Fixes for ST-based damage?

[ArmoredSaint]

I recall from a couple of recent threads on DR and damage that some people feel that ST-based melee weapon damage rises too fast. For instance, as Douglas Cole stated in the recent Low Tech Plate Armour DRs thread:

As far as I can tell, the issues with GURPS' damage are mainly in the muscle-powered weapon side, both ranged and hand-held.

1. ST damage increases too rapidly. Based on the force you can apply (basic lift) and using typical penetration type numbers, muscle powered damage being about equal to ST/10 works a bit better than the current +2 ST = +2 sw and +1 thr progression.

2. Not sure if ST10 = 1d swing is the right place to start that progression. Or, rather, since 1d = ST10 IS a nice game-rule place to start, whether firearms need to be re-normed around this.

3. Ranged muscle powered weapons use the "too fast" ST progression and not the sqrt(KE) progression of other projectiles that wound the same way. A 200lb bow (ST20) should probably do 2d rather than 2d+1 to 2d+3, while a 70lb bow (ST12) is probably 1d to 1d+1, and a lowly 35lb bow (ST8) still does 0.8d, or 1d-1.

Slight re-tweaks to the progression and norming of ST and firearms damage would more consistently rationalize the two, and the 'muscle vs firearm' headaches that pop up rather frequently would quiet down a lot.

I seek an easy house-rule fix for this issue. What about simply ignoring ST-based "swing" damage, using only the "thrust" value for each level of ST, and giving a -1 to thrust attacks? Would that work?

[roguebfl]

Don't see this happening at all, remember the also been a large amount of complaints that ST does not increase in damage fast enough for it's point costs, I don't see a fix happen that will slow it down more.

[Kuroshima]

Personally, in my Supers games, in order to keep ST useful, I simply extend the current 10-20 progression ad infinitum. It makes ST worth using at high levels, when you use enough force multipliers (karate/weapon master/imbuements/etc) and don't allow Super ST for damage (You can take Power Blow though). Now realism is the least of my worries in Supers games, but the thing is, reducing the ST-based damage that dramatically will have to reduce the cost of Striking ST, probably to 1/level (and full ST to 6/level), and this will in turn result in many more extremely strong heroes just because it's cheap.

[Verjigorm]

I've toyed around with the idea, adopted from Ludo(I think?) of requiring ST 13 and above to buy additional levels of HP and Lifting ST. For example, a ST 15 man would have Lifting ST 17 and HP 17. It helps to push big guys towards using grapples and the like to get past heavy armor, rather than just hacking it apart. And it gives those big guys the basic lift to become nimble and dangerous combatants.


Sometimes you can be terrified by the speed in which a huge man can move, even in heavy equipment.

[Icelander]

One of the primary problems that I see is that Basic Lift and damage do not appear to have a coherent relationship. A man with ST 20 can lift four times what a man with ST 10 can do and should logically therefore be able to penetrate twice the DR in GURPS.

This, however, does not hold true. Instead, the larger man can penetrate around 3.6 times the DR using unmodified swing damage and four times the DR with unmodified thrust damage.

If we retain 1d as the ST 10 swing baseline (which seems as good as anything else), a ST 20 character ought to have a swing rating of 2d. Normalise the rest of the table according to that and you're good.

Of course, this does not necessarily reward high ST builds enough to make players happy. In order to really account for the benefit of high ST, we'd have to rework the weapon system so that higher ST allows the use of more impressive weapons* and perhaps even that the Parry rating and Reach depended partially on the proportion of the user's BL rather than innate quality of the weapon.

A strong man would then be terrifying not because he could cut armour plates but because he could move fast while wearing battle harness and fence adeptly with a longsword.

*The current Minimum ST ratings seem very lenient in many ways.

[Anthony]

Alternately, the price of ST can be modified. Realistically, for someone with 20 ST (4x BL) to get 4x the impact energy, they'd need to be using a weapon that's 4x heavier; using a ST 10 weapon, they'd probably get no more than 2.5x the impact energy (1d -> 1d+2), but would also hit 60% faster, which would mechanically behave more like DX than ST.

[Brandy]

For what it's worth, t-bone has some of this stuff worked out on his site, specifically the linear progression of strength and damage.

[Polydamas]

In any future GURPS game I run, I'll change the damage table so doubling ST doubles damage (currently it increases faster up to ST 25 or so) and so SW is about 1.5 times TH (currently its about twice up to ST 25 or so). See this thread from when I was even younger and more enthusiastic.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

In any future GURPS game I run, I'll change the damage table so doubling ST doubles damage (currently it increases faster up to ST 25 or so) and so SW is about 1.5 times TH (currently its about twice up to ST 25 or so). See this thread from when I was even younger and more enthusiastic.

I worked up a house-ruled weapon table that didn't use swing damage at all, instead basing the swing damage increase on the weapon. The concept I used was that swinging a weapon gave a particular increase in power due to leverage, and high ST characters would need appropriately long levers to get the most of their swinging power. Essentially, if you do 10d punches, swinging an 18 inch bar won't suddenly boost that to 15d (though the maximum damage due to the ST rating of a weapon prevents it from getting that silly).

I wasn't pleased with the result, though I believe it was a flaw with method rather than concept. I will probably revisit it, though I will wait for LT first.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by Icelander

If we retain 1d as the ST 10 swing baseline (which seems as good as anything else), a ST 20 character ought to have a swing rating of 2d.

I'd prefer to keep the ST 14 baseline of 1d thr, 2d sw (average damage ST/4 thr, ST/2 sw; dice are ST/14 thr, ST/7 sw.) It bumps up melee damage for average ST a bit, but using the existing 1d/2d point as the base seems more elegant, and does the convenient relation between ST and average damage that it produces.