Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Part of what puzzles me is the choice of genre; picking Cyberpunk, then saying you don't want death by gunfire, seems odd. Kind of like picking high fantasy and disallowing magic. Why go with Cyberpunk at all, unless it's an espionage-themed game?
And are you going to nerf the PC weapons, too? That might annoy them a bit as well; " What do you mean my M-16 does damage like a thrown dagger!?!?"
If big vampire dudes sinking axes into their enemies is what you want, maybe After The End or a Fantasy game would fit your ideas better?
I'm not trying to rain on your parade - I just think that your expectations of a Cyberpunk campaign are outbif synch with the traditional weapons.
If you don't want the PCs dying in a firefight, you have every right as GM to fudge and describe rolls to make it dramatic. I don't think rewriting all the damages is the best way to go. But ymmv.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I don't want *instant* death by gunfire....

Ok, imagine you boot up the video game cyberpunk 2077. You have that first mission with the cyber ghoul haunt right? Ok, you mistep and two of the goons notice you. They shoot you ONCE and it's game over. You try it again and discover yes you can stealth it but that means all the weapons in the game are pretty much pointless because whenever you actually shoot someone and go into combat you get shot ONCE and it's game over. It starts to feel pretty hollow doesn't it?

There's games and places for that. Games like Red Orchestra where you spawn in repeatedly, not a game where you spent quite some time designing and falling in love with your character only for the rules to be structured such to discourage any playstyle but one and the instant you slip up or do the wrong thing? Instant death.

Fudging the rolls would be an option, I think it would be better to find a consistent non arbitrary solution. And yes, the tighter the wire you make your players run, the less margin for failure you allow in your game that means the fewer play styles they are allowed. You make the margin for error too tight then you have worked out of your game all playstyles but one. Preeeeeeeetttttttttttyyyyyyyyyyyy lame.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I'll be honest... you guys are winning me over on the damage modifiers. It gives reason for the (in setting extremely rare) laser to exist or to use swords. The vampires are just going to be that tough. Maybe the advantage of cyborgs is natural DR and insane strength so they can carry heavier and heavier armor without being slowed down?

Mages? Well... I'm still figuring out the basics, we will see where they fit as the basics get in.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

It's worth bearing in mind that it takes 60 HP of injury to auto-kill even a typical human, much less a vampire, and that GURPS is a team game. Say you've got a team of four vampires, each of them with above-average HP (say HP 14) and a few points in HT 13 and Hard To Kill 2. Farmer Joe gets a lucky hit with his 7d rifle round and does 24 HP of damage to one of the vampires, who happens to have no armor (DR 0) and failed his Dodge attempt and didn't have Luck. Instant death?

Not really. The main thing that happens is that that particular vampire loses Move and Dodge and might go unconscious after a few seconds. He can maybe still fight, and he doesn't automatically die until he reaches -5 times his HP, which takes a total of 84 points (6 x 14) of damage. Farmer Joe needs to shoot him three more times to guarantee a kill! Meanwhile, the other vampires are probably feasting on Farmer Joe (or whatever--I don't really play vampire games so I'm only guessing).

So in practice it will always take more than Farmer Joe with a high-powered rifle and a bit of bad luck to TPK the party and end the game. Eight goons with high-powered rifles, yes, that might wipe out a group of four vampires. (I dunno details, depends on how powerful they are, but it seems possible.) But the power of teamwork ensures that "getting shot once" is NOT going to be game over[1], it's just going to be a timeout for healing.

[1] Unless it's a headshot of course. 96 HP of damage from Farmer Joe's headshot could be ugly.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I mean, not really, no. I played through Rogue Spear, which was quite a lot like that unless you were willing to treat your team as expendable. The best gunfight is when only your side knows there's a gunfight. (Meanwhile, gotta repeat again that that's not actually what happens in a GURPS gunfight. Unless you not only get shot but get shot in the skull or vitals, in which case you're more likely to be done.)

Video games make bad settings.
Again, buy luck! Oops, you fumbled a vital roll (or an enemy rolled a crit) and are going to die? No, that just didn't happen. You're fine, so long as you don't keep having that happen more frequently than your Luck supply can cover.

This is why we have that Advantage.
1v1 definitely amps up the sense of lethality of hits that aren't, in their own right, at all lethal - if there's one vampire and one Farmer Joe, and Farmer Joe is a believer in no such thing as overkill, the vampire who falls over stunned might well get shot again and again until they stop twitching.

If the one down isn't alone, OTOH, the shooter has better things to do than keep shooting somebody who isn't fighting.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Instant death by gunfire is about as likely in GURPS as real life (especially if you use bleeding and the rules from the box on High-Tech p. 162) and generally only when you have a central nervous system hit or a very high caliber high velocity round like an HMG.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Short range bursts by 9mm SMGs or 12g shotguns, much less assault rifles, can easily achieve 24-36 injury against an unarmored target and cause death checks. That's not an automatic death, but it is more or less instant.

I don't see a lot of death in my fantasy games - people usually drop out of a fight before hitting -1xHP - but my modern day and sci-fi games have people drop dead. Not everyone, but a couple in any high intensity combat.

Automatic death is incredibly rare. Like maybe a handful of times across hundreds of combats, though again more likely with guns. 7.62mm sniper rifles to the skull are rare, but not much survives them. Though I've seen some PCs that just shrugged them off.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Sure, you might have one or two death checks in that case. Even with HT 10, and two death checks, you have a 55.80% of either passing them both, or failing with a mortal wound. Either way, you don't die instantly.

Although, yes "riddled with bullets" is also a way to die fast.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Getting close enough to use the SMG and land lots of hits is much harder, of course, so there's balance there. Vampires tend to have enhanced perception and other abilities that make getting close hard and dangerous.

