Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

one thing that may not have sunk into the OP (coming as he seems to from
D&D) is that a natural 3 in Gurps is not roughly the same thing as a natural 20 in D&D. The nat 20 is 1-in-20/ the nat 3 is 1-in-216. Slightly more than 10 times more rare.

The reason we usually use a euphemism for D&D is that we seldom have nice things to say about it. For example, I have killed a PC in D&D (it was 3.5) with a nat 20. Even then it could have been avoided with better adventure design.

The module designers had created this Orc variant with more ST but less Dex and Con and then armed them all with fancy polearms. The result had only 6 hp and AC 12 but did something like 2D4+6 with a x3 crit. In general this is what is termed a "Glass Cannon" and it's pretty much the opposite of what a good designer should do.

My PCs were contemptuous of the Orc-variants because to say they died like flies is to grossly exaggerate how fast flies die but one of them did roll a 20 and then maxed damage aand di 42 pts to a 2nd level character.

Had I redone what the designers did they just be regular Orcs with Morningstars and shields and had 1 more HP and 2 pts more of AC but only done 1D8+1 (x2) and that 2nd level character would probabl;y have survived.

This is easily applied to Gurps. If you're worried about what a single lucky die roll could do to a PC don't throw Glass Cannons in their path. That farmer (who shouldn't have been intended as serious opposition) could have easily had a shotgun as a deer rifle and with a little range and not aiming at the skull had much less damge potential.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I still think it's weird that no-one has defaulted to Damage Reduction as an in-genre solution to some of the lethality issues. It's in Supers for a reason. Don't reduce gun damage; make the PCs harder to mortally wound, if that's what you want.
But ultimately, it's a matter of the GM choosing what to do. Don't want a PC taking four sniper bullets to the skull? Then don't ambush them with snipers.
Don't want them dying in a hail of machinegun fire? Don't shoot at them with machineguns.
Would you nerf crossbows or bows? Because a powerful enemy with those can kill with a shot to the eye as well. If playing Fantasy, an Ogre or Giant can do masses of damage as well - would you say they don't, just because it might kill a PC?
You don't want the hypothetical insta-kill (which I have never seen in my 20+ years of GMing GURPS because I don't do that to players), fair enough. But the solution isn't to rewrite the weapons. It's to use the rules to get what you need, whether by cinematic combat, Damage Reduction, armour, or smart players. And that takes some GM work, but it's way more entertaining than "we're safe because all the guns hit like they are .22 calibre".

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Not really, because the 'fudging' you're complaining about is built-in, and that plus various other options are available to deal with the core rules being too lethal.

That said, if your goal is to have guns be less lethal to everyone, PC and NPC alike, then just cut their damage back. Leave muscle-powered weapons' damage as-is or change it as you see fit.

However, if you want the PCs to be hard to kill but not the NPCs, then you need to use different advantages/disadvantages and/or rules for each. The easy way is to give the PC's Luck and Combat Reflexes, and generally not give the NPCs those (and possibly also rule the NPCs flee or surrender when they take a major wound or get to 1/3rd HP).

However, while it is entirely possible for a PC to get unlucky and take a bullet to the head and 'just die', or to fail their HT checks vs death when they take a hit from a 7d rifle to the chest (had it happen in one of my games), it's not at all likely, especially for 250-point characters with good HT, Fitness, Hard to Kill, etc., decent HP levels, and so on, especially if they have Luck.

Head hits are not common, unless the shooter aims for the head (-7 to hit the Skull and thus get the x4 damage multiplier). Even Vitals hits (x3 damage) are easy for most shooters (-3). Hits to the limbs and extremities are capped for damage, so while they'll probably put someone out of a fight, they won't kill them, in and of themselves.

