Complex and unnecessary

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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

 

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

 

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

[ghost-angel]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

...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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

That's...ahem...my point - in Hero you can either kill someone quickly with a pin' date=' or not at all.[/quote']

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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?

 

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

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Not my doing (for once) - this is straight out of the rule books' date=' 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).[/quote']

 

What is the DEF of the Earth anyways?

 

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

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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.

 

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

[ghost-angel]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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.

 

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

 

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I once saw a suggestion posted to the forums (I'm sorry, I can't recall who came up with it ) 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]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I once saw a suggestion posted to the forums (I'm sorry, I can't recall who came up with it ) 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!)?