Excellent discussion about the single shot above - clearly demonstrates it's not as instantly lethal as some might suspect.

Also, Farmer Joe needs a pretty good weapon skill and/or weapon enhancements and/or plenty of aiming time to get a hit. Doesn't sound so much like a farmer, but if he's well more than just a farmer then he's a much more potent foe and the GM should use him sparingly.

If the GM wants to kill a PC, they die. Whether that's by fiat or recklessness or ridiculous scenario. It's equally easy for the GM to avoid that and present a balanced option where death could happen, but not automatically and not without the PCs having a chance to get out of it. If the GM wants the players to be able to hold onto their characters for a while and death to be unlikely (but time in torpor or other healing and so on to be the primary impact) then set the opponents appropriately or use one of the many options provided to alter the balance.

Something that I think we've all missed so far, so I'll throw it in now, is a recommendation to the "How to be a GURPS GM" series:

https://warehouse23.com/search?q=how...prefix%5D=last

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I sense that the OP's concern is primarily about not wanting to kill a PC accidentally, the way that an AD&D housecat will murder a 1st level wizard if you run it by its MM stats. Imagine the poor DM muttering to himself, "I was just trying to introduce a potential familiar for you, not a deadly combat encounter!"

@OP's takeaway by now is hopefully "don't worry, that's extremely unlikely especially if you have a buddy."

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

There is no such thing as accidental death in these situations. If you go into combat you are choosing to risk your life. If the GM presents you with opportunity or occasion for combat they are presenting you with the chance of endangering yourself. If you want to have zero chance of death, don't fight.

The game mechanics of GURPS is consistent with this. The chance of death may be small. But it always remains possible that you'll make that bad dice roll and your character will die.

For me, at least, this is a feature. On one hand, it gives players an incentive not to settle every situation by drawing a gun or throwing a punch. On the other hand, since players know they are risking their characters' lives, it makes the choice to go into a fight a dramatic one, like Hector going out onto the fields of Troy to face the enraged Achilles. It's the chance that their character won't come back that gives players skin in the game.

And now, to argue against myself, I'm surprised no one has suggested to Klink the standard answer of many GURPS players who disagree with that sort of logic: fudge the dice rolls. If you're the GM, and you have a chance to roll the dice, and one outcome would kill the character—roll behind a GM screen and lie about the outcome. That's a lot simpler than making up different rules.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

This has been suggested, but OP has expressed (understandable) resistance to it - better to have consistent rules that give the results you're looking for than having to frequently fudge rolls. I'm not certain why the various other solutions offered - giving the characters traits that prevent death (or make it into a temporary state), using cinematic rules like Flesh Wounds, etc - are unacceptable, however.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

For the record I think lying to your players is a bad idea and has the potential to forever destroy your players' ability to trust you.

If you find that you've accidentally killed a PC (for example by giving cyber equipment to Farmer Joe that turns out to somehow be much stronger than you were expecting), there's no need to lie to your players. Just tell them you made an honest mistake, apologize, and either move forward with a funeral and a new PC and a promise not to repeat the error, or tell them that you're retconning the unexpectedly deadly result to be less lethal, and resurrect the PC.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Don't have a ST 20 Barbarian with a Flail and a fondness for attacking the Skull, do you? :)

This does serve to illustrate that it is _targeted_ attacks (mostly to the Vitals or the Skull but sometimes the Neck) that result in instant death.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Mrugnak was literally over a decade ago, but I suppose I underestimated the death rate at peak Mrugnak. 4d+4 (2) cr to the skull generally autokills HP 10 foes, and has a reasonable chance of kill anything with HP 20 or less.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

While I understand trying to avoid "instant death" for PCs, it's worth noting that guns are deadly; that's why they are used. And why police (who are very likely to run into guns in the real world) wear armour. Hell, if they hear of a firefight, the SWAT officers look like big cyborg beetles when they respond, they are so armoured-up.

Cyberpunk is about danger, violence, and risk-taking; that includes the risk of getting hurt or killed. Nerfing everyone's boom-sticks isn't solving the issue, it's circumventing it.

So maybe most of your baddies use shock weapons, or pepperballs, or beanbag rounds; if anyone has heavy firepower, telegraph it so the PCs know what's coming and can adjust tactics accordingly. Keep the bullets to a minimum, and then they are a deadly threat when appropriate. You didn't say if you plan to downgrade the PC weapons as well.

Also, Vampires in my games usually have Damage Reduction/2 or more, so incoming damage is less menacing in the short term. I had a PC with DR10 and IR/2 who survived a car wreck at 90 kmh. That would also give them a "that should have killed you!" surprise factor in play.

Just my thoughts.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

But mostly only in real life, not in GURPS. Ditto falls actually. A 50 foot fall is lethal about half the time in real life, but hardly ever to a GURPS character.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

The highest damage roll I ever achieved on a character sheet I still have is Bryce's 2d+1 quarterstaff, though I can remember an axe-and-shield fighter that I'm almost certain was higher. It probably says something about me that the strongest character I felt was worthy of archiving was ST 13. (Bryce had DX 16, and Orzon was IQ 18, so it isn't merely stat normalization).

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Nyx the Barbarian eventually had magic raise her ST to 22 and 4D swing. Her magic flail added 6 to that and being a Weapon Master added 8 more for 4D+14. She was also a 400 pt+ character. You subtract a few pts for a helmet and the Skull's natural DR and multiply the rest by x4 and you can get over 100 pts of damage.

She also wore DR10 magic armor and of course had more than 20 HP. That 7D rifle might have made her mad.

