Rescaling GURPS HP – some car thoughts

As as was driving in to work, I was thinking about the relationship between ST, HP, and damage. One of the potential solutions people have talked about to bring fisticuff damage, especially swing damage, in line with firearms has been to double HP and DR scores, add a (2) to all pi damage, and call it a day.

My post today is not about that. 

It’s really just a realization that one of the impacts of having reasonable HP and mass relationships is that doubling the HP that a character has very, very much widens the range of HP scores that are game-relevant. 

If you look at most humanoids in most games (not all games, and not all humanoids, of course. This is GURPS) they’ll tend to run from the 80-400 lb range. 

Female champion gymnasts run from about 80-125 lbs. Pro jockeys tend to be in the 100-120 lb. range. So on the low end, that’s not bad. 

William Perry, Adventurer at Large

Andre the Giant clocked in at 500-650 lbs, depending on the source. So there’s an argument for going even higher.

William “The Refrigerator” Perry, an American Pro Football player, was 335-385 lbs, but could dunk a basketball and ran a 100-yd dash in about 11 sec (Sprint Move 9, or regular Move 7.5). This is more in line with a “professional” GURPS adventurer.

At the normal scale, the gymnast is going to be a low of 9HP high of 10HP. Jockeys will all fall in the 10HP range. Most men in the 150-200lbs range are all 11 HP. The Refrigerator is 14 HP. Andre clocks in at 16 or 17.

Parting Shot

Doubling the HP totals means your low end gymnast is 17 HP, but the high end is 20HP. Jockeys are still all going to be 20HP (more or less), but from 90-150 lbs (for example) you now get HP from 18 to 21, and in the adventuring range doubles (as expected).

I like that this carries with it the potential for more differentiation in a lot of things. Characters are the heart of the game, and from a “what makes for a sensible HP number for various folks” perspective, having a wider range of useful values is good.

From a damage and DR perspective, now we have the identity 20d(2) = DR 140 = penetration of one inch of RHA steel instead of 20d = DR70 = penetration of one inch of RHA steel. That keeps all of the armor and gun damage in the game where it should be.

It would provide more differentiation using The Deadly Spring for bows, too, so that you don’t have to get crazy-town increases in draw weight to increase bow penetration by a point (assuming you don’t also give arrows pi damage, which I would not), since the resolution is higher.

This isn’t something I’d just go do if I started a game tomorrow. But I couldn’t help notice that the increased resolution when translating weight (and Basic Lift, a topic of recent interest) to HP was pretty friendly.