- "Hey big guy, that wobbly left knee? It's the first thing I'm going for." - Lexi, Blood and Treasure: The Lunchbox of Destiny
Hit Location are penalties to hit smaller parts on a body.
Penalties[]
The penalties are as follows. Italicized ones are for non humanoid creatures:
| Location | Penalty | Nullifying Advantages Injury Tolerance |
|---|---|---|
| Eye | (-9) | No Head (maybe); No Eyes |
| Skull | (-7) | No Head |
| Face | (-5) | |
| Right/left Leg/Arm Foreleg, Mid Leg, Hind Leg |
(-2) | No Arms, No Legs, No Limbs |
| Torso | None | |
| Groin | (-3) | Unusual Location per Alien Nation |
| Hand/Foot | (-4) | No Arms, No Legs, No Limbs |
| Neck | (-5) | No Head |
| Vitals | (-3) | Homogenous; |
Grappling[]
Martial Arts, p.68 seems to take the "greater penalty" interpretation when discussing Targeted Attack:
Grapples use half the usual hit location penalty, round towards a larger negative number:
- -1 for Arm or Leg
- -2 for Hand or Foot
- -3 for Face or Neck, etc.
Some confusion might have been generated for how it works with strikes:
- the fighter can buy off up to half of his default penalty (round up) for a strike,
The direction of rounding is given in an example:
- Defaults to Boxing-5; cannot exceed Boxing-2.
In this case "half" of the default penalty is rounded "up" just like B400 and in this case, up is towards 0.
- extremity reduces from -4 to -2
- limb reduces from -2 to -1
Basic[]
370:
- To grab another body part, apply half the penalty given under Hit Location (p. 398) to your roll; see
Grappling and Hit Location, p. 400.
400:
- Halve hit location penalties (round up) if you are grappling a body part – it’s easier to grab a body part than to strike it. This does not apply to grabbing a weapon!
This may read confusing to some people who might think "up" means a greater penalty, when sometimes "up" for negative numbers is toward zero: a lesser penalty.
The way rounding "up" is discussed on MA68 implies you move it towards 0, although the example of being -3 for Face/Neck disagree with it.
Technical[]
Pg 5 of GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling for example mentions:
- The modifier can be improved up to the grappling penalty, but not more than that; e.g., when punching the skull, you could spend up to 4 CP to improve the
hit location penalty from -7 to -3
TG implies you round the penalty "up" in the positive direction (toward 0) meaning a lesser penalty, since -3.5 becomes -3 and not -4, unless that is a typo.
It appears to work like a temporary "Targeted Attack" when discussing halves and not like a grapple's idea of half, even though both say to round up.
Trivia[]
- There seems to be disagreement on which way to round the "halving" of hit location penalties. Just use the larger negative number.