As I once remarked "Character points are magic". If the OP hands enough of them out to his players those worries about one-shotting a PC might go away.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Well, just essentially halving the firearm damage while similarly reducing armor DR is a pretty similar solution to what has been suggested in terms of cinematics. It's also pretty simple. Unliving advantage is also useful but not every player is going to be a vampire. I want the margin for failure to be more than a straight and narrow path thereby allowing for a lot of possibilities and creativity. Not "well if you aren't built this exact way due to the sheer deadliness of the slightest failure... you won't last five minutes!"

I'm setting up some short campaigns with myself (playing 2-3 characters of my own to "simulate") before I commit to any such thing now though. We will see. Also being TL9 first aid apparently is pretty good now...


As mentioned elsewhere there are impossible trans dimensional beings, vampires and magic as well as cybernetics we have yet to achieve in the real world. I'm not particularly interested in "well this gun puts down someone this reliably in real life so it should in game" arguments. This is a fantasy game, get with the fantasy lol.

it seems so freaking odd to me that the game name is Generic *UNIVERSAL* Role Playing System and time and time again people are mentioning reality "well this is like the real world." No no, this is supposed to be a *UNIVERSAL* role playing system and I'm not interested in playing a realistic campaign where my players get shot and die within five minutes for being gonk enough to think they could actually do anything. Nope nope nope. Lets expand our options and variety a bit from "realistic" and adopt the motto of a *UNIVERSAL* role playing system!

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

One of the foundations of this is that "realistic" humans (who are probably built on a base of 25 pts excepting Social advantages) will always have the same relationship to threats. If they travel to another world it won't be a peculiar one where guns do different damage.

No one is telling you that you can't have PCs built on many more pts and who thus don't have the same relationship to threats.

Make your PCs tougher and more capable. Don't shrink and soften your world.

There's also a specific note about the "halve firearms damage and halve armor values" option. This will ahve the effectiveness of any firearms in the PCs' hands and probably annoy them mightily.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

If bring "realistic" is what's bothering you, have you looked at The Cinematic Campaign (p. B488-B489) and Cinematic Combat Rules (p. B417), which provide the rule changes needed for games where being "realistic" takes a backseat to the game (and story) being exciting?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

It has now been explained several times that the system is not as instantly deadly as you appear to think. Also, numerous rules to ameliorate the concern even more have been pointed out.

(BTW, Some degree of consistent realism is essential to making a universal game. Realism is the foundation off of which fantasy departs. For example, gravity is pretty consistent across most fantasy fiction, but not always. You've got to have rules for falling for the ones that do have gravity even if the ones that don't have it don't need it.)

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

You can perfectly well have player characters whose reaction to being shot at is not to take cover, but to charge for the guy with the gun. For example, you can have supers. Not having to worry about guns is one of the standard requirements for being a super (the other two are being able to take on multiple people hand to hand and win, and having some splashy ability that evokes sensawunda).

They're also built on a lot of points, as Fred says. My character La Gata Encantada, whose reaction to guns was to leap through the air at the shooter and kick the gun out of their hand, was built on 555 points in the version I have in my files; I believe she started out at 500, which is a good starting point for baseline supers.

Your campaign isn't in the supers genre as standardly defined, I know. But it has a lot in common with it. It has power sources, and origin stories, and characters with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and it even brings together characters with powers from several diverse sources. All of that is almost exactly like supers. Try building some sample characters on 500 points, giving them protective abilities that that point budget will allow, and test them against each other.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

A UNIVERSAL system needs to be capable of doing close to everything from realistic to cinematic. GURPS stats things as realistic as it can but does not cap it. It provides all the rules you need to change the settings expectations as you need.

You are STUCK with the mind set of "This part is too realistic and I want it to not be" while ignoring the part of GURPS that you should be using, which is giving the characters the abilities they need to be cinematic.

Guns are dangerous, in every setting I have ever seen. The difference in their danger does not come from CHANGING the guns, but the characters. In an urban modern spy thriller, guns are the end all be all for the PCs. In a Supers, they are a nuisance to the PCs. The guns are the SAME, its the PCs that changed.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Bruno (Mrugnak's player) once fired a 125mm anti-tank missile at an extremely large dragon and rolled 84 dice of damage. We were playing online and had flexible die rollers so she actually could roll 84 dice instead of doing 6dx14 like you would on a tabletop.

Highest consistent, low-tech damage at my table was probably Big Al, the half-ogre knight with Weapon Master in a DFRPG game. He tended to go up against a lot of demons, golems, and other weird monsters by the time he reached that point, but 4d+12 damage splattered anything that was vulnerable to being splattered.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

In most cinematic settings guns are perceived as dangerous but are very rarely actually effective. This is not something GURPS handles well (though most other game systems don't do a lot better, it's hard to manage "looks dangerous but actually isn't" in a rule set).

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Guns are very effective in cinematic settings EXCEPT when the script needs different.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I would reverse that: Guns are only effective when the script requires it.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

This thread is evidence that GURPS handles it very well indeed.

Looks dangerous: new player sees 7d damage from Farmer John in the rule book, compares that to HP, expects instant death

Actually isn't: GURPS characters with decent HT can survive down to -50 HP or more, and even just hitting a vampire in the first place potentially involves beating Stealth, vampire Speed, range penalties, Dodge, Luck, and so on.

Mission accomplished!

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

No, it isn't evidence for anything of the kind. Handling it well would probably be something like "injury cannot exceed margin of success on the attack roll, nor can it exceed margin of failure on the defense roll; critical hits do not exist (though a low roll does increase MOS)".

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I'd like to ask if the OP has a further question outside the dispute about (gun) damage, because if so we might be able to give an answer to that that would be found useful.
Which settings fit that?

In a cinematic action work about human-equivalents where guns exist, I generally expect protagonists to use guns, and to do so frequently and successfully.

