Help a noobie understand critical hits

[Fred Brackin]

one thing that may not have sunk into the OP (coming as he seems to from
D&D) is that a natural 3 in Gurps is not roughly the same thing as a natural 20 in D&D. The nat 20 is 1-in-20/ the nat 3 is 1-in-216. Slightly more than 10 times more rare.

The reason we usually use a euphemism for D&D is that we seldom have nice things to say about it. For example, I have killed a PC in D&D (it was 3.5) with a nat 20. Even then it could have been avoided with better adventure design.

The module designers had created this Orc variant with more ST but less Dex and Con and then armed them all with fancy polearms. The result had only 6 hp and AC 12 but did something like 2D4+6 with a x3 crit. In general this is what is termed a "Glass Cannon" and it's pretty much the opposite of what a good designer should do.

My PCs were contemptuous of the Orc-variants because to say they died like flies is to grossly exaggerate how fast flies die but one of them did roll a 20 and then maxed damage aand di 42 pts to a 2nd level character.

Had I redone what the designers did they just be regular Orcs with Morningstars and shields and had 1 more HP and 2 pts more of AC but only done 1D8+1 (x2) and that 2nd level character would probabl;y have survived.

This is easily applied to Gurps. If you're worried about what a single lucky die roll could do to a PC don't throw Glass Cannons in their path. That farmer (who shouldn't have been intended as serious opposition) could have easily had a shotgun as a deer rifle and with a little range and not aiming at the skull had much less damge potential.

[Purple Snit]

I still think it's weird that no-one has defaulted to Damage Reduction as an in-genre solution to some of the lethality issues. It's in Supers for a reason. Don't reduce gun damage; make the PCs harder to mortally wound, if that's what you want.
But ultimately, it's a matter of the GM choosing what to do. Don't want a PC taking four sniper bullets to the skull? Then don't ambush them with snipers.
Don't want them dying in a hail of machinegun fire? Don't shoot at them with machineguns.
Would you nerf crossbows or bows? Because a powerful enemy with those can kill with a shot to the eye as well. If playing Fantasy, an Ogre or Giant can do masses of damage as well - would you say they don't, just because it might kill a PC?
You don't want the hypothetical insta-kill (which I have never seen in my 20+ years of GMing GURPS because I don't do that to players), fair enough. But the solution isn't to rewrite the weapons. It's to use the rules to get what you need, whether by cinematic combat, Damage Reduction, armour, or smart players. And that takes some GM work, but it's way more entertaining than "we're safe because all the guns hit like they are .22 calibre".

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

Right now it's so tweaked toward realism, so impossibly pushed in that direction that players use dice fudging to make up for the absolute lack of forgivness. That's... A problem guys.

Not really, because the 'fudging' you're complaining about is built-in, and that plus various other options are available to deal with the core rules being too lethal.

That said, if your goal is to have guns be less lethal to everyone, PC and NPC alike, then just cut their damage back. Leave muscle-powered weapons' damage as-is or change it as you see fit.

However, if you want the PCs to be hard to kill but not the NPCs, then you need to use different advantages/disadvantages and/or rules for each. The easy way is to give the PC's Luck and Combat Reflexes, and generally not give the NPCs those (and possibly also rule the NPCs flee or surrender when they take a major wound or get to 1/3rd HP).

However, while it is entirely possible for a PC to get unlucky and take a bullet to the head and 'just die', or to fail their HT checks vs death when they take a hit from a 7d rifle to the chest (had it happen in one of my games), it's not at all likely, especially for 250-point characters with good HT, Fitness, Hard to Kill, etc., decent HP levels, and so on, especially if they have Luck.

Head hits are not common, unless the shooter aims for the head (-7 to hit the Skull and thus get the x4 damage multiplier). Even Vitals hits (x3 damage) are easy for most shooters (-3). Hits to the limbs and extremities are capped for damage, so while they'll probably put someone out of a fight, they won't kill them, in and of themselves.

The thing is, as Anthony has said, it's very hard to make guns seem dangerous in a game with making them dangerous. If people are throwing 7d rifle shots or bursts of 5d assault rifle rounds downrange, sooner or later someone's going to get hurt. Not getting hurt in situations means being very hard to hit (probably super-naturally so, which should require special advantages) or lucky. Systems that allow PCs to do this sort of thing 'seamlessly' have just baked this special status into the system, or (if it's universal) they've just nerfed guns and called it a day (which is fine if that's the outcome you want).

