03-02-2019, 09:54 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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On the Fragility of Life
GURPS does a fairly good job of showing the fragility of life. A skilled combatant in unarmed combat can leisurely kill a less skilled combatant in a minute just by punching and kicking them to death. While the less skilled combatant might struggle and get in a few good attacks, they are likely not going to survive. With melee weapons and stealth, a more skilled combatant can kill a less skilled combated quite quickly, potentially with one strike from stealth, allowing them to eliminate an enemy within a moment.
Imagine then a 250 CP mundane character with ST 12, DX 14, IQ 12, HT 14, Combat Reflexes, Night Vision 5, Stalker 4, Knife-20, and Stealth-20 (along with other unimportant traits for this exercise). If they came upon an enemy camp with one hundred soldiers in the middle of the night, how many of them could they kill in a night with a very fine long knife? Could they kill them all before they were discovered? |
03-02-2019, 11:34 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ronneby, Sweden
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
Seems quite unlikely if the assumption is that all the soldiers are up and about since our attacker will have to succeed well enough on each encounter to stop the victim from raising the alarm. He only have to fail once to fail the entire challenge. I.e. even if he have 95% chance to take out one guy silently the chance is only .95^100 ~ 0.0059 to succeed 100 times in a row.
If he have to hide bodies along the way the odds are even worse since that will be more rolls. If most soldiers are sleeping and he only have to take out a couple of sentries he will have much better chances of course. |
03-03-2019, 01:26 AM | #3 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
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(I'll add that whether the marauder's Move is higher than the soldiers' should be pretty important. If it's significantly higher, he can keep try to keep from being surrounded once the soldiers sound the alarm.)
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03-03-2019, 02:58 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Trondheim, Norway
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
I did some calculating, using these simple assumptions:
In the extreme case of all the soldiers being asleep, the probability of getting them all is 39.27%. A few cases in between (awake/sleeping - probability of getting all 100):
If I was the GM in this scenario, I would impose these additional requirements:
Edit: By the way, by taking a -5 on the attack rolls to strike the neck, the assassin will critically fail on a roll of 17 (instead of just missing). This was not included in my calculations. Edit 2: He can of course overcome that by making All-Out Attacks (determined), for +4 to the rolls. At least until he's discovered and the soldiers start hitting back.
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03-03-2019, 04:31 AM | #5 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
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03-03-2019, 07:02 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
Not that it's all important for the purposes of this exercise, but innate Night Vision 5 is not possible for a human in a realistic setting. As per GURPS Tactical Shooting, a maximum of Night Vision 2 can be justified as realistic for a human.
More generally, I suspect that the fact that it generally takes a long time to kill a single person with a knife and there will usually be sounds of struggle and incidental sounds while the victim bleeds out will lead to even a very skilled infiltrator being discovered before he kills very many. This is going to come down to GM adjudication, but even a person brought to negative HP and failing a death check or consciousness check will not necessarily expire noiselessly. A lot of people sleeping in the rough will be huddled close for body warmth and even if we assume somehow that there was no system for keeping watch, there might be people having trouble sleeping and/or having to get up to attend to bodily functions. Even with a grapple of the face area to prevent screaming of a knife victim, there might be struggling, even sounds of air escaping from wounds (especially loud for cut throats, but possibly noticeable even with a stab to the vitals) that could be enough to alert someone sleeping right next to them. Hell, even just the smell of blood or bowel contents might awaken someone sleeping close, not to mention how someone would almost certainly awaken if the person sleeping next to them suddenly spilled the contents of their body under their joint covers. Even if all the soldiers are really private and shy about their sleeping arrangements, blood from arteries, like the ones in the neck or vitals area, can spray far enough to hit a person sleeping far enough away to avoid all physical contact. So, basically, in game terms, killing more than one of the sleeping soldiers requires more than skill and abilities, it also requires luck about factors that the infiltrator has no real control over. And in any sort of realistic setting, that luck will eventually run out.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 03-03-2019 at 07:46 AM. |
03-03-2019, 08:05 AM | #7 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
I would disagree with that assessment, as you can develop the equivalent of Night Vision through operating regularly at night. If we assume that -5 vision penalty is the brightness of a crescent moon (since -7 is starlight), I learned to be quite functional in that light while I was a child because I had to feed and care for animals on a farm without artificial light (I found that flashlights were fairly useless for such activities because they ruined my night vision). Even though it was a routine activity for me, I found that many of my friends were hopelessly incapable of functioning in that level of light. Of course, that changed as I developed vision issues, but I was quite found of the night for a time.
From a technical point of view, humans actually have quite good night vision, as we can maintain visual acuity down to what GURPS would classify as a -9 (overcast moonless night). What would define advantageous night vision, would be rapid adaptation to differences in light, as it can take hours for people to achieve complete night vision. With the plethora of artifical lights though, most people have not been forced to operate in darkness during their childhood long enough to develop the proper visual pathways, so I would not be surprised if most people raised in urban environments suffer from a quirk level of night blindness. |
03-03-2019, 08:22 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
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Techniques for working in low light might be more expensive than Night Vision, but they are the canonical way to represent training in low-light operations. Granted, I think that buying such a technique for all combat skills quickly gets too expensive and I would totally support a leveled trait that reduced darkness penalties to multiple related skills, like for example combat skills. But Night Vision is really too cheap for the purpose and, importantly, also allows the character to see as well in the dark as a cat. Which is a cool superpower, but not actually realistic.
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03-03-2019, 09:20 AM | #9 |
Icelandic - Approach With Caution
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
What's the TL of the scenario?
Are all the hundred soldiers asleep when the attack starts? Is the ground perfectly level and flat with no obstructions? |
03-03-2019, 10:40 AM | #10 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: On the Fragility of Life
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And to really get realistic (at least where game realism is concerned), it's only fair to ask whether some of those 100 will have Light Sleeper, Danger Sense, etc. (Still. If the soldiers aren't packed too tightly together, a good assassin could really get some work done. There's the proverb I half-recall, something about a running man with a knife... [hits the Googles] Oh, it's "Four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man", apparently, and its source is... Klingon?? Huh. Well, apparently, Klingons would be willing to give the assassin good odds in this thread.)
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