I expect guns to be infrequently used successfully against protagonists, because the work acknowledges that that would be a serious consequence so it can only happen in service to the plot rather than as fight choreography sugar. But characters who don't need to make it to the next scene will be available to demonstrate that the gun does do its job as expected.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

TBH I was originally planning on 250 points.

However... When I look at the core rule book I don't see many advantages that actually improve survivability (for humans, vampries can have unliving ) other than combat reflexes. There's hard to kill / fit but that doesn't really do anything about -50 HP and that's pretty easy to get into when the bad guy rolls a crit hit (first combat I did I had two bad guys armed with tl8 9mm pistols WITH A SKILL OF 10, one rolled 3 while aiming at the head due to most of the rest being behind cover... as a dm I had to fudge that "no no! your arm is exposed too! he actually was aiming for that!" Therefore I got to roll 2d6, not 8d6 for damage... I'm sorry but a mid level 250 point character under threat of "roll save vs death" from ONE lucky hit is what i'm worried about here. It's stressful painful, obnoxious gameplay. He wouldn't even have gotten to roll save vs death if it was a rifle doing 5d6 damage getting a crit headshot so it's now doing 20d6 damage. Sorry but at a certain point it's downright ridiculous. )

Players aren't allowed to have a large pool of hitpoints. That's not realistic (it also poses a problem for the melee weapons. ) If I were to follow that logic there's a ceiling on their HT and DX...

lets say this wasn't a cybernetics laden campaign. What WOULD they spend points on? Skill points in knitting? If they can't have 30 hitpoints why would it be allowable to let them have a speed of 18? (which again doesn't protect them from a critical hit hurtling them fighteningly close to death in one single bad dice roll even though they literally spent 260 points on it... )

Fortunately I can do lots of things with cybernetics, higher dr, new rules of death similar to vampire topor if they have the right cyberwear.......... but in a campaign setting set in the 1950s? Well the players better have magic! Because 500 points doesn't seem to be enough to save em without the DM fudging things a little!

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I would expect them to be able to mow down mooks with guns. I would also expect them to be able to mow down mooks with their fists.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Check out both Enhanced Dodge and extra Speed. Hypothetically, if your GM lets you dump 210 of your 250 points into Combat Reflexes [15], Enhanced Dodge [15], and Speed +9.00 [180], with 40 points left over for other stuff like guns, you'll have Speed 14, Move 14, and Dodge 19. Before Farmer Joe can pull the trigger you'll already have shot him, and you'll also dodge 98% of the non-critical hits rolled against you.

That's just an illustration, not necessarily the best way to invest your points. Luck, DR, high Stealth, high HP, and high weapon skill so you can kill enemies with high offense (a.k.a. the best defense) are all good choices too, plus supernatural stuff like Unkillable and Regeneration.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Nonsense.

You can have 20 HP, though most humans shouldn't. If you acknowledge that combat reflexes helps, you have to acknowledge that buying up Basic Speed or Enhanced Defenses to get more dodge also helps. You can buy a bunch of HT, which makes you ludicrously hard to actually put down. You can buy Acrobatics skill to perform Acrobatic Dodges, which I imagine La Gata Encantada would have. And that Basic Speed comes with extra Basic Move to avoid getting stuck in a bad position.

And, of course, you can buy Ridiculous Luck, to deny things like that natural 3.


(Though you also typically would spend a lot of those stuff that helps you make sure nobody gets more than one shot at you before you happen to them, in whatever style your character practices.)
Have you, at any point, acknowledged that Luck exists?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Ah well... it looks like all my players will need to have luck... Their character sheets will all look eerily similar... That or I don't put a single rifle in the game, nothing cool yknow?

And yeah, I can allow my characters 30-40 whatever HP because the setting has cybernetics and vampirism to justify it. HOWEVER everyone is harping on this realism thing and stressing in the past pages that normally you do not allow such things...

But 40HP, Luck, Combat relfexes and all the same feats. I think we answered the question. Margin of error so razer thin you *must* take that advantage. There's no other choice. Seems... flawed to me.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Another way of putting it is that guns are very effective in cinematic settings except when used against major characters. So the trick is giving major characters counters against guns.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I ran 2 PCs through around 15-20 sessions of 1920s noir investigations, including multiple shoot-outs with tommy guns, Browning automatic rifles, and other nasty ordnance.

Neither PC had more than 10 HP, DX over 13, HT over 11, or Combat Reflexes. Their only armor was some DR 5 semi-bullet proof vests. They both did have Luck, but we started from the Action! templates and all of those have Luck. To my memory, I didn't fudge any die rolls.

The PCs survived by using their superior senses to avoid ambushes, taking cover when necessary, and careful shooting of their .38 caliber revolvers. Frankie may have used Rapier Wit a couple of times to flummox foes at close range.

I think you had a bad experience with a test combat, and you're overreacting to the potential lethality. If the PC had Luck, they could have canceled that critical hit. Luck, Destiny Points, or spending CP to buy successes (or cancel other people's criticals, see Basic p 347) give PCs a lot of flexibility to get out of a jam, and that means there are a lot of different ways to build characters in practice.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

There are some alternatives to Luck but they are genre-dependent: a Bless spell requires a setting with magic, Destiny Points are only for cinematic action campaigns AFAIK, Injury Reduction and Unkillable are supernatural, decoy illusions require holograms or magic, etc.

But Luck or its equivalent is incredibly common for protagonists in war movies, urban fantasy novels, superhero comics, etc. Protagonists often barely escape horribly lethal deaths through sheer luck.

(Even Dungeons and Dragons often defaults to explaining PC survival as "HP are luck/plot armor," although other DMs view them as something real such as life force. It's controversial.)

