Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

I'm not really comfortable with arbitrarily assigning all NPCs in the campaign world stats near the human maximum just so the high-point value PCs don't get to do stuff which GURPS rules are poorly set up to handle.

Also, why would the NPCs, assuming that they are not stupid, perform anything close to real-world naval tactics? Clearly, in the world of GURPS, those don't work. You can't sail close to the enemy in order to use your guns, because you'll be sunk on the way there.

Having NPCs in eggshells trying to act like those are warships with sides that light cannonballs bounce off, just because that's what happens in real life, will just result in lots of dead NPCs with egg on their faces if done in GURPS.

I might abstract the actions of hundreds of able seamen into skill rolls vs. averages modified by their officers. That doesn't mean that I can ignore the fact that if any PC wants to use GURPS rules to roleplay shooting the enemy ship with a cannon (or use a magical fireball, or just shoot it with his sling a few times), the effects will not even be remotely close to reality and will entirely fail to match the narrative descriptions of what happens among the NPCs, assuming I were to narratively assume that physics are in effect during the naval battle rather than GURPS RAW.

If I resolve naval battles narratively, the ability to use GURPS rules during it is a high-point value superpower. That's not a result I want.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Were I to run an actual game set in the age of sail where the PC's are involved, they'd either have positions of command and can affect the outcome of the battle as sailing master, gunner, or captain - or even lieutenants commanding a section of gunners, I'd keep in mind the following:

If a cannon is to hit because the players are crewing it, it matters in the game I'd use (Beat to Quarters). If the players score a crit success, then their shot might hit an enemy commander, tear away a rudder, take down a section of the enemy ship's mast (or entire mast!) etc. If one player is playing a marine, and rolls a crit success on a perception roll, I might point out that he spots a man carrying a powder charge for an upper deck cannon or perhaps an officer he can take a shot at or what have you. It fits the narrative into the battle itself.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

You need to have every blow endanger a HT roll to do this 'properly', else non-major wounds would just be ignored. But yes, I generally like a system like that - it's very similar to the 'toughness'/'damage' system in Mutants and Masterminds, which always felt better than pure accumulation of hit point damage.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Not quite. Vehicles have Injury Tolerance (Unliving), which means it gets to divide injury of piercing, impaling, and beam weapons by 3.

So with your examples, the 7dx4 dam gives an average of 98, to which you subtract DR 6 to get 92, as you did above. You then divide that value by 3, giving you only 30 points of injury to the ship instead of 92. So it would take 9 hits to possibly sink the ship (i.e., at negative HP).

EDIT: As pointed out by Vierasmarius in a further post, I was wrong. Although Unliving is x1/3 for pi, for pi++ it is actually x1, so it would remain at 92 injury!

Note that while this is better that your example, it's still significantly less hits than it usually took to bring a ship down.



Myself, I use David Pulver's article that increases the injury divisor for larger vehicles (EDIT: Correction: it decreases the Wounding Modifier, but ultimately same effect)... well, I would if such a situation came up where it was imperative we had numbers and rolled damaged instead of using GM fiat.

That said, I do have other half-baked suggestions that I haven't worked out or tested at all.

1) I wonder if the problem is not an issue about HP, but rather of what is hit. In the case of vehicles like these ships (and buildings for that matter), there's a lot of "empty space" inside of them. A cannon ball could theoretically go right through such a ship hitting nothing but the hull on either side... at which point the "damage" it does would be minimal. So, for this optional rule, what if you did something along the lines of the overpenetration rules? Say, find out the hull thickness, determine the HP that has for a give section. And that becomes the maximum damage it takes on a hit because after that the shot has gone through it. I think that's effectively the "DR" of the ship, so in the above example, that would be 6 HP. After that, the cannon is inside the ship. Multiply the maximum value by maybe 3 to represent the odd structural beam, and then coming out the other side, and you got a maximum of 18 HP damage per hit before the shot comes out the opposite side. Basically, you need a single new stat: "maximum damage per hit", and you're done.

