Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
You should avoid things that boost vehicle hit points that don't similarly boost the damage output of large weapons. The problem isn't that vehicles are too easy to kill in general, it's that they're too easy to kill with small weapons.
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I think it’s a scaling issue, in that GURPS is centered around a human scale, and doesn’t take into account scales that are vastly different.
As an example, if you take a (human-scale) hypodermic needle and gently pierce an ant to a depth of a few mm, even the largest ant is going to die from that wound. But the same needle and same action on a human is basically nothing; and even doing so dozens of times to the human is still basically nothing (except annoying).
Why? Because the hypodermic needle is too small an injury to a human, but a huge injury to an ant.
Humans are SM 0, roughly 4.5-6 feet tall; even the biggest ants are 1.2-1.6 inches, so about SM-12. Ant-scale damage should be divided by a factor based on the size difference when applied to SM 0 humans.
Similarly, with a car vs a human - a car is much larger than a human. Even with a hammer and full swings (two-handed, Telegraphic, AOA, etc to get past DR and do max damage), bashing a car is never going to render it “dead” unless you hit something vital because the car is much larger, and so would divide damage until the damage is too small to matter individually. You can bend the frame and make it look awful, but it will still function as a car. To really see the effect, think of one of those mining ore haulers - the scale is so huge, that no human-scale weapon will be able to damage it… unless you hit it in a vital spot.
GURPS already has the start of a mechanism to do this: piercing damage comes in several flavors based on size/scale and the effects depend on which one it is.
It would be great to extend this to include all forms of damage, and with small adjustments, that info could be included right in the damage tables, e.g. instead of just “imp”, “burn”, etc, use “imp-0” for human-scale (and allow the default to be human-scale if the scale designator is left off), “cut-12” for a dinoponera ant’s jaws, “pi++” would become “pi+2”, “pi-“ would become “pi-1”, “cr+4” for a cannonball hit, etc. Creatures with over-sized jaws (like crocodiles) could have their damage-scale adjusted right in the stats.
Oh, and I’d add “tbb” for tight-beam burning, and tie that effect to something similar to impaling vs crushing damage.
I haven’t run the numbers, but I’ll bet the divisor and multiplier for scale would line up pretty sell with the SSR table, so in-play it would turn into a quick multiply or divide of damage based on a table everyone has around anyways, and a round down or up based on which way the scale goes.
That damage-scale ties in nicely with Spaceships - d-scale is just a +6 size adjustment. And it works out nicely for things like swarm attacks: a swam of ants (call it SM-12 through SM-14) can’t do significant damage until you have enough of them (like 100) to shift +12 on the damage-scale, and they get pretty dangerous if you have 1000 of them giving +18 on the damage-scale.
Similarly, you get a small cut? Trivial. Get 100 small cuts? There’s going to be a lot of blood and maybe the blood loss gets you for 1-2 HP. Get 1000 small cuts? Serious risk of death, even though each one was trivial.