Are tanks really that tough?

[Sean Waters]

I am not, believe me, going to read the whole thread, fascinating as it almost certainly is, before posting.  I apologise in advance if I cover any already well ploughed ground.

 

My view is that tanks are too tough, but then I think that the damage progression in Hero is all skew and nukes probably should top out at about DC50.

 

I won't explain in detail my reasoning because, well, this is me, and I'd go on for pages.

 

So: tanks are too tough?  I think so.  What am I going to do about it.  I'll tell you what I have done and done quite successfully: so I have this world where superpowers are a product of your genetic code (well, your junk DNA) , and your mitochondria.  Specifically aliens in the past infected humanity with a retrovirus which replaced their own cell organelles with the mitochondria we have today.  Mitochondria (basically) provide energy for running the cell.  The ones we have now do that but the ones we used to have allowed us to dip into a universal pool of energy (zero point, or somesuch) and provided a vast oversupply of energy which we could manipulate.  The junk DNA between active alleles used to be used for that purpose, but without the energy went unused and natural selection never selected for it so it became largely corrupted.  That means you get some REALLY interesting SPBs when they get their power cells back.

 

Anyway, point is, if you have the old style cellular energy generation (never mind how, at least not here) that allows you to wield powers but also affects your relationship with the world: basically you do double damage to anyone or anything that does not have the gene (with the exception of the metallic element Tritium and certain Tritium compounds, again, not here not now...) AND you take half damage (before defences or damage reduction) from anything that does not have the gene (and is not made of Tritium). 

 

Boom.  Instant high powered superheroes, without tripling the points.  It also means that only SPBs can effectively deal with SPBs, Tritium being very rare indeed.  Even a 150 point enhanced martial artist can take down half a battalion.  Suddenly the world around SPBs is a lot more fragile.

 

This solution will not suit every campaign nor every GM or player, but it at least deals with Grond being unable to rip a tank apart and, instead, having to pick it up and shake it to kill the contents.

 

Anyway.  There you go.

[Sean Waters]

The other problem with tanks being that tough is that tank guns can brew them up with one hit (or should be able to: can they?  Hmm...), which means there are guns that can 'brew up' even the toughest supers (OK, OK, Damage Reduction, fine: it may take more than one hit).

 

I'm generally not in favour of superhero games, at least superhero games where the PCs are supposed to be pretty powerful, ending suddenly in a hail of tank fire.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Markddoc,

 

I utilize the older stats for tanks meaning 20 defense front and 16 defense sides/top hardened. And the M1 120mm cannon doing 6D6k damage with APFSDSDU rounds being APx2.

 

I also utilize critical hits (less than half) and hit locations and internal damage as laid out in TUV. So any hit to the movement or engine section of the tank which immobilizes the tank, essentially disables it and would cause the crew to abandon it if safe to do so.

 

A critical hit to the tank which causes damage to the tank far beyond what the weapon should normally be capable of I represent via secondary ammo or fuel explosions or critical damage to essential systems....which seems to be exactly what happened in a good number of the examples you cited.

 

Its all about interpreting the dice rolls to represent what should reasonably happen based on the situation. So you managed to roll a critical success from a "mere" RPG against the front of the tank. The GM determines that the RPG impacted against a lightly armored seem and that some of the shaped charge was able to penetrate and cause slight internal damage (this would be like the shot that penetrated between the turret and main body mentioned by Markdoc above) its all about how you interpret the dice.

[Hugh Neilson]

While a potential solution, the "critical that causes damage to the tank beyond what should be possible" is just another example of changing the rules to get around a writeup that was probably inappropriate to begin with. Does a Critical when the crook runs out of bullets and throws his gun at Superman mean it KO's him? Maybe that's why TV Superman always ducked?

[Markdoc]

The other problem with tanks being that tough is that tank guns can brew them up with one hit (or should be able to: can they?  Hmm...), which means there are guns that can 'brew up' even the toughest supers (OK, OK, Damage Reduction, fine: it may take more than one hit).

