Hurting things in GURPS: towards a solution?

So, I tinkered.  I tried to make damage somehow related to the skill roll (a la Harnmaster and my home-brew Runequest).  I tried to convince myself that what GURPS really needed was polyhedra dice.  But I abandoned that idea.  Some things are sacred.  At one point, I changed the whole skill mechanic from 'roll 3d under a target' to 'Roll 3d, add a skill modifier and compare to target number.'  And I tried, endlessly, to adjust the Swing and Thrust damage table.

Finally, I hit upon something that seems to be a solution.  For now.

I realised that GURPS's strength was a weakness.  The revelation came from a desire to simplify.  I'd been entranced by the cutting / impaling distinction and had shamelessly nabbed it for my homebrew Runequest.  But - as I tinkered with that set of rules, I became frustrated with the cascading multipliers I had foolishly built into that system.

You hit someone with a dagger, right?  So, daggers are small weapons, and in my rules that means the basic damage is halved.  But they are cutty-stabby weapons as well, so the damage that penetrates armour is doubled.  Which seems like a lot of palaver just to slaughter a Goblin.

My solution was to make the most common type of damage (Cutting, in my homebrew) the one that is not modified.

I realised this could also be applied to GURPS.  Most damage in GURPS is Cutting or Impaling.  Few people wander about with maces in GURPS, because they aren't awesome like axes or swords are awesome.

• Crushing damage - whatever gets through armour is halved.
• Cutting damage - whatever gets through armour is not modified.
• Impaling - whatever gets through armour is doubled.

That solved one problem, to a degree.  But the problem of the odd progression of the damage table  remained.

I spent an awful lot of time trying to come up with a progression that allowed thrusting damage to remain substantial enough to remain a valid tactic.  It proved very hard, until one day I realised something that should have been very, very obvious.

There was no need for two damage values.

All I had to do was come up with a damage progression for Thrusting damage.  Swinging damage could be one and a half times that.

Coupled with my new conception for Crushing, cutting and Impaling damage, the whole tactical array fell into place.  Swing your sword, and the swing gives you a decent chance of getting through armour, but nothing beyond that.  Stab with it, and you will be less likely to get through armour, but more likely to do significant damage if you do.

And because they were both linked to the same value, there would always be that tactical tension - more now, or potentially more later?

From there - after years of abjuring Steve Jackson Games for unleashing this torment on me - it was relatively simple to draw up a new damage progression system.  The only significant innovation was banding Strength in twos, rather than having an increase for every level of Strength.

(Which might seem to devalue Strength - but more on that, later!)

The new table looks like this:

ST	Damage
1, 2	1d-3
3-5	1d-2
6-8	1d-1
9-11	1d
12-14	1d+1
15-17	1d+2
18-20	2d+1
21-23	2d+2
24-26	3d+1
27-29	3d+2
30+	4d+1

(The formula, FWIW, is fairly simple.  Starting at 1d-3, every three full points of ST adds +1.  When the total adds reaches +3, a new 1d-1 is added.)

It is not without flaws.  Some may object to the lower 'resolution,' with only a lousy +1 difference between ST 9 and ST 14.   But that (may) be addressed in my next tweak.  And it seems consistent and produces values roughly in accordance (well, slightly higher than) the original Thrusting column (Where ST 9 gave 1d-2 damage and ST 14 offered just 1d!).

Hurting Things In GURPS: The Problem

I started playing GURPS - the Generic Universal Role-playing system - in the late 80s.  Adulthood intervened for a while, but recently, I got my hands on the bewilderingly massive 4th Edition rulebook; and even more recently, the more restrained 3rd Edition I played in my youth.

GURPS is a supremely clever system.  It introduced me to points based character design; character advantages and disadvantages; a universal system that could cope with any setting;  a mouth-watering, massive skill list.  And not a level or a character class in sight!

I played GURPS for years.  Inevitably, I uncovered flaws, like the odd way that you can sustain damage up to negative Health; and from that point, and every five points there after, you have to make a survival role.  Why every five points?  Why is five more deathy than 4?

Or the single second combat rounds.  Fine for combat with firearms; less so for sword and sorcery combat.  Everyone seems to move at great speed and acts with impossibly acute comprehension of fast moving events around them.

But the thing that bugged me most was an oddity in one of the best rules of all - the hand to hand damage table.

