Piercing vs Cutting vs Crushing damage

Although it might be worth noting that such protection may be somewhat do-or-die: after all, one of the responses to hard, broad-coverage plate armour, as I recall, was to wield a thin stabbing knife; this could be inserted via the gaps between plates or openings such as eye-slits. That's likely not an easy thing to pull off (especially in mid-fight), I imagine, however.

Nevertheless, such plate would likely be rather better than nothing, so I don't gainsay the recommendation.

Against crushing damage I imagine—and I do stand to be corrected—that heavy padding would be the way to go. Avoid mail, by the way: as I recall, the loops can end up being pushed into the wound by a crushing blow (which is not fun).

(Mail is best against cutting attacks, as I recall.)

(As to axes, I might label them as dual-damage weapons, doing both piercing (or perhaps cutting) and crushing damage.)

edited 21st Feb '15 6:19:26 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

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Pedant note: mail is worn over padded armour, so it wouldn't ever touch your skin. Your gambeson would protect you from getting damaged by your own mail, though you're right that mail on its own wouldnt help a ton with being bonked by a blunt object. Mail was surprisingly effective against most things other than lances and crossbows.

Ah, good point—I'd forgotten about the padding.

I do still recall reading somewhere about mail-rings being driven into wounds, but I'm honestly not sure of where I read that, and don't seem to be finding the reference... Hum... Come to think of it, it might have been related to narrow piercing weapons, which could force their way between rings, penetrate the padding, and perhaps drag some rings along with them...?

I'm really not sure; my apologies!

edited 21st Feb '15 8:02:29 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

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Yup I just read a reference to that, it was indeed a pierce from a lance that broke the rings and drove a crusader's mail into him. (reference http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html )

edited 21st Feb '15 8:07:29 AM by MrShine

The mail ring into wound is normally caused by piercing weapons...like bullets.

Give me cute or give me...something?

Ah, that makes a lot of sense—thank you for that. I think that what I read was a more general statement, but your mention of a lance does support it. ^_^

"Touche" seems appropriate here!

Eh, I'll admit that I do see arguments for bullets being labelled as "piercing" damage (for one thing I wouldn't see bullets as being likely to be terribly useful against skeletons outside of "much more dakka" approaches). However, the matter of kevlar also makes the "piercing" category seem like an imperfect fit. Perhaps a fourth damage-type might better fit bullets?

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Real life physics is more complicated than D&D. News at 11. There's absolutely no reason to create an exception for bullets, any more than there is to create one for pencils. A bullets pierces you and does damage via hitting vital organs or blood loss.

^^ LOL. Still, seriously, it was a bit of big deal, since there were attempts to use mail as armor from late 19th century to around WWI...doesn't go well of course. The rings shattered when hit by bullet...making the wound even worse. Though they're more successful being used in splatter mask (for tank crew), since mail is actually quite well at stopping shrapnel from hitting you when hung like a curtain.

^ Again really it's issue of how to deal with armor...

edited 22nd Feb '15 7:08:21 AM by onyhow

Give me cute or give me...something?

If we're talking about game systems... It would seem to me that the easiest solution would be to add an exception or special function to how Kevlar armor interacts with piercing damage from specific weapon types. Like, for instance:

Kevlar Vest: Has X Piercing Defense, and +Y Piercing Defense from bullet-based weapons. Or -Y Piercing Defense from thin-bladed weapons. [knives, thrusting swords, etc.]

No need to give bullet-based weapons a fourth damage category that way.

@Clarste: But we're (I presume) talking about games. One could similarly argue that the original three damage types needn't exist: they all do damage, so why bother to differentiate them?

After a little more thought, I'm inclined to think that the answer isn't a simple "yes" or "no", but rather depends on the game: in some cases it might be worth it, while in others it might not. To argue via examples:

• A high-fantasy game in which only a single gun appears might not bother with modelling "bullet" damage as anything other than piercing, instead just giving the gun a trait that allows it to bypass all armour. After all, I don't think that any (non-magical) armour-type likely to be present in such game is likely to stop a bullet.
• Conversely, a game that takes place in a modern setting, and in which guns are by far the predominant weapons, might not bother to model the three basic damage types at all, instead making any knives, axes etc. exceptions. Interestingly, in this case it might be knives that ignore a character's armour.
• Finally, in a setting that includes all of swords, axes, knives and guns as viable choices of primary weapon (perhaps an Urban Fantasy setting), we might find it useful to model all four damage types, giving each advantages and disadvantages. A knife might bypass modern armour types, but be less effective against plate; bullets would be effective against anything but kevlar; axes might (I think) be effective against either kevlar or plate, but less so against mail; and so on.

