something strange about the "minimum 1 damage" rule for crushing/cutting knockback

[Plane]

B378 top-right under Knockback

cutting attack can cause knockback only if it fails to penetrate DR

1 cutting damage hits ST 3 target w/ 1+ DR (turtle?) : fails to penetrate, knocks it back 1 yard, just like a 1 crushing damage would

B378 mid-left under Damage Roll:

A negative modifier can’t reduce damage below 0 if the attack does crushing damage,
or below 1 if it does any other type of damage.

So imagine this situation as a ST 10 person with thrust 1d-2 and swing 1d

You have a credit card (MA224 swing-4 cutting: so you do 1d-4) and make a 1-handed Defensive Attack (-2 to damage). Your 1d-6 cutting attack will always do a minimum of 1 damage: you will always knock back that turtle exactly 1 yard.

If however you punched (thr-1 crushing: 1d-3) as a defensive attack (1d-5), you will only knock back the turtle 1 in 6 tries.

One-handed shoves aren't any better, they also do thr-1 so a defensive 1h shove would be 1d-5 as well: the only benefit is that 1/6 of the time you do roll a 6, the 1 yard knockback gets doubled to 2 yards. The other 5/6 of the time the turtle stays put.

Maybe to avoid this there could be some rule making cutting weapons a bit less effective at knockback, like "cutting attacks are -1 to basic damage for knockback calculation purposes" perhaps?

It becomes a bigger issue as a wider variety of weapons can inflict cutting damage, like Tip Slash for Impaling for example.

That gives a scenario where you're more likely (as a weak person) to be able to knock back the turtle using a flick of a rapier than with the poke of a bo staff, if you're down to that 1d-5 threshold.

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

The "minimum damage" rule makes more sense if it is read as "minimum injury", IMO. That is, a crushing attack can simply fail to have enough impact, whereas even resting a blade against flesh and then sliding the blade a little, with only its own weight, can still cut.

[RyanW]

Also, there are a lot of GURPS rules that don't really deal well with being taken outside human standards, especially when dealing with low damage/HP. The fact that there is nothing between "no damage at all" and "meaningful damage to a human" causes it to get really chunky at such small scales.

[AlexanderHowl]

At HP 3, a turtle weighs around 4 lbs. A ST 10 person can just pick it up and throw it 15 yards. On a more serious note, scaling up to an effective ST 10 for the turtle is probably appropirate, which would scale the human to an effective ST 33. They effectively do 3d+1 punching damage (3d-2 on a defensive attack), which translates to 1 yard of knockback.

[SolemnGolem]

I had that scaling problem with my Forest Critters campaign, where my solo player played as a squirrel. (Hence, "SQUIRPS".)

I've stuck with everything in animal-scale, so the squirrel has an effective ST of 1, which then makes essential other means of combat evasion, like a very effective Dodge, a somewhat-effective Block (using Cloak, a variant of Fuzzy Tail) against light things, and mandatory Luck advantage.

The game is also less frustrating if the squirrel has an IQ of 10, as contrived as that may be...

[Black Leviathan]

Well, if you want to get into it. Your punch is thrusting at a downward angle and would be driving a substantially smaller and more stable foe towards the ground, while your critical fail at swiping a credit card would actually strike the turtle with directional force and given it's slender size could very possibly get under the turtle to give it some lift. Arguably the Credit Card attack, with ordinary strength could launch the turtle much further than a single hex.

Or we could just go with, this rule doesn't intended to scale down to a fully grown human battling a hyper-slow SM-7 creature and you may need to go off-book in this "battle". Something like "I want to grapple the turtle! I'm going All-out because even through we're in the same hex it will still take him some time to reach me." "He attempts to dodge, his basic speed is .25, it would be lower but that's all we've got. The dodge is not successful." "I'm gonna throw him, I don't care about direction, I'm going for distance rather than a target" "Ok, no roll required, he weighs half-a-pound, with your ordinary strength he's a ways out there. His DR is more than the damage you can do but he's now more far from you than he is angry, and you sort of yeeted him nearly a day's travel in his estimation so he's done with this fight."

[Tyneras]

GURPS is human focused, and humans have a tiny amount of DR and really poor strikers. Instead of making things really complicated by having punches and kicks have a 0.5 armor divisor and listing DR 0.5 (tough skin) on virtually every character sheet, it is simpler to allow crushing attacks to roll 0. This sometimes results in strange effects at tiny values. It makes perfect sense to presume every attack has a minimum damage value of 1 for knockback purposes.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

At HP 3, a turtle weighs around 4 lbs. A ST 10 person can just pick it up and throw it 15 yards

Maybe a better example would be to compare 2 situations of lacking manipulators?

B457 a Falcon with ST 3 (thrust 1d-5, so a 1d-6 punch and 1d-8 defensive punch) has Sharp Claws which convert punching damage from crushing to cutting: but due to cutting doing a minimum of 1 damage, they are guaranteed a yard of knockback against things with ST/HP of 1-3 so long as they have 1 DR.

On same page a Large Guard Dog has ST 9 (thrust 1d-2, punch 1d-3, defensive punch 1d-5) so he meets the situation established by humans in the previous example.

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

Well, if you want to get into it. Your punch is thrusting at a downward angle and would be driving a substantially smaller and more stable foe towards the ground

True if standing, but we could make the turtle on a table or a human lying down to remove those vector issues.

Originally Posted by Tyneras

having punches and kicks have a 0.5 armor divisor
listing DR 0.5 (tough skin) on virtually every character sheet

Interesting approach.

Using "Modifying ST-Based Damage", the 1d-2 thrust from ST 9/10 is a 0.4 dice Crushing Attack, so the base cost is 2 points instead of 5 for a full die.

-50% for a DR multiplier of 5 would be a [-1] disadvantage (quirk).

If a full point of DR is worth 5 points, than 1/5 a point of DR (0.2 DR) should be worth 1 point.

A x5 multiplier applied to 1/5 a point of DR works out to 1 DR...

This is just way too convenient.... I actually forgot to apply Tough Skin here, is the problem. Maybe to keep things balanced could combine that with 2 levels of Hardened?