One of the other things that GURPS did differently to other systems was hand weapon damage.  Most other systems based damage on the weapon.  A dagger might do 1d4 damage, a short sword 1d6, a broadsword 1d8, regardless who was waving it about.  The user's strength might add something, maybe a +1 or (as in Runequest) a d4 or d6, but it was the weapon, not the wielder, that determined how much hurting was caused; whereas in GURPS, damage was based on the strength of whoever was holding the sword.

The system also divided damage into two categories, thrusting and swinging - taking a swing at someone with a stick did more damage than poking them with the same stick.

The damage table evolved, from edition to edition, but looks a bit like this:

ST	Thrust	Swing
5	1d-5	1d-5
6	1d-4	1d-4
7	1d-3	1d-3
8	1d-3	1d-2
9	1d-2	1d-1
10	1d-2	1d
11	1d-1	1d+1
12	1d-1	1d+2
13	1d	2d-1
14	1d	2d
15	1d+1	2d+1
16	1d+1	2d+2
17	1d+2	3d-1
18	1d+2	3d
19	2d-1	3d+1
20	2d-1	3d+2

(d stands for d6.  One feature of GURPS is that it only uses six sided dice.)

You can see it is a thing of singular beauty. Damage increases as strength increases, a supremely realistic idea.  A wimp with ST of 8 should not have anywhere near the potential to inflict pain like  a bruiser with ST 18.  In most systems, there isn't really much difference.  In GURPS, the difference is huge - the former would do between 0 and 4 points damage, the latter between 3 and 18.

A further rule created an extra tactical element.  Damage was further described as Crushing, Cutting or Impaling.  Any Cutting damage (sharp bladed things, like axes) that got through armour was multiplied by 1.5.  Any Impaling damage (Sharp pokey things, like spears) was multiplied by 2!

Impaling damage was usually based on Thrust and Cutting damage was usually based on swing - you poke at someone with a spear, and swipe at them with an axe.  So the spear (based on thrusting damage) may do less basic damage than the swung axe; but the spear may ultimately cause more hurt, once the imapling bonus is taken into account.

It was an ingenious idea that cancelled the tendency to choose, automatically, whatever weapon that lets you roll the most or biggest die.

BUT I found a couple of flaws with these ideas.

I couldn't get my pedantic head around the way that, at some points, it was possible for a strong character to have a lower minimum damage than a weaker character.  Look at the swinging damage at ST 16 and 17.  Strength 16 gives you 2d+2.  Minimum damage 4.  ST 17 gives you 3d-1.  Minimum damage 2.  How does that make sense?

Sure, the average and maximum damages progress logically - the top end numbers always get bigger.  But I assume any character of mine will be rolling badly, so perhaps I pay undue attention to what is happening at the lower end of the range of possibilities.  Only things hitting me ever roll well.

Oddly, while a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to refine / improve / over-complicate the GURPS damage system, no-one seems to worked up about this particular aspect.  Maybe they have enjoyed better luck than my characters.

Then I became aware of a second problem.

Some weapons, like swords, could do thrusting or swinging damage.  You can whack an Orc with the blade, or poke him with the tip.  I loved this tactical element - if the orc was wearing armour, you went for the swing so as to blast through it; if not, you stabbed them to get the increased damage from impaling.

But ... but ... sometimes the difference between the amount of damage made thrusting pointless (pun intentional).  A thrust does less basic damage than a swing; while you got to double it, you still got to add half again to your swinging damage.  This blunted (pun intentional, again) the tactical element described earlier.  Swinging was a higher base roll, and still got augmented.  Faced with with a heavily armoured foe, you would take a swing.  Faced with an completely nude foe, you'd take a swing.  In most cases, wouldn't make sense any other way.

Part of the problem stems from the decision to ratchet up Swing damage more rapidly than Thrust.  Thrust increases every two steps.  Swing every step.  But given GURPS's admirable refusal to use anything other than six sided dice, it has made a grand mechanic fairly redundant.

I will explore some possible variations In Posts To Come, but I await comments from my readership with baited breath.

Founding

I've set up this blog to record my various thoughts and ideas around role-playing games and other hobby-ish stuff that interests me.  I'm based in Palmerston North, because someone has to be, which is why the blog name is the way it is.

I'm mostly a GURPS and Runequest player.  I have a horror of character classes, levels and alignments.  I'm also a compulsive tinkerer with rules.  I need somewhere to collect the results of this unseemly habit.  I don't mind sharing my branes with the rest of the world, so it might as well be somewhere public.

Or maybe no one will ever visit these lonely pages and I will never post anything.  In which case, consider this:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.