 

Tanks are filled with high explosives in the form of ammo, and fuel, and lots of burnable stuff in the form of electronics. If you look at the battle reports, one-hit kills of tanks by tank guns or by missiles are quite common. A "kill" doesn't always mean that it explodes in a giant fireball (though of course that can happen) but that, quite often it stops working properly, catches fire and after the crew bail out it just burns out. This even happens in state of the art tanks like the Abrams with built in halon-dump fire fighting equipment, but it was even more a problem with older designs.

 

One of the problems with the current setup is that it's essentially impossible to one-shot a tank like the Abrams with weapons that routinely do one-shot it (ie: make it stop working so that the crew bail out) in the real world. You could solve that problem by making the weapons even more powerful, but that's "solving the problem" in the same way that you can put out a fire by pouring on gasoline until it uses up all the available oxygen: they are already capable of taking down almost any published hero with one, or at most two, hits and do building-leveling damage.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

While a potential solution, the "critical that causes damage to the tank beyond what should be possible" is just another example of changing the rules to get around a writeup that was probably inappropriate to begin with.

Agreed. It'd probably be simpler to fix the problem at root.

There's actually - as I see it - three problems here.

 

1. Ranged weapons in Hero system almost all do too much damage. This has been discussed at length, but the very short version was that weapon damage was based on the idea of "the instant kill" which is an artifact of TV shows. People shot in the head, or the heart don't "die instantly" (with the exception of weapons that cause massive trauma) - instead they fall down and bleed out over the space of a minute or two to a few hours. In the real world "lying down with heavy bleeding internally" is the same as "dead" unless you happen to actually be in an operating theatre - and I speak as someone with experience on both ends of that equation. I've written before of trying to save someone who was shot right outside our hospital. He wasn't dead after being shot - at all: he could still run and scream - but he passed out and died despite having a fully equipped surgery only a couple of hundred metres away and being rushed through the door of the hospital by a posse of doctors. So a handgun that can do 10-12 BOD with a head hit (ie: 5 or 6 before doubling) is doing a real life "instant kill".

People also overestimate how lethal handguns are - in the US, about 13% of shootings where the target is hit end in a fatality, and that includes all shootings (important edit: excluding suicide attempts!) regardless of of how many bullets ended up in the target. (Edit: of course that's because most of them end up in hospital - the fatality rate would be significantly higher if medical attention was not available) Of course, most people are not very skilled - a skilled shooter can put bullets where they count more, but it makes the point that the base damage is not high enough to kill a human in the vast majority of cases. A head hit - even a hit that penetrates the skull - does not always kill the target, and I'm living, writing proof of that.

If we accept that the low end of damage is unrealistically high, it naturally follows that the high end of weapons damage is also unrealistically high, because it simply builds up from the base.

 

2. The second problem - the high DEF of tanks - grows organically out from the first problem: when you have high damage for small arms, you need a ton of DEF to stop people just shooting up tanks with their pistols ... which then puts it out of sync with other attacks.

 

3. The third problem is a mechanistic one: in the real world, damage does not work the way we model it in most RPGs (including Hero). If all you want is an abstracted combat system, that doesn't really matter. But it becomes a problem when we try to scale damage of real world weapons, because we think we know how those work. I've been worrying away at this problem for a while, trying to think of a better way to model damage in Hero system and I've been reading a lot of inquest and battle reports (as the initial post above might indicate!) to put those thoughts into perspective. The short version is that in-game we work on the principle of attrition - you have a pool of damage points (whether for a person or a vehicle) and when that's used up - be it in small dribbles or one big hit, you stop functioning. Damage in real life, however, tends to be "spiky". Generally it requires penetration of the target, but that when that occurs, it can often be catastrophic - so even a small attack in the wrong place can kill you, if you are unlucky. In short, in reality, 3 small wounds are not the same as one larger wound, and attacks that are stopped by defences often do little or nothing at all. The last thing of course is that in real life an attack that doesn't incapacitate you at all, can still kill you later on, through bleeding. Few RPGs model sustained damage, and it's an open question as to whether we actually want to go there, anyway.

