Complex and unnecessary

[Sean Waters]

I tell you what really hacks me off...

(Don't you love it whena post starts like that)

...this whole thing about 2xmass=+1 Body. Grr. So the planet Earth has 86 Body, or thereabouts.

Well, actually it doesn't hack me off that much but what it does is creates serious conflict with the rest of the system, which works on a largely arithmetic progression (yes, we might possible have chatted about this before). If +1 Body represents an object twice as massive, then +1 Body damage should represent twice as much destructive potential. That would mean that a hit on the planet that did 86 Body in one go could crack the mantle, but 86 hits that do 1 Body each should have no real effect at all.

Reflecting that in the system would require major changes unless...

What if we assumed that a 2 Body hit was more effective than 2x1 Body hits, or a 9 body hit was much more destructive than 3x3 body hits?

So, something with 1 Body can take 1 x1Body hit. Something with 2 Body can take 2 x 1Body hits, something with 3 body can take 4x 1Body hits.

Binary increase, basically. That would mean that something with 10 Body could take 512 x 1Body hits, or 32x 5Body hits and so on?

That would mean that a small increase in Body damage would have much more damage potential. Going back to the example of planet Earth, if you wanted to destroy the planet with 1 Body hits (after defences obviously) then you would need 2^86 hits, or 7.7E+25 - a big number.

OK, that involves more book keeping and certain other changes when it comes to stuff like focii and vehicles, but it isn't that difficult a concept and would make the rules more coherent.

Nascent idea still, but any initial thoughts?

[ghost-angel]

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

[Sean Waters]

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

Our physics teacher at school used to threaten us with 'The Death of a Thousand Rusty Pen Nibs' (this was back when we had pen nibs*), and I oftent hink that the basic using of aliveness/coherence in hero is a bit of a blunt tool: if 1 pen nib isn't going to do any Body, then 1000 aren't either (certainly not one at a time) and if 1 pen nib does any Body, then 1000 would be overkill.

Personally I would like to see more exponential elements in Hero as, IMO, it makes superheroes more super, which I think is a good thing.

I started thinking about this when I was going through some Star Hero stuff and realised that some of the starships were actually harder to destroy than planets were and that Hero vehicle rules tended to make a mockery of damage when it was in fact easier to sink a battleship than blow up a main battle tank.

The answer is not just jigging with DEF and Body values - because that then leads to jigging with damage and almost everything else and we wind up rapidly playing make believe.

Something like this allows a massive but relatively low DEF object to actually take damage but not be destroyed ridiculously quickly: take the climax of Star Wars 4: the Death Star, in Hero terms, probably has a lot of Body (but not THAT much) and relatively low DEF (because bits of it ont eh surface got blown up reasonably easily). Never mind sending a torperdo down a cooling vent, a dozen ships, a couple of phases and some autofire lasers and it would be slag.


*and, of course back when we had teachers who could threaten children with such things and not be subject to dismissal and public villification.

[Killer Shrike]

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

Same.

[ghost-angel]

Actually ... I have a spreadsheet that tracks damage for the Terran Empire writeups ... they aren't harder to destroy than planets. In fact they aren't as tough as it appears at first glance, they are tough per Genre Simulation, but not impossible to kill.

Several of the writeups in SH are similar to the TE builds.

Also - keep in mind that with Very Large Objects it's generally not a good idea to treat the whole thing as the same "scale" as Comparatively Small Objects.

A space fighter being a CSO should not be able to do significant damage to an object a magnitude of order larger on the Size Scale - i.e. a VLO.

What we really need are to come up with some useufl Size/Damage Comparison Models to use. I think Thia Hamaldes has done some thoughts along these lines.

[archermoo]

I'm still trying to come up with were people ever got the idea that doubling something's mass meant that it had +1 BODY.

[Sean Waters]

I'm still trying to come up with were people ever got the idea that doubling something's mass meant that it had +1 BODY.

Growth power, shooting through walls rules, and there is a specific example in Star Hero (actually a sort of side bar) that confirms the rule and calculates the Body stat of planet Earth.

**Checks reference** page 447 of 5ER (second column 2/3 way down) specifically states that 2x mass = +1 Body.

[Sean Waters]

Actually ... I have a spreadsheet that tracks damage for the Terran Empire writeups ... they aren't harder to destroy than planets. In fact they aren't as tough as it appears at first glance, they are tough per Genre Simulation, but not impossible to kill.

Several of the writeups in SH are similar to the TE builds.

Also - keep in mind that with Very Large Objects it's generally not a good idea to treat the whole thing as the same "scale" as Comparatively Small Objects.

A space fighter being a CSO should not be able to do significant damage to an object a magnitude of order larger on the Size Scale - i.e. a VLO.

What we really need are to come up with some useufl Size/Damage Comparison Models to use. I think Thia Hamaldes has done some thoughts along these lines.

Well the Alien Wars write ups have 200m long battelships with 180+Body, which is more than Earth has, although the ships in Star Hero itself have mroe reasonable totals.

One option is to assume that 2x mass = +1 Body AND +1 DEF*, which then makes planets much tougher targets.


*or +1 DEF when the whole object is targeted**



** which has the intriguing possibility of attacking on different scales

[Doc Democracy]

Also - keep in mind that with Very Large Objects it's generally not a good idea to treat the whole thing as the same "scale" as Comparatively Small Objects.

A space fighter being a CSO should not be able to do significant damage to an object a magnitude of order larger on the Size Scale - i.e. a VLO.

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

It is like putting MegaScale on damage and defences which allows you to use reasonable numbers and numbers of dice without squeezing everything into a small scale.

So earth would have 86 MegaBODY - to do a MegaBODY with normal damage you would have to do 10, 100 or even 1000 BODY with an attack.

Much easier to attack MegaBODY entities with MegaDice attacks....


