Quote:
Originally Posted by Shimmin Beg
The point where I really got stuck is the rope arrow (Toys and Tech IV). To embed this in a surface, you need to overcome DR and inflict damage
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your pick can get stuck in an enemy, but I can't see how you would do something like deliberately embed it in a wall.
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I took a look and would take issue with the vague phrase "If it penetrates and inflcts at least one point of damage" because it doesn't seem to capitalize on GURPS nomenclature.
Even stuff that doesn't penetrate DR can "inflict damage" (Basic Damage) while the difference after subtracting DR from Basic Damage is "Penetrating Damage".
Penetrating Damage is then acted upon by wounding multipliers/divisors to determine if there is "Injury".
In the case of Fatigue Attack the injury is to the FP, but other kinds of attacks cause injury to HP or possibly to Vitality Reserve (one of the pyramids adapted that from editor notes somewhere I think)
I think in terms of Ablative DR (or Corrosive Attack vs normal DR) we should acknowledge a 3rd type though: "injury to DR".
B47 talks about ablative DR being "destroyed" and how it "heals", as does P70.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to treat the depletion of DR via your attack as "inflicting damage" since to me that seems to roughly express the idea that the result of your damage is the depletion of some kind of quantity. You "damage" FP with Fatigue Attack or "damage" DR with Corrosive Attack, even if neither are technically an "injury" to the DR's owner.
Another interesting bit is the idea of objects which provide a DR less than which they possess. Low-Tech has that: armor is protected by 1 less DR than what it provides to a wearer. No idea how to stat that as a character ("Affects Others Only: Not Self" on 1st point?) but it gives an edge case where you can damage armor HP without damaging wearer HP (inflicting EXACTLY the DR it provides to a wearer: causes 1 HP of damage to the armor but none to wearer) so if you wanted to rope-dart somebody, you might catch on their arrow even if you didn't catch on their flesh underneath it.
Of course one other weird part is how armor's HP doesn't help w/ cover DR, but that's prob ignored since it's Homogenous which only gives 1/4 the cover and most pieces of armor have less than 4 HP so it rounds down to zero? Except homogenous objects tend to get huge HP to compensate for this...
It's too bad we can't make armor Unliving AND homogenous (I don't think you can stack them) since then it'd be 1/8 HP as cover DR.
Breaking armor int osmaller and smaller pieces would hopefully lower HP to the point where you could ignore it's regular role in cover. Like for example yeah the entire guantlet might weigh 2 pounds but you're really only penetrating one side of it which would be 1lb, so you could consider the HP of the separate halves of a gauntlet when calculating cover DR from HP small enough to round down to 0 so that only the DR itself matters.
Or maybe "cover DR from HP of 1" is why the objects provide 1 DR more than what they are protected from... stuff that provides DR 1 is actually DR 0 and has HP of 4-7 in that specific section?