 

So what do we do about this? I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts and I have to run right now, but I can post my ideas later.

 

cheers, Mark

[Chris Goodwin]

People also overestimate how lethal handguns are - in the US, about 3% of shootings where the target is hit end in a fatality, and that includes all shootings regardless of of how many bullets ended up  in the target. (Edit: of course that's because most of them end up in hospital - the fatality rate would be significantly higher if medical attention was not available) Of course, most people are not very skilled - a skilled shooter can put bullets where they count more, but it makes the point that the base damage is not high enough to kill a human in the vast majority of cases. A head hit - even a hit that penetrates the skull - does not always kill the target, and I'm living, writing proof of that.

If we accept that the low end of damage is unrealistically high, it naturally follows that the high end of weapons damage is also unrealistically high, because it simply builds up from the base.

Most of us don't have a real in-depth knowledge of firearms or firearm injuries, so we go with what we expect to see in the fiction. I think that what we have -- larger guns and larger bullets do more damage than smaller -- probably gets us close enough.

 

2. The second problem - the high DEF of tanks - grows organically out from the first problem: when you have high damage for small arms, you need a ton of DEF to stop people just shooting up tanks with their pistols ... which then puts it out of sync with other attacks.

We don't seem to have a similar problem in fantasy games with, e.g., broadswords vs. iron-strapped oaken doors. Real Weapon vs. Real Armor seems to be good enough there; I'm curious as to why we don't consider it with tanks. Alternately, we could replace Real Weapon and Real Armor with various other modifiers: Real Small Arms vs. Real Tank Armor; Alien Blaster Cannon (+0) vs. Real Tank Armor; Death Star Main Weapon (+1/2) vs. Real Tank Armor; etc.

[NuSoardGraphite]

While a potential solution, the "critical that causes damage to the tank beyond what should be possible" is just another example of changing the rules to get around a writeup that was probably inappropriate to begin with. Does a Critical when the crook runs out of bullets and throws his gun at Superman mean it KO's him? Maybe that's why TV Superman always ducked?

Isnt half the GMs job interpreting the dice rolls into dramatic action. The dice rolls are simply a randomized element in a mathematical equation which is used to simulate whats going on in a physical sense. Those results must then be translated into the drama.

 

When a player wants his character to leap a chasm that may be too far, and the GM calls for an acrobatics or Dex roll to see if they make a safe landing, do you just make the roll and move on, or do you describe the outcome based on the dice roll? Damage to the tank is the same kind of situation and may require some translation from math to drama.

 

Of course, that is simply my style of play and I find it works for me very well.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Also, there should be no way for the crook to do damage to superman, even if the crook rolls a crritical...his mortal strength posses no threat to superman. If Metallo or Kalibak threw that gun at Superman, that would be a different matter entirely...

[Markdoc]

Most of us don't have a real in-depth knowledge of firearms or firearm injuries, so we go with what we expect to see in the fiction. I think that what we have -- larger guns and larger bullets do more damage than smaller -- probably gets us close enough..

It's not a bad starting point - larger, higher velocity bullets *do* do more damage. The only reliable way to incapacitate a target is to hit something vital, and a high velocity round will penetrate deeper or go right through the target (thus having a better chance of hitting something vital) while a larger round has a larger cross-section and thus also has a better chance of hitting something vital (plus it typically has more momentum, helping with penetration).