Doc

[archermoo]

Growth power, shooting through walls rules, and there is a specific example in Star Hero (actually a sort of side bar) that confirms the rule and calculates the Body stat of planet Earth.

**Checks reference** page 447 of 5ER (second column 2/3 way down) specifically states that 2x mass = +1 Body.

Thanks, though it seems that that ref is a general rule of thumb, and moreover only applies to objects. In fact it seems to me to be describing the rule of thumb that was used to generate the amount of Body given to different objects on the table. It also specifically notes that the Body total gained that way should be modified as appropriate.

I think some people get stuck thinking of the Hero rules as immutable laws of physics, rather than general rules to allow for the dramatic simulation of heroic fiction. Showing that a law of physics breaks down at extremes is a good way of showing that our understand of the law needs to be updated. Showing that a game rule breaks down at extremes is unnecessary: It's a given. :)

Though I'll also say that I agree with g-a and KS. :D

[OddHat]

we wind up rapidly playing make believe

Um, yes. That's pretty much the hobby. :)

[Maur]

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

Depends upon which incarnation of D6 you are referring to. In the original release I believe they used Damage Caps and To-Hit Caps and split everything up into named scales (character, speeder, walker, starfighter, capital). So, you looked up what your scale was as the attacker and the scale of the defender to find your damage cap (e.g. dice rolling above X are treated as rolling X) and looked up on another chart your To-Hit changes (e.g. dice rolling below Y are treated as rolling Y). So, character shooting at a starfighter had a much easier time hitting it, but far less likely to do damage.
In the 2nd Ed R&E version it was changed to bonus dice which were either applied to the attacker's damage or the defender's damage resistance.
In the current incarnation the scale of an object is an actual number (and the books have a chart of mass/time/volume/etc... to look up what that scale is). The scale difference is added to the to-hit roll, but subtracted from the damage roll.
Ex: a person shooting a handgun [scale 0] at a tank [scale 10] would add 10 to their to-hit roll for hitting (10 - 0), but subtract 10 (10 - 0) to the damage roll for doing damage)
Ex: that same tank shooting back at the person with the main gun would add -10 to his to-hit roll (0 - 10), but subtract -10 (or add 10) to the damage resistance roll (0 - 10).

[Doc Democracy]

Was first edition that I remember...

Doc

[Sean Waters]

Thanks, though it seems that that ref is a general rule of thumb, and moreover only applies to objects. In fact it seems to me to be describing the rule of thumb that was used to generate the amount of Body given to different objects on the table. It also specifically notes that the Body total gained that way should be modified as appropriate.

I think some people get stuck thinking of the Hero rules as immutable laws of physics, rather than general rules to allow for the dramatic simulation of heroic fiction. Showing that a law of physics breaks down at extremes is a good way of showing that our understand of the law needs to be updated. Showing that a game rule breaks down at extremes is unnecessary: It's a given. :)

Though I'll also say that I agree with g-a and KS. :D

There is support for this being a general principle int he game as the growth power also operates on +1 Body for a mass doubling. Body is pretty mutable though: a normal human could have a 20 body which, by those lights, would be the same as a normal with 10 levels of growth who weighs in at 100 tons. I know I've been hitting the beer and doughnuts a little hard, but...:)

Also the principle is confirmed in Star Hero at page 197 (co authored by James Cambias and Steve Long) where the Earth, if treated as a homogenous sphere of rock (DEF 5, Body 19 per hex) has a Body of 86 and would be effectively destroyed by an attack that did 91 Body (to account for defences) or completely vapourised by an attack that did 177 Body.

I don't really have a problem with that as such - 86 Body is a LOT, but if we are assuming Earth has a DEF of 5, it is shockingly easy to destroy: a normal with an Uzi 9mm and 5 clips of ammunition could create an extinction level event* :D

OK, that is silly, and whilst testing at extremes often yields silliness (and is, as you say, unnecessary) it can also show up areas that might stand a little improvement.

Star Hero basically advocates an ad hoc approach to this sort of thing, which is fine - it isn't often that this is going to come up but the principle comes up at much smaller scales, and, perhaps, should inform the way we use Body. The system had a Body stat and a 1-20 range for normals long before we translated that into a mass relationship. Now that relationship seems quite embedded, we might need to stand back and take another look.

At the very least if a weapon was going to destroy the planet I'd want the whole planet in range of the weapon, and sufficient AoE to cover a large part of the Earth - but we do not use such distinctions on Gigantica the 150 metre tall woman: realistically (HA!) human scale weapons should have little effect on her no matter what the theoretical damage output - you'd need vehicle weapons at least to get a projectile deep enough to do any actual harm.

This is all a balance though between principle and playability. Playability has to win, obviously, but if we can incorporate more principle without detracting from the game, I think that is a good thing.







* Of course, had it been Arnie with an Uzi and 5 clips, noone would even raise an eyebrow

[Sean Waters]

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

It is like putting MegaScale on damage and defences which allows you to use reasonable numbers and numbers of dice without squeezing everything into a small scale.

So earth would have 86 MegaBODY - to do a MegaBODY with normal damage you would have to do 10, 100 or even 1000 BODY with an attack.

Much easier to attack MegaBODY entities with MegaDice attacks....


Doc

The Mega Attack idea is something Hero has done before IIRC in Robot Hero, or Mecha Hero or wahatever it was called. I don't have the book, but it rings a vague bell. The trouble with this approach is that it is a little ad hoc - how many different damage ranges do you create*?

Well, now we can formalise it: the idea I suggest incorporates a mega damage (or more like a mega defence) principle:

If you assume that Body works on an exponential scale then you have to use an attack that gets close to the Body of the object in damage or it has little effect. For example, using the complex and unnecessary idea presented, if you want to destroy an object, but cannot do all the Body in one hit it takes an increasing number of hits to bring the target down: if you are doing 6 Body less than the target's Body it takes 64 hits to remove all teh Body, not 2. The practical effect is megadamage - only really powerful weapons are effective at destroying really tough targets - whilst less powerful weapons might be able to do damge still, it will be cosmetic at worst or take years (sometimes literally) to do significant damage.




