship problem handily, but it is slightly more bookkeeping. You can also apply this to tight beam burning damage, as he does for laser rifles shooting ships.

So a SM +7 Kong vs. SM 0 M16. Kong enjoys IT:DR 20 against this. An average damage of 17.5 is divided by 20, which is optionally rounded down to 0 injury. Kong takes the occasional 1 HP of injury when a round penetrates DR with 20 damage left, but mostly he just ignores gunfire. Now HEAT rounds from an Apache will make him bleed, still...

It looks like a good house rule, thanks! Maybe I will settle for something less complex, like IT:DR equals to SM/2 (round down) versus pi, imp and tigh burning attacks, but it was what I was looking for!

Also, I found the movie official specifications of Kong, which put the ape at a massive 158 tons, or 348.000 lbs (talk about a buff ape...), but it seems that I did the wrong calculations on its hit points, that should be about 140, which, when you consider that now it is taking 1/3 damage from the rifles, "feels better" than the standard rules.

Thanks again! (also, can someone please check the math on its hit points?)

[Humabout]

Originally Posted by Seneschal

...This is good stuff! Solves a lot of scaling problems. Do you have a more detailed writeup of the houserule, or is this all there is?

From Luke's website: http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/HouseRules/ImpPierce.html