 

The detailed data-gathering that has gone on in the last couple of US wars has taught us a lot about bullet trauma. In those two wars, bullets killed about 18% of the soldiers who were hit in combat with them, and (odd tidbit here) the average bullet trauma included 2.3 bullets. Obviously, that covers a wide range of situations and bullet types, but the commonest firearm was 7.62 calibre, suggesting that the vast majority (80 +%) of soldiers hit with 2 or 3 rounds in that calibre survived - and we are only talking about those wounded, so those cases where body armour stopped the round are not included. Modelling this is pretty iffy, because you have to make so many assumptions, but I have played around with it, and the most consistent number is around 3-4 BOD per hit, or about half what you'd expect from the current assumption, which puts such weapons at 2d6 RKA. This number might even be on the high side, because roughly 2/3 of the deaths were KIA (killed in action) and the rest were DOW (died of wounds: meaning they survived long enough to be evacuated to a casualty station). In other words, the number of soldiers killed outright by single rounds appears to be very low - way, way lower than you get using current values.

 

Interestingly, if you assume a 7.62 round does 1d6 damage, then a hit to the unprotected head using hit locations)has about a 16% chance of causing an instantly fatal wound (ie: fall down, bleed to death in short order) to an ordinary fit adult ... which is actually not that far off, though a bit on the low side. 1d6+1 is probably closer to reality, and gives you a fatality rate (once distributed out over the hit location chart) not too different from real life figures.

 

There's two catches to this approach. The first is that it squeezes weapons down into a smaller DC range, reducing your ability to differentiate various weapons. While this appears to be realistic, it is also apparently deeply offensive to weapon enthusiasts.

The second is that in real life, damage is "spikey", meaning that 9 times out of 10, or even 19 times out of 20, a single hit might not kill you, but sometimes, it will. One solution to this is to replace the flat modifer for hit locations with a die roll for damage that penetrates. That works, and gives quite realistic results, but makes combat potentially more lethal: your hero can be felled by a point or two of damage that gets through his defences, but gets a really good modifier. The flip side is that it models real life defences quite well - damage that does not penetrate defences often does little or nothing.

 

We don't seem to have a similar problem in fantasy games with, e.g., broadswords vs. iron-strapped oaken doors. Real Weapon vs. Real Armor seems to be good enough there; I'm curious as to why we don't consider it with tanks. Alternately, we could replace Real Weapon and Real Armor with various other modifiers: Real Small Arms vs. Real Tank Armor; Alien Blaster Cannon (+0) vs. Real Tank Armor; Death Star Main Weapon (+1/2) vs. Real Tank Armor; etc.

That's a really good question, and I think there's two aaspects to the answer. The first is that in a fantasy game, attacks and defences tend to be lower, so they are *already* more compressed than modern weapons. In the firearms section, man-portable weapons range from 15 to 420 active points, vs 17-48 in the muscle-powered weapons section. Modern vehicles can have 30 hardened DEF, while the best armour a fantasy PC can wear is 8 (magic excluded in both cases).

That means while the GM can reasonably say “You can't damage the iron bound door without breaking your broadsword" or "You can't damage the nazi warwalker with your .45", in the latter case the players can respond with "What about my BAR?" or "What about my bazooka?" You rapidly hit a point where GM fiat becomes obvious fudging. In a game as crunchy as Hero, that suggests system failure to me.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Also, there should be no way for the crook to do damage to superman, even if the crook rolls a crritical...his mortal strength posses no threat to superman. If Metallo or Kalibak threw that gun at Superman, that would be a different matter entirely...

And that brings up back to the numbers. It's the GM's job to interpret the results in a fun and plausible way, but (at least in Hero system) it's not his job to just make up the numbers. The players should have a reasonable idea of what their characters can (and cannot) do, based on the numbers on their sheet.

 

Cheers, Mark

[NuSoardGraphite]

I feel that Hero is one of a short list of games that gets it right.

 

You say that about 18% of shots are fatal in the field. Have you factored in the possibility of limb hits in comparison to torso or more deadly head shots? In Hero, limbs fet hit a whole lot more often than the head location and makes combat less deadly as a result of the "x1/2" damage multiplier.