* Star Hero sort of addresses mega damage: what it does though is increase the damage large ships do to small ships - it doesn't work the other way round.

[casualplayer]

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

It is like putting MegaScale on damage and defences which allows you to use reasonable numbers and numbers of dice without squeezing everything into a small scale.

So earth would have 86 MegaBODY - to do a MegaBODY with normal damage you would have to do 10, 100 or even 1000 BODY with an attack.

Much easier to attack MegaBODY entities with MegaDice attacks....


Doc

Sounding kinda Rifts-y there. :D Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

But to steal from another system's concept, I've always felt that damage should propagate similar to the feat Cleave. If the damage done exhausts the BODY of the target hex, the remaining damage carries on to any adjacent hexes, and so on and so on. That is, unless the affect area is constrained or predetermined by a power modifier.

It's a symptom of the escalation of power that has creeped into the game. Characters are literally Tough as Dirt (because of Combat Luck or other defenses) so weapons get bigger to be able to hurt characters to instill drama so defenses notch up in a grail quest for invulnerability so weapons get turned up to 11....Then the poor GM one day realizes "Holy Smokes! Gunslinger's handcannon can knock down an apartment building" and he realizes just how many aspects of the game have been neglected in the care and feeding of PCs and he looks around at his mighty works and despairs. Stuff either isn't tough enough or damage has to be taken down a notch.

[Fitz]

I vaguely toyed for a while with the idea of scaling DEF, BODY and damage along the same sort of lines as the MegaScale advantage to cater to the enormous range of power levels that people play this game at. I let the idea lie and didn't develop it any further when I stopped running a Space Opera game, but I think it could work well enough within the current game parameters if the costings were properly worked out.

[Sean Waters]

................ Showing that a law of physics breaks down at extremes is a good way of showing that our understand of the law needs to be updated. Showing that a game rule breaks down at extremes is unnecessary: It's a given. :)

Though I'll also say that I agree with g-a and KS. :D


Another example from Star Hero (I'm really enjoying the book) to illustrate your point: the damage done by FTL missiles is calculated (on a move through basis) as 120,000,000d6*. Hoo boy, I'm gonna need more dice :D

This example is given in the book because it illustrates the point that you can take this stuff too far, but it all makes for a really enjoyable read. I'd strongly recommend Star hero to anyone who has not read it yet.




*yes, 120 million :eek:

[Sean Waters]

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

The problem with that approach is that you can do 40 Body a 12d6 KA or with 12x1d6 KAs (OK, after defences - we may need to make it 15d6 KA or 12x4d6 KA), which means that you either have to start defining large/tough objects as having Body in the 100s or 1000s (with consequent damage inflation), and start looking like Palladium, or acknowledge a degree of exponentiallity (new word?) and work a fix. The easiest answer is to relate not just Body but also DEF to mass - which makes massive objects much harder to do significant damage to, but that brings its own problems, not the least of which is damage inflation (again).

To take a low level example: last summer I had to chip this bit of concrete out using a hammer and masonry chisel. Took hours. Each blow was causing some damage but far less than 1 Body: a concrete wall in Hero requires only 5 hits that get damage through to take it down (i.e. it has 5 Body) and a DEF of 6. Assuming the chisel is (just) capable of doing 7 Body (or more likely 4 Body and is AP against masonry), such an endeavour is not going to take long. Using the 'Body is exponential' idea, it would take 16 x 1Body blows to do 1 Body to a 5 Body object, or 90 effective hits to chip through. Believe me that feels a bit more like it.

[ghost-angel]

The problem with that approach is that you can do 40 Body a 12d6 KA or with 12x1d6 KAs (OK, after defences - we may need to make it 15d6 KA or 12x4d6 KA), which means that you either have to start defining large/tough objects as having Body in the 100s or 1000s (with consequent damage inflation), and start looking like Palladium, or acknowledge a degree of exponentiallity (new word?) and work a fix. The easiest answer is to relate not just Body but also DEF to mass - which makes massive objects much harder to do significant damage to, but that brings its own problems, not the least of which is damage inflation (again).

To take a low level example: last summer I had to chip this bit of concrete out using a hammer and masonry chisel. Took hours. Each blow was causing some damage but far less than 1 Body: a concrete wall in Hero requires only 5 hits that get damage through to take it down (i.e. it has 5 Body) and a DEF of 6. Assuming the chisel is (just) capable of doing 7 Body (or more likely 4 Body and is AP against masonry), such an endeavour is not going to take long. Using the 'Body is exponential' idea, it would take 16 x 1Body blows to do 1 Body to a 5 Body object, or 90 effective hits to chip through. Believe me that feels a bit more like it.

When I build a Campaign I look at how things fit together. The System itself isn't going to be very good at telling you these things - it's too wide open for that.

If I want something that's very hard to kill, I start with what I want my average Person to look like, and what I want an average damage to look like to be a threat to said person. And I look at what I'd allow as a Maximum Damage in the Campaign - and make appropriately hard to kill objects have the level of Body and/or Defense to make that happen.

The System can't tell me that space ships are fragile, or nearly impossible to kill. The System really doesn't care. The Campaign is where that's decided, where you take and scale the appropriate System parts together to make happen what you envision.

So - what kind of Campaign are you running, and how hard is it to kill the Average Character with the Average Attack?

[Sean Waters]

When I build a Campaign I look at how things fit together. The System itself isn't going to be very good at telling you these things - it's too wide open for that.

