Damage Type Abbreviations - Reducing Footnotes

[ectropy]

It's nice that we have 2-4 letter abbreviations for all the damage types, but on the off chance that GURPS ever comes out with a 5th edition, I want to put out the following simple suggestion for changes:

1. For all those lasers and blasters and such which do tight-beam burning, instead of listing damage type as burn and then relying on obscure rules elsewhere to cover its tight-beaminess, why not give it a non-footnote-requiring type like tbb. Leave regular burn damage to bonfires, torches, molten metal, and dragon's breath.
2. Explosion effects at the lowest level result in damage divided by 3 times the distance, and at the highest level divided by 1 times the distance. So for exp damage, why don't we incorporate that damage divisor into the damage type? e.g. exp3 for explosions in air, and exp1 for explosions underwater and nukes.
   Speaking of nukes, there should be another non-footnote method to denote that tox rad damage is divided by the square of the distance, something like dist2 tacked onto the end.

Thoughts?

[ham2anv]

Originally Posted by ectropy

For all those lasers and blasters and such which do tight-beam burning, instead of listing damage type as burn and then relying on obscure rules elsewhere to cover its tight-beaminess, why not give it a non-footnote-requiring type like tbb. Leave regular burn damage to bonfires, torches, molten metal, and dragon's breath.

I think beam would work better here.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

All the cases in #2 are either situational (Underwater explosions) or special cases (Nukes). It seems like it would unecessarily clutter up the tables with extra information to include all that in the damage line for all such weapons, rather than as a special note for those few special weapons.

[ectropy]

Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon

All the cases in #2 are either situational (Underwater explosions) or special cases (Nukes). It seems like it would unecessarily clutter up the tables with extra information to include all that in the damage line for all such weapons, rather than as a special note for those few special weapons.

But they may not all be special cases: if your Innate Attack does exp1 damage, do you really want to have the weapon table entry have a footnote?

My proposal doesn't add more than a single character, and in the case of any explosive damage with level higher than 1, it adds no extra characters in the table, and reduces the space required in footnotes.

[SuedodeuS]

Originally Posted by ectropy

But they may not all be special cases: if your Innate Attack does exp1 damage, do you really want to have the weapon table entry have a footnote?

My proposal doesn't add more than a single character, and in the case of any explosive damage with level higher than 1, it adds no extra characters in the table, and reduces the space required in footnotes.

If it's an Innate Attack, it isn't on a weapon table. It might be on the table on your character sheet, but then you can just write the "Divide by yards" or "Divide by yards^3" in the Notes line... or just write exp1 or exp3, if that works for you. Having it on the GURPS weapon tables (that is, the ones in Basic, High Tech, and Ultra Tech) isn't necessary because in those cases it only shows up in special cases like underwater explosions and nukes.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by ectropy

Thoughts?

Both sound good, in that they eliminate unneeded footnotes, or unneeded coss-referencing.