Maybe you'll wind up with one guy with Combat Reflexes and crazy-high Guns skill and Speed, one Unkillable vampire who can turn into mist and phase through walls, one cyborg armored like an M1 Abrams tank, and one wizard who can turn the others invisible and Great Haste them or let them fly or scout ahead with Wizard Eye. Even if they all have Luck they'll still feel different.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Instead of having to invent rule after rule after rule after rule to special plead a way out of a problem, wouldn't the solution to be to... solve the problem? Just.... reduce the damage so that you aren't seeing 20d6 potential damage?

I mean I COULD warn all my characters that they *MUST* have luck and this. and that.. and just... fill out their character sheets so they are all the same and say "there! Write your name here." Or... we could increase the margin for failure in the game buy reducing the ridiculous scale of damage and not need special pleading rules to come in and save the day...

I'd rather not watch all the fun and joy fade from my players eyes when I tell them because I liked so many of gurps mechanics all their characters are going to be the same build...

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Literally nobody but you has suggested 30 HP is an appropriate response. Soaking damage with HP is not the first choice in GURPS, it's something for specialists.
Feats? Are you playing D&D now or something?

Luck and Combat Reflexes are recommended for all combat protagonists, yes. I don't understand what about this you're objecting to. What do you lose by having the same advantage appear on multiple character sheets?

Are you also unhappy that a lot of your PCs will probably have Guns and increased DX?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

feats/ advantages same thing. And y'know, *taps title of thread*

I'm sorry that I'm pretty disappointed that the game when it comes to firearms is so fundamentally broken and flawed it requires a special pleading mechanics to fix the problem. "no no that dice roll didn't count." That's not a solution to the problem, it's papering over it. Allowing the players to do that by spending points or the GM just rolling his dice twice because he's unwilling to let his players get insta killed, it's the same thing.

I'm not even saying I don't want luck in the game. I'm saying THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH A GAME THAT REQUIRES DICE ROLL FUDGING.

The other recommended solution was... allow the PCs to be so powerful and scale the encounters so the enemy doesn't get to fight back before they are all well on the ropes or dead (the offense being the best defense argument.) So my players get bored as they don't feel any threat or challenge because if the enemy fights back and has anything other than the crappiest weapon they CAN potentially get that hit...

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Many GM's (and players) consider Luck to basically be a required purchase for PC's, because as you note it really sucks to lose because of a single unlucky roll. Heck, you could just give it as a campaign Advantage for free, leaving them able to spend the entirety of whatever points you give them on whatever they'd like (although from your previous comments, it sounds like they're largely all going for quasi-speedsters, so they're likely to wind up with similar sheets regardless).

Now, this doesn't mean you truly have to buy Luck. There are other routes to keep your character alive - and sometimes, keeping your character alive isn't even the point anyway. But it is a trait that gives you a lot of bang for your buck.

Massless HP is certainly an option. You might also consider Vitality Reserve; personally I'd fluff this the same way high HP is fluffed in That Other Game - it represents near-misses, grazes, etc, rather than the character simply no-selling a hit.

There are some options in GURPS to mimic the effect somewhat (of course, the real reason guns are rarely effective is that the way the author decides if a character gets hit, and if so how badly wounded they are, is entirely by fiat... which doesn't work well for a game). Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy ensures the first shots by the enemy will always miss. Flesh Wounds turns a deadly headshot into a grazing wound to the shoulder. Gun Control Law means the OpFor only attacks with firearms if the PC's are using firearms (otherwise they'll only use them for threats and as improvised bludgeons). Vitality Reserve, above, functionally gives the character a narrative force field (renaming the trait Plot Armor wouldn't be entirely inappropriate) to keep them alive longer, but with a limit to how much harm it can prevent - and note you should be able to get it cheaper if you limit it to only apply against firearms. Nothing but GM fudging will truly replicate the effect in most media, because otherwise there's always the chance of a string of bad luck that kills a major character.


Another option, which really isn't mentioned anywhere in the GURPS canon that I'm aware of, is to treat all fatal wounds on PC's as inflicting the Mortally Wounded condition (and possibly ignoring the rules about needing to roll against HT from time to time to stay alive - the character basically goes into the same sort of "Wounded" condition one sees in JRPG's until they receive treatment from the setting's equivalent of a Phoenix Down). Yes, even if the character gets shot in the head by .50 BMG (average of around 160 HP Injury without armor), they cannot exceed Mortally Wounded. If the rest of the party emerges victorious, great, now they can get their friend the medical assistance needed. If the rest of the party is beaten (or flees and leaves the "dead" character behind), OpFor can treat the character in hopes of getting information out of them, publicly executing them, putting them on trial, or whatever - leaving the party the chance to escape (or mount a rescue). The player can opt to simply let their character die on a failed Death Check, particularly if it would be dramatically appropriate, but otherwise as long as it's not breaking anyone's immersion, PC death simply does not happen. That would be on the extreme end, but easily doable.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

You seem to be missing the option that people die in lethal combat. If you don't want lethal combat, that's what TV Acrion Violence is for.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

To me it seems like the perfect solution. Being too lucky to get shot is exactly how non-bulletproof protagonists in all the media do it. And real people. It's the only countermeasure!

(There are, of course, plenty of unreal countermeasures you can use in GURPS when you want to, which I think you've been exposed to.)
You still want Luck with that, otherwise Batman might just get shot in the face by a mugger.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

The interesting thing is how people here say "the other game" like saying "he who must not be named" or "you know who" like it's voldemort or something.

Guys... the reason why I went to gurps is the core structure of the game allows me to build the unvierse I want. Sneering at the other game because "well it's not like our game, it's not "realistic"" is just... silly. If you want total realism that's great! But a universal role playing system shouldn't demand that I play hyper realism with the rest of you. It's astounding to me how the folks replying are absolutely against the idea of just softening things up, increasing the margin of error by stepping back from "realism" for fun. It's pretty silly to be so obsessed with realism when I'm talking about magic and vampires in the first place...

