Help a noobie understand critical hits

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

So the most relevant answer there is that blowthrough is an optional rule, and you are definitely not obligated to be using it.

Personally I'd want to, but we clearly have very different interests in rules usage. Which GURPS supports!

I've been assuming you're not using optional rules as much as I can manage, though making reference to them.

I'm totally not against people adding lots of rules if they enjoy them! Optional rules can be great!

But for me there's a balance. I love that gurps has actual active defenses rather than other rpgs passive defenses. But it will slow things down a fair bit! This is a time usage thing. If I take all 5 hours of a game session for combat with 2 bad guys because of excessive combat rule usage my players won't show up to that table again and I wouldn't blame them one bit.

It's pretty simple. The setting has guns, lots of em. Players need to be in an environment with those guns and actually not be told "combat encounters are inadvisable" as combat and death are part of a cyberpunk setting. It's a world of struggle and conflict. They need to be able to do this and enjoy it without fear of instant death and they need to be able to do this as even newer players than me AND we need to be able to do this without having to evoke increasingly esoteric rules to compensate for other problems like a rifle doing 5d6 damage.

That's why I started paring everything down. For now I jsut got burn (aggrivated damage to vampires ie it can kill em and to other eldrich beings. Comes form lasers) and kinetic. I might expand it a bit but so far that's it so we don't have to calculate wound profiles after armor penetration. Just what the dice shows is what you do! Then i just more or less halved the damage for now. We'll see how play testing works :).

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

TBH I've always wondered why we horse around with 57 different wounding types?

Because as you have previously mentioned, penetration and injury are different things. If I shoot you with a ridiculously high powered 3mm bullet that has the same armor penetration as a 5.56mm round and as 12g shotgun slug, they're all going to penetrate the same distance, more or less, into your body. But the 5.56mm round is going to destroy around 4 times as much tissue, with a corresponding increase in the chance of hitting something vital, and the 12g slug is pulverizing around 30 times as much material. So the 3mm bullet does 5d pi- for an average of 17 damage and 8 injury on an unarmored human, the 5.56mm bullet does 5d pi for an average of 17 damage and 17 injury, and the 12g slug does 4d+2 pi++ for an average of 16 damage and 32 injury.

Similarly, if I hit you with the blunt end of an axe's head, I'm doing crushing damage and I might break your arm. If I reverse the axe and hit you with the sharpened edge, I'm doing cutting damage and severing skin, muscles, and tendons as well as possibly cutting through the bone. It's the same amount of energy, momentum, whatever in both cases but the chopping head creates more grievous wounds.

It's not hard to remember the wound modifiers if you play for a bit, or you could just write a tiny lookup table somewhere:

bu   x1
co   x1
cr   x1
cu   x1.5
im   x2
pi-  /2
pi   x1
pi+  x1.5
pi++ x2
tx   x1

But it's your gaming table, do what you want.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

It's pretty simple. The setting has guns, lots of em. Players need to be in an environment with those guns and actually not be told "combat encounters are inadvisable" as combat and death are part of a cyberpunk setting. It's a world of struggle and conflict. They need to be able to do this and enjoy it without fear of instant death and they need to be able to do this as even newer players than me AND we need to be able to do this without having to evoke increasingly esoteric rules to compensate for other problems like a rifle doing 5d6 damage.

I mean, I genuinely don't understand how you're envisioning this cyberpunk setting where getting shot with a rifle is very unlikely to make a baseline person - not a battle cyborg or whatever, just somebody - have a chance to pass out. Where a pistol literally can't put someone down for more than a few seconds. Combat and death as part of a cyberpunk setting tend to be fast and rich in instant kills in all the relevant media I can think of, to the point that you'd find GURPS lethality not coming close to the stories.

I can't really argue about it usefully, though.

