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Old 04-17-2023, 09:06 AM   #21
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Realistic Human DR

A variant armor/damage system I considered some time ago (but got lost in the weeds looking up stuff like sheer strength) worked something like this: on a hit, roll 1d to see what sublocation (on the arm, shoulder vs upper arms vs elbow vs forearms, as in LT) you hit, another 1d to see roughly where on the sublocation you his (say, on the arm, bone vs muscle vs a grazing hit to the skin), and a final 1d for roughly what angle you struck at (a poor angle results in a DR multiplier). There may have also been another 1d in the mix to determine the armor coverage at the point of impact. I worked under the assumption a trained combatant wouldn't have enough variability in damage output (outside options like All Out, Defensive, etc) to justify a roll there, although untrained (or minimally-trained) characters did have another roll involved to see how close to their nominal damage the attack actually dealt (with the best damage result corresponding to what trained characters output all the time). Of course, in all cases rolling a 1 was to be the best result, and a 6 the worst, keeping with GURPS' typical "roll low" mentality. But of course, that's a whole lot of rolling (which is another reason I abandoned the concept).

Oh, and it would need to be combined with a semi-cumulative wounding system (such as the one by Luke Campbell, or the fairly-similar "Conditional Wounding" system by Douglass Cole) of some flavor. I also considered a system where the severity of a wound was non-linear with depth of penetration. I couldn't come up with a model I liked, plus it would be annoying to implement, so that also got abandoned.
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Old 04-17-2023, 09:47 AM   #22
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

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Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
it would be an All-Out (Strong) attack, delivered as a devastating punch to the jaw with high damage dice rolls (representing perfect technique and victim being in just the right spot for maximum damage) and then very bad rolls for Knockout and survival.
at.
Gurps doesn't quite handle this yet. It needs a "1 in 6 Uppercuts to the Jaw do damage directly to the Brain" note to simulate the "countre coup" damage mechanism that results in many boxing deaths.

Without this damage that would require a Survival roll would need a ST of 35 or higher (Thrust of 4D-1 +8 for Boxing at DX +2). With middle teens human ST even the incredibly rare 3x damage Crit might not not get you to the necessary threshold.
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Old 04-17-2023, 10:10 AM   #23
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

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Originally Posted by mr beer View Post
Few blows in a boxing match are at both full power and squarely connecting with the target. Boxers move around a lot, keep their arms in the way and tend to be shifting away as punches land. When one heavyweight does land a full power hit squarely on his opponent, it often ends the fight right there.

TL;DR Boxers aren't just eating 100s of punches that would KO a normal person.
One of the optional rules I liked in BESM was that margin of success determined how much damage you do. That has verisimilitude - a glancing blow won’t do much, but a solid hit will.

As a nod towards that, my own house rule is:
* If you make your attack roll by exactly zero, it does half damage.
* If you make your defense roll by exactly zero, you take half damage.
* These stack.
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Old 04-17-2023, 11:47 AM   #24
Polydamas
 
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

If you really wanted to simulate a tackle in American football, the pads, helmet, and cleats would probably need mechanics (may already be in GURPS High-Tech?) But realistically, that is a 'thought exercise' not something that frequently comes up in-game.

As I said in my first post, you could argue that injury in GURPS is not as random as in the real world, but I think that single injuries to human or human-like characters tend to have plausible effects. I am not making a claim about multiple injuries because its so much harder to decide what is plausible.
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Old 04-17-2023, 03:55 PM   #25
zoncxs
 
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

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Originally Posted by DemiBenson View Post
One of the optional rules I liked in BESM was that margin of success determined how much damage you do. That has verisimilitude - a glancing blow won’t do much, but a solid hit will.

As a nod towards that, my own house rule is:
* If you make your attack roll by exactly zero, it does half damage.
* If you make your defense roll by exactly zero, you take half damage.
* These stack.
This was an optional rule printed in Pyramid 3-34 "Ten Tweaks to Customize Combat"

Called "Grazes".

