Adjusting Swing Damage in Dungeon Fantasy

Inspired by a comment I made in response to "Noodling around with DR in Dungeon Fantasy."

In every edition of GURPS, there are two major types of low-tech damage: swing/cutting, representing swung swords and axes and other weapons that act as levers to multiply the user's strength; and thrust/impaling, representing spears and rapiers and other sharp weapons that do not have the same leverage effect. Armor absorbs damage, and the resulting value is (usually) multiplied by x1.5 for cutting weapons and by x2 for impaling weapons to produce injury. (There are other types of damage, but most weapons are one of these two types).

In theory, thrust/impaling weapons are better against unarmored targets, and swing/cutting weapons are better against armored targets. In practice, the base damage for a swing/cutting weapon is at least 50% better than thrust/impaling weapon, so swing/cutting weapons almost always do more damage. 4th edition's revision of Weapon Master (to add per-die bonus damage) and addition of Injury Tolerances (representing various things like doors or skeletons that are more resistant to impaling attacks) magnified the superiority of swing/cutting weapons: a ST13 Weapon Master gets +4 damage when swinging his sword, but needs to be ST19 to get the same bonus damage when thrusting. And if that Weapon Master has to face skeletons, golems, and other common monsters of Dungeon Fantasy, then not only does his thrust/impaling blow do less base damage, it does even less injury than normal. His swing/cutting blow does more damage and gets full x1.5 injury past armor.

In serious DF games, all this has the unfortunate tendency of homogenizing weapons to swing/cutting weapons like swords and axes, with the occasional flail. Spears are not cheap, versatile weapons; they're the weapons of people who don't understand how the game mechanics work. All swashbucklers end up using Edged Rapiers, as these versatile weapons combine swing/cutting damage with fencing parries and a flexible 2-hex Reach. All serious fighters need ST13, if not ST17, and need to be Weapon Masters to get that bonus +4 or +6 damage.

All that has some weird secondary effects. A ST17 Barbarian does 3d+2 (average 12.5) with his oversized ax, while a ST14 knight/weapon master does 2d+7 (average 14) with his broadsword and gets better parries and Rapid Strikes. Second line combatants, like thieves and clerics, can't begin to compete with the DR necessary to challenge the strong weapon masters. Monsters with reasonably low DR that can be penetrated by a ST12 cleric's ax have effectively 0 DR against the knight. And on the other side, monsters with high ST and swing/cutting weapons (such as stone golems or ogres) become extremely swingy: very few delvers wear enough armor to absorb or meaningfully reduce a 3d+6 cu attack, so delvers either get through a combat unscathed or get splattered.

The entire situation is very unsatisfactory.

What's the Real Problem?

The swing damage chart goes up too fast compared to thrusting damage. Each point of ST increases swing damage by 1, but it takes 2 points of ST to increase thrust. So while a ST10 guy with a broadsword does 1d+1 cutting and 1d impaling, and has some reasonable choices for strike type to make depending on his target's armor, a ST17 guy does 3d cutting versus 1d+4 impaling, and there's rarely any reason to thrust. Up to about ST14, and without Weapon Master, the ST table works. Past that, it rapidly spirals into unreason.

What are Some Solutions?

There's been a lot of suggested fixes for this: limit striking ST for humans to 14 (unsatisfactory); create a very complicated ST table (too complicated in play); doubling DR for armor (complicated and unsatisfactory). None of them have been very successful. Most of these solutions require even more rules fixes and carve-outs, such as adding armor divisors for spears or special rules for dwarves or whatever else. They don't address the fundamental problem, which is that swing damage goes up in value too quickly as ST increases.

Reducing Swing Scaling

The solution I'm proposing is fairly simple: get rid of the +1 to swing damage for every +1 to ST. Instead, the swing damage table goes up at the same rate as the thrust table: +1 to swing damage for every +2 to ST. Use the following table:

ST	Thrust	Swing
10	1d-2	1d
11	1d-1	1d
12	1d-1	1d+1
13	1d	1d+1
14	1d	1d+2
15	1d+1	1d+2
16	1d+1	2d-1
17	1d+2	2d-1
18	1d+2	2d
19	2d-1	2d

The progression should readily apparent: +1 to swing damage on even ST scores, and +1 to thrust damage on odd ST scores, with Xd+3 converting to (X+1)d-1.