The thing is, as Anthony has said, it's very hard to make guns seem dangerous in a game with making them dangerous. If people are throwing 7d rifle shots or bursts of 5d assault rifle rounds downrange, sooner or later someone's going to get hurt. Not getting hurt in situations means being very hard to hit (probably super-naturally so, which should require special advantages) or lucky. Systems that allow PCs to do this sort of thing 'seamlessly' have just baked this special status into the system, or (if it's universal) they've just nerfed guns and called it a day (which is fine if that's the outcome you want).

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Nope, not even that - DR comes off first. So the average result is (9 - 2 (DR)) x 4 = 28. That'll put the average person on -18HP and require a death check. With HT10 they have about a 3/4 chance of not dying right away, and a 50% chance of not being in a dying state at all (the other 1/4 of the time they're down and mortally wounded).

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

ST16 gives swing damage of 2d+2, so that cutlass does 2d+1 cut, which counting the x1.5 multiplier is more than a 9x19mm pistol firing ball is doing. That cutlass has a fairly good chance to cut limbs clean off unarmoured folks.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Actually... B345 says:

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Note that the original Orcs in D&D3 had ST15 and used Great Axes, so they did 1d12+3 damage with 20/x3 threat/crit. Even an average critical could one-shot 2nd or 3rd level characters, and a good roll would mess up 4-5th level characters.

D&D3.5 changed that. They gave monsters better stats (a base spread of 13,12,11,10,9,8 rather than 3e's 11,11,11,10,10,10), so Orc Warriors had ST17, but they also swapped their Great Axes out and gave them 'Falchions', so they did 2d4+4 with a threat of 18-20/x2. Their base damage was thus only slightly worse, and they criticaled far more often, but they didn't get those huge damage spikes.

The one-shot kill I got on a PC with a rifle like that was a conscript guard with an old Mosin-Nagant, and I'd assumed they'd have the sense to not make noise and attract attention, or talk the guard down if discovered. But no, they decided he wasn't a threat because he was obviously unskilled and scared, and one tried to jump him. Gun goes off, PC (not the one who started the fight) gets hit, takes enough damage to force a death check, which they fail - and they'd already used their luck recently, so that was that.

However, it took a bit to get to that point, which was the end of a series of pretty bad decisions by the players that brought them to that point, and at some point, if you're going to get yourself shot at, it's reasonable that there be dire consequences, in my opinion.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

In a fantasy campaign I was in decades ago, the storyline built up to our being confronted by a powerful dragon. My character, a hunter, seeing that they were all faced with imminent death anyway, decided to take a risky shot and aimed his bow for the dragon's eye. I rolled a critical! That was impaling damage to the brain, quadrupled, bypassing armor, and with no option for a defense roll . . . and since the dragon had levitated us all to a considerable height, I believe it was followed by a total party kill; at any rate there were no more sessions of that campaign!

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I'm pretty sure that between any two players at that game, we could have scrounged 84d6 if we were all in the same physical space. But I have better things to do with my gaming time than roll that many dice and sum up 84 integers.

The convenient thing about doing it online is that it doesn't take appreciably more time to roll 84d6 than it does to roll 3d6.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I noticed people on the forum doing it back when I joined, and thought it was funny. I'll also sometimes abbreviate it to TOG. D&D is a behemoth in the hobby, so sometimes it's just fun to refer to it like some evil Dark Lord.

Part of the benefit of Luck (from the standpoint of the table as a whole) is the fact it's limited use. When a PC suffers from an unlucky result, Luck bails them out... but then they cannot count on luck again for some time (an hour of playtime for Luck; you can either shorten the delay or allow more uses within an hour with further levels, I believe the default is the latter), and so need to approach things a bit differently while their Plot Armor is recharging (typically this means being more cautious, but some players may instead opt to go for broke to try to end the confrontation as quickly as possible before another unlucky result crops up). But with that said, if Luck doesn't get you what you want, you'll need a different approach. And, yes, your nerf guns are an option, we're largely just trying to make certain your players will be OK with such.

