Help a noobie understand critical hits

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

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?

Generally you shouldn't be shooting your players at all. Unless they're really disruptive, anyway. :P

But more seriously, a good reason to still list a weapon as 5d even if using blowthrough rules that limit it when used on humans is that GURPS doesn't assume you're only shooting humans. Maybe you're actually shooting a bear, an elephant, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, or something even larger. The houserules I linked earlier - which generally result in a lower blowthrough cap than the official blowthrough rules - have SM+2 targets with a blowthrough cap of 5d, so anything that size or larger is basically going to take full damage from a 5d pi rifle.

Now, there have been discussions in the past on if having both Armor Divisors and Wounding Modifiers is really necessary, considering they're largely the same effect just stated differently. Personally, I prefer them as they are, but I could see cause to pare things down to just one or the other.


As for your suggestion to set handguns at around 1d and rifles at around 2d(2), if you want anemic firearm damage in your setting that's certainly an option. As a player I would certainly find it bizarre that the advanced firearms in a cyberpunk world are so pitifully weak, but I'm not playing in your campaign, so as long as it works for your players, go for it.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

? 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.

It should be average damage: [dice×3.5+adds]×AD = DR

So armor that stops 9mm×19mm 2d+1 is DR 8

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

Everyone seems offended I would dare to pare down the weapon damage exactly as you recommended ;P.

I think people are just trying to steer you away from taking the hard way when there are easier solutions.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

The old (incredibly old) gurps cyberpunk book even mentions it saying most 150 point characters will be dead in a session.

The answer to that is to not make 150 pt characters.

In 4e your characters can start with as many character pts as the GM wants to give them. Look at the vampire in the 4e "Iconics" (p.320-321). The Baron is built on over 500 pts and he's not even really a heavy combat type.

He also has 24 HP (and these are based on ST and not HT). He also has IT:Unliving and Unkillable 2.

If you don't want your PCs to die like normal people you give them much more than normal abilities and pay for those with a high pt budget Your PCs will be happy if normals still die easily.

Id guess 400pts as a base. Maybe more.'

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

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?

Because some targets can soak that much damage without blow through.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

All that you described can just be done by assigning different roll values to the weapon as appropriate and then add a dr modifier.

No, it cannot.

2D+1 Pi- penetrates as much armor as 2D+1 Pi+, but after penetrating in causes lesser wounds.

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

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.

If your game focuses mostly on guns, and you're not letting players do fancy stuff like shoot enemies in the head or cut off arms and legs, you CAN just treat basic damage (what you roll after you hit) and injury (how many HP are lost) as the same thing, after subtracting DR.

If you do start getting into that fancy stuff, or run a game that's more medieval instead of gun-based, then those wounding multipliers start getting interesting. E.g. if you shoot a zombie in the torso and roll 5 damage, it's piercing damage, so because it's a zombie (Injury Tolerance: Unliving) it takes only 1/5 of that as injury. It loses 1 HP where a human would lose 5 HP. But if you shoot it in the head, which is harder, it has an extra +2 DR so there's only 3 points of penetrating damage after DR. But there's a x4 wounding modifier instead of x1/5 so it takes 12 points of injury instead of only 1!

The upshot is that those various wounding modifiers exist to reward players for roleplaying intelligently against various kinds of foes. If you always did the same injury with a weapon no matter who you hit and where, there wouldn't be a reason to headshot zombies or to cut the arms off a living statue instead of stabbing it in the "heart".

They exist to give players more interesting choices during combat.

P.S. There are also some advanced rules like knockback which are based on basic damage (before DR) and not on final injury, but I'm assuming that you're not using those or you wouldn't be asking.

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

No, it cannot.

2D+1 Pi- penetrates as much armor as 2D+1 Pi+, but after penetrating in causes lesser wounds.

Unless it's a headshot! Then they both use x4. Or vitals shot, like aiming for the heart, where they both use x3.

I know you know this but saying so for OP's sake.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

No, it cannot.

