Help a noobie understand critical hits

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by Farmer

Then don't shoot them. Or do less damage. You're the GM, you make the story. The dice are a guide.

Everyone seems offended I would dare to pare down the weapon damage exactly as you recommended ;P.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The Gurps:VtM book is from the early 90s and predates lots of stuff. In fact it introduced an early version of IT:Unliving only it wasn't that well done rules-wise. Gurps 3e spent the next 10 years patching things that crept into the system in the Gurps: World of Darkness books. Now we're 20 years after that and you can take inspiration from Gurps:VtM but I wouldn't try and use _anything_ from it rules-wise. Use current 4e rules.

For example against a vampire who has Injury Tolerance: Unliving that 7D6 P rifle round only does 1/3 damage. So an average of 24 pts becomes only 8 and the vamp is only wounded. Even less if he was wearing that concealable vest.

If he had Luck he could have re-rolled that blown dodge roll and be unwounded. The last time I did pregens _all_ the PCs had Luck.

Lol well the core rules I am going with are 4th edition. I got the VTM book off ebay to have a jumping off point for the vampires in the campaign as I like they fit the theme of powerful, "magical" beings of the night. This is not to be VTM but I used it as an example here of the reasoning behind why I want to re-write all the damage models in the game for my campaign.

Specifically it's cyberpunk with Vampires as a contrast. I thought it would be a fun balancing act. Cybernetics are their own path to great power allowing human characters, player or otherwise to achieve great things but vampires have their own path to power. Lore wise in my setting they heal too completely to cyberize. Thrown in the mix are mages for more fun. To balance you have to pick as a human. Cybernetics or magery, they are incompatible with each other (right now I'm playing with a disadvantage that reduces ones FP ceiling for casting spells based upon the points in cybernetic advantages he has in order to accomplish this.) It was when I was using the VTM book as a guide to write the vampire chapter in my source book, modifying things as needed that I realized how the sheer level of damage in gurps combat renders even the fantasy elements moot, when I was considering increasing the fortitude ability's damage resistance by a factor of 5 or 10 I realized that I instead needed to look at fixing the root of the problem. The damage scale of the weapons themselves.

Beeeeeing cyberpunk the player characters aren't going to be sitting around discussing the finer points of pottery or roleplaying politics of the night (some folks might like such campaigns but to me a campaign where nothing actually happens, there's no conflict is just boring.) They are going to be in a gritty, dangerous, violent setting where the people at the top of society could not have gotten there if they were not familiar with a gun.

I got this fun idea of having a NPC that is intended for the player characters to fight and kill and then they see him next week. If they kill him he comes back again! Every time! Of course its a invitation to the players to begin to learn the arcane secrets of the setting, the npc is a ghoul in lovecraftian sense. He gets shot, dies, wakes up in the dream lands. Usually that means he wouldn't find his way back to even the same dimension but the campaign takes place at a particular city that has become a beacon across the planes that ghouls (and other beings) can see across infinity. It's the first place ghouls have always been able to return to. This builds to our heroes fighting beings of incomprehensible power as the big bosses of the game. The ghouls are just a hint at the existence of a greater darkness. TBH, the vampires in the setting are too a symbiosis of humans and "eldritch" beings themselves in the setting rather than VTM's legacy of Cain story.