Pyramid 3-100 has "Realistic Injury, Expanded"

Last edited by zoncxs; 04-17-2023 at 04:00 PM.
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Old 04-17-2023, 06:01 PM   #26
Pursuivant
 
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Gurps doesn't quite handle this yet. It needs a "1 in 6 Uppercuts to the Jaw do damage directly to the Brain" note to simulate the "countre coup" damage mechanism that results in many boxing deaths.
Such deaths are rarely instant, however. Add in the Bleeding rules to represent brain bleeds or traumatic brain swelling to represent "boxer goes down hard, doesn't wake up, dies in the hospital."

Critical hit results of 3 or 18 for crushing injuries could also be modified to represent a slow internal bleed which just seems like a really bad bruise or a mild concussion, but actually triggers a slow bleed over hours which eventually causes the victim to collapse. Unless they're close to a trauma center and the trauma team is really good, they're likely to die. That models things like slow internal bleeding from ruptured organs, pericardial trauma, delayed aneurysms or strokes due to blood vessel damage, or subdural/ intracranial hematomas.
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Old 04-17-2023, 07:28 PM   #27
Polydamas
 
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

Evil Stevie found criminal lawyers to write GURPS Mysteries, martial artists to write GURPS Martial Arts, and shooters to write GURPS gun rules. I wonder if a paramedic or trauma surgeon would be interested in looking at variant rules for injury?

Characters dying slowly from the long-term effects of their wounds is usually not useful for stories. So its rarely a priority for rules designers.
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Old 04-18-2023, 08:25 PM   #28
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
One problem with realistically modeling human (and animal) damage tolerance is that in real life, it's all over the place. There are so many factors in play that lots of outcomes are possible. People are fragile. That's a fact of life. Yet they sometimes survive, relatively intact and unhurt, the most amazing things that really, logically, should have crippled or killed them. At the same time, relatively minor impacts and injuries are sometimes known to be crippling or lethal if things go badly. You can find examples of all sorts of things from real life.

That said, the general rule in real life is that people are fragile, and real violence and real disaster can rapidly cripple or kill you, no matter how much of a badass you are.
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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
*Damage* isn't realistic. That pretty well prevents making any kind of call about things that modify it like DR.
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I think that most people would agree that the effects of single injuries on a human-like character in GURPS is usually plausible and moderately specific ("left arm crippled and Major Bleeding" not "fracture of the radius and ulna at the ... with damage to the ... arteries"). We can contrast this with eg. damage in D&D where its never even clear what a "hit" means or how we should visualized someone surviving a fireball.

Given that baseline, we can move on to ask whether the effect of modified DR would be plausible.
Really, all this. Because of this, I'll just echo what Power Ups 2 says and say that Special Exercises should be limited to 3 levels which would let someone buy DR 3 with certain limitations. Crushing Only on top of Tough Skin seems the most 'realistic'. Because that comes out to 1pt, I'd likely let someone get at least one level without Special Exercises as a "Thick Skin" perk and that perk likely explains quite a few people really easily.
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Old 04-19-2023, 08:56 AM   #29
Varyon
 
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

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Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
Evil Stevie found criminal lawyers to write GURPS Mysteries, martial artists to write GURPS Martial Arts, and shooters to write GURPS gun rules. I wonder if a paramedic or trauma surgeon would be interested in looking at variant rules for injury?
I believe there was a discussion some time ago in which a user who is/was a military surgeon commented that the GURPS rules are largely good enough (at least for single wounds) at the level of abstraction GURPS works at; I believe he concluded that, to make a properly realistic system, he'd need a grant and a few thousand goats to shoot. That's probably not an option for SJGames (even ignoring the legality and expense, I'd imagine there would be a lot of - frankly well-deserved - public backlash for funding such animal cruelty simply for the sake of maybe getting some better game rules out of it).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
Characters dying slowly from the long-term effects of their wounds is usually not useful for stories. So its rarely a priority for rules designers.
In a story where the author has control over what goes down, something like that can be useful to heighten drama and the like, with the hero's condition continually worsening as they try to complete their mission, get to somewhere they can be treated, etc. But I suspect that wouldn't work very well for a game.
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Old 04-19-2023, 09:23 AM   #30
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Realistic Human DR

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In a story where the author has control over what goes down, something like that can be useful to heighten drama and the like, .
Well, the writer can "try" anyway. I think the entertainment value of fictional suffering and death gets vastly overrated.
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