No, I mean Instant Death Wands. When a protagonist shoots someone, the target typically dies. The exceptions are generally when the target is functionally bulletproof and when the protagonist does not, in fact, shoot their target (and the in-between Grazing Wound). Making firearms 1d pi or 2d(2) pi means that when the PC hits a foe, that foe is much less affected by the hit than the players will typically expect. Armed characters being disarmed for purposes of having a fistfight is a different situation (which isn't limited to firearms, there are plenty of fights in media where the unarmed character readily disarms the swordsman; heck, you'll have fights where both characters start out armed, one gets disarmed, then easily disarms the other... or even cases where an unarmed character disarms an armed one, gets a weapon of their own - possibly the one they just took from the formerly-armed character - and is promptly disarmed in turn). A cinematic option would be to give unarmed characters sizable bonuses to defenses against armed ones, disallow Deceptive Attack from armed characters against unarmed ones (maybe even require them to use Telegraphic Attack), and basically not allow characters with ranged weapons to use them beyond their foe's reach, or at least suffer sizable penalties to do so (basically a variant of Unarmed Etiquette).

One of the examples of the problem was a character taking a headshot from a 9mm pistol, which gives a very similar result (2d+2 pi vs Skull results in only 4 more HP of wounding than 2d(2) pi vs Skull). So if that's an indication that the wounding system is broken, the proposed fix leaves the wounding system still broken, because the same thing can still happen. Of course, a big part of that is that the Skull is an extremely-valuable target to hit (but also extremely hard to hit), and it seems one would expect a hit to the brain to have serious repercussions. Heck, even in games where melee does markedly more damage than most firearms, a headshot will almost invariably insta-kill the target (unless it's an anemic hit, which typically calls for a combination of a lower-damage weapon and long range). If Skull (and Vitals) hits give results you don't want... don't target the Skull (or Vitals).

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I prefer not to roll 84 dice; it changes the statistical pattern. If you roll 6d, the standard deviation is 4.18 (so two-thirds of the rolls are between 16.82 and 25.18). If you multiply by 14, the standard deviation is 58.12. But if you roll 84d, the standard deviation is only 15.65. So that central range is 235.88-352.12 in the first case, but 278.35-309.65 in the second. In other words, rolling more dice makes the outcome substantially less random.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

The first rule (sometimes unwritten) in RPGs is that the rules are what the GM wants. End of story. If you don't like something, change it. However, if you then post it, expect people to disagree.

Most GURPS players will find it unreasonable to derate a firearm to ridiculous levels. As has been shown, there are many ways to NOT resort to that and still use RAW with other options that are mostly RAW.

That being said, I also do not like critical hits (which is what you referenced in the OP) but would go with one or more of....

• Critical hits are just normal hits
• Critical hits are just normal hits with no defense roll
• A critical hit by an NPC is just a normal hit
• Eliminate most of the critical hit results and expand the "normal damage" to almost the entire range with the rest being incidental (drop what you're holding, fall down, stunned, etc)
• Any other modification you deem necessary that doesn't derate firearms

I treat critical misses similarly.

Obviously, like most rule changes, there are downstream effects of the above that must be managed as well.

Also, it seems a bit wonky to call the damage model, "...a bit silly...", b/c a hit to the head from a "...hunting rilfe..." (which is SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to drop game dead or nearly so with the correct hit location) drops a character dead or nearly so.

Regardless, your solution is perfect and 100% correct...for you. If your players like it, go for it.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

As an aside, this is something that irks me a bit about GURPS, the fact that lower damages are more random while higher damages are less random (of course, this isn't really unique to GURPS). I would prefer some option of having it essentially always be the same amount of random, but most methods I come up with for that would be messy in play (with the exception of "replace nd with 1dxn," but the spread one sees out of 1d is arguably a bit too random; something that always used a 3d roll would give the sort of spread I'd like, but then you've got to multiply or divide the result by something with fractions and deal with rounding, and most players - and GM's - would rather not deal with all that).

