Impenetrable

[Chris Goodwin]

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

In Star Fleet Battles, there's a trick the Romulan plasma weapons can use, called enveloping.  It does lesser damage, but to ALL shields, so if one's down?  Uh oh.  Some of these are that type...they're searching out weak points and breaching through them.  The attacks you've noted are similar to this.  The insect swarm, the stream of sand...those might be stopped by Impermeable, rather than Impenetrable.

 

This is good, I think is exactly what I was looking for. 

 

  

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

I don't really think this is Penetrating, but I will grant, it fits the mechanics we have better.  Slug to the chest can kill you from the shock of impact, even if the armor isn't breached.  

 

I would postulate that this is an effect of the Real Armor Limitation.  But I'm not sure exactly how you'd represent that.  Most likely a combination of things: a critical hit by the attacker, a Physical Complication: bum ticker on the part of the target, and perhaps some Unluck coming into play. 

 

And enough damage for the Penetrating being enough to kill the target would have already overwhelmed the armor. 

[Lord Liaden]

1 hour ago, Chris Goodwin said:

 

LL, you've given me a lot of good SFX for "damage" but nothing that is specifically "damage that should leak through defenses that are otherwise high enough to bounce all of it".  Or alternatively, some of those could be SFX for Drains, particularly being doused in acid or sandblasted.  All of the things you mention are certainly SFX for attacks that should get damage through to characters without enough DEF to fully resist them -- perhaps that's one of those obvious things that need not be mentioned? 

 

 

2 hours ago, unclevlad said:

In Star Fleet Battles, there's a trick the Romulan plasma weapons can use, called enveloping.  It does lesser damage, but to ALL shields, so if one's down?  Uh oh.  Some of these are that type...they're searching out weak points and breaching through them.  The attacks you've noted are similar to this.  The insect swarm, the stream of sand...those might be stopped by Impermeable, rather than Impenetrable.  

 

 

Unclevlad answered this as I should have, thanks Unc. Maybe we were both guilty of assuming something was too obvious to mention, Chris.

 

Just as a further illustration, I believe a distinction could be made between someone shooting a jet of fire at you, versus covering you in burning napalm. You may have enough defense to "bounce" the flame jet, but the fire from the napalm will go all over your body, including parts that aren't normally hit like eyes and mouth.

[Duke Bushido]

O have a weapon in a can't say setting that has Piercing Points (2e's 'penetrating') with the limitation "only versus Dragon scale."   This weapon was painstakingly researched and scientifically designed for the express purpose of turning the nature of Dragon Scale against itself and harnessing its defensive prorperties to instead aid the transfer of damage when struck with this particular hammer.

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

Sounds good to me, Duke.   But in the interest of balance, I should make the point that in this context, the Special Effect comes across as being created to justify the game mechanic, rather than the mechanic having been chosen to match the SFX. There are several things that could fit that SFX just as well: Armor Piercing, the Deadly Blow Talent, Linked Drain vs Defenses, and so on.

[Duke Bushido]

Hard to prove, but in this case, it is the other way around.  I had a Cat torn down to the block some ywars ago- a modem no-glow-plugs type, though I cannot remember the model (it wasnt a 3208, so I wasnt in love with it.   ).  I was just staring blankly forward while pondering possible plans of action deoending on what the heads fluxed at in the machine shop when I really got struck by the shaoe of the piston tops.  

 

I put it out of mind, but eventually I was breaking down an exploded Cummins (dear Dodge (and to a lesser part, Ford) fans: that Cummins is an awesome engine _only_ because you are driving a pick up truck.  Put it in its narive environment, and it is nothong but problems until the day it dies.  Frankly, I could take a gas burner from a transfer truck (though I"d need a time machine), stick in your tiny little pick up, and you'd be just as amazed) )

 

Anyway, I had to wonder some things to keep from losing to boredom (yes; you can be bored even when you are too busy to keep up).  I pulled one of the piston (one without a hole in it) and tossed it into a shelf instead of the scrap trailer and went about my day.

 

 

Skupping to the end, a few years later, I had it in mind to visualize a compression-fired explosion.  At one point. I was wrapping the piston against a sheet of saw-dust covered aluminum (looking for an oscillation pattern) and eventually plexiglass and what I saw there moved me on to a diffetent direction.

 

I ground the piston down a bit and kept shaping it here and there until I was able to drop the piston onto the aluminum and leave little digits from the hersheys kiss in the middle.

 

Then I had other things to do and back in a shelf it went.

 

A,couple years later and I am cleaning out the shop, and run across my ground and cut and filed diesel piston and remember that I had not found a perfect oscillation board for it.  I had a pretty flimsy sheet of acrylic, though, and dumped some metal dust from the collection bag onto it and tapped the acrylic with the piston.  To my annoyance, the acrylic cracked, and fairly quickly.  I woved to a different spot, and had a simialr problem.

 

Anyway, experimentation demonstrated that this happened every time with a that piston (and a xouple of others), but only with that one was it the exact same crack patterns.  More experimenting cofirmed the modificarions I had made to the piston before, in the hopes of capturing an oscillation pattern in sawdust were poorly concieved for producing rings of oscillation, but quite impressive at causing intersecting ripples, eight up until the tip cetter of the piston hit the acrylic.

 

 

It was after that just a matter of remembering that when creating Dragon  scale of chitin for one particular world.