If I want something that's very hard to kill, I start with what I want my average Person to look like, and what I want an average damage to look like to be a threat to said person. And I look at what I'd allow as a Maximum Damage in the Campaign - and make appropriately hard to kill objects have the level of Body and/or Defense to make that happen.

The System can't tell me that space ships are fragile, or nearly impossible to kill. The System really doesn't care. The Campaign is where that's decided, where you take and scale the appropriate System parts together to make happen what you envision.

So - what kind of Campaign are you running, and how hard is it to kill the Average Character with the Average Attack?

My point is that it does not matter how you pitch it, in terms of Body or even DEF - what matters is how that damage can be accumulated. I see a massive difference between a single large attack and a dozen small attacks but, if they both exceed DEF, the system doesn't - all it 'cares' about is damage through defence and that can lead to a great deal of unrealistic results having to be handwaved on an arbitrary basis. That's what I'm talking about, not making rulings over what body levels should be.

[Sean Waters]

Using the mass/Body relationship, a human heart has a Body of 2 and a human brain has a Body of 4, so even a point of damage to a heart can disable it, or 2 to the brain. I may be getting a little carried away now.

[OddHat]

My point is that it does not matter how you pitch it, in terms of Body or even DEF - what matters is how that damage can be accumulated. I see a massive difference between a single large attack and a dozen small attacks but, if they both exceed DEF, the system doesn't - all it 'cares' about is damage through defence and that can lead to a great deal of unrealistic results having to be handwaved on an arbitrary basis. That's what I'm talking about, not making rulings over what body levels should be.

So what's your solution?

[Sean Waters]

So what's your solution?

...clearly in need of a better explanation. What I was trying to suggest in the OP is that the amount of Body that a thing has should define not just a raw total of Body it can take but also how tough it is.

Thus you cannot destroy a 10 Body thing with ten hits that do 1 Body each but you can destroy it with a single hit that does 10 Body. The idea is that it would take two 9 Body hits, or four 8 Body hits, eight 7 Body hits and so on.

There would be an automatic scaling of damage and toughness (as represented by Body) because unless an attack was doing Body damage near to the Body total of the attacked object it would have negligible effect.

I appreciate that this is a mathematical solution that would cause some to shy away and it certainly is not a core concept, but it seems a reasonable way to deal with what has been termed 'megadamage' attacks: in essence you would never be able to destroy a planet unless the damage you were doing had Body results within about 10 points of the Body of the planet (and even then it would take a considerable number of hits.

To simplify you could, in effect, ignore any result that did Body damage less than (target Body-10). That prevents an accumulation of pinpricks having the same effect as an orbital kinetic spear. That has to be a good thing.

[OddHat]

There would be an automatic scaling of damage and toughness (as represented by Body) because unless an attack was doing Body damage near to the Body total of the attacked object it would have negligible effect.

Not sure about this. I can kick open a door without destroying it. Given time, I could even whittle my way through it with a pen knife. A needle would take more time, but so long as it didn't break, it would work eventually.

Could I destroy the Earth with a pen knife? Nope, even with unlimited time gravity would keep pulling it back together. This seems like a case where the Earth's defenses should be higher than the maximum damage that could be done with a pen knife. Or where the GM should say "no".


I appreciate that this is a mathematical solution that would cause some to shy away and it certainly is not a core concept, but it seems a reasonable way to deal with what has been termed 'megadamage' attacks: in essence you would never be able to destroy a planet unless the damage you were doing had Body results within about 10 points of the Body of the planet (and even then it would take a considerable number of hits.

Make things too math heavy and you end up with a table full of people number crunching rather than role playing. Fine for some groups, not for others. Personally, I'd rather avoid it.


To simplify you could, in effect, ignore any result that did Body damage less than (target Body-10). That prevents an accumulation of pinpricks having the same effect as an orbital kinetic spear. That has to be a good thing.

You can kill a person with a pin. It just takes a little time. ;)

[Captain Obvious]

Another example from Star Hero (I'm really enjoying the book) to illustrate your point: the damage done by FTL missiles is calculated (on a move through basis) as 120,000,000d6*. Hoo boy, I'm gonna need more dice :D

This example is given in the book because it illustrates the point that you can take this stuff too far, but it all makes for a really enjoyable read. I'd strongly recommend Star hero to anyone who has not read it yet.




*yes, 120 million :eek:

Holy crap! You could vaporize an entire solar system with that!

[ghost-angel]

...clearly in need of a better explanation. What I was trying to suggest in the OP is that the amount of Body that a thing has should define not just a raw total of Body it can take but also how tough it is.

How tough somethng is, is a matter of Defense, not Body. I have pointed out you need both.

And yes - you CAN kill someone with a lot of little attacks. I think your argument falls apart completely because it is simply very possible to do a large number of - taken by themselves - nearly negligible damaging attacks that add up to death.

I take a saw and start cutting off 1 BODY of wood at a time from a plank and soon I have many little pieces of wood and no plank (it's "dead").
I take a steak knife and cause a large number of small wounds to a person and they bleed to death.

It's very simple, and very easy, to get a small amount of damage to add up to a large amount of damage.

And - real life doesn't add up the way Gaming System Damage does. So it's a false comparison anyways.

[OddHat]

Actually, I think the point has merit when looking at something like planet busting. If you go by the straight Star Hero stats, things get very strange. I'd fix as much of a problem as I see by saying "Common sense dictates that your pen knife can not hurt the planet. No, I don't care how many damage classes you bought for your Knife Fighting martial art." Also, I'd tweak vehicle, weapon, and inanimate object stats until they worked as I liked in a campaign.

In the end, it's a game. Do what's fun.

[Sean Waters]

......................

You can kill a person with a pin. It just takes a little time. ;)


That's...ahem...my point - in Hero you can either kill someone quickly with a pin, or not at all. (sorry, couldn't resist)

[OddHat]

That's...ahem...my point - in Hero you can either kill someone quickly with a pin, or not at all.

