Damage Resistance (Tough Skin) vs. Mosquitoes

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Greetings, all!

I'm somewhat stumped as to whether having Tough Skin is of any use when going through regions with nasty mosquitoes. On one hand, Tough Skin says that "Any effect that requires a scratch [ . . . ] affects you [ . . . ] even if it does exactly 0 damage". On the other, it seems like tougher skin should be . . . tougher,

Tough skin is of course a total misnomer. It's your skin that isn't tough with it. Instead you have toughness underneath your skin, allowing you to be scratched but rendering damage to organs, bones and major blood vessel super hard to achieve.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Tough skin won't protect against anything but the direct damage of the vampire; it explicitly doesn't help against blood agents. It also won't protect against allergic responses to mosquito bites, if you have giant mosquitoes that stab you for 1p impaling tough skin will reduce the impaling damage. I'm not sure if 'tough skin' actually models anything in the real world at all.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's a generic toughness, not innate unliving armor.

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Tough skin is of course a total misnomer. It's your skin that isn't tough with it. Instead you have toughness underneath your skin, allowing you to be scratched but rendering damage to organs, bones and major blood vessel super hard to achieve.

You know, by now I'm totally convinced that it should've been called Toughness, or at least Tough Flesh.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

You know, by now I'm totally convinced that it should've been called Toughness, or at least Tough Flesh.

You know it used to be. Toughness was removed because it was a direct overlap with DR.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

You know it used to be. Toughness was removed because it was a direct overlap with DR.

Well, making it a modifier for DR seems like a reasonable solution that both maintains some level of reverse-compatibility* and makes more sense descriptively than the 'tough skin' label.

* == IIRC there were ways in which Toughness behaved unlike DR in 3e-specific ways, but I might be misremembering.

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

* == IIRC there were ways in which Toughness behaved unlike DR in 3e-specific ways, but I might be misremembering.

It cost a lot more and was limited to 2 levels.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

It cost a lot more and was limited to 2 levels.

It added to the resistance vs. Neck Snap, said that your flesh also has DR (thus heavily implying that it works even against damage that comes from within the skin envelope), and offers no protection against Pressure Points. I'm pretty sure there's something else I missed.

[LemmingLord]

I would say you can get protection from mosquito skin for as a perk - assuming you had also bought tough skin.

[Varyon]

If your skin is actually difficult to draw blood (sufficient for Blood Agents) from, it has 1 or more levels of Flexible DR, even if it's just "tough skin." You may be able to justify a further -10% for Contact Agents working just fine (you could say each of not resisting Blood Agents and Contact Agents is -10%).

So, a character with DR 4 (Tough Skin -40%) [12] is affected by mosquitoes just as much as a normal character. A character with DR 3 (Tough Skin -40%) [9] and DR 1 (Flexible -20%, Contact -10%) [4] is immune to any mosquito that can't manage to penetrate DR 1 (which is going to be pretty much all of them).

EDIT: I should note this is consistent with LemmingLord's suggestion of a Perk for characters with Tough Skin. In fact, in the above case you can replace up to 2 points of DR with the "Flexible but allows for Contact Agents" variant for a net cost of [1].

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by LemmingLord

I would say you can get protection from mosquito skin for as a perk - assuming you had also bought tough skin.

I would allow it as a perk even without tough skin. DR 1 (Limited: Mosquitoes) shouldn't cost more than 1p anyway.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I would allow it as a perk even without tough skin. DR 1 (Limited: Mosquitoes) shouldn't cost more than 1p anyway.

Yeah, there is in fact a perk that does pretty much that in fancier ways (Controllable/Selective Lifebane etc.). I was curious if Tough Skin alone is sufficient, now I see it definitely isn't.