Help a noobie understand critical hits

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

I don't want *instant* death by gunfire....

Ok, imagine you boot up the video game cyberpunk 2077. You have that first mission with the cyber ghoul haunt right? Ok, you mistep and two of the goons notice you. They shoot you ONCE and it's game over. You try it again and discover yes you can stealth it but that means all the weapons in the game are pretty much pointless because whenever you actually shoot someone and go into combat you get shot ONCE and it's game over. It starts to feel pretty hollow doesn't it?

There's games and places for that. Games like Red Orchestra where you spawn in repeatedly, not a game where you spent quite some time designing and falling in love with your character only for the rules to be structured such to discourage any playstyle but one and the instant you slip up or do the wrong thing? Instant death.

It's worth bearing in mind that it takes 60 HP of injury to auto-kill even a typical human, much less a vampire, and that GURPS is a team game. Say you've got a team of four vampires, each of them with above-average HP (say HP 14) and a few points in HT 13 and Hard To Kill 2. Farmer Joe gets a lucky hit with his 7d rifle round and does 24 HP of damage to one of the vampires, who happens to have no armor (DR 0) and failed his Dodge attempt and didn't have Luck. Instant death?

Not really. The main thing that happens is that that particular vampire loses Move and Dodge and might go unconscious after a few seconds. He can maybe still fight, and he doesn't automatically die until he reaches -5 times his HP, which takes a total of 84 points (6 x 14) of damage. Farmer Joe needs to shoot him three more times to guarantee a kill! Meanwhile, the other vampires are probably feasting on Farmer Joe (or whatever--I don't really play vampire games so I'm only guessing).

So in practice it will always take more than Farmer Joe with a high-powered rifle and a bit of bad luck to TPK the party and end the game. Eight goons with high-powered rifles, yes, that might wipe out a group of four vampires. (I dunno details, depends on how powerful they are, but it seems possible.) But the power of teamwork ensures that "getting shot once" is NOT going to be game over[1], it's just going to be a timeout for healing.

[1] Unless it's a headshot of course. 96 HP of damage from Farmer Joe's headshot could be ugly.