How does the new table work in practice? Here's the damage for an ordinary thrusting broadsword for various STs, without and with Weapon Master:

Broadsword Damage for various STs, using the old and new tables

ST				Old Swing Damage	New Swing Damage	Thrust Damage	Weapon Master Swing Damage	Weapon Master Thrust Damage
10				1d+1	1d+1	1d	1d+3	1d+2
11				1d+2	1d+1	1d+1	1d+4	1d+3
12				1d+3	1d+2	1d+1	1d+5	1d+3
13				2d	1d+2	1d+2	2d+4	1d+4
14				2d+1	1d+3	1d+2	2d+5	1d+4
15				2d+2	1d+3	1d+3	2d+6	1d+5
16				2d+3	2d	1d+3	2d+7	1d+5
17				3d	2d	1d+4	3d+6	1d+6
18				3d+1	2d+1	1d+4	3d+7	2d+5
19				3d+2	2d+1	2d+1	3d+8	2d+5

And on on the high end, here's the amount of injury past armor for a ST17 attacker versus various DRs, again without and with Weapon Master.


Broadsword Damage past armor by DR for ST 17

DR	Old Sw/cu	Old Thr/im	Old Sw/cu WM	Old Thr/im WM	New Sw/cu	New Thr/im	New Sw/cu WM	New Thr/im WM
Average Damage	3d (10.5)	1d+4 (7.5)	3d+6  (16.5)	1d+6  (9.5)	2d (7)	1d+4 (7.5)	2d+4 (11)	1d+6 (9.5)
0	15.75	15	24.75	19	10.5	15	14.25	19
1	14.25	13	23.25	17	9	13	12.75	17
2	12.75	11	21.75	15	7.5	11	11.25	15
3	11.25	9	20.25	13	6	9	9.75	13
4	9.75	7	18.75	11	4.5	7	8.25	11
5	8.25	5	17.25	9	3	5	6.75	9
6	6.75	3	15.75	7	1.5	3	5.25	7
7	5.25	1	14.25	5	0	1	3.75	5
8	3.75	0	12.75	3	0	0	2.25	3
9	2.25	0	11.25	1	0	0	0.75	1
10	0.75	0	9.75	0	0	0	0	0

This last table brings out some of the points I mentioned above: under the normal rules, there's almost no any reason to use an impaling attack, since cutting attacks always do more damage. The new table makes thrusting attacks much more valuable: they're higher damage in almost all instances, though with the usual caveat that targets with Injury Tolerance rapidly reduce the value of impaling damage.

Implications

On the positive side:

• More weapons are useful. Spears do competitive damage to swords and axes at all levels of ST, at least against living targets. Picks (swing/impaling weapons) come into their own for breaking into heavy armor.
• More templates can usefully contribute to melee combat. The ST12 cleric swings for 1d+3 with his broadsword, versus 2d+4 for the ST17 knight with Weapon Master. The knight is still better, but his average damage is no longer nearly twice the cleric's maximum damage. Unarmed martial artists still have issues, but at least their damage is somewhat on par with everyone else's.
• Armor is more useful since damage is lower. A ST20 ogre with an oversize axe does 2d+4 cu damage, which can be partially absorbed by heavy mail, instead of 3d+5 that can't be.
• Lower damage means that one-shot kills are going to less likely. For the players, this means they have more time to get in over their heads without the first successful hit doing so much injury that the delvers can't move fast enough to flee. For the GM, since his monsters are going to last longer, he doesn't need to put as many foes into a given encounter to challenge the PCs, which means the game will run faster.
• Armor behaves about the way it would realistically. Even a strong man with a broadsword has a hard time penetrating full steel plate. Light armor (DR3 or 4) protects against light weapons used by normal humans.

On the negative side:

• ST, already probably overpriced at 10 pts/level with the old table, is almost certainly slightly overpriced with the new table. Bruno has suggested 8 points/level, which sounds about right (with Striking ST costing 3 pts/level).
• Heavily armored foes, like dwarf knights in dwarven steel plate with Armor Mastery (DR11 + 2 tough skin) or sword-armor golems (DR17), are much harder to deal with in straight melee combat. These types of foes are going to have to be grappled, knocked to the ground, and all-out attacked for damage into vulnerable chinks in their armor. Arguably, that's how knights were defeated historically, but it's a bit of a change from the dungeon fantasy tradition. Not all groups are going to want to bring out the grappling rules for every fight.
• Players who enjoy making one-shot kills on powerful foes are going to be in for disappointment.
• Knights and barbarians lose some utility as the "big, powerful hitter" guys, especially against big, armored monsters.
• GMs are going to have to modify the published damage values for monsters that use swinging weapons.

Swing/cutting attacks will stop being the go-to attack for all foes and all target locations. They will still be useful attacks, targeting weaker limb armor or fighting Unliving and Homogeneous foes. Thrust/impaling attacks will be common for attacks to the torso, vitals, face, and skull, which seems to match historical fighting styles.

On the balance, I think this is a change for the better. I do need to playtest it some time, probably after I get done replaying Dragon Age 2 again.