Super Edge Protection: Foreword

A brief foreword: In my efforts to develop and create a series of rules to better allow GURPS characters to have interesting armored swordfights, I have run into much opposition from others about the basic facts of how the system functions with regards to armor. Thus, before posting any rule that complains about how GURPS' DR systems are lacking and how I propose to change and fix them as optional rules, I felt that I should provide some background for my frustrations with the system and explain my rationale for my house rules.This post contains no rules - it should instead be considered a primer for the next part, which will contain the actual rules that I justify the need for here.

GURPS Damage Reduction is great. With the way DR normally works in GURPS, the 'bite' of most injuries is far reduced, allowing an armored character to keep his feet in the face of unlucky defense rolls. Armor is a huge force multiplier even in the most basic of GURPS games, even before Low-Tech came along to add one of the most fun-to-play-with armor systems I've seen in a tabletop RPG. However, even with Low-Tech's improvements on the system, there are still a few issues with it that make it really difficult to have a really interesting, engaging swordfight where armor is involved.

First and foremost, since DR is just a flat subtraction of damage, the result of someone being hit in armor is usually fairly predictable, barring any critical hits: Either the armor holds and the user takes no damage, the armor fails and lets some tiny amount of damage through. Usually, assuming a DR 6 plate and people with spears or swords and ST 10, this means that each party is doing 1d6+1 imp, giving them a 1-in-6 chance of doing a single point of damage past the armor. (This grows more likely as ST increases, of course.)

This means that between two combatants with their bodies covered head-to-toe in plates, fighting becomes a senseless whack-a-thon, with each party trying desperately to get a few points of damage past his adversary's armor. This can be partially fixed with the usage of Harsh Realism - Armor Gaps from Low-Tech (which I would highly recommend), but those gaps are extremely difficult to target, so oftentimes it will indeed come down to who can get enough attacks through the armor first. If you are playing a strong person, or the NPC you're fighting is a strong person, he may try to ignore gaps and simply hit you hard enough to 'crack' the armor, over and over again.

Now, let's stop and think about this for a minute in terms of the real world: If you are wearing a metal plate on your chest, and someone stabs you with a spear with his body weight behind it, is it really likely that the plate will fail and crumple inwards, but only the tippy-tip of the spear will penetrate for two points of injury? (1 point of base damage x 2 for imp) Armor usually fails in a much more 'cleanly' binary fashion - either the armor holds and little if any damage is sustained, or the armor experiences catastrophic failure and blows inwards, stopping very little, if any, of the energy of the attack. Taking a single point of basic damage through armor is a bit ridiculous. There are very few times where something will penetrate a metal plate, but won't have enough energy to penetrate the flesh underneath more than an inch. 'Death by peritonitis' is really quite unlikely.

You could say that the one-or-two-or-three damage penetrations that are occurring are really more like blunt trauma or non-penetrations, but with the way GURPS handles things mechanically, that doesn't make any sense. If there is poison on the spear when it does a single point of damage past your four-thousand-dollar plate cuirass, it's now in your bloodstream. You're vulnerable to infection. If you're using the Bleeding rules, you're now bleeding. By all aspects, mechanically, the enemy got through your armor.

We also have a second problem with creating an interesting armored swordfight in GURPS: The fact that when someone is struck in armor in GURPS, they take no blunt trauma. Armor is usually very good at preventing you from dying, but it can't simply make energy 'go away' - if you are struck by a polehammer to your midriff, all the energy in the blow hasn't gone away. It's simply been spread out across your body. Some of it turns into recoil, some of it goes into the armor, and some of it goes into a wide swathe of your bodily tissues. GURPS has almost no way of simulating this. No matter how or where or when you get hit, if the opponent doesn't roll enough damage to get past your DR, you take no damage.

"But wait!" You might say. "We have a blunt trauma rule already - it's in Campaigns!" Well, yes, we do. That rule allows you to do a single point of blunt trauma for every 5 points of damage that is blocked by the armor. Unfortunately, this rule is completely insufficient - it comes up in low-tech games so infrequently that it may as well not exist. Why? Well, the simple fact is - most low tech armors don't have DR over 5. All those flexible leather jerkins and cloth armors are functionally indifferent from rigid armor, since their flexible nature coming up in actual play is a physical impossibility (aside from the layering rules, at least). Heavy mail has a DR of 5, so if you roll 5 points of damage on the button, you get to do a single point of crushing damage to the target. Whoopee!

On top of that, the blunt trauma rule only applies to flexible armor, so it is a complete nonissue for plate armor, as in our example. Perhaps you see why I feel this rule is insufficient.

Finally, we have a pretty simple third problem: Thrusts have no advantage over cuts. In GURPS, thrusts do universally less damage thanks to not using leverage, which also means that they get through armor poorer than swings. This means that your best option for getting through armor is to swing your sword, not thrust it. This doesn't make any sense, because as the Poem of the Pell states:

And to thrust is better than to strike;
The striker is deluded many ways,
The sword may not through steel and bones bite,
The entrails are covered in steel and bones,
But with a thrust, anon your foe is forlorn;
Two inches pierced harm more
Than cut of edge, though it wounds sore.

Or, in plain English: Thrusts are way better at getting through armor than strikes, because they concentrate energy down onto a single point rather than spreading it out over an edge. GURPS also doesn't recognize any conditions where it is easier to penetrate armor, such as when a target is laying on his back, where he cannot recoil.

How do we fix all of this? These are the problems as I understand them:

• 'Death by peritonitis' - Armor only lets a few points of damage through at a time. It never fails catastrophically.
• Armor is much weaker than it was historically, and it's far too easy to get a penetration in general.
• There is no way to hurt or stun people through their armor without 'penetrating' it, mechanically.
• There is no advantage given to penetrating armor in any given position or circumstance, including when doing impaling instead of cutting, or when the target is prone.

While I haven't fully solved any of the problems that led me to create this post, I feel like the 'Super Edge Protection' system that I've come up with does do a good job at meeting these objectives and making armored swordfights more fun. The rules in question will be in my next post.