4E's hit point philosophy

[jacobmuller]

You are not alone:D
Pyramid #3/34 HP and Weight: use square root for vehicles*. There's also Taming Explosions.
#3/37 had interesting articles too, eg Armor & Volume: high %age armor means lower surface area, hence higher DR; and Square Root of Destruction: basing energy weapons on square root, no benefit to handhelds but ship mounted become useful.
Can't remember which Pyramid has the reduced WM vs high SMs table... But the Pyramid articles allow age-of-sail to work better.

*You could use it for living beings but then you'd have horses you'd need antitank weapons to stop and dragons/ dinosaurs... nuke 'em from orbit?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

My point is that it's not a flaw in the system when the system doesn't do something that it was never designed or intended to do. You might as well complain that a hammer makes a poor butter knife.

Well, GURPS 4e does not work for modelling Age of Sail naval battles and I'm pretty sure that this is not a feature, it's a bug.

You can pretend that this is a good thing if you like, and that anyone who thinks differently is doing it wrong, but that strikes me as not only rude, it's also disingenous.

There is no possible way to argue that playing a pirate captain and his scurvy crew is not something that GURPS 4e is supposed to be designed to allow.

Yet, with the design as it stands, a variety of perverse incentives exists that, among other things, make cannonballs much less effective for engaging enemy ships than grapeshot or even a volley of muskets.

If the rules discourage popular fictional tropes, which are found in both realistic and cinematic fiction, in favour of silly Murphy's Rules behaviour that no one has yet indicated they find interesting, cool or helpful for immersion in their pirate roleplaying, the rules are at fault.

Not the players who want to be able to roleplay a long running battle between their ship and the English brig chasing them, ending with an exciting boarding action, but the rules, which aren't capable of modelling such a battle.

Because the way the rules are written now, the ships will sink each other shortly after coming into range, especially if either side is controlled by someone who can do basic arithmetic and realise that a volley of musket and pistol fire will speed the enemy ship on its way to the bottom.

[Ashtagon]

My understand is that HP represent the damage necessary to break/kill/shatter/disable a creature/object/device, not to vaporise it. At that is best represented by the cube root function, as used by gurps.

Your example in the OP is specifically something that gurps HP isn't intended to model.

I suspect that there need to be a couple of additional "creature/object composition" types to account for this. Perhaps "homogeneous" could be renamed to "animated", and be a square root function, and a new homogeneous trait (for when it truly is a bulk object with no breakable parts) work on a linear function.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

My point is that it's not a flaw in the system when the system doesn't do something that it was never designed or intended to do. You might as well complain that a hammer makes a poor butter knife.

If you advertise a dinner set, and only include a hammer, then I reserve the right to complain about your poor quality butter knives.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by hal

Comments?

My only comment is that realistic penetration, damage done and injury sustained isn't modeled well by the "depleting health pool" method of wound tracking even when we're talking generically "average humans"; the further you get from that baseline, the greater the discrepancy between game and reality.

GURPS is calibrated around plausible action-adventure (not cinematic, but not overly realistic either!) heroes. GURPS is not a simulation engine.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

If you advertise a dinner set, and only include a hammer, then I reserve the right to complain about your poor quality butter knives.

GURPS is a roleplaying game, not a vehicle combat simulator. It emulates (not simulates) vehicle combat to the degree necessary to faciliate roleplaying, and no more.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

GURPS is a roleplaying game, not a vehicle combat simulator. It emulates (not simulates) vehicle combat to the degree necessary to faciliate roleplaying, and no more.

I disagree. In my experience, it fails to emulate a lot of vehicle comvat crucial for popular genres of heroic roleplaying. So much so that for Age of Sail or WWI or WWII flying aces campaigns, I am forced to seriously consider using alternate products instead. I don't want to, but the fact is that GURPS currently lacks tools capable of emulation that does any kind of justice to such genres.

It's no great disgrace to admit that GURPS is not perfect. It's certainly much more courteous and professional for people associated with SJ Games to do so and indicate that they are willing to work toward solutions in an area where GURPS underperforms (like David Pulver and Kromm do in this regard) than blame the customer for playing wrong and denigrate his tastes as disease-inducing because he dares to ask for better emulation, in order to facilitate his roleplaying experience.

Frankly, such attitudes strike me as very inappropriate in someone who, by virtue of moderator status, is supposed to represent the company on these forums.

[Gnome]

I think the real issue here is with Injury Tolerance (Unliving) and Injury Tolerance (Homogenous). I have always had a problem with these two advantages. They cost loads of points, and all they do is change the wounding modifiers on some weapons!
Maybe, going with suggestions upthread, both of these advantages should open up the possibility of buying more HP, with Unliving taking you up to sqrt(mass) and Homogenous taking you up to mass.
Something like that, anyway.

In my pirates one-shot, I basically dumped the 4e vehicle rules for ship battles and made things up as I went along. It worked fine for a one-shot, but I would have liked to have some playable rules (like the ones in 3e Swashbucklers).

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Icelander

It's certainly much more courteous and professional for people associated with SJ Games to do so and indicate that they are willing to work toward solutions in an area where GURPS underperforms (like David Pulver and Kromm do in this regard) than blame the customer for playing wrong and denigrate his tastes as disease-inducing because he dares to ask for better emulation, in order to facilitate his roleplaying experience.

I question your use of the term "disease-inducing"; the closest thing I've said is "break out in hives," and that's my opinion of strict simulationism, not a company statement. I believe my previous post is pretty clear in that regard.

I also think "blame the customer for playing wrong" is awfully harsh; what I've said is that I don't think GURPS is the best tool for some kinds of encounters, and trying to shoehorn those encounters into GURPS as written is going to lead to frustration and difficulties. (As this thread demonstrates!)

What I will say -- in my capacity as a gamer, not as a company spokesperson -- is that I think the more rules you load onto GURPS to make it a better simulation engine, the more daunting you make the game for casual players, and the more likely it is that those players will abandon the entire game in favor of something that chooses gameplay over realism. I don't think that's a desirable outcome for the line, for the company, OR for the fans.

Edited to add: I'm not in the least opposed to the creation of such rules for the players who want them. I do not think they should be the default, and I certainly don't think that the lack of those rules is a flaw of a system designed to appeal to as wide a base as possible.

[robkelk]

This is an intriguing discussion... that, to me, appears to be based on a faulty premise provided in the original post

Originally Posted by hal

My mind went on the road or train of thought that started with "Why is it that hit points scale with the cube of the weight" but then doesn't follow known physics when it comes to reality?

But do hit points actually scale with the cube of the weight? I was under the impression that it was possible to have two characters with the same height, mass, and build, but different hit points.

If I've missed some optional rule somewhere, well... it wouldn't be the first time. (Optional rules are optional, after all.)