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.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

In which case why does it matter what the stats are for ships and weapons in the tactical combat system if you aren't going to actually use it?

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

I reworked those SM-scaled pi vs modified ship HP numbers, eg if the frigate hull is treated as SM+7, and it has 1600HP, a 24lb cannon is pi+6 and a 42lb cannon is pi+8... An SM+7 Unliving target treats SM+6 as SM-3, SM+8 as SM-1. Average damage from 6d*5 is 105; with DR6 that's 30 and 70 HP Injury. The 4d+2 musket would barely manage 1HP Injury.
Even with such extreme mods, having approx 30 cannon averaging 50HP Injury per hit - if half hit, once per 1.5 minutes, that's 3 minutes to 0HP, 18 minutes to -5*HP. Perhaps I should keep it as an SM+9 target...

Got to include that the SM-pi scaling system treats a pi++ bullet vs an SM+3 elephant as pi-. But the .600 Nitro Express, 5d*2 pi++, still comes out as approx 21HP Torso wound or 90HP Skull (Basic Set Elephant has 45HP...)

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

So the etymological dictionaries tell me, anyway. It is a rank as well as a role, as you say.

It seems to me that it's also a useful task for apprentice officers-to-be. They get to see what orders experienced officers give in various situations, and get used to telling the sailors what to do and having them do it.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Would some of the damage problems go away if parts of a vehicle were treated in a manner similar to limbs?

By that I mean a human's arm (or leg) can only take so much damage; extra is lost. Instead of treating a vehicle as a big hunk of HP, would it be better to view it in sections?

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Yes and that was suggested upthread. Lot of reading here to sift through.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

You're hitting sections of wooden walls for the most part; some with extra armor. A foot-thick one-hex section of wooden wall has DR 12* (Combustible), HP 54 and HT 12. (GURPS Basic, pg 558)

The problem with vehicles is rather simple: Vehicles are structures composed of many sections that don't especially care about what you do to the other sections unless you hit a vital bit of machinery or a load-bearing structural member. GURPS treats all of those semi-independent structures as having a single shared pool of hit points when they do no such thing. The most obvious solution to this renders it less than gameable though ... tracking injury done and the effects thereof for every hex of structure separately can be a rather large chunk of numbers to keep track of.

Especially when one considers that each hex is also acting as cover for every hex 'behind' it. One can always have a computer track it, or a lot of notes!, admittedly, but the requirement for such can and will slow play down in a non-negligible manner. Ah well.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Hmm. That is an idea actually.
Limbs already are treated in some ways as separate compartments.
So what about buying Extra Limb as External Shell/Hull?
As an Extra Limb it can get damaged and blowthrough goes into the interior space but its not destroyed or count as additional HP damage once disabled until it gets a blow high enough to destory it.
Have to work out a few other details.

Other compartments can be bought as well. Bridge and many compartments could be treated as Extra head or Limbs.
I think you still need the damage reduction.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

That is true of some vehicles, mainly those build in a frame-first tradition. It is not true for others, particularly those built in a hull-first tradition.

I think its obvious why any system which depends on having detailed plans of a vehicle (or on the GM understanding shipbuilding traditions and aircraft manufacturing techniques) won't work for 99% of cases.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

I'm not using the GURPS rules because they are unusable? Where they usable and gave reasonably expected and consistent results, I'd be trying to make use of them instead of having to use a different game to play it out. As it is? The game stats are easily enough understood that one could use both GURPS and BEAT TO QUARTER in a relatively seamless manner. You wouldn't have to use cube roots, nor would you have do a lot of calculations on how many dice each cannon does. A GURPS age of sail game should be so easy!

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Yep, I stand corrected. I think I got this confused with some optional - yet I'm positive it's official - rule somewhere (Monster Hunter? Dungeon Fantasy?) which simplified it to divide injury by 3 for Unliving and by 5 for Homogenous, which is what I tend to do on the fly as a GM.

But even then I still made the mistake that the normal Wounding Modifier should have applied, as the /3 is to the injury, not penetrating damage. So it should have been x2 for pi++, then /3, for a net x2/3. With that rule, it would have been (92 x 2/3 =) 61 injury to the ship.