Right now it's so tweaked toward realism, so impossibly pushed in that direction that players use dice fudging to make up for the absolute lack of forgivness. That's... A problem guys.

No, I don't need to give luck as a free advantage, as gm I can re roll any bad roll I want to. What I want is to set up an experience where i don't have to. Where if they screw up this roll and fail intimidate there's another option, and there's another option beyond that to get the info. They could take more than one path and we don't have to re-roll. It happens though, the less experienced the gm the more he has to do it... but the GOAL is not to have to do it at all. The GOAL is an entire experience where no one player or gm *needs* to fudge rolls, then suddenly luck is a fun advantage. It's not something you call out of desperation, but something that brings light and life to a game funnily like unlucky would.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

So use TV Action Violence or Survivable Guns or something.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

So, Luck. As lots of folks have been saying.

But also, the average roll for a d6 is 3.5.

So a head shot from a 9mm pistol that does 2d+2 pi is likely to end up doing 36 damage to the head, minus 2 for natural head DR, for 34 final head injury. A PC with 12 HP is going to have to make only 1 death check with that damage.

And if the PC has HT 12, they're probably going to survive that death check - and end up living, if a teammate can get them to a hospital. And that's for a regular human who has slightly above average (i.e. adventurer) stats. ST 12 and HT 12 is only 40 of those 250 points.... And you still haven't used that Luck advantage, which would have forced Farmer Brown to reroll that 3. (And as folks have pointed out, the chance that Farmer Brown is going to roll a 3 is 1 in 216.)

In my opinion, the game is a lot cooler when you get shot in the head and still manage to come back to tell the tale than when a GM fudges dice rolls that probably didn't need to be fudged in the first place.

Again, in my opinion, the game is a lot more fun when there's a real chance of getting shot in the head by Farmer Brown and having it be game over - except that you're just a little bit tougher than a random zero point guy.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

There exist a large number of ways to tone down firearms if realistic deadliness doesn't fit your campaign, as has been noted. And yes, your idea if nerfing all guns is indeed an option, it's just that most players are going to be rather disappointed when they make a gun-toting PC and the GM arms them with a pea-shooter. As I stated earlier, if your players are fine with 1d pistols and 2d(2) rifles, go for it. Of course, when one of your PC's takes a maximum-damage rifle shot to the Skull and dies instantly from the resulting 44 HP Injury (which calls for 3 death checks for anyone with HP 11 or lower, 2 for anyone with HP 14 or lower, and one for anyone with HP 22 or lower), you'll still be in the same boat...

GURPS doesn't require dice roll fudging... but it can result in dice rolls you don't like. It's hard to find a game that can't without fudging. When I first played an introductory adventure in Pathfinder, the first attack of the first round of the first (and only) serious combat in the module (everything else was stuff like an imp who did subdual damage and I think some giant rats who had anemic bites) was a maximum damage critical hit from a greataxe, and killed the unlucky PC outright (the table decided he wound up split straight down the middle, from crown to groin, and comically fell to either side). Stuff like that happens when dice are being rolled.

Many players find it fun to basically set up the situation so they can overwhelm OpFor (positioning everyone for an ambush, say). If what your players prefer is a more direct confrontation, obviously that isn't going to work, so giving them traits that make surviving - and winning - a direct confrontation would work well. You can also use the suggested cinematic options - TV Action Violence, which I forgot about until sir_pudding referenced it, makes it so that players have the option to negate a hit (particularly a lethal one) by burning 1 FP and losing their next turn. Naturally, if you don't like any of the available options, you'll need to come up with your own - as I've stated before, your firearm downgrade could certainly work.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

2d6 times 4 averages 28 damage. What if you just...took the hit? Your PC would probably need to take a bit of a lie-down, but very likely wouldn't be dead.

(Though, yes, getting brained with an assault rifle is pretty likely to kill an unprotected human PC.)

Not sure why the bad guy was even able to make that shot, though. They're at -7 to hit against the hit location, so if they've got any range penalties that they aren't compensating with Aim or AoA bonuses, the shot becomes literally impossible.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

People aren't disappointed when they buy a SW-1 cut TL 4 saber, have a really high 16 strength and therefore roll just a 1d6 for base damage and multiply by 1.5 for wounding modifier now do they?

Not only is that 2d6(2) "peashooter" doing more damage (instead of 1d6 minus the armor dr, multiplied by 1.5 it's flat out twice the dice) but unlike that saber it has the potential for three damage rolls a turn unlike the saber that has to have all out attack (sacrificing the ability to defend next turn) to do just two.

It's a flat out garbage weapon by game rules and nobody complains about it? So why would it feel enemic to be able to knock the average human into negative hp with a rifle in one hit?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Well, there is the +2 with a 9mm.... But you know what? I just rolled 2d6 and came up with ... a 1 and a 2. That head shot is as likely to do less than average as more than average damage.

Let's say in your crazy head shot scenario, you just rolled that 3 and told your player, "Oh, damn! Farmer Brown just got off a critical head shot on you with a 9mm!" And then you roll 2d6 for damage, get a 3, add the +2... And it's 20 head damage, 18 injury. You roll on the Critical Head Injury table - and get anything between a 9 and 11: "Normal head blow damage only."

Even a zero point character with HP 10 doesn't have to make a death check roll with that damage!

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

You actually hit it on the nose. -3 range modifier. -5 due to the location of what was exposed behind cover. Character had 10 skill. The only way the shot would have landed was a critical hit, which happened.

