Realistic Human DR
 

Help me out guys.
Martial arts says something about DR Tough skin 1 and ablative 1.

But does not say which are realistic. Or neither version is?

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

It's a GM's call with little official guidance.

IMHO the most realistic version would be Crushing Only and Tough Skin together. Not only martial artists but American Football players and similar impact sport athletes do shrug off some pretty significant looking impacts.

Ablative DR as a sort of special HP is a fairly convoluted game mechanic and I wouldn't know how to recognize it in the real world.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

Both Martial Arts options are bordering on cinematic, but could have realistic explanations. Tough Skin is more likely than Ablative.

If you want hyper-realism:

Nominally the human skull provides DR 2 for the brain but that's perhaps a bit cinematic as well, since living bone isn't as rigid as dry bone and any injury which hits the head hard enough to inflict HP damage as the potential to inflict Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). At best, it provides DR 1 vs. kinetic attacks (cr, cut, imp, pi), DR 2 vs. burn and corrosive attacks.

The human rib cage should provide DR 1 (Ablative, Limited (Only vs. crush, cut, burn & corrosive) for the Vitals.

The spine should provide DR 2 to protect itself (Ablative, Limited: Only vs. crush, cut, burn & corrosive).

Fat, thick muscle, scar tissue, or similar might give DR 1 (Tough Skin, Limited: Crushing only, Not for Head or Groin).

Realistically, people who play contact sports do suffer massive bruising, it's just that it doesn't immediately show. The same thing is true of normal people who suffer massive crush trauma. The damaging effects of the injury don't really kick in until after the wound begins to heal, when all the crushed, dead tissues starts to be broken down. At that point, the massive increase in waste products in the blood stream can overload the kidneys.

That suggests a potential modifier for DR:

Delayed Damage Onset (-20%): Your DR doesn't actually protect you, it just prevents damage from affecting you as quickly. If you take this limitation, keep track of all points of damage you suffer. At some point in the future, specified when you take this limitation you suffer all the deferred damage at once. Choose any delay from 1 hour to 1 week (although 24 hours is most common). Deferred damage might be due to supernatural or superscience effects or just the fact that your body doesn't respond to the damage as quickly. This limitation is commonly associated with the Ablative or Tough Skin limitations.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

I'm not even sure it would actually count as any DR. In more realistic campaigns another GM friend ruled that if you take 1 or 2 damage to the skull, it doesn't count as hitting the brain but any damage past that does count instead of the skull providing DR. That might be a little overly fragile, though.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

One problem with realistically modeling human (and animal) damage tolerance is that in real life, it's all over the place. There are so many factors in play that lots of outcomes are possible. People are fragile. That's a fact of life. Yet they sometimes survive, relatively intact and unhurt, the most amazing things that really, logically, should have crippled or killed them. At the same time, relatively minor impacts and injuries are sometimes known to be crippling or lethal if things go badly. You can find examples of all sorts of things from real life.

That said, the general rule in real life is that people are fragile, and real violence and real disaster can rapidly cripple or kill you, no matter how much of a badass you are.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

To reinforce that, some informed people think that GURPS armour performance is too unpredictable, but I don't know anyone who thinks that the wounding rules are unrealistically unpredictable. Life is full of cases like the person who died from one punch or the person who was shot in the head with a .22 and the bullet was channelled between scalp and skull rather than inflicting a traumatic brain injury.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

In my copy of GURPS Martial Arts, Special Exercises (DR with Ablative) is not marked as a cinematic perk with *. So its meant to be available in all campaigns. The note in the previous paragraph on p. 153 is a bit confusing. So is the listing of DR (Tough Skin) under Bando, I don't see a comment there. Martial Arts p. 43 suggests that DR for human martial artists is generally cinematic.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

GURPS performance against armor is simultaneously too predictable and too unpredictable. Whether an attack penetrates a given thickness of armor plate is pretty predictable. How much armor plate is actually in front of an attack is not.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

*Damage* isn't realistic. That pretty well prevents making any kind of call about things that modify it like DR.

I mean seriously, a single additive tally that tells you whether something has been struck enough to be dead seems plausible to you? I was a slightly better approximation in its original wargame form, as a representation of fraction of men in a unit killed, and it's not terrible for attritional fights like age of sail warships, but it's just not even close for individuals, even with all the add ons like bleeding or Major Wounds or hit location modifiers GURPS sticks on it to improve it.

Re: Realistic Human DR
 

When 0 seems too low and 1 seems too high that sounds like a job for house-allowance of decile DR and decile HP tracking. Instead of 5 points to subtract 1 damage maybe it's a perk to subtract 0.2

If you want to add further limitations (or deal in 0.1 increments) then I guess one could also involve decile spending of bonus character points.

Any more than a single decimal place and things will start to look ugly though, I wouldn't recommend it.