As to Beam Weapons, this I really don't remember where that came from. Probably just a personal house rule I implemented, so can't even claim that's an official optional rule from anywhere. (But I still think it makes sense to treat it the same as bullets as they only make small holes)

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Ah, I wasn't familiar with that option. I actually rather like it. It basically turns Unliving and Homogenous into limited forms of IT:DR, and makes more sense than their current seemingly-arbitrary Wound Modifiers.

I can certainly see the justification there. I'd treat Tight-Beam Burning as somewhere between Piercing and Burning. Against the Vitals, TBB gets x2 compared to Piercing's x3, which implies that it's "half piercing" (half the damage gets x3, half gets x1, for a total of x2). So against Unliving, it would deal (0.5+0.5/3) x2/3 damage, and against Homogenous it would do (0.5+0.5/5) x3/5 (I'd round that down to x1/2 to differentiate between the two).

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

One thing I'd consider would be simply not accumulating HP damage at all. Still track the accumulated HP damage in order to model blood loss, but otherwise completely ignore it. Only hits large enough to cripple or cause a Major Wound or worse would then 'matter'.

I'm not sure how well this option would work in play - I'm specifically worried about rapid-fire weapons, but the current rules make them more lethal than they seemingly are anyways (at least in a 'amount of damage per bullet hit' sense).

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Found the source. Monster Hunters 3 - The Enemy, p.25, in the Injury Tolerance box, under "Quick ’n’ Dirty."

But yeah, that's exactly how I interpreted it: a limited IT:DR. Make more sense to me, and easier to apply quickly in game.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

o.O

This is perfect! I hope this gets used for 5th edition, whenever that may be...

The one single expansion I would suggest:
For cutting/impaling (really, everything), make the weapon's WCM already scaled to give the number so it works out for SM0 and put the phrase "Cutting attacks get +1 WCM, Impaling attacks get +2." into a "Under the Hood" box on the side.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Round cannon/musket balls should probably also have AD of 0.5 or worse, as the sphere shape is worse at piercing armor than a pointed bullet shape. And pointed bullets are worse than stilettos, which are worse than needles...

So perhaps that's another thing to factor in - impact shape and AD.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

I think the mentions of non-cumulative wound systems have some merit here, although I'm more partial to semi-cumulative wound systems, like this (which I think was linked earlier in the thread).

Using that, and stealing tbone's analysis, the damage from an 18 pounder cannon results in 184 HP damage per hit (the above system doesn't give unliving targets injury tolerance against piercing, but replaces this with other advantages), which is a Major Wound (more than 50%, less than 100%). It takes 6 of those in a given hit location for a Critical Wound, and 6 of those for a Massive Wound, which is the earliest level at which an unliving target risks incapacitation. Assuming HT 10, that translates to 36 shots to the torso-equivalent hit location for a 50% chance of rendering the ship dead in the water, 72 for a 75% chance, and so on.

On the other hand, the average damage from a musket is a Scratch (more than 1/16, less than 1/8). It takes 6^5=7776 musket shots for a 50% chance of incapacitating the ship, 15552 for a 75% chance, and so on.


I don't know how close to reality those figures are, although I will note that the ship becomes even more capable of survival if you use the Pi scaling from earlier in the thread... although at that point it may become virtually unsinkable! If a musket is pi+2, that 18-pounder is probably, what, pi+4 or so? With an SM+7 frigate, the 18-pounder is effectively pi-3, dropping average damage to about 31 and resulting in a Minor Wound (between 1/8 and 1/4), of which you need 6^4=1296 for a 50% chance of incapacitating the ship... which just seems ridiculous. Don't even bother with the muskets - rolling maximum damage on a x4 critical hit doesn't even register.


For hit locations of ships, I'd say you could probably get away with considering each mast as its own hit location (comparable to an extremity), treat the upper deck as one hit location (comparable to a limb, but likely more difficult to "cripple"), treat the middle as one hit location (torso), and treat the area near/below the waterline as another (vitals). Optionally, you could also subdivide these locations into fore/aft/port/starboard.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Aspect ratio is already partially factored in to the basic damage determination. Unless the sphere is worse for reasons beyond having a higher ratio of cross-section to energy, probably they should not have a divisor.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

There are only two inputs to the basic damage formula: caliber and kinetic energy.