Thankfully there was a thread on the forums explaining that only the first bullet fired out of a full rof burst counts as a critical. Because the character's skill was 10, the negatives were -7 and he rolled a 3... well only the first shot hit, the additional -2 on the next shot meant it could not possibly hit. Imagine if the npc had actual skill and rolled a critical success? Or imagine as I suggested he had a good weapon not the garbage he was using? It doens't matter how high in character points my pcs are they won't survive it.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Well, if they buy HT 14, they probably will survive it. Aren't the PCs supposed to be vampires?!

I think you're not paying attention to some of the basic mechanics of GURPS. The probability of surviving any death check with HT 14 is better than 90%.

Every +1 to HP adds 6 injury to your life expectancy - just less than 2d injury. A character with 10 HP is automatically dead at -50 HP (60 HP possible life expectancy). A character with 11 HP is auto-dead at -55 (66 HP possible life expectancy). And so on.

If you have just a few extra HP and just a couple points of added HT, you're already extraordinarily tough.....

EDIT: An average, zero point NPC, with 10 HP, is only automatically killed with an average of about 17 dice of injury....

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Unless that's an intentional houserule that would be pretty disappointing, yes. Since standard swing damage for ST 16 is 2d+2, you should be doing 2d+1...

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

They *can* be a vampire. Or they can delve into cybernetics... or they can delve into magic. All are options. Vampires can delve into magic if they got the points just like people can choose to have more magic than cybernetics.

And no, as I said "imagine if they didn't have a garbage weapon? What if they had some skill?" What's 4 times 5d6?

Ok, what if he had a rifle and had twelve skill in it? What's 4 x 5d6 x 2? (The 5.56 rifles have a recoil of 2 as well!) Oh look the PC took 155 damage to the head! game over.


Ah I got swing and thrust reversed. So it's 2d+1 minus dr x 1.5 for one attack a turn vs 2d6, enemy dr halved for 3 or more attacks a turn. I wonder which is nastier...

TBh I think a crit hit situation like I mentioned is still pretty bad... 4x2d6(2) x 2? Oh the player took 62 damage and died...

Hrmm... This is a problem...

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

-5 doesn't hit skull. If that was the shot they took, it should have been a face hit, doing only normal damage. Good chance of knockdown and stunning, negligible lethality.

But you're right, taking an impossible shot and hitting because you rolled a natural 3 or 4 is by the book.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Ah! It's -7. Thanks for the correction. The difficulty there helps a little. It means pc and npc need a fair bit more skill than a 12 to land two hits that way. That tbh helps a little.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Are you - and your players - really wanting to play in a game in which a head shot from a high-powered rifle does NOT mean automatic death?

You're wanting to play a game in which it's either impossible to get shot in the head? Or in which somebody gets shot in the head by a high powered rifle and doesn't have to at least roll a death check?

And now my question is - what kind of game is this? If this is really what you want, wouldn't you be happier playing something without any kind of dice rolls? Where you have total control of the narrative?

Just for the sake of running the numbers: a Tech Level 8 sniper rifle does 9d+1 pi. A sniper sets up a head shot and gets off all 3 shots! All of them hit! The PC doesn't have Luck, is totally surprised, and gets no dodge attempt. The shots are going to do 33 damage each, -2 for head DR, times four for a head shot: that's an average of 124 final injury for each shot. Sounds about right to me.

Are you really wanting to run a game in which a PC survives getting shot three times in the head by a sniper? Or do you want a reality in which getting shot can't happen?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

RoF isn't that good, TBH. You certainly don't get "3 or more attacks a turn" out of it unless you're doing very particular things.

The thing is, it's not 3 or more attacks. It's one attack that can hit multiple times...can. But practically won't much, because you need at least 2 margin of success for each additional hit.

Of course, you're focused on the 'what if the dice come up 3', and I'm not that worried about that because it's a less-than-2% chance.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

yes

You do realize most people don't play tabletop games because they want an exact reproduction of what they'd experience IRL if they tried to do the same stuff right?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

How would characters kill monsters or AFVs with nerfed guns?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

How do players kill dragons with swords?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

With great difficulty, if at all? Probably using excessively high strength based damage plus magic plus unrealistic Weapon Master bonus damage plus Vitals hit location.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

So then what's the problem with Luck and Unkillable?!

I honestly can't figure out what your problem is, here, then. You want your players to get shot at, but you want it to not matter at all to the tune of getting shot right in the head with a sniper rifle and walking away?

So give them all Luck, Unkillable, HT 16, and DR 50!

Or did you want regular humans to shrug off head shots? Because that doesn't seem very UNIVERSAL to me.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

So then if the PC shoot a baseline human guard in the head with a high caliber rifle, the guard's not going to die, either?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

You can build characters to withstand gunshots, or you can let them die.

If there's a problem, it's that you don't want the solutions for some reason.


Ablative DR works great in this function.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

By being built powerful enough to do so.

Like we do if we want them to readily survive gunshots.

So then, what is your answer to the question I posed?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

People who are looking for decent damage aren't going to go for that sabre, which has the lowest swing damage in Characters of any weapon that isn't a knife or whip. A dedicated swordsman is also unlikely to be built with only ST 10.

Now, if your players are coming at things from the perspective of how it all works in video games (which is fine!), they may well expect even unarmed attacks to do more damage than some firearms, as that's how it often works in games to give closing to melee range a benefit. But if they're coming at things from the perspective of movies (where a gun in the hands of a protagonist is an Instant Death Wand) or real life, they're going to be expecting for their gunslinger to be able to take out foes rather readily.

