No Head

Cost: [7 or 2]

No Head is one of the options under Injury Tolerance and includes the benefits of No Brain [5]. If used in conjunction with Homogenous it is only [2].

Although this would lead one to think the remaining benefit of No Face is worth 2 points, the pricing of No Skull at -4 actually implies that is worth 4. (No Skull is not advantageous in anyway if there is no brain to protect)

However, this does not eliminate the senses contained on/in a head (seeing, speaking, hearing, smelling, tasting, etc) unless the appropriate disadvantages have been taken.

Eyes and Neck

MA115 mentions:

"No Head protects completely against all of these attacks . . . but if you lack a head, you can’t make a Head Butt!"

This phrase follows these consecutive sentences:

No Eyes prevents Eye-Gouging, Eye-Poke, Eye-Rake, etc., from causing blindness or special injury.

No Neck renders Choke Hold ineffective and means that neither Neck Snap nor a throw from a Head Lock can injure you.

This seams to be a mistake, thinking that No Head includes those benefits, because Basic Set pretty clearly indicates it does NOT on B61:

It is common – but not mandatory – for those with No Head to have No Neck, No Eyes, or both.

Martial Arts

Pg 137 mentions hit locations rendered nonexistent by Injury Tolerance

ear, jaw, and nose for No Head

The "No Head" in basic is more like a 7 point metatrait "No Brain [5] No Skull [-2] and No Head [4]"

The first 2 components clearly are not the portions which remove ears/nose/jaw so it must be the last.

No Ears and No Nose are perks in The Weird, so subtracting those from the 4 point value of No Face leaves 2 points to account for the sum value of No Jaw and No Face.

• the meta-trait approach allows more customization, like for example a "headless" being which still has targetable ears or nose on their TORSO
• F47 Herecine can still bite despite having No Head (being headless doesn't even give them Weak Bite) so this clearly does not include "No Bite", just being jawless so biting and eating ability cannot be crippled (which makes sense for plants, they do not have a jawbone)

Weak Bite alone is worth -2 and Missing Teeth is a separate quirk that impedes eating in Power-Ups. These could be taken to save points on jawless creatures for conceptual purposes. The Hereceine would take a lot longer chewing (-damage) and swallowing (-teeth) if it had that -3 discount.

No Jaw should not mandate either disadvantage: you may be able to bite and eat competently without having those means vulnerable to crippling.

The "No Jaw" perk could be assume to be included in Diffuse (since it prevents modification to knockdown rolls AND crippling)

quotes

PK

2010 http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=1002569&postcount=10

"The head" is already covered in GURPS. The "skull" is any head-shot that's aimed at the brain. The "face" is any head-shot that isn't. Between the two (and the special cases, like "eyes" and "nose"), you've got the whole head.

I suppose one could choose to abstract the two to a single "head" hit location, at -6 to hit (the average of -5 and -7), and then roll a die to see if damage was aimed at the brain or not, but that takes away a lot of tactical options.

Kromm

http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=1002892&postcount=12

The hit location that you call "head" is what GURPS calls "face." Whatever you call it, it's -5 to hit – or -7 if you try to target the brain within it. The -2 shift from "face" to "skull" (brain) is identical in intent to the -3 shift from "torso" to "vitals," "leg" to "joint" (knee), or "leg" to "artery" (femoral artery); it's an extra penalty to hit something vital inside. If you have Martial Arts and know about joints and arteries, then you'll also know that hits to most of these areas have a 1 on 1d chance of hitting the vital bit anyway; for instance, if you target the face, a 1 on 1d means a skull (brain) hit.

As for why the head is -5 to hit, I've explain this many times. Hit location modifiers are not modifiers for target size alone. Please see this thread. The short and the long of it is that if you're only using target size for hit locations, then you're doing it wrong.

• based on this, if it were possible to take No Face alone (without No Brain) it could imply that brain hits would be easier to hit

• it's unclear how Kromm means a -2 shift is equal to -3 shifts, they are SIMILAR in both being penalties to hit vital things, but different because the penalty is less.
  • It's only 1 step worse than targeting less-vital face sublocations such as the jaw/ear (and EASIER to hit them from rear)
    • it's 2 steps easier than eyes though. Eyes are basically a Bane to skull DR

see also

• Extra Head