The aspect ratio thing is somewhat legit, I think, especially for short projectiles.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

I know. And some of the effect of aspect ratio is that it narrows the cross section while maintaining the same mass, and thus the same kinetic energy if velocity is the same.

Aspect ratio may provide a separate penetration advantage, though if it does that would be a hole in your formula...

I'd also suggest that making a baseline 'ball' round have a (0.5) divisor doesn't make much sense. It should just have half the damage!

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

It doesn't really matter either way. You'll never get through everyone's turn even if the PCs do go first. You'll never even get into shooting range.

My point is that if you insist on using the regular GURPS combat system for this, the too-low DR/ too-low HP problem is really the least of your worries. The map the size of a football field and the decades worth of individual man-turns is going to make that irrelevant.

If you are willing to do this, then why aren't you willing to use a combat system more suitable to the scale in the first place? If you have a player that insists on this, then you can point out the need for the a map hundreds of feet on a side and the endless sequence of one second turns. I doubt he'll continue to insist.

It's not any different from any other battle with hundreds of men on a side. You wouldn't let a player insist that he gets to attack a seven hundred man company on foot with the tactical combat rules, would you?
I'm not suggesting that you resolve it narratively. I'm suggesting you use rules that are in the correct scale.

They can't sensibly be expected to give playable results in every possible situation of warfare, though. The system is an individual tactical system that handles single combat and small unit skirmishes. The unit scale is one man, the ground scale 1'=1yd and the time scale is 1 turn= 1 sec. This is obviously completely unsuitable when the units are capital ships, the battlefields are measurable in square miles and endure for days. Sure, that's my point. Use Mass Combat or Tactical Mass Combat if you want an quick easy native abstraction. Otherwise adapt Iron Men and Wooden Ships, Broadsides!, Beat to Quarters or any other Age of Sail wargame that seems suitable if you want naval combat to the be focus of entire game sessions.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

My players, not unreasonably, assume that anything close to 0% will take no time to resolve.

The only people making relevant rolls willl be PCs and their critical NPC foes.

Oh, I am. I just don't see any reason why it should work differently from gaming it through second by second. I'm very prepared to boil things down to how things would turn out a minute by minute or even hour by hour. I just want it to fit second by second odds, unless there is some reason to assume the phase being used favours one side over the other.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

I see these people saying that you need a 30 foot map to play ship combat in GURPS and that therefore musketeers destroying ships are acceptable just like people who say that D&D HP and damage is wrong, but it doesn't need to be changed because if you change it, you will also need to create a medical system who encompass everything from ear cancer to the death plague.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

So what you're really saying then, if I'm reading you correctly, is that GURPS can't handle vehicular combats all too well. The fact that SJGames has a product out there that suggests game turns of 20 seconds to 10 minutes, has no bearing on whether or not GURPS can handle that genre of vehicular combat? The fact that GURPS VEHICLES when it came out, could handle building an analog for an PZ Mark IV tank, or a World War II aircraft - but we can't expect that people might want a reasonably realistic approach to vehicle design for use with GURPS 4e? That sounds like GURPS VEHICLE DESIGN SYSTEM for GURPS 4e is doomed from the start!

Frankly? GURPS VEHICLE DESIGN SYSTEM for 4e is doomed from the start if it produces 1st rate ships of the line that can be sunk by Musket Fire! It is doomed from the start if a person can't build a B24 Mitchell Bomber that has attributes similar to the real world version. It will be doomed - because, as you say, GURPS is really a melee game design that functions best for 1 second turns, 1 yard hexes. This implies of course, based on other things you've said, that GURPS doesn't really handle World War II combats where rifle ranges could be at 300 yards. Do you know how BIG a gaming table would have to be in order to play out an encounter of that magnitude? 1 Inch hexes, requires some 300 inches to game out encounters at 300 yards. That's roughly 25 feet!

