Help a noobie understand critical hits

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

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So when people say "but it's realistic" I ask "why is it that melee weapons are so garbage in comparison?"
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Because they are garbage in comparison.

If you want to make melee weapons more effective at damage than firearms, that's fine. It's your game.

But GURPS tries to ground itself to reality for those things where we have a pretty good grasp of how reality works. That's why things like the weights of melee weapons are what they are. Someone brought in actual melee weapons and weighed them and then used those weights in the statistics for those weapons.

Where some of us have problems with your assertions is when it sounds like you're trying to say this is how reality is. I don't have a big battleaxe sitting around the house, but as an apt comparison, if you were to hand me a fully loaded 5.56mm C7 rifle and you were to pick up a still serviceable WWI 18" bayonet and you were to tell me, "Let's try to kill each other. I'm not allowed to throw the bayonet at you and you're not allowed to strike me with the rifle, only fire it. We'll start 6 feet apart." I know who's chances I'd fancy going into such a fight.

I'd seriously wonder about your judgment if you did think such a proposal would be even close to a fair fight, much less lop-sided in your favour, as you've got a big, honking knife to my piddly little bullets. Granted, the big, honking knife isn't quite a big, honking axe, but the situations aren't that dissimilar in terms of outcome.

[zoncxs]

Originally Posted by Farmer

...
An alternative, if you want it to feel a little bit more like "That Other Game" is to provide "free" "Heroic Hit Points". ...

Ignoring everything else in this thread, this would be the best solution instead of messing with the amount of damage a weapon does.

Power Ups 9: Alternate Attributes, page 30, Stun Points.

...everyone have Stun Points (SP) that are N times HP. N = 5 works well.
Injury is compared ... as usual, to determine stun, knockdown, and crippling. But while the character is conscious, losses come off SP, with only 1/N of that, rounded down, coming off HP. Unconsciousness is automatic after any attack takes SP to 0; SP can’t go negative. At that point, further injury comes off HP at full value, which can lead to death.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by zoncxs

Ignoring everything else in this thread, this would be the best solution instead of messing with the amount of damage a weapon does.

Power Ups 9: Alternate Attributes, page 30, Stun Points.

That's a great option. Slightly more complex than simple additional HP, but reflective of "That Other Game" but also avoids just creating a "layer" of extra HP before you start to feel effects.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Varyon

A 5.56mm rifle bullet to the ribcage is more likely to kill than an axe. That axe is going to bruise your vital organs, possibly even perforate them. The bullet shards are going to shred your vital organs. You're not terribly likely to survive either (if the axe hit hard enough to split the bones anyway; you need a strong attacker and/or a good hit to do more than crack them), but the bullet is much more likely to kill you. If that's where it hits, that is - those cases of people being relatively unaffected from being shot typically involve hits elsewhere (or involve people who are actually in the process of dying but don't realize it; GURPS doesn't model this very well, admittedly).

Exactly right. Also depends on the type of bullet - is it designed to expand in the target or not? Most of the "clean through" wounds would not be from hollow point rounds, for example.

I think movies have exaggerated the damage from melee weapons and lessen that of bullets.

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by zoncxs

Ignoring everything else in this thread, this would be the best solution instead of messing with the amount of damage a weapon does.

Power Ups 9: Alternate Attributes, page 30, Stun Points.

I mean I had considered that.... but then what do I do about the dr of vampire fortitude? If I give all those hero hit points what about the melee weapons? They are useless now are they not?

Originally Posted by Farmer

Energy of a 5.56mm / .223 round at muzzle is about 1,650nm with a front area of about 25mm^2.

An axe (a decent sized hand axe) is about 110nm and an equivalent frontal area of an axe is harder to define, but clearly the surface area increase rapidly as it penetrates. So it has less energy and a great area, meaning the pressure is less. This changes depending on the striking strength of the wielder, of course. That's why axe rarely leave exit wounds.

Both can create lethal wounds, and if a bullet exits then not all of its energy is transferred into the target. But to say that a bullet has low momentum energy (which is a tautology) is not correct.

I think you need to reconsider your understanding of energy and how it is measured. Look at momentum and pressure in particular, but then also consider how that translates into damage of a body.

Eh you are probably quite right about my understanding of the physics involved and being able to represent it in terms of numbers, values percentages ect. Pressure over area as an example is a great example of how to show why the projectile penetrates easily.

We've seen enough evidence of what is it now... 80 years of use of the 5.56 to have a pretty good idea of it's wounding profile and it works... but it's not been shown to be a portable deathstar obliterating all within it's path laughing at the axe, which even though it can hack people open and chop limbs off quite easily is a joke to the mighty 5.56 which causes them to pop and explode open like some water balloon!

When I see that melee weapons are typically given 1d damage profiles in game and a 5.56 rifle given 5d damage profiles that's what goes on in my head. It's... pretty silly, cmon now.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Deep wounding being more effective that surface wounding seems to be pretty well known.

