Should humans really be DR 0?

[sjmdw45]

There are lots of things that will make you bleed but not threaten your life in any serious way. Cat scratches, needle pricks, etc. Isn't that DR/Tough skin? ("Toughness" in 3e GURPS parlance)

Is there any good reason why humans should be DR 0 doing IIRC 1d-2 thr for ST 10 instead of being DR 2 doing 1d thr with ST 10? Just shift the DR baselines a little bit and adjust the ST tables, and you won't affect combat between humans[1] but now cats can kill rats and not human beings.

-Max

[1] Not completely true. It becomes easier to kill people with eye shots (which bypass DR), and Weapon Master-style damage bonuses scale slightly better.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

There are lots of things that will make you bleed but not threaten your life in any serious way. Cat scratches, needle pricks, etc. Isn't that DR/Tough skin? ("Toughness" in 3e GURPS parlance)

No. Those are attacks which do 0 points of damage. That doesn't mean absolutely no damage so much as it means not enough damage to get up to 1 point.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

No. Those are attacks which do 0 points of damage. That doesn't mean absolutely no damage so much as it means not enough damage to get up to 1 point.

One of the things I found interesting about damage rules in GURPS, stems from that of SLAMS.

If you roll the dice of damage per the normal GURPS rules, a roll of 1d6-3 can result in the following:

1 = -2
2 = -1
3 = +0
4 = +1
5 = +2
6 = +3

Net results are:

0,0,0,1,2, and 3.

Now for the fun part.

If you roll damage equal to 2x what your opponent rolled in his "slam", you automatically knock them off their feet.

What is 2x0? 0. What is 1x 0? 0. What is 1,000,000 x 0? Still 0. ;)

GURPS with its damage rolls, can be a fun and tricky thing. Rolling zero points of damage is one of those oddities I suppose.

[Anthony]

No, humans aren't realistically DR 0; you can kill small animals with blows that won't even hurt a human.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Anthony

No, humans aren't realistically DR 0; you can kill small animals with blows that won't even hurt a human.

Does that mean humans aren't DR 0, or does it mean that you need to use a finer-grained scale of damage and DR values to properly represent these small animals?

[martinl]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

There are lots of things that will make you bleed but not threaten your life in any serious way. Cat scratches, needle pricks, etc. Isn't that DR/Tough skin? ("Toughness" in 3e GURPS parlance)

Is there any good reason why humans should be DR 0 doing IIRC 1d-2 thr for ST 10 instead of being DR 2 doing 1d thr with ST 10? Just shift the DR baselines a little bit and adjust the ST tables, and you won't affect combat between humans[1] but now cats can kill rats and not human beings.

This is a resolution issue. Human skin and padding is some defense, but not even 1* DR on the GURPS scale. If you increased all DRs by 2, tough leather would be only slightly tougher than human skin, which is redonkulous.

Human skin is probably DR 0.2 or so.

* Actually, for crushing, human "padding" can be comparable to armor padding with real DR. Padded cloth is not an order of magnitude better padding than a strong human's muscle mass, or a fat humans fat.

However, this issue has been dealt with fairly well in the past, at least for 3e. Get the hence to Tbone's GURPS diner (http://www.gamesdiner.com/) and poke around.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Anthony

you can kill small animals with blows that won't even hurt a human.

...because the granularity of HP is such that meaningful damage to small animals is below the threshold of meaningful damage to humans. DR is scaled appropriately to HP. If you want to handle damage to small animals realistically (which GURPS doesn't, man being the measure of all things there), you need to rescale both HP and DR, and probably FP and lots else besides.

[Kromm]

Two things:

1. Most anemic attacks have an armor divisor less than 1. Such divisors give DR 0 things DR 1 (pp. B110, B379). This accounts for many of the "damage without injury" results in the real world.

2. Fractional damage exists. No rule says that damage only comes in integer quantities, and it's possible to have, say, 0.01 or 1.4 points of damage. It's just that one considers only the integer for a target with at least 1 HP. A human ignores a 0.1-point scratch; a bug with 0.1 HP doesn't. The current absence of explicit scaling rules obscures this fact, of course.

In game terms, 1 HP is significant harm. If caused by a cutting attack, it could in theory even cause a low-HT person to bleed to death. Most attacks are simply below that threshold. I'd be reluctant to say that humans actually have DR 1, though. I'd prefer to acknowledge that we'll need rules for what DR 0.1, 0.05 HP, etc. mean in game terms one of these days.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by Anthony

No, humans aren't realistically DR 0; you can kill small animals with blows that won't even hurt a human.

Isn't that an effect of their low HP?

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Kromm

In game terms, 1 HP is significant harm. If caused by a cutting attack, it could in theory even cause a low-HT person to bleed to death. Most attacks are simply below that threshold. I'd be reluctant to say that humans actually have DR 1, though. I'd prefer to acknowledge that we'll need rules for what DR 0.1, 0.05 HP, etc. mean in game terms one of these days.

Gads! <makes warding sign> What would make us want that?!

heh