"Less-lethal" Gurps

[GM Joe]

Lots of great suggestions so far.

I'd also add that making sure the bad guys retreat when appropriate lowers lethality. Rarely does anything in real life continue fighting in the face of certain defeat. Keeping in mind that the original meaning of "decimate" was to take out 1/10 of the enemy forces helps me.

[DanHoward]

We find that it is pretty hard to die in GURPS already - PC death is a lot rarer than any other system we've played. Incapacitation is fairly common but not death. The simplest way to make it even harder to die is to not use the bleeding rules.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by SteampengMK-1

I was wondering, is there a way to make gurps less-lethal, as in how to lower the damage of weapons so it isn't a grantee insta kill if it was aimed at a PC?

Are you mostly thinking about guns? What sort of setting are you playing in?

Most important, what sort of things do you want the PCs to be able to do? Ignore snipers? Charge into machine-gun fire?

[somecallmetim]

The "second wind" rules options can allow characters to survive multiple damaging scenes as long as they have enough character points (or a pool of "drama points" that can only be spent for second wind uses or Luck-style rerolls). It helps with those post-Die Hard style action scenarios, where the characters keep going after multiple highly damaging scenes. Ignoring crippling wound results and critical hits on PCs works well too.

[Propjock]

Do you want PCs to be able to survive point blank shots?

Personally, I favour Action Point type saves where PCs can buy modifiers to rolls that allow them to successfully block/dodge/parry. Another thing I've considered (but never tried) was that anything that would blow through your all your positive HP in one round (including hits from multiple attackers) just takes you to zero. Damage taken beyond zero happens as normal.

None of this is particularly "realistic" but it does give PCs a chance to re-evaluate their life choices when things go wrong.

[Lord Azagthoth]

Large damage does not always mean the PC takes all damage. A tight beam energy weapon could do several dicex6 of damage while a human only takes a small portion of it. he has a small hole through his muscles but the excess damage is still in the beam that passed through him and hit another target behind him.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Lord Azagthoth

Large damage does not always mean the PC takes all damage. A tight beam energy weapon could do several dicex6 of damage while a human only takes a small portion of it. he has a small hole through his muscles but the excess damage is still in the beam that passed through him and hit another target behind him.

Technically, the Body Hits rule from High Tech does not apply to tight-beam burning damage.

It should, almost certainly, but having it do so is a house rule.