Really it seems like the problem in the comparison here is less your expectation about the bullet (which GURPS agrees won't always put someone down - depending on exactly which rules picks you're using it might even usually not) but your expectation that hitting somebody with an axe makes them double-plus-dead.


Which from the not caring about realism side surely would be just as 'un-gameable' as the bullet one-shots. I'm not sure who you ask for experimental data relating to hitting unarmored humans in the chest with an axe though.

I mean... Ok. If the axe splits a log... what will it do when it hits your chest?

The closest experiment is something like the zombie go boom channel on youtube. They have fairly plausible dummies to test various weapons against a skull. It's not great but it's something?

Do you think someone's likely to shrug off an axe to the chest like known reports of people with 4-5 gunshot wounds from a 5.56 rifle shooting SS109 cartridges? If you're going for plausible I'd think shrugging off that 5.56 is more likely...

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

It's half damage and armor divisor 2, so that .32 pistol does 1d-1 (2) pi-, and has a 33% chance of doing 1 damage and failing to penetrate a DR 2 heavy leather jacket. Otherwise, it does 2, 3, 4, or 5 damage vs effective DR 1 and normal humans take 1 or 2 injury.


Pi- is divide by 2. Cutting and piercing+ are divide by 2, then add by the initial value. Impaling and piercing++ are multiply by 2. In practice, on the table, it's pretty bearable.

Okay, Injury Tolerance means you sometimes need to divide by 3, 5, or 10 but none of those are hard.



The damage model is working fine IMO. Your implementation of vampires doesn't seem very good, so I'd go back and redo that. It's been literally decades since I cared enough about WW games to remember how their stuff worked, but I'd still recommend redoing your vampires before redoing the game's damage model.



Well, it factually takes around 9mm of steel plate to protect against a 7.62mm rifle round, and 9mm of steel is at least 3 times as thick as any historical steel plate armor. So while I can't say as to whether a big axe is going to do more damage to unarmored human torso than a rifle bullet, I will say that the axe is going to penetrate less steel plate than the bullet will, and GURPS DR is based on penetration.



Extra Basic Move +5 and Enhanced Dodge +2 turns the average man from a Dodge of 8 (25% success) to a Dodge of 15 (90% success), as well as doubling his running speed. I'd start there. You should probably spin off a thread to talk about your templates for PCs: I think there's a lot of advice that could be provided there.



It prevents the shock penalty when you're injured, but not the Move and Dodge reduction for being below 1/3rd HP. You may be thinking of its improved version, Supernatural Durability.



I've seen plenty of swashbucklers with DX 15, HT 13, HP 11, Acrobatics-16, Luck, Enhanced Dodge 1, Combat Reflexes, Basic Speed 7, and Dodge 12 jump into combat and use good tactics and ability to avoid 4-5 attacks each round: Acrobatic Dodge gets them up to a 14 versus the most dangerous attack, and then they've got Luck to fix a bad roll on the next 3 or 4 rolls versus a 12.

TBH I've always wondered why we horse around with 57 different wounding types?

If you want the damage range to be 1d6 LIST IT AS 1D6! If you want it to penetrate armor better? Easy peasy, list it as 1d6 (2). If you don't want it to do 1d6? Well list it as 1d6-2! Why do they insist on making me flip to three separate pages trying to find the different piercing wounding profile, the burning wounding profile, the cutting wounding profile, the crushing wounding profile... Then making me do the math on those as well as the armor math every die roll instead of just listing the damage they want the weapon to do!

That's why for the moment I didnt' list that .32 as 1d6 PI- I listed it as 1d6-2 and the m16 as 2d6(2). As little math as possible, everyone listed in the weapons details instead of having to jump through to completely different sections in the book trying to figure out what anything means. Clean... simple.

and yeah, the penetrating power of the rifle is something you're right about and it's where I think the issues with representing it in game without making melee wounds seem like jokes has come from. I think it's better done by just giving these weapons armor divisors rather than just adding more and more and more and more and more dice to them. It's more plausible if you want realism, but it's also better gameplay too to make the weapons normal instead of portable death lasers.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

Eh you are probably quite right about my understanding of the physics involved and being able to represent it in terms of numbers, values percentages ect. Pressure over area as an example is a great example of how to show why the projectile penetrates easily.

We've seen enough evidence of what is it now... 80 years of use of the 5.56 to have a pretty good idea of it's wounding profile and it works... but it's not been shown to be a portable deathstar obliterating all within it's path laughing at the axe, which even though it can hack people open and chop limbs off quite easily is a joke to the mighty 5.56 which causes them to pop and explode open like some water balloon!

When I see that melee weapons are typically given 1d damage profiles in game and a 5.56 rifle given 5d damage profiles that's what goes on in my head. It's... pretty silly, cmon now.

That's the point, though. The 5.56mm round really *does* laugh at an axe. If it didn't, we'd still arm soldiers with axes.

