Can a Slam be Parried?

[Inky]

Basic Set seems a bit confusing about whether a Slam, or one of the various other moves that use the same rules as Slams such as Flying Tackles and Pounces, can be Parried or not.

The Slam rules on Basic Set page 371 say

Your foe may block, dodge, or parry (but your body counts as a heavy weapon; see Parrying Heavy Weapons, p. 376).

But the "Parrying Heavy Weapons" rules say

For the purpose of these rules, treat a punch, kick, bite, etc. as a weapon with an effective weight of 1/10 the attacker’s ST. Use his full ST if he made a slam, flying tackle, pounce, or shield rush!

and

Regardless of the weight of your weapon, if you are parrying unarmed or using a one-handed weapon, you cannot parry a weapon heavier than your Basic Lift – or twice BL, if using a two-handed weapon. Attempts to parry anything heavier fail automatically; whether or not your weapon breaks, the attack sweeps it aside and damages you normally. If your weapon does not break, you drop it; if you are unarmed, you are knocked back one yard (make a DX roll to avoid falling over).

Which seems to imply that, since with a Slam the attacker's body is counted as the weapon and is usually going to weigh a lot more than twice your Basic Lift, you can't parry a Slam. Unless that's not what it means. Anyone know?

The context was I was wondering what you'd call this rather silly move from Girl Genius in GURPS terms. (Besides a rather drastic case of "Talking is a Free Action"! :-D ) I thought it might be a Flying Tackle and a Parry, but I'm not very well up on the complicated bits of GURPS combat rules.
(It's pretty confusingly drawn, but it seems like what's meant to be happening in the pictures is that Vole (the blue guy) hurls himself through the air and Gil grabs him in mid-air and whams him against a table).

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Inky

Which seems to imply that, since with a Slam the attacker's body is counted as the weapon and is usually going to weigh a lot more than twice your Basic Lift, you can't parry a Slam. Unless that's not what it means. Anyone know?

ST 10 has a Basic Lift of 20 meaning you could use a 1-handed parry to stop a Slam from someone with ST 20, so it's something which probably won't come up unless there's a huge difference in ST.

I think a Pyramid article somewhere suggested a tweak for this but I forget where

Shield Rush is an interesting situation since Basic Set shields were heavier (this was lowered in Low Tech) so a Shield Bash using the shield's weight would weirdly be harder to parry than a Shield Rush which combined both the shield and the user's weight.

I've never liked the hard-capped system on parrying, I'd rather a kind of soft-capped system where you just get progressive penalties, either to the parry roll or maybe in how much damage you can reduce the incoming attack by.

Originally Posted by Inky

The context was I was wondering what you'd call this rather silly move from Girl Genius in GURPS terms.

(It's pretty confusingly drawn, but it seems like what's meant to be happening in the pictures is that Vole (the blue guy) hurls himself through the air and Gil grabs him in mid-air and whams him against a table).

Just looks like a tall guy trying to set up a grapple to me.

[Inky]

Ah! So a number of lbs equal to the attacker's ST, rather than the actual body weight corresponding to their ST. That makes more sense.

Just looks like a tall guy trying to set up a grapple to me.

Looked at it again, could also be that, yeah. (Vole is excessively tall). If that was the case, Gil somehow swinging him up over his head from a standing start would be even more startling, especially if he's as big as he would have to be to have his feet on the ground in that shot, but then Gil apparently has some kind of berserker thing going on in this scene and normal rules may not apply. Honestly, it's a pretty mixed-up scene - people mostly seem to be facing the wrong way anyway - and it seems like the only thing you can be sure of is that people are fighting loudly :-D

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Plane

ST 10 has a Basic Lift of 20 meaning you could use a 1-handed parry to stop a Slam from someone with ST 20

Which is clearly absurd.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Plane

ST 10 has a Basic Lift of 20 meaning you could use a 1-handed parry to stop a Slam from someone with ST 20, so it's something which probably won't come up unless there's a huge difference in ST.

I think a Pyramid article somewhere suggested a tweak for this but I forget where

My group set the effective weight for a slam to attacker's BL/2, and the effective weight for unarmed attacks to BL/20. It keeps the same values for ST 10, but it makes stronger creatures hard to parry.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

My group set the effective weight for a slam to attacker's BL/2, and the effective weight for unarmed attacks to BL/20. It keeps the same values for ST 10, but it makes stronger creatures hard to parry.

I like this... consider it yoinked.