So, if we want a wargame simulation (how is this different than a melee simulation for a TL 2 or TL 3 combat/skirmish) we need to turn to wargames? Hmmm. That's good to know. When I want to do a World War II game, I should play Squad Leader instead right? If I want to simulate World War I aerial dog-fighting, I should get out some wargame (Dawn Patrol from TSR maybe?) instead of hoping that the Vehicle Design rules can get me the same thing using GURPS?

Ah well - it is late and I should end this here. In fact? I should remove my subscription to the list, because someone I respect, wrote something whose implications are depressing to say the least, and whose intent may very well be why GURPS 4e vehicle rules became what they became.

As I say to my one player in my gaming group...

A implies B.

The cube root of mass/weight times a constant makes larger vehicles subsequently more vulnerable and more fragile. To what end? If it is gameability or playability - then so be it. LIke you say, I should use miniature rules I respect more than I should play GURPS based games.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

While I agree that GURPS tactical combat doesn't work at all scales, the issue with ships being sunk by musket fire goes beyond this. Let's say you want to run an adventure where a ship of evil pirates have taken over a port town, and it's up to the PC's to save the beleaguered citizenry. You've opted to leave the way they do this up to the players - perhaps they'll try diplomacy to convince the pirates to leave, perhaps they'll sneak on board the ship and blow up its powder storage, maybe they'll even round up the local militia for an all-out war on the pirates.

A stat-savvy player opts to round up the previously mentioned militia and has them come to the ship under the cover of night. They all aim their muskets, and you get ready for an epic confrontation - you already have plans in your head of the surprised pirates grabbing their weapons to mount a haphazard defense, during which time you imagine the PC's will be sneaking on board to dispatch the captain.
Instead, the NPC's fire their weapons, you roll damage, and then gape as you realize their volley has just sunk the pirates' ship.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

If vehicle combat requires giving every crewman a turn, then a chase through a crowd and along a highway in rush hour has the same problem. So does a heist during a party. In actual games, people ignore the unimportant NPCs and just give turns to those who are most relevant to the PCs. Similarly, if I were GM I would say "splinters fly, sails rip, and cables part but the ship sails on" rather than accept a silly outcome of a mass volley against a sailing ship. Rules which lead to implausible results and GM fiat are a problem, but not a fatal one.

I know that this has been a long thread, but I already pointed out the comment on this forum where a GURPS author explained why scaling HP with area causes problems. No need to speculate if you can track that down.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

The problem is, there really should be rules to resolve the actions of a crowd, in a way that produce similar results to resolving the actions one at a time. Those rules don't exist, but if they did, they'd produce silly results in many cases (shooting at ships is hardly the only one).

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Here's the problem. Let's say we have two age of sail warships facing off. On one of these ships are our intrepid PCs, and they are actually TIME TRAVELLERS(or dimension hoppers, whatever) with some TL8 weaponry. Like say, a single M2HB machine gun. What happens? The games that focus on age of sail combat are great at handling age of sail combat, but when you throw anachronistic devices in, it creates a problem.

By the RAW, I think an M240G should be sufficient to sink a ship of the line. I don't think that jives with reality.

Should a Boston Whaler with an M2, a couple M60s and maybe a Mk 19 be able to completely destroy a TL4 ship of the line with ease? I don't think so.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

You don't need all that, a M16 will do the job.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

If you're referring to GURPS Spaceships, it's really more an exhibit for the prosecution. The Spaceships combat system proposes a variety of distance and time scales...and the way the combat will work will change dramatically depending on which one you play it out in. The shortest timescale might be somewhere close to compatible with second-by-second, though you need to make a whole bunch of interpretations to figure out how stuff behaves on a second-by-second basis. Any of the other scales are comprehensively off.

Spaceships might be playable...I have lost all desire to test it on that point. But as far as faithfulness, you might as well play your combats out in Attack Vector: Tactical.

I don't think a functional system for GURPS-compatible large-vehicle actions is impossible, by any means! But I haven't seen it published. (Unless we count Basic Set vehicles plus a GM readily glossing over turns and dealing with mass rolls with a mix of abstractions and computational aides. Which isn't exactly published.)