Ultimately, as with the three base damage types, the decision of whether to include a separate damage type for bullets comes down to whether the difference is sufficient that it produces additional meaningful choices for the player. In my first two examples above it likely doesn't: in the former guns are too rare, and kevlar likely not available; in the latter, knives are too rare, and non-kevlar armour may not be available or desirable. In the third, however, I feel that the inclusion of "bullet" damage adds a new item to the usual tactical rock-paper-scissors decision.

In many cases the difference between "knife"-piercing and "bullet"-piercing damage might not be worth a new category, but I do think that there are potential cases in which it might be worth the creation of a new category.

edited 22nd Feb '15 3:17:51 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

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You do realize that kevlar works on knives too, right? It's not magically weak against knives. If you had a choice between having a knife-fight while wearing either a kevlar vest or just a T-shirt you should definitely take the kevlar every time. It's just not a perfect defense because we don't live in an abstract RPG world. The way this is modeled in a game is that a knife thrust does more piercing damage than a bullet, and thereby overcomes the defense.

Front Mission is an RPG about semi-realistic modern day robots with guns and flamethrowers and stuff, and uses a Piercing, Impact, Fire damage type system.

edited 22nd Feb '15 11:45:38 PM by Clarste

^ That seems like a good base, but I wondered how the impact damage works.

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Impact is robot-punching and shotguns for some reason. Of course, the way armor types work in that series is essentially technobabble magic.

I do, yes, but my understanding is that it's less effective against knives.

From earlier in the thread, regarding Kevlar:

Compare Kevlar under knife-attack to plate under mace-attack: a flanged mace has as one of its advantages the fact that it can inflict damage through plate armour, I believe; nevertheless, I daresay that a person in plate armour would receive less damage from such an attack than a person without any armour at all.

I was simplifying the matter a bit by allowing knives to bypass Kevlar, but that's because I'm thinking about this in terms of gameplay.

If you wanted a more accurate model, you might allow Kevlar to reduce "bullet" damage by X and "piercing" damage by Y, where X > Y; thus a person wearing Kevlar is still somewhat protected from knife-attacks, but less so than from bullets.

I don't think that there is only one "right" way to model damage in a game: the damage model used for a given game is based on what's called for in that game. Different games have different requirements.

Just look at your example of Front Mission: you say that it uses "Piercing", "Fire" and "Impact" as its set of damage types. Should all games then use "Fire" damage, and none use "Slashing"? What about "Magic" damage in fantasy games?

Actually, that brings to mind another thought: consider the "lightning" damage type in some games. Technically, and to the best of my knowledge, lightning does damage by a few mechanisms, including heat and shockwave. However, doesn't always overlap with "fire" or "impact"/"sonic" damage. Part of this is likely due to the fact that electricity interacts differently with various materials than does, say, fire. So even though at least some of the damage is technically the same, the desire to express those differences in gameplay results in the choice of having "lightning" as a discrete damage type.

edited 23rd Feb '15 7:45:58 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

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Don't even get me started on magic damage. I'll concede that bullets can be modeled however you want, but I don't think the single anecdote that knives are marginally better against kevlar should be something you latch so strongly onto. If your game has "bullet" damage and "blade" damage then that's just how it is, but I don't think "bullet" is intuitively opposite "piercing".

As for electricity, my understanding is that it's mostly burning (lightning causes shockwaves, but that's just because it's ridiculous in many ways), but it has a quite different effect on the human body because it burns from the inside rather than the outside. For that matter, fire itself can have different effects depending on how the fire starts; there's some particularly disgusting phenomenon where your internal fat can melt into oil and start burning... For me, the takeaway from all this is just that nothing's as simple in real life as it is in a game, so trying too hard to model things after real life isn't as helpful as it might seem. Going for quick, easy-to-understand impressions is probably better. Although I guess from that you could argue that you think bullets being different from spears or arrows is also intuitive?

edited 23rd Feb '15 8:06:48 AM by Clarste

Now I'm tempted. ;P

I'm not—as my post just above the post that I quoted there shows, that was a pre-existing impression on my part, and while—as I said there, I believe—I'm no expert, I don't think that I've been contradicted thus far on the point that while Kevlar does likely provide some protection against knives, it's less effective than it is against bullets.

I don't claim to know all of the specifics of electrical damage (I'll add that, as was pointed out to me recently, electricity may also overwhelm the central nervous system or interfere with the signals that control the beating of the heart), but that seems more or less right—and how many games have you seen that actually model all of that?