 

Your 7.62 assault rifle round doing 2d6k damage, or 7 body on average will only do 4 body after hitting a. Limb location. Not particularly life threatening there. Even a torso hit is only an Impairing wound, which would take most soldiers out of the fight, it wont kill them if they recieve medical attention within an apporopriate amount of time. Certainly 2 hits will put the soldier into critical status which will require medical attention forthwith or he will bleed out, but it is still not instantly fatal. The situation becomes even more favorable if the soldier is wearing body armor. A mere PD of 4 drops the damage below an impairing wound, allowing the soldier to continue operating at normal capacity till he is hit (in the torso) by the 4th round, which will put him intona critical status. Hits to protected limbs will allow the soldier to absorb even more hits.

 

However, hits to vital areas such as the head or vitals locations will produce lethal results. 14 body to an unarmored location which is pretty much instantly fatal. (Will expire in a minute or so). These location results are oftentimes based upon sheer luck but can also be facilitated by those with extreme skill, so the peaky results of bullet damage vs biological systems remains, is relatively reliable to predict, but can through chance, stray outside this range on occasion.

 

It may not sync up perfectly with reliable battlefield data, but its a pretty good approximation of what happens on the battlefield without getting to crazy in physics simulations.

[NuSoardGraphite]

And that brings up back to the numbers. It's the GM's job to interpret the results in a fun and plausible way, but (at least in Hero system) it's not his job to just make up the numbers. The players should have a reasonable idea of what their characters can (and cannot) do, based on the numbers on their sheet.

 

Cheers, Mark

No one is suggesting making up numbers. Simpy interpreting what the numbers give you in a way that makes sense.

 

For example: if your tank has a 16 defense from the rear and the enemy has a HMG capable of doing 3d6k, 98% of those .50 rounds are going to bounce off the tanks armor, but occasionally, a 17 or 18 damage roll is made and some actual body damage gets done to the tank. Some may cry "foul! A .50 should not be able to damage a tank!" And some GMs may rule that the real weapon limitation prevents this damage, but other GMs may wish to interpret this damage by saying the machinegun round hit an external fuel line which sparked a fire which caused a minor explosion and damaged the drive system. Something that has actually happened on the battlefield.

 

Thats what I mean by interpretation. Not making it up as you go, but making it WORK based on the results of the dice.

[IndianaJoe3]

There's two catches to this approach. The first is that it squeezes weapons down into a smaller DC range, reducing your ability to differentiate various weapons. While this appears to be realistic, it is also apparently deeply offensive to weapon enthusiasts.

The second is that in real life, damage is "spikey", meaning that 9 times out of 10, or even 19 times out of 20, a single hit might not kill you, but sometimes, it will. One solution to this is to replace the flat modifer for hit locations with a die roll for damage that penetrates. That works, and gives quite realistic results, but makes combat potentially more lethal: your hero can be felled by a point or two of damage that gets through his defences, but gets a really good modifier. The flip side is that it models real life defences quite well - damage that does not penetrate defences often does little or nothing.

 

Compressing the raw DC does reduce differentiation, but adding a Penetration Multiplier would add a way to increase it. A little mental math suggests that +1/2 for a x1.5 multiplier and +1 for a x2 multiplier are about right.

[assault]

As other people have pointed out, the mechanics of the hit location system already makes damage "spiky" when it is used. Not "realistically" spiky, perhaps (a hit to the femoral artery is a fine way of killing someone with a limb hit, for example), but spiky enough to provide a "dead or not" hit system. Maybe the system could be divorced from its notional locations? Of course we don't use these systems in cinematic games.

 

The problem is having to use such systems for vehicles in cinematic games. I'm not keen on the Real Weapon type fudges, precisely because they are fudges.

 

Restatting the vehicles does seem to be the answer.

[Hugh Neilson]

Isnt half the GMs job interpreting the dice rolls into dramatic action. The dice rolls are simply a randomized element in a mathematical equation which is used to simulate whats going on in a physical sense. Those results must then be translated into the drama.

 

The problem largely discussed above is that the tank is not getting damaged by the dice as rolled.  Presumably, you don't have to describe how the thug's gun clocked Superman, as his defenses are not penetrated by the gun.  If the tank's defenses are such that the attack can't penetrate them, then there would never be a description of the tank being damaged by the attack.