That 2d(2) pi rifle, when used against an unarmored HP 10 foe, has an 8.33% chance of dropping the foe to 0 HP, and an equal probability (8.33%) of dropping the foe into negative HP. That's all of a 1-in-6 chance. Now, safe money is that it's going to deal a Major Wound (6 or more, 72.22% chance), and it has a better-than-even chance of dropping the foe below 1/3xHP (7 or more, 58.33%), so it will work alright against unaugmented street thugs or maybe some farmers... but against cyborgs, vampires, monsters, etc? Probably not.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

By giving the monsters and AFVs appropriate stats?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I think you mean "invitation to be disarmed". Unless it's a John Wick film, guns are for taking out extras.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Could you elucidate what you think should happen instead when a character takes four assault rifle bullets to the head?

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Unless I misrember, if an action is GURPS-impossible, they are not allowed a roll.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Or a whole lot of films from before hand-to-hand choreography became obligatory. Which I want to attribute to The Matrix, though that could be wrong.

Also, I don't understand what's wrong with taking out extras.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

If you're looking for alternatives to Luck ("dice roll fudging") that would have saved the life of your test character, I'll call out four:

1.) Having 20ish HP (so it takes 120 points of damage to kill you) and good HT or Hard To Kill means that even a rifle shot to the head probably won't kill you. Say you've got a middle-of-the-road DR 5 helmet. That plus skull DR 2 will reduce a typical 7d headshot (24 damage) to only 68 injury (17 x 4). You'll be at -48 HP and will have to pass two death checks, but you probably won't die. 20 HP means you're beefier than Arnold Schwarzenegger but for a cyberpunk game it's pretty reasonable, and of course a tanky cyberdude or vampire can have much more than a basic DR 5 helmet.

2.) Unkillable 2 seems thematic for vampires, which means no amount of damage will kill you.

3.) If you allow magic, spells like Deflect Missiles can make you temporarily immune to missiles, or Invisibility can make you approximately impossible to hit with a headshot. (See below.)

4.) Finally, there's tactics. If Farmer Joe is shooting at you with Guns-11, and he's shooting at the head, then he needs a 4 or better to hit. If he takes even a -2 penalty, his target number will drop so low that even a 3 doesn't hit, which means that even if he rolls a 3 it's not a crit, it's a failure. So if Farmer Joe is at least 5 yards away from the character, that's a -2 penalty so the PC doesn't die. Or if it's twilight (-2 or -3 to vision and attacks) or moonlight (-4 to -6) or moonless night (-7), the PC doesn't die. Or if the PC is a very tiny creature like a pixie (SM -6, six inches to a foot tall IIRC), attackers always have -6 to hit and the PC doesn't die. If you're invisible due to powers, technology, or magic, that's -6 to hit and the PC doesn't die.

If Farmer Joe's skill is higher than Guns-11 you may need to stack more multipliers, but the point here is that you really did get very unlucky with rolling a 3 and might also have made a rules mistake in e.g. not applying ranged penalties and darkness penalties. (Or maybe this practice fight took place in broad daylight and the shooter aimed long enough to get an Accuracy bonus big enough to cancel out any ranged penalties--I wasn't there, so you tell me.) Darkness is pretty thematic for vampires anyway and if your players fight like Batman, in the dark most of the time and often using surprise, that doesn't seem like a bad thing unless you really do insist on zero PC deaths instead of 0.00001%.

People recommend Luck not because it's mandatory (it's not) but because it's cheap and pretty good and good for almost any character concept. But the game doesn't break if the GM bans Luck.

For the record, I don't think I'm doing this, and if you want to decrease the damage of guns that seems okay to me although you should make sure your players don't mind if they need to shoot regular mooks a lot of times before they fall down. I'm just trying to make sure you are aware of the various magic and/or vampire options your players have for staying alive and unwounded even if they are getting shot at with rifles doing 7d of damage or more, which you'll probably have somewhere in the game even if you do reduce the damage of most guns. Like, you're still going to have sniper rifles and anti-tank missiles and tanks somewhere, right?

P.S. I agree that it's weird when people refuse to use the words "Dungeons and Dragons", although who knows? They might be talking about Classic Traveller or Bunnies and Burrows instead. :-P

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

The Matrix cemented the use of wire-fu for western cinema fight choreography, but there's a reason the scene in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark where he shoots the sword-wielding enemy (after punching and whipping his way through a half dozen other foes) was so memorable: it's because it defied the conventions (and was originally planned as a much longer sword vs whip fight).
Nothing, but guns don't need high damage for that.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I really feel sorry for some of you that have never played in a game where you were allowed to gonzo in some way.

I really feel sorry for some of you that can't just roll 84 dice. Or my wallet that I've purchased more than 84 d6s...


Highest consistent non-magic based damage I've seen in a fantasy game was the Ogre Wrestler who had 3d+3 punches, 5d+9 mace swings, and did 12d+33 vs a door once (Power Blow does amazing things). I'm not even going to discuss highest damage in a non-fantasy game, as we're talking munitions and supers, and that gets ugly fast.




It isn't broken, it's just not doing what you want.

You've got a fix. Why are you still arguing with people trying to convince you not use your fix?

But that's what's going to happen when you nerf all the weapons.

I mean unless all the PCs ever face are firearms in the campaign where swords and axes are king. Which if that's what you want, the PCs going for high ST and carry ancient weapons... well then, go for it!

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

On the contrary, the book says you cannot succeed unless your skill is at least 3.

Basic Set, Campaigns pg 345: You may not attempt a success roll if your effective skill is less than 3, unless you are attempting a defense roll (p. 374).

Attack rolls are a form of success roll, so this applies. It's too bad it's not re-stated on page 381 though.

Therefore these mooks, who had skill 10 and a total of -10 to hit, could not have hit the PC's head even on a 3.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

That is highly unlikely. That being said, when I design superheroes I design them with Luck, HT 15+, hard to kill or unkillable.