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Because as you have previously mentioned, penetration and injury are different things. If I shoot you with a ridiculously high powered 3mm bullet that has the same armor penetration as a 5.56mm round and as 12g shotgun slug, they're all going to penetrate the same distance, more or less, into your body. But the 5.56mm round is going to destroy around 4 times as much tissue, with a corresponding increase in the chance of hitting something vital, and the 12g slug is pulverizing around 30 times as much material. So the 3mm bullet does 5d pi- for an average of 17 damage and 8 injury on an unarmored human, the 5.56mm bullet does 5d pi for an average of 17 damage and 17 injury, and the 12g slug does 4d+2 pi++ for an average of 16 damage and 32 injury.

Similarly, if I hit you with the blunt end of an axe's head, I'm doing crushing damage and I might break your arm. If I reverse the axe and hit you with the sharpened edge, I'm doing cutting damage and severing skin, muscles, and tendons as well as possibly cutting through the bone. It's the same amount of energy, momentum, whatever in both cases but the chopping head creates more grievous wounds.

It's not hard to remember the wound modifiers if you play for a bit, or you could just write a tiny lookup table somewhere:

bu   x1
co   x1
cr   x1
cu   x1.5
im   x2
pi-  /2
pi   x1
pi+  x1.5
pi++ x2
tx   x1

But it's your gaming table, do what you want.

Thanks for the list (i'm actually saving it because I have typed up the penetrating table but i keep having trouble finding the rest. )

But frankly. All that you described can just be done by assigning different roll values to the weapon as appropriate and then add a dr modifier. You don't need to have a table for your players to look up. They look at their character sheet and it tells them exactly how much damage their weapon does! That's good gameplay right there.

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I mean, I genuinely don't understand how you're envisioning this cyberpunk setting where getting shot with a rifle is very unlikely to make a baseline person - not a battle cyborg or whatever, just somebody - have a chance to pass out. Where a pistol literally can't put someone down for more than a few seconds.

I can't really argue about it usefully, though.

*sighs*

I keep getting pulled into the realism argument because people find it important.

I'm not really concerned about realism in my setting. I'm happy with the idea that it can take a few hits on average to put down even a normal guy on the street. That's ok. I want people have a good time, not losing their characters every five minutes.

You're right that is a trope of cyberpunk even, death that swift. The old (incredibly old) gurps cyberpunk book even mentions it saying most 150 point characters will be dead in a session. That's not the sort of game I'd like to play nor is it what my players would like. They invest time in writing their characters.

[zoncxs]

Originally Posted by Farmer

...I think movies have exaggerated the damage from melee weapons and lessen that of bullets.

They did, a good link that covers this:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...nAcrossTheRoom


I can't find the name of it, but old movies (before 1950 I think) had gunplay where when a person was shot, they just fall down, cause that is what happens. If you ever saw someone get shot and die, it looks like a puppet just got its strings cut.

After a while people wanted more "action" and so in movies people started to exaggerate the wound by jumping back or using wires to get pulled back.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

I deleted my initial response because I was excessively annoyed and wasn't reading the bottom part...

Ok... please explain to me *WHY* you would list the weapon as 5d6 damage if it's not capable of doing 5d6 damage to the player because of blow through?

How many charts and tables do I need open, how many calculators do I need to to the letter of the rules simulate a gunfight in the game?

It is capable of doing 5d6 damage to some targets. It can punch through body armour, it can punch through walls or car doors, and so on. It's also *realistic* in that it has that much energy. That it may not do all the damage because it's hit a hand or an arm is reasonable and realistic. If you hit centre mass, though, you're taking the damage. As has been pointed out, on average, a single 5.56mm round to an average person won't actually kill them instantly, but it will knock them down. There is a 30% chance of an outright kill, though.

If the target has body armour, their survivability increases, reducing that single shot kill considerably even with just a modern tactical vest.