Ah. It looked like your point was that you could never, ever kill someone with a pin.

In Hero, you'd have to accept that you can kill someone with 8 or so pin jabs, or house rule damage less than 1 Body per jab.

[ghost-angel]

I think the idea of very large things being divided into Hexes for purposes of Damaging part of it, instead of the whole, has both been talked about and generally accepted as common sense.

[archermoo]

I think the idea of very large things being divided into Hexes for purposes of Damaging part of it, instead of the whole, has both been talked about and generally accepted as common sense.

Which is what these kind of discussions seem to devolve to very often. Basically an argument of "if I ignore common sense, X is broken!". Which I generally reply with "Well, stop ignoring common sense." :)

[Chris Goodwin]

I'm still trying to come up with were people ever got the idea that doubling something's mass meant that it had +1 BODY.

Been there as far back as 3rd edition Champions. I can't say with any certainly how much further than that.

[Chris Goodwin]

I tell you what really hacks me off...

(Don't you love it whena post starts like that)

...this whole thing about 2xmass=+1 Body. Grr. So the planet Earth has 86 Body, or thereabouts.

Also note you have 5 million hexes of dirt over it for DEF.

[Sean Waters]

Also note you have 5 million hexes of dirt over it for DEF.

Well that's one approach you can take: rule that the DEF of a planet is pretty huge, in fact relate the DEF of the object to its mass, as the Body is related to mass - which makes a whole planet hard to break but a bit of a planet is easier to break.

That's good for big numbers, but doesn't solve the small number end of the spectrum - the finest grade of damage that Hero can manage is still a pretty big step.

Of course, not all problems need to be solved - very often keeping track of tiny amounts of damage would just be a pain, so to speak, and common sense is an excellent tool in reining in the rampant excesses of rules nit-picking. However having some principle upon which to hang your common sense judgements, a common basis for discussion, allows a two different people's common sense to overlap to a greater degree.

[Lord Liaden]

Actually ... I have a spreadsheet that tracks damage for the Terran Empire writeups ... they aren't harder to destroy than planets. In fact they aren't as tough as it appears at first glance, they are tough per Genre Simulation, but not impossible to kill.

Several of the writeups in SH are similar to the TE builds.

Also - keep in mind that with Very Large Objects it's generally not a good idea to treat the whole thing as the same "scale" as Comparatively Small Objects.

A space fighter being a CSO should not be able to do significant damage to an object a magnitude of order larger on the Size Scale - i.e. a VLO.

What we really need are to come up with some useufl Size/Damage Comparison Models to use. I think Thia Hamaldes has done some thoughts along these lines.

There's actually an optional rule in The Ultimate Vehicle that addresses difference in Vehicle sizes. In the case of a difference in SIZE stat between two vehicles, you add the difference to the BODY damage rolled by the larger vehicle's weapons when used against the smaller one. Although TUV recommends against doing the reverse, I have done so in Heroic games, including extending the rule to man-carried weapons used against vehicles, treating humans as SIZE 0. IME that greatly helps curtail such unrealistic results as sinking a galley with a volley of arrows.

[Sean Waters]

How tough somethng is, is a matter of Defense, not Body. I have pointed out you need both.

And yes - you CAN kill someone with a lot of little attacks. I think your argument falls apart completely because it is simply very possible to do a large number of - taken by themselves - nearly negligible damaging attacks that add up to death.

I take a saw and start cutting off 1 BODY of wood at a time from a plank and soon I have many little pieces of wood and no plank (it's "dead").
I take a steak knife and cause a large number of small wounds to a person and they bleed to death.

It's very simple, and very easy, to get a small amount of damage to add up to a large amount of damage.

And - real life doesn't add up the way Gaming System Damage does. So it's a false comparison anyways.

Using the steak knife example, the maximum number of wounds you can cause before death occurs is 17 (allowing for deterioration after you go below zero, and assuming a SPD of 2 and a Body of 10). That's a lot, but not THAT many when you consider how much surface area you have to work with: I've known people to cut themselves an awful lot more than that with only minimal functional effect (is it me or is this post getting weird?).

What I'm suggesting is that we could effectively subdivide Body damage into smaller chunks, whilst acknowledging that a bigger single wound is more dangerous than a lot of little ones - a single knife thrust can kill, but you can do a lot of damage without killing.

Even if we don't actually play it that way it is a useful basis for making decisions about how Body damage works - a useful thought tool.

[lemming]

The thing is, if you have to have a rule for every little thing that could be taken to the extreme, you wind up with a system that's unplayable.

This whole +1 Body, various things have existed for quite some time. I think it was Espionage that used the doubling rule with explosives. I think a rather over powered brick of mine could be stunned by a mass of C4 the size of Neptune's orbit...

I see this as a total non-issue by following the Ghost Angel line of reasoning.

We're playing a game, not a reality duplicator.

[Doc Democracy]

I think there is something here for particular types of game and I think that the discrepancies are more likely to come up in Star Hero kinds than others.

In heroic genres it makes sense for damage systems to be fuzzy and abstract and even for main battletanks to be taken down by a machine gun weilding heroic figure.

In superhero systems potentially planet busting damage will often barely result in cracked paving stones...

In more 'realistic' games there might be some need to make distinction in scales and thus introduce varieties of BODY to the game.

You do use 88mm howitzers to target individual soldiers, nor small arms fire to take down tanks.

This could be done in a number of ways, would be nice to see it worked up though....


Doc

[SteveZilla]

I tell you what really hacks me off...

(Don't you love it whena post starts like that)

...this whole thing about 2xmass=+1 Body. Grr. So the planet Earth has 86 Body, or thereabouts.

So the whole of the Earth, the Sum Total of Humanity's Home Address... has as much BODY as 8.6 Hexes of Dirt? :ugly: :slap:

Yeah, I'd go with GA's method.

