What are some games where knives are actually deadly instead of just doing chip damage?

Knives aren't actually that deadly in real life, most people survive knife wounds.

The same is now true of gunshots, but those are quite deadly in the average RPG

DoT's are just one of those mechanics that don't really work well in a tabletop setting where just straight up killing a thing works better if it can be done in the fewest number of turns possible. Why kill a thing 5 turns from now when you can kill it in 2 turns by just hitting it really hard with a hammer?

Here's the source I was thinking of
pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2014/january/survival-rates-similar-for-gun#

Percentage based DoTs work great in long drag out fights against enemies with lots of HP, such as those found in video games. The problem is that anything percentage based in a tabletop game is a pain in the ass to calculate - as is even remembering to apply the damage from the DoT in the first place.

Fantasy Craft knifewielders are pretty scary. Taking Knife Basics means you're never disarmed if there's a knife anywhere in your inventory. Someone tied you up in a chair and took all your stuff, but missed that knife in your boot? Ask him to come closer so you can whisper sweet knifings in his ear.
The Supremacy lets you one-shot any regular mook who's less intelligent than you are, once per round. Also that one die of sneak attack damage stacks with the two dice from the Basics if you assume the stance.

On the other hand, knives were the most common method for killing armored knights. Bear him down and have someone slip a knife under his armor, and say goodnight, knight.

Burning wheel and torchbearer do a pretty good job. Combat system consists of scripted actions, all weapons except knives and fists you have to take a break between scripted 'stab' actions. This means that if you close to a good distance for a knife, your sword wielding foe will be flailing at you ineffectively, and you'll be stacking up small wounds on them super fast.

Off, if they're wearing armour you're totally boned.

I thought the advantages of knives were all about their size?, what is a situation in which getting stabbed by a knife would be comparable or worse than getting a sword slash in the same area?

In Unknown Armies - while knives deal only 2d10+3 damage as a sharp weapon, you can take a knife-related obsession and obsessed skill, that will allow you to make any of your attacks a dramatical success (potentially dealing 1d100 damage) or failure.

youtube.com/watch?v=c4ZpyKSmgdE

WoD. But then again, everything is deadly in WoD.

The right answer that is always ignored.

Riddle of Steel

in call of cthulhu a knife deals about 1d6 damage, while your average human will have about 10-12 hp

so max damage will deal half their hp total, and will give them a major wound that will hobble them until they find medical attention

Sure, but average damage on a D6 is 3.5, which we round to 4. So you're looking at an average of 3 attacks, assuming all your attacks hit and assuming your foe doesn't kill you before then

Meanwhile firearms deal multiple, larger dice per hit

Song of Swords is great for knife combat. Their main disadvantage is reach though.

Three hit KO isn't chip damage.
AFMBE and other Classic Unisystem games. d4*2 for average strength, then *4 after armour for a neck hit. On a damage roll of 3 or 4 your opponent is probably dead or dying.

>Most DoTs don't inflict enough damage within enough time to stop your opponent from just killing you outright, even if they also die soon afterward
Well, that's pretty much the deal with knives IRL too.

There's a reason a lot of self-defense types say "Nobody wins a knife fight." Unless there's a huge disparity between physical strength and skill, a fight between two people with knives will end with both getting completely fucked up before one is killed/incapacitated.

7 health levels, total, and you have to be supernatural or armored to soak lethal at all. With the dazing rule, anyone that isn't undead and loses more health levels than they have stamina between turns doesn't get to take actions on their next one to try to feebly roll through their wound penalties. ST is fudging if you see a human survive two stabs.

In DnD 5e, a Rogue can do massive damage with a dagger through the Sneak Attack feature, especially if they are an Assassin subclass. For all other classes and level 0 NPCs though, you'd have to homebrew it so that they got some level of sneak attack.

The weird thing is, that a dagger's base damage alone has a 25% chance to drop a commoner in one hit. If you have any kind of skill in wielding it, then the chances go up significantly. I tried to find some statistics on knife attacks vs knife attack deaths to get some sort of comparison on how lethal a knife's damage should be to a commoner, but I didn't find anything. Also note that a single knife wound is much less lethal now that it would have been 500 years ago due to increased obesity (armor) and advances in medical care.

A /v/ example would be the Souls series of games. In all the ones I've played, a dagger has a special critical hit that deals a shit load of damage.

GURPS, you can target the neck or vitals either using cutting or impaling damage, if you use the supplement you can target even more deadly points.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the grand majority of deaths in warfare in those times due to infection, rather than outright death by massive trauma or shock? So wouldn't that knight still have enough time to stab you back before he succumbed?

