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Old 07-05-2015, 01:00 AM   #11
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: Knockback Questions

I don't think of knockback with a TL1-4 hand weapon as picking up the target and throwing it, as I agree that's not realistic physics. I think of it as "people standing up are tippy, and hitting them very hard may cause them to lose balance, recoil reflexively using their own legs, etc. Maybe more realistic would be having people get displaced semi-randomly based on hits, but I always thought the result of the existing (pre 4e) rules seemed to have nice results that were easy to apply. I've certainly seen people nearly fly across a room when fighting when they weren't even really being hit for damage (again not really mainly from the strength of their opponent, but because they're trying to stay standing and so backpeddle etc across the room).
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Old 07-05-2015, 01:48 AM   #12
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Default Re: Knockback Questions

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Originally Posted by Skarg View Post
I don't think of knockback with a TL1-4 hand weapon as picking up the target and throwing it, as I agree that's not realistic physics. I think of it as "people standing up are tippy, and hitting them very hard may cause them to lose balance, recoil reflexively using their own legs, etc.
Really, it won't. Putting your hand on someone and pushing is significantly more total impulse than any weapon hit. Someone who gets totally surprised by a hit might stumble, but that's more like a critical failure on defense than a normal hit.
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Old 07-05-2015, 02:54 AM   #13
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: Knockback Questions

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Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
No - this is an optional rule that was not grafted onto the Basic Set treatment of such in the way that some other books expand the core (I'm thinking of rules-centric books like Powers and Martial Arts, and the case can easily be made that there's The Basic Set, and there's All The Other Optional Stuff). This is not in effect for most games, and if someone were to be writing a Pyramid article about knockback, they'd be perfectly justified rejecting this one outright, or incorporating it into their work, as they like.

In short, a better restatement of this would be that if you're using the optional rule from LT, there's a larger zone of non-penetrating damage that might induce knockback that extends to 2xDR instead of just to DR. That doesn't change the phenomenon involved - get to that threshold and knockback goes away.

Note I'm not sure how unrealistic this is, and suspect it's more right than wrong - if you punch through the target rather than collide with it, the target isn't pushed around much.
Yeah, I didn't make it clear that the new rule is optional. It still significantly reduces the 'low-tech weapons rarely cause knockback' effect. Using the non-cutting portion of a cutting attack for knockback calculations is probably one of the neater ways of extending this LT rule.
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Old 07-05-2015, 01:57 PM   #14
Koningkrush
 
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Default Re: Knockback Questions

Another thing to remember is that knockback occurs within the turn, which means getting 8 yards of knockback means you are going back at 8 yards per second. You can't really stumble backwards at that speed. 2 yards of knockback, or 2 yards per second, could be represented by stumbling however. Anything above that feels more like they came off the ground.
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Old 07-05-2015, 04:26 PM   #15
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Knockback Questions

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The realistic rule is that knockback does not exist between people functioning at human sizes and remotely near human strength levels, except for collisions and shoves.
This one. Also, momentum transfer is barely related to damage. A shove that does no damage transfers much more momentum than the impact of any weapon. At best there is a missing term involving the weapon mass.
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Old 07-05-2015, 05:49 PM   #16
Anthony
 
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Default Re: Knockback Questions

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
This one.
Though of course if you get out of the human mass range this can change. Hit a mouse with a baseball bat and it will go flying just fine.
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