[Sean Waters]

So the whole of the Earth, the Sum Total of Humanity's Home Address... has as much BODY as 8.6 Hexes of Dirt? :ugly: :slap:

Yeah, I'd go with GA's method.

Not my doing (for once) - this is straight out of the rule books, which is why I'm suggesting that adding smaller damage totals should not be the same thing as doing a single large damage total (or that increased mass should increase DEF as well as Body).

[ghost-angel]

Not my doing (for once) - this is straight out of the rule books, which is why I'm suggesting that adding smaller damage totals should not be the same thing as doing a single large damage total (or that increased mass should increase DEF as well as Body).

What is the DEF of the Earth anyways?

Not the DEF of a Hex Of Dirt - The DEF of The Earth.

[Captain Obvious]

DEF is one of those things that should scale with growth, or not, depending on what is being done. If you're trying to cut a hole into a steel bulkhead or drill a well into the earth, DEF of an object should have a set value. If you're trying to sink the ship that that bulkhead is part of, or blast apart the Earth, the DEF of the steel or the rock should scale up to account for the fact that one small hole ain't gonna do it.

Some better guidelines might be good, but there will be a need for the foreseeable future for a GM to do some figuring on the fly to come up with the best (taking into account the desire for realism, and the cinematic satisfaction of the result) ruling on what blows up what.

EDIT: Oh yeah, thinking about this thread and the "death by 1000 cuts" examples brought up here, it occurred to me that some workable house rule might be hammered out to take this sort of thing into account, at least for living things. What kills people is mostly blood loss, with structural damage to bones, organs, etc making things a little more complicated. Suppose we say that small damage wounds are mostly contributing to blood loss without the complications that high damage wounds cause.

In game terms, if a character takes an impairing or disabling hit, treat this as normal in all ways. If the hit fails to impair, it's a bleeding wound...don't subtract it from the character's BODY score, but add it to the total damage taken for purposes of Bleeding damage. So a character who gets shot in the head will probably drop right away, but an unarmed guy who's trying to ward off a knife fighter will take dozens of defensive wounds before he loses enough BODY from blood loss to drop dead.

Just a thought.

[Trebuchet]

What is the DEF of the Earth anyways?

Not the DEF of a Hex Of Dirt - The DEF of The Earth.The whole "Earth has 86 BODY & DEF 5" thing has long been the single stupidest item in the entire Hero system. I've railed about it for years. By the rules a character with a paltry 2d6 RKA (such as an ordinary M60 machinegun) can destroy our planet before he uses up a single belt of ammunition. :stupid:

It's amazing that World War Two didn't leave Earth an asteroid belt. :rolleyes:

[ghost-angel]

The Beam Limitation might have something to do with that. . .

AND - Star Hero p197 where we encounter our 5DEF Planet ... states that it's silly to kill the Earth with a tiny weapon.

And of course that leads us back to "I'll give it as much Body, and DEF, as I feel is appropriate to the object being statted" line of thought.

[SteveZilla]

This discussion made me think of something I'd call "Wound Factor". Basically, you'd compare the sizes of attacker and target as a ratio, then apply that ratio to the damage that gets though the target's DEF. Normal rounding would apply.

Now, this is for the *destruction* of the target, not just rendering a bit of it unusable but still relatively "there". A Hydrogen Bomb can excavate a huge crater (by normal human standards) and render an area unfit to live in. But it has no chance of destroying the Earth -- it just moves a tiny (in Earth terms) bit of dirt from one place to another. Look at large asteroid impacts on the Earth. No chance of destroying the Earth, but they can produce E.L.E.s. for the life living upon the Earth.

In addition, I'd say that "close counts, but is also mitigated". If the attacker is within 4 Sizes of the target, it's no change in damage (10:10). Every 4 Size different equals +/- 1 Wound Factor. A Size 30 attacking a Size 10 would get the benefit of 5 Wound Factors, making it's damage modified by a 10:15 ratio.

Size would be defined by every full 15 points of Growth (i.e. 15 pts Growth makes a size 10 "normal" into size 11). I picked 10 as a Size baseline primarily because all the other primary stats start at 10, and it reduces the effects of a single point of Size difference.

I haven't done a thorough run of the numbers yet. I just thought it up and figured I'd post the idea for discussion's sake.

[Lord Liaden]

The whole "Earth has 86 BODY & DEF 5" thing has long been the single stupidest item in the entire Hero system. I've railed about it for years. By the rules a character with a paltry 2d6 RKA (such as an ordinary M60 machinegun) can destroy our planet before he uses up a single belt of ammunition. :stupid:

It's amazing that World War Two didn't leave Earth an asteroid belt. :rolleyes:



The Beam Limitation might have something to do with that. . .

AND - Star Hero p197 where we encounter our 5DEF Planet ... states that it's silly to kill the Earth with a tiny weapon.

And of course that leads us back to "I'll give it as much Body, and DEF, as I feel is appropriate to the object being statted" line of thought.

Virtually every real-world weapon written up for Fifth Edition has the "Real Weapon" Limitation on it, and an explicit part of that Lim is that the weapon can't damage things that its real-world counterpart couldn't logically damage in real life, no matter what's rolled on the dice.

For my part I've confined "planet killers" to MegaScale Area Of Effect weapons. In other words, if you want to directly affect the BODY score of an entire planet, you need a weapon with an AOE roughly comparable to the planet's diameter.

[Maur]

Well, then maybe things that are larger and more complex shouldn't be modeled as a single unit, but as a collection of subparts. If you hit a carrier with a missile, it isn't an all or nothing kind of attack, but can damage various subcomponents without doing any real appreciable damage. So, something the size of the earth really needs to be thought of in terms of hex Volumes. Want to damage the earth with a drill or a space laser then becomes the same thing. Do damage to a volume. If you're able to exceed the total of Def/Body for that volume then you get to damage the next one down. Targeting a carrier, well, you might hit the carrier, but unless you are a good shot from a long range, then you aren't likely to hit the same area as the last strike. So, you can't destroy the comm towers if you are hitting the flight deck with that missile, heheh.