2d10+3 can be a lot when you only have 1d100 hit points.

In 5e, though, there's no reason to use a dagger for sneak attacks. Sneak attacks require a Finesse or ranged weapon, and Rogues are proficient with Shortswords and Rapiers, both of which deal more damage than daggers. If your GM gave you (or you gave your players) extra sneak attack damage for using a dagger, even for Assassin Rogues, that's a house-rule, not something in the game by default.

You thought right. Shorter blades have advantages in grapples, can be made stiffer than longer blades without most the negatives, and give better point control. In general, the weapon used to inflict a wound does not change how it interacts with the target. Putting a knife blade into someone is the same as putting the same amount of spear or sword into the same spot.

the idea is you get the knight on the ground, have your mates hold him down and then shank him between the plates
really more of an improvised execution, but the knife blade makes it easier

>the weapon used to inflict a wound does not change how it interacts with the target
in a stab maybe, but the swing and inertia are extremely significative as soon as you start making large movements

All flesh must be eaten's unisystem makes knives kinda dangerous, a simple pen knife can range in damage from 1 to 24 damage (depending on users strength) which then doubles after armour reduction, and the typical character has between 18 and 49HP.

It's a stupidly lethal game system.

Ah. Yea, that makes sense. He's not getting up from that.

You're not supposed to slash with a knife. It's not actually designed for it, even if the knife has an edged blade. The blade is only really there to widen the wound as the knife goes in in the first place. Slashing with a knife could easily end up breaking it, since the tang is usually not sturdy enough to withstand that kind of punishment.

Now, if you mean stabbing someone, and then sliding the blade to the side to open the wound up more, that's more something you do when you have a helpless or off-guard opponent, because the stabbing motion is much faster and harder to interrupt. The longer the knife is inside the target, the easier it is for them to grab the knife, and that's when you're in trouble. See, there's a reason so many deaths by stabbing have dozens of wounds, and it's not because all them bitches crazy. It's because that's how you kill with a knife, you usually HAVE to stab that many times because the victim isn't going to politely stay still and let you stab them in the heart, lungs, or throat. I remember my sensei when I was taking martial arts making knife attacks sound really terrifying, and borderline impossible to defend against, so I asked him how you actually defend against them at all, and he told me: "You don't. You LET them stab you. Then you grab the knife and DO NOT LET GO. Then they can't stab you anymore, and in a fight it's very unlikely the first stab will kill or even badly hurt you."

This was to a 10 year old kid. My sensei was hardcore like that.

In Holmes Basic D&D daggers infamously were the best weapon, because all weapons did d6 damage and daggers attacked twice a round

Moldvay/Cook B/X still regarded variable weapon damage as an optional rule, but I believe all other effects were removed.

How did that even happen? I mean, christ, that is an OBVIOUS imbalance. Why would anyone use anything but daggers EVER? I can understand how everything in 3.5 or Pathfinder is unbalanced, because something is rarely just OP by themselves in those games, it's all about how everything interacts with each other that makes those games so crazy, so it can be hard to catch in development. But that? That's just straight up making daggers better than literally everything, and it's completely fucking obvious they are. How do you make a mistake like that?

Sloppy editorial standards. That was from before TSR had really made it big, the hobby as we know it almost didn't exist so the biggest players were still a cottage industry affair

Did I say that daggers were better for sneak attacks than other weapons? No, I didn't.
Did I say that daggers do extra damage over shortswords & rapiers? No, I didn't.

When you get to higher levels as a rogue, using a dagger vs a rapier doesn't really matter much anyways. You're looking at 2 avg damage difference when you're doing 30+ damage from the sneak attack dice alone.

The OP just asked for a system where daggers could do a lot of damage. And daggers CAN do a lot of damage THROUGH THE SNEAK ATTACK FEATURE which is exactly what I said. You sound like a disgusting min-maxer who's assassin sneaks into an enemy's compound carrying a huge-ass rapier while wearing heavy armor and wielding a shield (because you took a feat at 1st and 4th levels XD !)

Game set in a boot camp.

Shadow War Armageddon/Necromunda. Especially if you're Str4 or more.

I sound like someone that understands OP wanted a game where you would actually use Daggers over every weapon. You both missed the point of the thread AND can't make an argument without spewing ad-hominems everywhere. Get out of Veeky Forums, we need good quality posts, not the fucking shit people like you bring from lereddit.

>Game where knives are deadly vs game where knives are OP
It sounds like you are missing the point of the thread. He is wanting a system where knives can keep up with other weapons, not one where knives are BETTER than every other weapon.