2D+1 Pi- penetrates as much armor as 2D+1 Pi+, but after penetrating in causes lesser wounds.

In an "armor divisors only" variant, 2d+1 pi- would instead be stated as 1d(2) pi (or 1d+1(2) pi, depending on how you round); meanwhile, 2d+1 pi+ would instead be written as something like 3d+1(0.7) pi (or 3d+2(0.7) pi, depending on how you round). I assume you'd maintain different attack types for purposes of things like Limited DR and the like, but you'd change everything to be a x1 WM at default (you'd still have boosted Injury for things like Vitals/Skull hits, Vulnerabilities, etc, but you wouldn't need to remember that cut is x1.5 and imp is x2, for example). That's going to ultimately end up with different results in a variety of situations, however - now what used to be pi- has markedly poorer performance with Skull and Vitals hits than what used to be pi++ (which isn't unrealistic, although I think the x4 difference between the two would greatly overstate the effect), blowthrough is messed up (unless you have the armor divisor play a role in that), etc. It's also going to be messy for melee weapons - a Thrusting Broadsword would no longer be thr+2 imp, sw+1 cut, but instead something like (thrx2)+4(0.5) imp, (swx1.5)+1(0.7) cut. Personally, I prefer having both armor divisors and wounding modifiers in play, but I don't have difficulty keeping in mind what each damage type has as a WM.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Varyon

In an "armor divisors only" variant, 2d+1 pi- would instead be stated as 1d(2) pi (or 1d+1(2) pi, depending on how you round); meanwhile, 2d+1 pi+ would instead be written as something like 3d+1(0.7) pi (or 3d+2(0.7) pi, depending on how you round).

Just as a note, dividing armor by 0.7 is going to slow down play a lot more than not dividing armor and halving injury after DR.

2d+1 pi+ hits a DR 5 armor, does an average 8 damage, 5 damage is resisted by armor, and the resulting 3 damage is multiplied by 1.5 and results in 4 injury is something I can calculate faster than I can type.

3d+2 pi hits a DR 5 armor, does an average 12 damage, and loses:
x = 5/0.7
x = 50/7
x = 7

7 damage to DR and the result is 5 injury is something I have to break down and calculate. And I'm lucky that 5 divides by 0.7 fairly cleanly, because that doesn't always happen with 7.

Colonel__Klink can do what he wants, of course, but I would strongly recommend running through a couple of combats and see how the system actually plays out before he decides to throw everything out and make up his own system. I'd recommend a 3 vs 3 unarmored fistfight, a 3 vs 3 swords and axes knights squabble, and a 3 vs 3 gun fight to get a better sense of how things play out. Give everyone all stats at 12, all skills at 14, and a variety of armor for the knights and gunfighters. Theorycrafting without play experience goes to weird places.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Colonel__Klink can do what he wants, of course, but I would strongly recommend running through a couple of combats and see how the system actually plays out before he decides to throw everything out and make up his own system. I'd recommend a 3 vs 3 unarmored fistfight, a 3 vs 3 swords and axes knights squabble, and a 3 vs 3 gun fight to get a better sense of how things play out. Give everyone all stats at 12, all skills at 14, and a variety of armor for the knights and gunfighters. Theorycrafting without play experience goes to weird places.

I think that's sound advice. My experience is that GURPS outcomes may be different than one anticipates without experience in running GURPS.

I've long remembered my second GURPS campaign, Unmoved Movers, where in one episode I had the PCs faced with a gunfight against a Texan soldier. I had given him HT 14. I hadn't realized that this meant that he had less than one chance in ten of either losing consciousness from injury or dying from severe injury. They kept shooting him and he just kept shooting back . . .

Which points, I suppose, to one other moral: High HT is your friend. It lets you go on fighting when you're wounded, it lets you avoid dying when you're fully negative on HP, and it lets you heal faster after the fight.

A cheaper form of insurance in a cinematic campaign would be to have all the player characters take a couple of levels of Hard to Kill. That lets them dramatically fall down from their wounds—and then regain consciousness when their friends have won the battle.