[Lord Liaden]

I once saw a suggestion posted to the forums (I'm sorry, I can't recall who came up with it :o) that sounded like it would work well for large vehicles versus smaller attackers, and might be adaptable to even larger targets. Divide the hexes of area of the target by the number of BODY the target has. The result is the number of hexes you have to destroy (exceed the DEF of) in order to do one overall BODY damage to the target.

Perhaps one could use volume instead of area. Surely one of the math-heads around here could calculate the volume of the Earth in cubic hexes. ;)

[Sean Waters]

I once saw a suggestion posted to the forums (I'm sorry, I can't recall who came up with it :o) that sounded like it would work well for large vehicles versus smaller attackers, and might be adaptable to even larger targets. Divide the hexes of area of the target by the number of BODY the target has. The result is the number of hexes you have to destroy (exceed the DEF of) in order to do one overall BODY damage to the target.

Perhaps one could use volume instead of area. Surely one of the math-heads around here could calculate the volume of the Earth in cubic hexes. ;)

About 1.37 x 10^20 hexes.

Not quite sure how that works - let us take a smaller scale example:

A stone object (DEF 5, Body 19 per hex) is 100 hexes in volume, so 100/20=5. Does that mean you need to do 19x5+5=100 Body to destroy in a single hit (or, say, 19x10 Body hits?). Hmm...that has possibilities.

How would that work with, for instance, characters that have growth (or shrinking!)?

[SteveZilla]

I once saw a suggestion posted to the forums (I'm sorry, I can't recall who came up with it :o) that sounded like it would work well for large vehicles versus smaller attackers, and might be adaptable to even larger targets. Divide the hexes of area of the target by the number of BODY the target has. The result is the number of hexes you have to destroy (exceed the DEF of) in order to do one overall BODY damage to the target.

Perhaps one could use volume instead of area. Surely one of the math-heads around here could calculate the volume of the Earth in cubic hexes. ;)



Area of a 2 meter (across) regular hexagon = 3.464101615 mm
Volume of a 2 meter tall 2 meter regular hexagon = 6.928203230 mmm

Average Diameter of the Earth = 7910.825 mi = 12,738.85 Km = 12,738,848 m
Circumference of the Earth (using Average Diameter) = 4,054,901.25 m
Surface Area of a Sphere: A = 4*Pi*R^2
Earth Surface Area (using Average Diameter) = 509,812,152,907,514 mm
147,170,091,864,500 hexes
Volume of a Sphere: V = (4*Pi*R^3)/3
Earth Volume (using Average Diameter) = 1,082,403,254,073,596,031,587 mmm
156,231,452,533,992,140,353 hexes

If my math is right.

[schir1964]

Sean,

I thought I would let you revisit this thread that kind of relates to what you are trying to do here.

Alternative System: Death, Destruction, and Function

I don't know if it will help you or not, but it does address the final result you are looking for.

- Christopher Mullins

[Markdoc]

The simplest approach - and the one I use - is that "an object" is the smallest unit that can function independantly.

For living organisms, that's the organism itself. Exceed the BOD score and it ceases to function properly. Double its BOD and it ceases to function at all. That's true whether it's a mouse or a 50 ft woman. All that's different is DEF and BOD scores.

For small vehicles like a car or even a tank, that's also a unit. Blow up the engine or even a bit of the inside, and it's pretty much done.

However for larger objects - a building or a battleship, for example - that's not the case. Blow up a main turret on a battleship and the ship continues to function. Blow up the bridge, and you may have degraded command but the ship will continue to function. If you blow up the powerplant, most of the ship will stop functioning but it won't sink and much of the lighter armament will still function. To make it sink, you need to make a biggish hole through numerous bulkheads - each of which is an independant entity (flooding one compartment won't necessarily have any effect on adjacent ones). Same applies for a building.

So as for the earth, each hex of dirt/stone is an independant entity (since destroying one hex has no real effect on the hex next door), with 13 BOD and 3-7 DEF). Call it 5 on average, and to destroy the earth would require 156,231,452,533,992,140,353 attacks doing an average of 31 BOD (based on the numberof hexes referred to above). You could get by with a somewhat larger number of attacks doing 6 BOD, but I suspect the LTE or old age is going to catch up with you before then: assuming SPD 6 (and nobody doing any repair, like shovelling dirt back into the holes), you'd be finished in only 9,908,133,722,349 years: call it ten trillion years, to be fair.

I think I can live with that. :)

cheers, Mark

[archermoo]

Been there as far back as 3rd edition Champions. I can't say with any certainly how much further than that.

Getting +1 Body for a level of Growth or Density Increase doesn't necessarily mean that doubling mass always and only adds 1 Body. It just means that adding 1 Body seemed appropriate for that level of that power.

[megaplayboy]

Getting +1 Body for a level of Growth or Density Increase doesn't necessarily mean that doubling mass always and only adds 1 Body. It just means that adding 1 Body seemed appropriate for that level of that power.

I also remember that doubling the thickness of wood adds maybe +1 DEF, but doubling the thickness of steel adds +2 DEF. So, it's possible that objects deliberately constructed to be more vigorous or "tougher" might have up to 2-3 times the calculated body for their mass. The capital ships in Terran Empire, for example, are monstrously tough and can survive multiple antimatter missile hits.

[archermoo]

I also remember that doubling the thickness of wood adds maybe +1 DEF, but doubling the thickness of steel adds +2 DEF. So, it's possible that objects deliberately constructed to be more vigorous or "tougher" might have up to 2-3 times the calculated body for their mass. The capital ships in Terran Empire, for example, are monstrously tough and can survive multiple antimatter missile hits.

