Realistic Human DR

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

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.

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.