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by JulianLW

So, Luck. As lots of folks have been saying.

But also, the average roll for a d6 is 3.5.

So a head shot from a 9mm pistol that does 2d+2 pi is likely to end up doing 36 damage to the head, minus 2 for natural head DR, for 34 final head injury. A PC with 12 HP is going to have to make only 1 death check with that damage.

Nope, not even that - DR comes off first. So the average result is (9 - 2 (DR)) x 4 = 28. That'll put the average person on -18HP and require a death check. With HT10 they have about a 3/4 chance of not dying right away, and a 50% chance of not being in a dying state at all (the other 1/4 of the time they're down and mortally wounded).

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

People aren't disappointed when they buy a SW-1 cut TL 4 saber, have a really high 16 strength and therefore roll just a 1d6 for base damage and multiply by 1.5 for wounding modifier now do they?

ST16 gives swing damage of 2d+2, so that cutlass does 2d+1 cut, which counting the x1.5 multiplier is more than a 9x19mm pistol firing ball is doing. That cutlass has a fairly good chance to cut limbs clean off unarmoured folks.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

-5 doesn't hit skull. If that was the shot they took, it should have been a face hit, doing only normal damage. Good chance of knockdown and stunning, negligible lethality.

But you're right, taking an impossible shot and hitting because you rolled a natural 3 or 4 is by the book.

Actually... B345 says:

Originally Posted by Campaigns

You may not attempt a success roll if your effective skill is less than 3, unless you are attempting a defense roll.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The reason we usually use a euphemism for D&D is that we seldom have nice things to say about it. For example, I have killed a PC in D&D (it was 3.5) with a nat 20. Even then it could have been avoided with better adventure design.

The module designers had created this Orc variant with more ST but less Dex and Con and then armed them all with fancy polearms. The result had only 6 hp and AC 12 but did something like 2D4+6 with a x3 crit. In general this is what is termed a "Glass Cannon" and it's pretty much the opposite of what a good designer should do.

My PCs were contemptuous of the Orc-variants because to say they died like flies is to grossly exaggerate how fast flies die but one of them did roll a 20 and then maxed damage aand di 42 pts to a 2nd level character.

Had I redone what the designers did they just be regular Orcs with Morningstars and shields and had 1 more HP and 2 pts more of AC but only done 1D8+1 (x2) and that 2nd level character would probabl;y have survived.

Note that the original Orcs in D&D3 had ST15 and used Great Axes, so they did 1d12+3 damage with 20/x3 threat/crit. Even an average critical could one-shot 2nd or 3rd level characters, and a good roll would mess up 4-5th level characters.

D&D3.5 changed that. They gave monsters better stats (a base spread of 13,12,11,10,9,8 rather than 3e's 11,11,11,10,10,10), so Orc Warriors had ST17, but they also swapped their Great Axes out and gave them 'Falchions', so they did 2d4+4 with a threat of 18-20/x2. Their base damage was thus only slightly worse, and they criticaled far more often, but they didn't get those huge damage spikes.

This is easily applied to Gurps. If you're worried about what a single lucky die roll could do to a PC don't throw Glass Cannons in their path. That farmer (who shouldn't have been intended as serious opposition) could have easily had a shotgun as a deer rifle and with a little range and not aiming at the skull had much less damge potential.

The one-shot kill I got on a PC with a rifle like that was a conscript guard with an old Mosin-Nagant, and I'd assumed they'd have the sense to not make noise and attract attention, or talk the guard down if discovered. But no, they decided he wasn't a threat because he was obviously unskilled and scared, and one tried to jump him. Gun goes off, PC (not the one who started the fight) gets hit, takes enough damage to force a death check, which they fail - and they'd already used their luck recently, so that was that.

However, it took a bit to get to that point, which was the end of a series of pretty bad decisions by the players that brought them to that point, and at some point, if you're going to get yourself shot at, it's reasonable that there be dire consequences, in my opinion.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Purple Snit

Would you nerf crossbows or bows? Because a powerful enemy with those can kill with a shot to the eye as well. If playing Fantasy, an Ogre or Giant can do masses of damage as well - would you say they don't, just because it might kill a PC?