Yup, which is why I pointed out earlier that as far as how it is mentioned in 5ER it sounds more like a general rule of thumb that give a decent starting place. Rather than a hard and fast law of "physics".

[megaplayboy]

All I remember are:
1. that Star Hero writeup for the Sun that had it doing something like 975d6 KA, with about 24 total levels of armor-piercing and penetrating at the core(as compared with the apparently puny antimatter missile doing 25d6 KA, no AP/Pen, and the also-pathetic hypothetical earth-killer weapon doing 50-52 d6 KA).
2. The Vehicle Sourcebook writeup for the Iowa-class BB, assigning it a 10 DEF.
3. A writeup for the M1 Abrams giving it 30 points of hardened DEF in its forward facing.
4. The Terran Empire warships with pathetically weak beam weapons in comparison to their four layers of armor and force fields (sometimes at levels of def totaling over 100 points--apparently the idea was that one had to "burn off" the ablative FF and armor in order to really have a shot at seriously damaging a capital ship--and this could take a dozen turns or more).
5. The M1's gun does 8d6 KA, and the Iowa's does 9d6 KA(albeit with a much bigger radius)

To say damage and defense scaling are inconsistent in Hero system is a dramatic understatement, imnsho.

[archermoo]

All I remember are:
1. that Star Hero writeup for the Sun that had it doing something like 975d6 KA, with about 24 total levels of armor-piercing and penetrating at the core(as compared with the apparently puny antimatter missile doing 25d6 KA, no AP/Pen, and the also-pathetic hypothetical earth-killer weapon doing 50-52 d6 KA).
2. The Vehicle Sourcebook writeup for the Iowa-class BB, assigning it a 10 DEF.
3. A writeup for the M1 Abrams giving it 30 points of hardened DEF in its forward facing.
4. The Terran Empire warships with pathetically weak beam weapons in comparison to their four layers of armor and force fields (sometimes at levels of def totaling over 100 points--apparently the idea was that one had to "burn off" the ablative FF and armor in order to really have a shot at seriously damaging a capital ship--and this could take a dozen turns or more).
5. The M1's gun does 8d6 KA, and the Iowa's does 9d6 KA(albeit with a much bigger radius)

To say damage and defense scaling are inconsistent in Hero system is a dramatic understatement, imnsho.

Actuallly none of that has anything to do with the Hero system itself. It has to do with either specifics in some of the settings, or examples provided. An Abrams A1 having 30 rDEF on its front isn't part of the rules. It is just an example of one way to model a tank of that class. And more specifically how they are modeled in the official Hero settings that they appear in. As I don't use the official settings, I've never really been overly concerned with comparing how they do different things. I buy them both to support Hero and to mine them for ideas.

[ghost-angel]

4. The Terran Empire warships with pathetically weak beam weapons in comparison to their four layers of armor and force fields (sometimes at levels of def totaling over 100 points--apparently the idea was that one had to "burn off" the ablative FF and armor in order to really have a shot at seriously damaging a capital ship--and this could take a dozen turns or more).

Sighs. Again - No. They aren't that tough.
1) TE ships are ATRI11, per writeups on pp172-176
2) ATRI11 all have Armor Piercing
3) Only the Empress Class Ship has any Hardened Defenses at all.
4) TE ships actually have 5 Defensive levels.

Using the Wasp Fighter (TE p174) vs the Peregrin Frigate (TE p176) - given Ablative drops 5 Active Points when breached (rounded to an average of 2 DEF lost per breach):

A Wasp will destroy a Frigate in 10 hits on only Average Rolls (28 Body).

Empress Class are almost impossible to destroy because their Hull Plating (second to last Defense) is Hardened.

Introduce the ships in Spacer's Toolit and the list of ships a Fighter cannot take out increases to include several others.

Only the Dreadnoughts and Battleships are as resist to damage as people make them out to be. And given the context of the Setting - Dreadnoughts should be really rare, and Battleships only slightly less rare that that. Everything else starts to fold in a Turn or two of combat. Probably less with concentrated fire.

The only reason I bring this up once again is that you can't just look at the write-ups of a things Defenses, Body et al. - you have to take it in the context of the Setting it is being presented in and for. TE is designed to create a kind of dramatic space combat - not one shot kills. And it does an admirable job of that - both by my playing with numbers and through actual experience using those write-ups.

As Archermoo said - that 30DEF Tank is just ONE way or writing such a thing up, and is by no means the only way or even the appropriate way for your specific campaign needs. Which brings us back, once again, to "Build it to your needs."

[SteveZilla]

I forgot to add that a 3,184,713" Radius AoE would be roughly equal to the size of the Earth...

[Sean Waters]

I also remember that doubling the thickness of wood adds maybe +1 DEF, but doubling the thickness of steel adds +2 DEF. So, it's possible that objects deliberately constructed to be more vigorous or "tougher" might have up to 2-3 times the calculated body for their mass. The capital ships in Terran Empire, for example, are monstrously tough and can survive multiple antimatter missile hits.

It adds BODY not DEF: the DEF for the material does not change (although arguably it should - anyone can bend a sheet of aluminium foil in their hands, noone can bend a 2" thick sheet of aluminium in their hands). Whether a wall adds 1 or 2 Body for a doubling of thickness, the principle remains that Body is treated as an exponential value. I think it is probably unfortunate that this confusion is added: the general rule is twice mass = +1 BODY. Even when dealing with damage against walls, exceeding the BODY of the wall blows a mansize hole in it and the size of the hole doubles for each +1 BODY (irrespective of material).

[casualplayer]

I forgot to add that a 3,184,713" Radius AoE would be roughly equal to the size of the Earth...

Yeah, but you'd have to target the core! Gonna need Indirect and Increased Range for that.