As to what you need to do? It's not hard, but it can have a few steps. There are some handy "cheat sheets" available at http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/pdf/GURPS...CheatSheet.pdf

Ultimately, though, it's up to you how realistic you want to make it or how simplified you want to make it (like "That Other Game"). But you wanted to understand critical hits and seemed to be asking about more advanced rule options, so we've been providing that to you. But it's all optional. So long as you and your players are happy, it doesn't matter which way you do it (but do ensure your players understand how it works so they are not confused or upset by how it plays out).

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Farmer

I think movies have exaggerated the damage from melee weapons and lessen that of bullets.

I don't think most movies underplay the damage of bullets? There are exceptions, but I'd typically expect a cinematic shooting to be one of:
-Winged him, mostly cosmetic.
-Instant death.
-Death following a few to several dramatic seconds. (In some cases, dramatic seconds with action, in others just near-death-speech drama.)
-No effect because the target is bulletproof.

If anything, the rarity of 'injured significantly but not that significantly' is probably a realism failure, though all the outcomes I listed are plausible ones...


The knockback of bullets is another story...

[Colonel__Klink]

Originally Posted by Farmer

It is capable of doing 5d6 damage to some targets. It can punch through body armour, it can punch through walls or car doors, and so on. It's also *realistic* in that it has that much energy. That it may not do all the damage because it's hit a hand or an arm is reasonable and realistic. If you hit centre mass, though, you're taking the damage. As has been pointed out, on average, a single 5.56mm round to an average person won't actually kill them instantly, but it will knock them down. There is a 30% chance of an outright kill, though.

If the target has body armour, their survivability increases, reducing that single shot kill considerably even with just a modern tactical vest.

As to what you need to do? It's not hard, but it can have a few steps. There are some handy "cheat sheets" available at http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/pdf/GURPS...CheatSheet.pdf

Ultimately, though, it's up to you how realistic you want to make it or how simplified you want to make it (like "That Other Game"). But you wanted to understand critical hits and seemed to be asking about more advanced rule options, so we've been providing that to you. But it's all optional. So long as you and your players are happy, it doesn't matter which way you do it (but do ensure your players understand how it works so they are not confused or upset by how it plays out).

Saved the cheat sheet because it's very very useful.

TBH I was asking about critical hits and ultimately had to ask about the rest because I came into the problem. How do you handle it when the armor of the target is mismatched with the weapon? I was writing my setting's weapons and armor values and I was always keeping the armor rating juuuuuuuust below the tier of weapon it was intended to defeat because I didn't know of any other way to ensure that at least something that can be done even if it requires rolling the limit or near the limit of a damage roll on the dice.

Of course, it was pointed out that impenetrable armor can be a interesting challenge. Take a -8 to half the armor values by shooting for a weak spot? Shoot him in the eye? Use environment? Ect.

Then we heatedly got into the weeds because I didn't mention how insanely lethal the weapons are which makes me feel like I have to always have my players pushed to the edge of the best armro that's available.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I don't think most movies underplay the damage of bullets? There are exceptions, but I'd typically expect a cinematic shooting to be one of:
-Winged him, mostly cosmetic.
-Instant death.
-Death following a few to several dramatic seconds. (In some cases, dramatic seconds with action, in others just near-death-speech drama.)
-No effect because the target is bulletproof.

If anything, the rarity of 'injured significantly but not that significantly' is probably a realism failure, though all the outcomes I listed are plausible ones...


The knockback of bullets is another story...

Even being "winged" can be extremely painful and a shock if it's more than a literal graze. But overall it's often underplayed as to how messy it is. "A through and through" can happen with a round that isn't designed to expand inside tissue, but there's still a large hole in you, massive damage to soft tissue or bone, a high chance of uncontrolled bleeding, possible hydrostatic shock if you accept that theory (I'm not at all convinced), high pain, and so on. Yeah, people can and have literally been shot without knowing it, but movies give you a solid hit, but little consequence when it suits them rather than a near miss or a genuine graze.

And, yeah, knockback is ridiculous as I think we all agree here!