[Lucius]

(a hit to the femoral artery is a fine way of killing someone with a limb hit, for example

That would be a hit to the vitals.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

This would be a palindromedary tagline

[megaplayboy]

What would be the real-world effect of a tank ramming into another tank at full speed? Would there be little impact on the function of the tank or would it shake up components and crew internally?

[IndianaJoe3]

What would be the real-world effect of a tank ramming into another tank at full speed? Would there be little impact on the function of the tank or would it shake up components and crew internally?

 

Considering that modern tanks get up to 40+ mph (70+ kph), I expect that stuff will break on both tanks.

[NuSoardGraphite]

In real life, they would do a ton of damage to one another. In Hero, they have a STR of 55 for 11d6 plus non-combat movement is 36" which is 12d6 for a total of 23d6. Max damage is 46 body which is pretty extensive, but normal damage is unlikely to achieve this.

[Grailknight]

In real life, they would do a ton of damage to one another. In Hero, they have a STR of 55 for 11d6 plus non-combat movement is 36" which is 12d6 for a total of 23d6. Max damage is 46 body which is pretty extensive, but normal damage is unlikely to achieve this.

 

That's the damage for one moving tank ramming a stationary one. Add another 12d6 for a head-on collision at full speed.

[Markdoc]

I feel that Hero is one of a short list of games that gets it right.

 

You say that about 18% of shots are fatal in the field. Have you factored in the possibility of limb hits in comparison to torso or more deadly head shots? In Hero, limbs fet hit a whole lot more often than the head location and makes combat less deadly as a result of the "x1/2" damage multiplier.

 

Of course I did. With the current rules, 2.3 hits to a lower limb (the average in reality) will be fatal in about 30% of cases (as you note, 4 BOD per hit and 2.3 hits (on average) per wounded soldier. Just on average rolls you are looking at 10 BOD .... which is in fact, pretty life threatening. Add in just one roll which is a bit above average and you are into bleeding to death territory.. Add in the probability of thigh hits (also non armoured) and the fatality rates go up significantly. Even assuming effective body armour (which I was) the current rules give a fatality rate around double that experienced in real life.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

In real life, they would do a ton of damage to one another. In Hero, they have a STR of 55 for 11d6 plus non-combat movement is 36" which is 12d6 for a total of 23d6. Max damage is 46 body which is pretty extensive, but normal damage is unlikely to achieve this.

 

Yeah, but as you note, your chances of rolling 46 BOD are infintesimal. In reality 23d6 will do 20-26 BOD, which means the tanks will be essentially unharmed ... which is not a real life result. As noted, if they both charged at each other, at noncombat speed you could get up to 35d6 ... which would still leave both tanks essentially unharmed (they might take some minor damage). This is definately not what happens in real life (I've read in the past of Abrams crashes, which resulted in crew deaths during training and the tanks being totalled). I think this shows that you can't describe the current Abrams defence stats. as realistic in any sense.

 

cheers, Mark

[NuSoardGraphite]

That's the damage for one moving tank ramming a stationary one. Add another 12d6 for a head-on collision at full speed.

Thats an excellent point.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Yeah, but as you note, your chances of rolling 46 BOD are infintesimal. In reality 23d6 will do 20-26 BOD, which means the tanks will be essentially unharmed ... which is not a real life result. As noted, if they both charged at each other, at noncombat speed you could get up to 35d6 ... which would still leave both tanks essentially unharmed (they might take some minor damage). This is definately not what happens in real life (I've read in the past of Abrams crashes, which resulted in crew deaths during training and the tanks being totalled). I think this shows that you can't describe the current Abrams defence stats. as realistic in any sense.

 

cheers, Mark

This situation is why I support lower armor ratings. 20 front, double hardened, 16 sides/top single hardened. You get better results that way and dont have to boost the damage of anti-tank weapons to compensate. And The Hulk can still damage it with his haymaker, which is why this whole thread got started in the first place.