2) Maybe a ship doesn't sink at 0 HP, but rather when it's actually destroyed (fully negative HP or below and failed a HT roll). Yes, 0 HP means "no longer functional", but does that really mean sink? Maybe it means you can't steer it, it has no power, etc. After all, cause all the damage you want to the upper decks, but if you don't put any holes to the lower hull below the water line, it just won't sink... maybe the age of sail's problem is they couldn't get the cannon balls to hit low enough with the accuracy required...

3) As a variation of the above, using rules similar to the hit locations where once a limb is out, further damage to that limb no longer causes any further injury or loss of HP. What if the "above the water surface" area was treated similarly? You can only do so much noteworthy damage to the top section, and must instead hit the actual "spine" (which includes hull below water) to take the ship down... the volley of hundreds of cannons was so that, on random hit locations, you eventually get enough hits on the spine to bring the HP to 0 and sink it. So basically... sure, you hit it and put holes in it, but only the odd lucky shot really causes noteworthy HP of damage to the "ship" (as opposed to parts of the ship)

As I said, haven't developed any of the above at all, so feel free to tweak around with the numbers and such.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Thanks, I figured there was something else like that to be considered.

So, about 3x3 = 9 cannon balls, or about 27x3 = 81 musket balls, would do the job. Much better, as you say, though still far from the historical reports being exchanged here.

Well, nothing else to add on my part, other than to say that some of your ideas sound good. You're right, a ship includes lots of empty space and/or stuff (furnishings, supplies, etc.) that aren't vital for structural purposes; perhaps another big damage divisor would be good. And, as you suggest, perhaps HP 0 could be seen as "taking in water" or otherwise very damaged, but not necessarily sinking yet.

All good stuff for making results more reasonable for a given ship. (However, making the numbers work for that frigate doesn't necessarily solve any issue of scaling. Essentially, if the scaling method is unsatisfactory, that means you can massage the numbers to work nicely for the SM +6 ship or the SM +10 ship, but not for both at once...)

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

As far as I know there really aren't any hard and fast rules for Age of Sail vehicles in GURPS 4e.

Figure out what the results *should* be and write rules to get close to that.

My estimation from what I've read here and my readings of fictional naval combat (most recently David Weber, but I've read others over the years), is that:

1. Naval ships need more DR. Possibly some of this could be ablative. The non-ablative DR should be enough to prevent muskets from sinking the ship.
2. Naval ships need more HP. They aren't built like normal vehicles that we're used to.
3. One thing I may have missed: a lot of the damage a cannon does is to the crew via wooden shrapnel. It's hard to sink a large wooden ship, but easy to kill people.
4. Also there should be a lot more penalties to hitting from ship to ship. A lot of cannon were fired that never hit. Both ships are moving, and the ship firing the cannon is moving up and down with the water.

I don't know (or care to find out) enough about the genre right now to make rules that are right. I could run an encounter using what I know now, but I'd just do fast talking and move through the boring part of the fight ("you spend a few hours praying that you and your ship survives until you can board or your laser pistol is in close enough range to pick off officers or light the sails").

BTW: all of this sounds extremely deafening, with a lot of smoke in the ship. How did officers send orders?

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Even a ship of the line is only about 200 feet long. So developing a loud voice helps. Speaking trumpets.

But most importantly, orders were repeated by officers in training to relay from aft to forward. A good place to put these officers was thus in the middle of the ship. Hence "mid-ship man". Midshipmen would also run orders between decks.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Ah! never understood that term before. Thought it was more like a rank thing.
in GURPS the perk for Penetrating Voice would be useful here.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

It is a rank thing. However, Anaraxes' explanation might be why that rank is named what it is.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

This is not accurate. See Basic pg 380. Piercing attacks do indeed get a x1/3 Wound Modifier and Large Piercing gets x1/2 (instead of x1 and x3/2 respectively) but Huge Piercing (such as musket and cannon balls) are x1, rather than x2. So in his example, damage after DR is not divided; it really does inflict 92 points of injury to the ship. Now, if you treat the hull as Homogenous rather than Unliving, things get a little better for the frigate. The WM of Huge Piercing drops to x1/2, for 45 damage

And as for Beam Weapons, those are almost exclusively Tight Beam Burning weapons, which is not affected at all by Unliving or Homogenous.