Help a noobie understand critical hits

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

So the most relevant answer there is that blowthrough is an optional rule, and you are definitely not obligated to be using it.

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.

I'm totally not against people adding lots of rules if they enjoy them! Optional rules can be great!

But for me there's a balance. I love that gurps has actual active defenses rather than other rpgs passive defenses. But it will slow things down a fair bit! This is a time usage thing. If I take all 5 hours of a game session for combat with 2 bad guys because of excessive combat rule usage my players won't show up to that table again and I wouldn't blame them one bit.

It's pretty simple. The setting has guns, lots of em. Players need to be in an environment with those guns and actually not be told "combat encounters are inadvisable" as combat and death are part of a cyberpunk setting. It's a world of struggle and conflict. They need to be able to do this and enjoy it without fear of instant death and they need to be able to do this as even newer players than me AND we need to be able to do this without having to evoke increasingly esoteric rules to compensate for other problems like a rifle doing 5d6 damage.

That's why I started paring everything down. For now I jsut got burn (aggrivated damage to vampires ie it can kill em and to other eldrich beings. Comes form lasers) and kinetic. I might expand it a bit but so far that's it so we don't have to calculate wound profiles after armor penetration. Just what the dice shows is what you do! Then i just more or less halved the damage for now. We'll see how play testing works :).