Ultimately, I suspect that the different damage types in games are separated less by how they deal damage to the target than by how effectively they get through to the target in order to deal damage: it's not about the type of damage, but whether (or to what degree) a given attack bypasses whatever defences the target might have (including innate properties, like ceramic being effectively fireproof).

Again, I think that the degree of adherence to physical interactions depends on the game. Dwarf Fortress, I gather, has a ridiculous degree of simulation, which I presume has some value in that specific game (I'll confess that I've never played it). Some games are fine without any modelling of different "damage types". Other games have other models.

As to bullets specifically, I stand by my assertion in post thirty-five above: in most games it probably won't be worth differentiating bullets from knives and the like, in part because they're not significantly juxtaposed, and thus differentiating the damage doesn't add new, interesting decisions for the player to make. After all, games in which bullets predominate tend to have few knives or arrows, and fewer suits of plate or mail, while games with lots of knives and suits or armour tend to have few bullets. However, for some games it may well be worthwhile to differentiate: if all of plate, mail and Kevlar are available, modelling (even if simplistically) the differences in the protection that they each offer provides choices for the player to make. ("Am I going up against knife-wielders? Better put on plate. But what if they have some gunners amongst them? Kevlar might be better, even though I'll take more damage from the knife-wielders...")

In short, I think that it's about providing interesting decisions for the player, informed by the physical interactions in question. Sometimes this may mean lumping things together, like labelling the damage from bullets and knives both as "piercing", and sometimes that may mean dividing things a little more finely.

Amusingly, the random text at the top of this post indicates that I put down my sword and pick up my pen...

Time to model "pen" damage? What armour is effective against a pen? We know that they do more damage than swords... :D

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If a game has a knight in plate mail using a rifle I think we're not really going for realism any more...

What about the carabineers in the first Empire Earth?

I smell magic in the air. Or maybe barbecue.

Kevlar vests have routinely been penetrated by knives when cops came into contact with armed criminals who stabbed them and who had gone into the situation with the thought that, "oh, that's fine, my vest will deal with this knife I'm about to get stabbed with. Oh shit, that hurts, why didn't my vest stop it?". That's the reason why British police ended up in vests falling into line with this UK specification "Home Office Scientific Development Branch (HOSDB) publication No. 39/07/C", said specs are much better at dealing with the threats that an average British police officer has to deal with, namely stabbing and slashing-caused injuries.

Most Kevlar vests aren't designed to deal with knives - they are meant to provide protection against various kinds of bullets below full-calibre rifle rounds like the 7.62mm NATO or 5.56mm NATO. Most manufactures of the vests will tell you not to get stabbed or slashed with a knife while wearing them as they will not guarantee that said stabbing or slashing will not damage the vest or cause it to fail to protect you.

...do they guarantee that bullets won't hurt you? That would sort of interesting if they did.

The point of armor has never been to be relied on though.

Nope. Most body armor sets I've seen labels of, including ones that are meant to deal with rifle-calibre rounds, have warnings that they are not supposed to get shot at. Public liability laws and all that good stuff, see. There are no guarantees. Bullet-proof vests and stab-proof vests do not exist except in the minds of the public. What you do get are bullet-RESISTANT and stab-RESISTANT vests, and they are not fool proof.

The bullets will still hurt even if they are blocked by the vest. The difference is that you get a nasty bruise instead of a hole in a vital organ.

Also, the chances of the vest blocking the bullet go down with each hit as the material becomes more and more damaged. Kevlar works because of the tight weave, so damaging the fibers or wearing the vest too loosely reduces the protection.

Standing on the edge of the crater...

Yep. A vest that's rated to deal with, for example, 9mm x 19mm Parabellum, which is still among the most common handgun rounds on the market even though it was old when my grandpops was born, is rated only to deal with a few of them at any one time. Put repeated bursts from something like an Uzi or an MP 5 submachine gun into the vest and it will fail.

Ceramic plates in body armor came from bitter experience of this.

@OP: Are you thinking of Symphony of the Night?

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Ars . . . Dwarf Fortress has ridiculous levels of simulation. Its goal is to become a fantasy world generator mixing both realism and magic together. All those armor and weapon types are important to know if you want a working military that can actually kill things.

And about guns in a fantasy setting: It depends entirely on what gun we're talking about. The term bullet proof came about because plate armor was upgraded to stop bullets in the early days of firearms. Bullet proofing meant shooting at a new set of armor to prove that it would stop the damn thing. They were thicker and heavier than older suits, and eventually gun power made agility become more important than tanking bullets. If you're going for modern weaponry, it's better to dodge the shooter's aim. If you're using handgonnes and arquebi, go for the thick plates and hope you don't get hit in a joint or the eyes.