When do punches become large piercing?

[Bruno]

Originally from the Slam Damage Is Weak thread:

Originally Posted by JCurwen3

I've wondered this before, but if you have the Move and SM to hit like a bullet... shouldn't there be a point when your slam counts as some kind of piercing damage?

Waaaaay back in 3e on the GURPSNet mailing list we chatted about how much ST do you need before someone punching is doing bullet-type damage. 3e of course had bullets doing a heavily-modified version of crushing rather than their own damage type, in 4e it would be large piercing. IIRC the verdict for 3e was around ST 80-100ish; when converting that to 4e I'd convert based on damage, not lifting.

It's still an interesting question, and we have more regular ways of determining bullet-y stuff in 4e now, so it would be an interesting thought experiment to run again. But off topic for this thread, so I'll go start another one.

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Now, obviously there's techniques in GURPS to turn punching into piercing damage. I'm not talking about changing your striking technique: I'm interested in if there's a threshold where a "traditional" punch should start being considered a large piercing attack. . . and perhaps you'd have to use a technique to not do large-piercing.

This would probably also be the point where a super (villain, monster, anti-hero, whatever) starts punching holes in people, rather than just smashing them.

[B9anders]

Although I do like the idea of gorily punching a hole through someone's ribcage rather than punching him into the horizon, I do think it can be treated as a difference in technique and simply use Lethal Strike for it. Supers that badass will tend to have karate over brawling anyway.

At least I think that's the way to go for genres where bodies flying is the norm.


In settings where the genre convention favours the gory... I'd probably take a look at overpenetration as a starting point.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by B9anders

Although I do like the idea of gorily punching a hole through someone's ribcage rather than punching him into the horizon, I do think it can be treated as a difference in technique and simply use Lethal Strike for it. Supers that badass will tend to have karate over brawling anyway.

At least I think that's the way to go for genres where bodies flying is the norm.


In settings where the genre convention favours the gory... I'd probably take a look at overpenetration as a starting point.

I don't think RAW allows for overpenetration to apply to torso and body hit locations, but I do it as a house-rule. I use the large-area injury rules for the threshold where overpenetration would no longer apply, but I'm still experimenting.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

I don't think RAW allows for overpenetration to apply to torso and body hit locations, but I do it as a house-rule. I use the large-area injury rules for the threshold where overpenetration would no longer apply, but I'm still experimenting.

There's no overpenetration for vitals hits, but the original overpenetration rules from HIgh Tech apply specifically and explicitly to the torso, IIRC.

[ClayDowling]

Given that the situation is completely absurd, I'd just house rule it to fit the genre you're trying to emulate.

If it helps for comparison at all, an eight pound cannon ball is about the same size as a large fist. Eight pounders were well known to carry off the occasional head. So when the damage gets to roughly that level, start changing it to pi++

[Figleaf23]

I'm not as science-minded as many other posters' here, so perhaps there's a flaw with this analysis, but it seems to me that in RW physics the answer would involve taking both the composition of the striker and strikee bodies and their surfaces into account. Accordingly it would be difficult to find an answer within the framework of GURPS damage systems as they are currently structured.

[Figleaf23]

A prodd does pi damage, but a slingshot does cr.

Going by that, the threshold is about 45m/s.