>Can't make an argument without spewing ad-hominems
My first post was a stance with no ad-hominems. My second post contained a valid counterpoint AND an insult for your condescending post. Just because someone insults you for being stupid, it doesn't mean they didn't also refute your main point. If you're not intelligent enough to sort the insults from the argument, then that's your fault.

I will continue to remain on Veeky Forums and avoid reddit as I have done in the past.

this is actually because most knife wounds are fairly minor, such as cuts to the fore arm or stabs around the lower ribs area. Most statistics are from an escaped mugging or a domestic dispute, very few actually deal with having 6 inches stuck in your gut 3 times.

Deadlands and Witcher make them absolutely deadly, but only when thrown - they deal weak to average damage when used as melee weapon, but will fuck you sideways if they are thrown at you.

Alot of misconceptions about knives and knife attacks here. The main advantage of a knife is that the target should feel it before he can see it. Also because of the small length, its better to inflict many stabbing wounds.

For a stab wound to be lethal it either has to slide into a vital organ, vein, or you need to use your push/pull muscles on the knife retraction to properly open up the wound, increasing bloodloss exponentially.

>most DoTs don't inflict enough damage within enough time to stop your opponent from just killing you outright, even if they also die soon afterward

yeah. That's called realism. It's how >80% of fights involving knives work: either one party surprises a chap and prison-sewing-machines him, or both duel a little/wrestle a little, stagger away and bleed out later.

This is why modern lethality for the same weapons seems swingier: hospitals stop blood loss.

Generally speaking in games the purpose of DoTs such as bleed effects or poison isn't to keep up with direct damage sources.

It's to tag your target with whatever DoTs you can, preferably while also front-loading as much damage as you can onto it, and then bug the fuck out (or take full defense actions, or enter stealth, or w/e else makes you an invalid/difficult target) in the absolute bare minimum time possible.

The advantage is that even if your damage per-unit-time is sub-par, it keeps happening even if you don't provide any more follow through. So don't continue to expose yourself to reprisal. Your damage output from DoTs may be low, but your opponent's damage output is even lower when you're flat-out not there to hit.

If your damage output WAS competitive per unit time while still affording you the option to be immune to reprisal, there'd be little reason to ever consider many direct damage paradigms.

One of the problems with this theory of course, is in multi-player environments you are immensely frustrating to fight (because you basically show up once, then spend the rest of the fight being an evasive little shit), and seldom able to significantly help your allies. So there's a lot of games which discourage this sort of approach to combat.

This is also why intangibles and intelligently-played vampires are horrible foes in D&D. They hit you once for a hard-to-remove debuff, then fade away and heal any hp damage you dealt. with a multitude of immunities and good saves, even quickly-cast save-or-suck spells hurt them less than their DoT or debuffs hurt you.

A dagger in 5e dnd does 2 less damage per attack than a longsword on average before considering STR/DEX and potential Feats.
So a Dagger would be an average 7 vs average 9 damage sword.
It's perfectly viable, before even considering a Rogue sneak attacking with it.

Sure it's "weaker" but by no means crippling you to use over, say, a shortsword.

poison'd, thanks to its escalating conflicts mechanisms.
Whipping your knife out means someone won't get up in the end.

Are there any games that have mechanics for non instant mortal wounds? Like you’ve been stabbed in the belly and are totally fucked beyond hope of saving but won’t die for hours. I can’t recall any.

How are you going to measure what qualifies as "beyond hope" in such a scenario? Humans can be quite the stubborn creatures, you know.

>How are you going to measure what qualifies as "beyond hope"
Dying and injured beyond the threshold of the setting’s level of medical technology to heal.

Knives can crit though. Max crit damage will put the average PC in the ground.

FFG Star Wars does death through stacking critical injuries rather than straight numbers (though those help). If built right, a knife can have a very VERY low threshold for activating a critical, which means every attack has a good chance of seriously wounding a PC.

GURPS
>Hit with Small Knife on the Vitals hit location
>Average damage is 1.5 HP
>Multiplied by 2 for impaling, then by 3 for vitals
>Average injury is 9 HP
>Must make a bleeding roll EVERY THIRTY SECONDS WITH A -5 PENALTY (-4 for vitals, -1 for injury between 5 and 9)
>The chance that you'll stop bleeding (i.e., get a critical success) is about 0.5%
>Fall unconscious at 0 HP
>You'll probably have died after reaching -20 HP--i.e., after 21 checks, or 42 minutes
Pretty deadly...

Surviving Edged Weapons