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

This is pretty close to what actually happens even if you use the RAW. I think half the possible results on the Crit hit table are no extra effect and almsot all the rest are things that might be useful to a 145 pt character with ST no higher than 13 (i.e. what you had in Man to Man in 1986).

The 3x damage hits are 2 in 216 after the chances of rolling the Crit in the first place. Cumulatively that's no better than 1 in c. 2000. I've seen lots of crits but never a bonus damage one.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

If you're using an electronic roller, the arithmetic can take care of itself.

If not you only really have to divide by the number of dice you rolled. (At worst, sometimes you could factor out the division.) 3 wouldn't be my favorite number to be dividing by. 2d/2 would be a lot easier, though a bit less central tendency. I'd consider 4d/4 easier as well.

If you divided before multiplying by the target number of damage dice instead of after, you'd only be dividing a small consistent range, so it'd be pretty easy to just learn and also easy to make it a lookup table. (However, the curve would be kinda blocky since you'd only have 6 steps.)

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

The most 'exotic' criticals I've seen were the "If any damage penetrates DR, it's a major wound" and "Normal damage, but the victim drops what they're holding". In every case the actual injury caused an effect as bad or worse anyway. My players fear the Critical Miss table a lot more than the Critical Hit ones.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

That's a big if there. The only targets that can be hit at all reliably with guns are (a) mooks, and (b) targets that are immune to bullets.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

Lots of major antagonists ultimately wind up dead from bullets. Consider Hector Barbossa from Pirates of the Carribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - sure, he starts out bulletproof (and basically everything-else-proof), but ultimately gets killed when his immortality curse gets revoked immediately after taking a bullet to the chest (the wound reopens, he comments on finally feeling something - "cold" - and collapses). Several Agents in The Matrix - even when they're Worthy- or Boss-level foes - wind up dead from singular gunshots ("Dodge this"). Wanted is chock-full of major characters - antagonists, protagonists, and switch-hitters alike - who wind up dead from gunshots. Now, it's certainly the case that major antagonists typically wind up in a prolonged fight (sometimes a gunfight, but more often a fistfight or similar) with the protagonist, to build up tension and give a spectacle, and this requires that the protagonist not be able to reliably hit them with firearms... but that's because the audience expectation is that the protagonist hitting them with firearms will kill them, so you wind up with fights that involve less obviously-lethal hits instead, with the more lethal hits reserved for the end. This is also why, in a sword fight with a major antagonist, each character has much better luck with offhand punches and kicks than with their slashes and stabs.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

I think this post got out of track a long time ago, and probably OP is not even reading it anymore.
Come on, guys. The first ideas of improving characters' survivability were nice, but then people got triggered because "don't mess with the gun cult." It's his game, if it works for him and his group, everything is ok.
Most of the responses (and I read the whole thread) will just tell a new player to stay away from the community.
It is not like we need a bigger player base /winky winky.

Now for my 2 cents.
Luck
I disagree that Luck is fudging the dice. From what I got from my players, it's a way to have some control over the narrative. They always prefer to have Luck instead of not having it.

Critical Hits and Critical Failures.
If they bother you, and you think they don't work for your game, just get rid of it. You will not break the game or anything like that.
Lots of folks in the community just rule that it bypasses active defenses, and roll damage normally. Some add full damage to that.

Gun Damage
You can either divide damage by 2 and add (2) as an armor division or use 3 instead of 2 (but I think that would break the system) or define an arbitrary value. Say revolvers and pistols are 1 to 2d. Shotguns 1-3d, rifles 3d.
I saw many people using the divide by 2 and the system works fines.

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

TV Action Violence

Re: Help a noobie understand critical hits
 

On the contrary, it was mentioned twice, now three times. It would have been four if I hadn't noticed the prior two and deleted my own post as redundant.

OP said he just got swing and thrust columns mixed up. See post #137: