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Old 12-21-2021, 11:02 AM   #1
zoncxs
 
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Default Conditional Injury and Injury Tolerance

So I am in the process of adding to my martial arts world book, and one thing I wanted to add was conditional injury from pyramid 3/120. I have come to a few things that needs clearing up.

Injury Tolerance Damage Reduction, how should this interact with the rules? There are rules for unliving, homogenous and diffuse, but damage reduction is left out. From what I can guess, I would treat the divisors and subtraction. So IT:DR 4, which divides penetrating damage by 4, would be a -4 severity modifier. The problem I see with this is that at low HP, this is expensive (You can spend 6cp to go from HP 10 to HP 13 and thus increase RT by 1) while at high HP it is cheap.

For my games I would limit how many levels you can take, and who can take them as well as prerequisites, but I like rules that require less handling from GM.

The other question would be about poison and disease. I saw a thread asking this same question but no response to it.
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Old 12-21-2021, 11:19 AM   #2
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Default Re: Conditional Injury and Injury Tolerance

Unmodified IT:DR should simply be [25] per -1 to Severity when using Conditional Injury, just as unmodified Vulnerability should simply be [-25] per +1 to Severity. In edge cases where the character is already close to a threshold, IT:DR can be a bad deal compared to boosting HP. Switching RT from covering a range of HP's to instead having each RT correspond to only one HP value, and requiring characters to have HP matching up to one of these values (so, for example, a character with HP 12 would have to either take -2 to HP for [-4] or +3 to HP for [6], if you set the threshold values to match the Size and Speed/Range table), will avoid such edge cases. You'll still have the issue that low levels of IT:DR are a bad deal if you don't have high HP, but that's something present in default GURPS; if this is a problem, consider repricing IT:DR in these cases to match how much you'd need to spend on HP to get the same effect (so for a character with 5 HP, IT:DR that gives -2 to Severity has a base cost of only [10], to match up with what +5 HP would cost).
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Old 12-21-2021, 11:20 AM   #3
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Default Re: Conditional Injury and Injury Tolerance

IT(DR) in GURPS RAW isn't worth taking for characters with less than 20-30 hit points, so no surprise it's the same in CI.
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Old 12-21-2021, 11:45 AM   #4
DouglasCole
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Default Re: Conditional Injury and Injury Tolerance

Quote:
Originally Posted by zoncxs View Post
Injury Tolerance Damage Reduction, how should this interact with the rules? There are rules for unliving, homogenous and diffuse, but damage reduction is left out.
Unintentionally so; I just forgot about it...no, I must have just dealt with the Basic Set when I looked. I didn't check Powers.

But yeah, it very much looks like you get 25 points for -2 Severity, and 25 points for each additional -1. That works well enough for the four levels allowed in Powers, and one could potentially extend it. Check to see if that breaks anything!

Quote:
From what I can guess, I would treat the divisors as subtraction. So IT:DR 4, which divides penetrating damage by 4, would be a -4 severity modifier. The problem I see with this is that at low HP, this is expensive (You can spend 6cp to go from HP 10 to HP 13 and thus increase RT by 1) while at high HP it is cheap.
True, but that's an artifact of the granularity of injury and damage. I think this winds up being something that is just true.

Quote:
For my games I would limit how many levels you can take, and who can take them as well as prerequisites, but I like rules that require less handling from GM.

The other question would be about poison and disease. I saw a thread asking this same question but no response to it.
Poison and disease are probably something that you'd want to look at as a series of HT rolls, failure of which either causes FP or simply increases wound level directly. Some poisons, like the necrolyzing bite of the brown recluse spider, might well do actual HP of damage, or again be "make HT rolls at a ridiculous penalty, and if you fail the limb is first impaired, then crippled, then lost."

I'm facing similar decisions, as it happens, as I write up some diseases and toxins for the Bestiary.
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Old 12-21-2021, 12:18 PM   #5
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Default Re: Conditional Injury and Injury Tolerance

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Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
But yeah, it very much looks like you get 25 points for -2 Severity, and 25 points for each additional -1.
Note the first level of IT:DR (divide Injury by 2 - or -2 Severity in CW) costs [50] (IIRC), with later levels being [25] each, which is why I suggested just going with [25] per -1 to Severity. Of course, while CW largely follows the Size and Speed/Range Table, RAW IT:DR is a bit different - instead of 2, 3, 5, 7, 10 it uses 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, and follows SSR thereafter. Personally, I favor just switching it to follow straight SSR (which also calls for changing Vulnerability to do the same, so the highest RAW level of Vulnerability changes from x4 to x5); this is also more compatible with CW, as it lets you just do [25] per -1, rather than [50] for -2, [75] for -3, [100] for -4, [125] for -4, and [150] for -6.

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Poison and disease are probably something that you'd want to look at as a series of HT rolls, failure of which either causes FP or simply increases wound level directly.
The idea of treating poisons (and probably other cyclic damage) as simply a wound that keeps getting worse is both simple and effective; I'll have to think of the best way to implement this - perhaps simply +1 severity per cycle, with an HT roll only if it's designed as resistible? But then a 1-damage cyclic wound might ramp up too quickly, particularly at later stages... again, something to think on.
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Old 12-21-2021, 12:31 PM   #6
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Default Re: Conditional Injury and Injury Tolerance

Sounds like I was on the right track.

I added an IT:DR 1.5 for 25cp for my games and ignore the missing "7" in the chart so I don't have to change the costs of them all, but since I am already doing that, might as well do it all.

So IT:DR matches Severity Modifier on a 1 to 1 ratio and cost 25cp each level. Sounds good to me. I can add a UB for higher levels on top of my normal prerequisite of certain levels of power talent.
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Old 12-21-2021, 12:37 PM   #7
DouglasCole
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Default Re: Conditional Injury and Injury Tolerance

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
Note the first level of IT:DR (divide Injury by 2 - or -2 Severity in CW) costs [50] (IIRC), with later levels being [25] each, which is why I suggested just going with [25] per -1 to Severity.
Yeah, I was skimming. 25 points per -1 works out nicely....

Quote:
Of course, while CW largely follows the Size and Speed/Range Table, RAW IT:DR is a bit different - instead of 2, 3, 5, 7, 10 it uses 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, and follows SSR thereafter. Personally, I favor just switching it to follow straight SSR (which also calls for changing Vulnerability to do the same, so the highest RAW level of Vulnerability changes from x4 to x5); this is also more compatible with CW, as it lets you just do [25] per -1, rather than [50] for -2, [75] for -3, [100] for -4, [125] for -4, and [150] for -6.
I was going to start into this, but I decided not to. Yes, I would absolutely just say [25] per -1 severity and let it ride. That puts 1/10 at something like 150 points, and 1/100 at 300 points. I think it scales well for superheroes uncapped.


Quote:
The idea of treating poisons (and probably other cyclic damage) as simply a wound that keeps getting worse is both simple and effective; I'll have to think of the best way to implement this - perhaps simply +1 severity per cycle, with an HT roll only if it's designed as resistible? But then a 1-damage cyclic wound might ramp up too quickly, particularly at later stages... again, something to think on.
A "simple" way to do this would be to give a bonus to the HT roll based on severity or "each further increase gets +[something] to the roll" or "bonuses double for each severity level" or something.

Basically, some diseases/poisons will proceed to a certain level of badness and then stop. Others keep going and will probably kill you. A thing that rolled the same HT roll each severity check would rapidly escalate to fatal, and would be used for really bad stuff.

Weaker poisons would scale HT bonuses to the point where only an already-weakened individual would fail the roll, and you're looking for crit fails that indicate an allergic reaction, systemic shock, or a particular susceptibility.

but having poisons and disease do HP of damage, converting that to something else, then using the CI system feels like the wrong approach to me.
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