B-Scale: Damage That Scales from Tardigrades to Kaiju
Mission X introduces the “B-scale” logarithmic damage system. The “B” stands for Basic – it’s the same clean progression every GURPS player already knows and loves from the Size and Speed/Range Table. +1B ≈ ×1.5 incapacitation potential. +6B = exactly ×10.
It presents one elegant scale – one GURPS veterans are intimately familiar with – that works perfectly from a housecat’s swipe all the way up to a space-kraken or orbital strike.
Robustness and the B-scale damage are now independent of ST but explicitly incorporate Size Modifier, the results scale cleanly in both directions. Guns feel like guns. Armor feels protective for threats in a certain range, dominant above it and useless below. Melee remains appropriately threatening at close range.
Injury and wounding effects are described by a wound Severity condition. Wound status ranges from a Sev 0 scratch to “Frederickburger” at Sev 12. At all scales, Sev 0 represents less than 1/10 of what GURPS Fourth Edition would call Hit Points of damage, while Sev 12 is “you just took more than 10× your starting HP in one blow.” Sev 6 risks unconsciousness; Sev 8 is a mortal wound.
Let’s unpack that. There’s a direct map from the typical points of damage that you see in GURPS Fourth Edition to the B-scale values. A 9mm pistol, which is pretty much the definitional scale of 2d+2 pi in Fourth Edition, becomes 5B+3 pi in Mission X. What that means is that the typical wound is Sev 5 on an unarmored, SM 0, Robustness 0 target. But that +3? You’ll be rolling a “Damage Variability roll” if you choose (and players generally will choose to do so, and should). The results of that roll can shift damage down by -2 Severity, or up by 2. That’s basically “half damage to double damage” in terms of impact, and somewhat mirrors what happens on a d6 if you roll a 1 (30% of average damage) or a 6 (about 170%). it shifts it up a bit, but the flavor is there. That “+3” adds to the 3d die roll for damage variability, and is effectively – on the average – a bit like +1 per die. So the worst you can roll with this is a 6, which is -1 Severity. The typical roll goes from 10.5 to 13.5 … still +0, no change. But even a tetch above average, a roll of 11, hits Severity 6, and with a roll of 14 or more, will do Severity 7.
Sev 5 is like taking 7 HP on a 10HP human, Sev 6 is like 10 HP, and Sev 7 like 15.
Armor is a quick compare. Is the protective value of the armor equal or more than the penetration Severity of the wound (after DVR)? Ping! If the armor is four or more less, on this scale the wound doesn’t even drop. In the middle it’s a 1-for-1 reduction in wound potential.
If you know my work, this is what happens when you combine “Armor as Dice” (from Armor Revisited, Pyr 3/34) with Conditional Injury (from Pyr 3/120). Instead of having to calculate everything, all the numbers are presented in that schema.
This also means that a lot of the evil math in guns, a lot of x1.5 and divide by two, but we don’t like the intermediate case (for, say, something between pi and pi-) because that’s “multiply damage by about 0.7). But in Mission X, with the Severity scale mapped to the Size and Speed/Range Table, you’ll see that x1.5 becomes +1 to Severity. x3 for the vitals is also +3 Severity, and you get a special bonus to the Skull location, at +4 Severity (which is more akin to x5 damage). Armor divisors become armor subtractors. A (2) armor divisor is just -2 to the armor value; treating “hard steel” penetrators is just an AD of -1 instead of some thing where you take the base damage, multiply by 0.7, but then apply a (2) to the result.
Much easier. Faster at the table … and validated faster in playtest.
Mission X delivers the depth and believability of GURPS with infinitely-scalable damage that matches the genre’s scope – from gritty close-quarters horror to galaxy-spanning sci-fi action. Nano-bot swarms and star destroyers resolve with the same mechanics and sensible outcomes.
Over the next weeks I’ll be making posts talking about the different chapters, the game development, what MX is … and what it’s not. Please stay tuned! If you want to follow on Kickstarter so that you will be on board immediately when it launches, please click here to jump over to the promo page!