Also, axes really can't chop limbs off easily or hack people apart simply as you suggest. And 5.56mm rounds don't explode people and no one is suggesting that, least of all GURPS which says most of the damage is blow through - you can only take a certain amount of damage to any given part of the body from a single round. It may or may not be fatal. Nothing silly about it. You're making claims that simply aren't supported in the rules about how damage works and then complaining about the rules...

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

We've seen enough evidence of what is it now... 80 years of use of the 5.56 to have a pretty good idea of it's wounding profile and it works... but it's not been shown to be a portable deathstar obliterating all within it's path laughing at the axe, which even though it can hack people open and chop limbs off quite easily is a joke to the mighty 5.56 which causes them to pop and explode open like some water balloon!

You do know that 5d pi is nothing like that description, right?

It occurs to me that you might not. Sorry if I've overlooked it, but if you're new to GURPS it is easy to not take into account just how little being at negative HP necessarily matters.

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

When I see that melee weapons are typically given 1d damage profiles in game and a 5.56 rifle given 5d damage profiles that's what goes on in my head. It's... pretty silly, cmon now.

Melee weapons aren't given 1d damage profiles, they're given swing or thrust plus damage profiles.

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

I mean... Ok. If the axe splits a log... what will it do when it hits your chest?

The closest experiment is something like the zombie go boom channel on youtube. They have fairly plausible dummies to test various weapons against a skull. It's not great but it's something?

Are you expecting your victim to be fixed in place against a solid backstop while you swing downward on them? Using an axe that's probably the wrong weight and balance to actually fight with? This is the kind of approach that makes people expect standing decapitations...

Also, if you axe someone in the skull in GURPS, that's going to take them down with pretty high confidence. (Though probably with a good chance of not being dead if you don't use bleeding or other optional advanced wounding rules. Because GURPS has a lot of 'down but not dead'.)

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

Do you think someone's likely to shrug off an axe to the chest like known reports of people with 4-5 gunshot wounds from a 5.56 rifle shooting SS109 cartridges? If you're going for plausible I'd think shrugging off that 5.56 is more likely...

I don't know what those reports are, exactly. But yes, I do have my baseline as 'you could very possibly hit someone in the chest with an axe and not stop them', and I think you should to.

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

TBH I've always wondered why we horse around with 57 different wounding types?

Different target types and hit locations.

If you're not using hit locations and only care about damaging humans, it's fair to say you're not getting a lot of benefit.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

5d PI is no damage modifier meaning... it's 5d6 damage...

And no, it's well established fact that a m16 does not put liquify it's target putting them down every time. No, I'm not going to pull combat report after combat report to show this just so you would accept that it's not a death beam.

Right. It's 5d6 damage. So now I'm going to talk about what that actually does to our standard GURPS sapient crash test dummy, M. 10/10/10/10.

5d6 pi damage averages 17.5 injury to a living target at a neutral hit location. This puts our 10 HP victim at close to but most likely above -10 HP. They do not even need to make a death check, the shot literally cannot kill them unless it rolls 20+ damage (which is about a 30% chance on 5d). They do take a major wound, so they have to make a check for stunning, and they are below 0 HP so they need to make a check against falling unconscious each turn if they're taking action.

I may be sliding some of the exact details - do they need an immediate consciousness check - but that's the picture here!

For them to be certainly dead, they'd need to take 60 damage, which is around 17d. For them to be just shredded meat, the threshold is actually 110 damage.

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by Farmer

That's the point, though. The 5.56mm round really *does* laugh at an axe. If it didn't, we'd still arm soldiers with axes.

Also, axes really can't chop limbs off easily or hack people apart simply as you suggest. And 5.56mm rounds don't explode people and no one is suggesting that, least of all GURPS which says most of the damage is blow through - you can only take a certain amount of damage to any given part of the body from a single round. It may or may not be fatal. Nothing silly about it. You're making claims that simply aren't supported in the rules about how damage works and then complaining about the rules...

I deleted my initial response because I was excessively annoyed and wasn't reading the bottom part...

Ok... please explain to me *WHY* you would list the weapon as 5d6 damage if it's not capable of doing 5d6 damage to the player because of blow through?

How many charts and tables do I need open, how many calculators do I need to to the letter of the rules simulate a gunfight in the game?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

I deleted my initial response because I was excessively annoyed and wasn't reading the bottom part...

Ok... please explain to me *WHY* you would list the weapon as 5d6 damage if it's not capable of doing 5d6 damage to the player because of blow through?

How many charts and tables do I need open, how many calculators do I need to to the letter of the rules simulate a gunfight in the game?

So the most relevant answer there is that blowthrough is an optional rule, and you are definitely not obligated to be using it. (Though if you're using hit locations, injury limits on limb hits is included in there IIRC. Torso blowthrough limit is a separate optional rule.)

Personally I'd want to, but we clearly have very different interests in rules usage. Which GURPS supports!

I've been assuming you're not using optional rules as much as I can manage, though making reference to them.