In a fantasy campaign I was in decades ago, the storyline built up to our being confronted by a powerful dragon. My character, a hunter, seeing that they were all faced with imminent death anyway, decided to take a risky shot and aimed his bow for the dragon's eye. I rolled a critical! That was impaling damage to the brain, quadrupled, bypassing armor, and with no option for a defense roll . . . and since the dragon had levitated us all to a considerable height, I believe it was followed by a total party kill; at any rate there were no more sessions of that campaign!

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

I really feel sorry for some of you that can't just roll 84 dice. Or my wallet that I've purchased more than 84 d6s...

I'm pretty sure that between any two players at that game, we could have scrounged 84d6 if we were all in the same physical space. But I have better things to do with my gaming time than roll that many dice and sum up 84 integers.

The convenient thing about doing it online is that it doesn't take appreciably more time to roll 84d6 than it does to roll 3d6.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

The interesting thing is how people here say "the other game" like saying "he who must not be named" or "you know who" like it's voldemort or something.

I noticed people on the forum doing it back when I joined, and thought it was funny. I'll also sometimes abbreviate it to TOG. D&D is a behemoth in the hobby, so sometimes it's just fun to refer to it like some evil Dark Lord.

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

No, I don't need to give luck as a free advantage, as gm I can re roll any bad roll I want to.

Part of the benefit of Luck (from the standpoint of the table as a whole) is the fact it's limited use. When a PC suffers from an unlucky result, Luck bails them out... but then they cannot count on luck again for some time (an hour of playtime for Luck; you can either shorten the delay or allow more uses within an hour with further levels, I believe the default is the latter), and so need to approach things a bit differently while their Plot Armor is recharging (typically this means being more cautious, but some players may instead opt to go for broke to try to end the confrontation as quickly as possible before another unlucky result crops up). But with that said, if Luck doesn't get you what you want, you'll need a different approach. And, yes, your nerf guns are an option, we're largely just trying to make certain your players will be OK with such.

Originally Posted by Anthony

I think you mean "invitation to be disarmed". Unless it's a John Wick film, guns are for taking out extras.

No, I mean Instant Death Wands. When a protagonist shoots someone, the target typically dies. The exceptions are generally when the target is functionally bulletproof and when the protagonist does not, in fact, shoot their target (and the in-between Grazing Wound). Making firearms 1d pi or 2d(2) pi means that when the PC hits a foe, that foe is much less affected by the hit than the players will typically expect. Armed characters being disarmed for purposes of having a fistfight is a different situation (which isn't limited to firearms, there are plenty of fights in media where the unarmed character readily disarms the swordsman; heck, you'll have fights where both characters start out armed, one gets disarmed, then easily disarms the other... or even cases where an unarmed character disarms an armed one, gets a weapon of their own - possibly the one they just took from the formerly-armed character - and is promptly disarmed in turn). A cinematic option would be to give unarmed characters sizable bonuses to defenses against armed ones, disallow Deceptive Attack from armed characters against unarmed ones (maybe even require them to use Telegraphic Attack), and basically not allow characters with ranged weapons to use them beyond their foe's reach, or at least suffer sizable penalties to do so (basically a variant of Unarmed Etiquette).

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That is highly unlikely. That being said, when I design superheroes I design them with Luck, HT 15+, hard to kill or unkillable.

One of the examples of the problem was a character taking a headshot from a 9mm pistol, which gives a very similar result (2d+2 pi vs Skull results in only 4 more HP of wounding than 2d(2) pi vs Skull). So if that's an indication that the wounding system is broken, the proposed fix leaves the wounding system still broken, because the same thing can still happen. Of course, a big part of that is that the Skull is an extremely-valuable target to hit (but also extremely hard to hit), and it seems one would expect a hit to the brain to have serious repercussions. Heck, even in games where melee does markedly more damage than most firearms, a headshot will almost invariably insta-kill the target (unless it's an anemic hit, which typically calls for a combination of a lower-damage weapon and long range). If Skull (and Vitals) hits give results you don't want... don't target the Skull (or Vitals).