Realistic Human DR

[Varyon]

A variant armor/damage system I considered some time ago (but got lost in the weeds looking up stuff like sheer strength) worked something like this: on a hit, roll 1d to see what sublocation (on the arm, shoulder vs upper arms vs elbow vs forearms, as in LT) you hit, another 1d to see roughly where on the sublocation you his (say, on the arm, bone vs muscle vs a grazing hit to the skin), and a final 1d for roughly what angle you struck at (a poor angle results in a DR multiplier). There may have also been another 1d in the mix to determine the armor coverage at the point of impact. I worked under the assumption a trained combatant wouldn't have enough variability in damage output (outside options like All Out, Defensive, etc) to justify a roll there, although untrained (or minimally-trained) characters did have another roll involved to see how close to their nominal damage the attack actually dealt (with the best damage result corresponding to what trained characters output all the time). Of course, in all cases rolling a 1 was to be the best result, and a 6 the worst, keeping with GURPS' typical "roll low" mentality. But of course, that's a whole lot of rolling (which is another reason I abandoned the concept).

Oh, and it would need to be combined with a semi-cumulative wounding system (such as the one by Luke Campbell, or the fairly-similar "Conditional Wounding" system by Douglass Cole) of some flavor. I also considered a system where the severity of a wound was non-linear with depth of penetration. I couldn't come up with a model I liked, plus it would be annoying to implement, so that also got abandoned.