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

We do have some such rules, such as using a crew's average Crewman skill for rolls, or treating the fire of many weapons as a high Rate of Fire attack, but many of those are problematic (the latter, for example).

GURPS does have some odd gaps (chase rules) as well as flaws (treatment of privilege and authority, the damage model, GURPS Magic magic).

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Mass Combat should still work.

I still really don't see the difference between "Lets have our 700 guys fight their 700 guys!" and "Lets have our 1st rate Ship fight their 1st rate ship." You wouldn't try to do the former with the tactical combat system, would you?

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Doesn't Action have Chase rules?

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Sometimes! I have run battles where I only handled the common-soldier-PCs and their immediate opponents in detail, and handled the larger battle by fiat and a few skill rolls (the heroes were barbarian mercenaries not generals or staff officers). In an epic game, one might well handle a battle as a duel between the heroes and the enemy champions- Kromm says that he has done that.

I don't think that a fight between one vehicle and one or a handful is the intended scale for GURPS Mass Combat, and MC doesn't really have rules for anachronistic weapons.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

MC doesn't have unit prefabs for e.g. 'lorica segmentata + assault rifle' units, but it does have units across TLs, so you can pit them in anachronistic battles.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

The ToC says so, but they were published in 2008, in a supplement for a genre which I don't play.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

You could do the same thing with naval engagements. The problem with the low DR/HP wouldn't be an issue there either.
With vehicles that large (and with such large crews) it's clearly closer than the intended scale of the regular tactical man-to-man combat system! It does have rules for different TL units. If you've got a TL8 Light Infantry Fireteam on a TL5 Ship of the Line, you can do that with Mass Combat.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Unliving and Homgenous reduce the damage from impaling and piercing attacks.
This works similar to a limited form of IT:DR
IT:DR can have Cosmic round to 0 so why not slap Cosmic on the Unliving or Homogeneous for the same effect?
that I think will at least help with the Musket ball problem.
Especially when combined with more IT"DR or some of the other rules proposed.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Observe my requirement: "in a way that produces similar results to resolving them one at a time". It's possible to come up with rules that actually work for those purposes, but it produces very odd results.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Still means it not a hole, just means it not in the basic set

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Well, it is an issue if the heroes are a gun crew, and they score some hits. Or if there is a pursuit, and they man or lay the stern chasers or the bow guns. Indeed, firing that one special shot is a common role for heroes.

I checked, and Mass Combat does have rules for transported troops with the Marine trait participating in a naval battle.

Which rule are you objecting to? I think that the "use average Crewman skill" rule works excellently, and I think that "treat many guns as an attack with high RoF" rule is flawed.

I also think that the most important thing is that rules for actions at both large and small scales reasonably describe reality (whether our reality, or that of a literary genre). Sometimes the right simplifications at one scale ("damage is all-or-nothing" and "everyone in a fight has limited control over their actions" for mass combat) are the wrong ones for another (basic combat has detailed damage rules and gives each player full control over their character).

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Well, average crewman skill runs into some averaging issues which may have more to do with GURPS basic level resolution than with the mass combat rules, but it's the RoF rules that I was objecting to (along with some opposite rules, such as shooting at a large group).

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Yep. Besides which, the Action 2 supplement is applicable to any and all genres equally - it is in no way restricted to just 'TL8 Action Movie' games.

Re: 4E's hit point philosophy
 

Heh heh, I would do something along the lines of "Your musket fire serves only to kill a few crewmen, cause some cosmetic damage and give away your position. The pirates now have plenty of warning and are roused from their slumber and ready to fight!"

But that's just me :)

I think to truly represent a large sailing ship you would have to take into account individual gun decks (slices of the ship, in a way) each with a separate pool of HP, the height of the decks for penetration and to determine what opposing decks can be hit, and the length of the deck - if one ship is sizably smaller than the other it won't be hit by all the guns. Once the HP pool is gone, the ship isn't destroyed but rather disabled (perhaps even have a HP/crew ratio for daring boarding actions!).