Fixing Injury Tolerance [Basic/Powers]

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by naloth

Right now there's the implication that 1000 lbs of living critter is about the same resilience as 125 lbs of machine or 16 lbs of a solid substance. You would think that if the machine was made of 125 lbs of paper, tape, plastic, and metal roughly the same material strength as a person, you'd end up with similar HP to a person. It gets even worse if you try to work out what an elemental the size of a human would weigh in rock twice as dense (250 lbs of a homogeneous substance is ~50 HP). We tend to bypass this with air or fire elementals (insubstantial), though it comes if up if you have Affects Insubstantial on Bind or an Innate Attack that has knock back. I'd also throw in dismemberment/crippling as an issue for arbitrarily giving more HP, since said paper,tape, plastic machine shouldn't be harder to cripple or dismember if it is indeed of similar structure and material strength as a living critter. It's a bad generalization that machines tend to be twice as tough for a fraction of the weight.

As a very generic assumption, I'd rather treat 125 lbs of anything with a fairly consistent HP regardless of composition. How resistant to damage it is would should depend on advantages that modify composition and structure. IT:Unliving and IT:Homogenous already offer pretty good damage reduction even without any HP bonus.

And how to you respond to the pulver quote?

[Mark Skarr]

I switched to the DF rules for Slams and haven't seen an issue. It gets rid of the HP from the calculation.

For the IT:DR issue of minimum damage being 1 HP, I usually go with a combination of DR and IT:DR to facilitate the characters' toughness.

A character with IT:DR /10 is less survivable than a character with DR 5 and IT:DR /5 when dealing with small amounts of damage. I always think about that and work it into the build.

Or just some Cosmic (Rounds fractions down) on IT:DR.

[naloth]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

And how to you respond to the pulver quote?

That was essentially my response to it. I don't disagree with the reasoning, but the implementation needs work.

Giving a zombie HP 20 for being 125 lbs of unliving flesh - making it twice as good as slams, twice as durable for dismemberment/crippling, and then tacking on IT seems undesirable. Are we using extra HP to handle resilience or Injury Tolerance to show that certain things are more resistant to certain types of damage? Basically machines have double the HP because they are assumed to have fewer fiddly bits to crush or poke, do they really need IT:Unliving as well? Then you get into things like burning damage which would effective do less to a zombie than a human. It must be assumed that machines and homogeneous structures have built in fire resistance as well if they burn for half or a quarter damage by weight.

My experience with machines has been largely been the opposite. Most machines aren't intended to stand up to intense abuse. They are built to work for a given purpose and outside that purpose they are easily fouled or broken. If they have flammable parts they burn pretty easily too.

Let's look at a (fairly light) 250lb human sized wood golem. It would have HP 50 by weight and could justify Homogeneous by structure. It might be more fire resistant (hard, wet wood?) but it seems like it wouldn't take x5 the effort to destroy by fire. Obviously we'd want to discount some of the HP for slams, since 250 lbs of wood that slams like an bull moose doesn't really make since. It takes 1/5 damage from PI damage after DR against its HP.... which sounds like that scene in the original Predator where the light machine gun chops through the trees minus any of the chopping. Say 7d-1 damage per shot (~24), less than DR5, x 1/5, round up for ~5 damage. That's around 10 hits to just zero out a man sized target whereas a human target would have taken enough to be paste (~240 damage). Perhaps that's cinematic, but it seems excessive. Obviously if you treat normal trees as huge, high DR, homogeneous targets, that LMG isn't going to fell many if any. Now if the 250lb wood golem had HP 14 instead, even at 1/5 the damage, 3 LMG hits would drive it to 0 HP (and speed game play). Too far the other direction? Perhaps more telling in this example is that often a few points of DR won't sway the injury total.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the supplements don't stick with that much HP for zombies, elementals, and other things that don't have definable weights.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Just take the extra HP with Massless +0%

Is there a note I can find on that being a neutral feature? Also wondering how you'd price someone who could switch between massless/massful HP. Would that be like switchable HP (mass only -%)?

Originally Posted by evileeyore

What about becoming an undead makes someone so much harder to destroy (-10xHP) than when they were alive?

Maybe if we defined destruction differently, like destruction for living things is actually just a transition to an unliving state where HP needs to be depleted all over again?

M151's zombie spell, for example, can be cast on someone with massively depleted HP... and if they're either a Mummy/Zombie template (M152) they'll actually end up with 5 more HP than they began with.

Skeletons too, they don't get extra HP (actually 1 less) but they do have body-wide DR everywhere except the skull...

So based on the skeleton, maybe we could look at human "destruction" as in just enough destruction of the "livingness" aspect of the body, but there's still unliving bits behind? Kind of like death works like some permanent rebirth into an unliving template which has to have HP depleted all over again?

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

You're only destroyed if that would make sense based on the injury and damage types

It's easy enough when accumulative damage is all the same type, but then I wonder what happens if it's 50% burning 50% impaling combined...

Where it's important, maybe we could stat a skeleton like a separate character that lives in the flesh (kind of like Possession: Permeation) to see how shook up it is by whatever causes flesh death.

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I switched to the DF rules for Slams and haven't seen an issue. It gets rid of the HP from the calculation.

It would be nice if being Very Fat gave some kind of bonus damage to slams, since it acts as added mass in other respects like when resisting knockback.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Plane

It would be nice if being Very Fat gave some kind of bonus damage to slams, since it acts as added mass in other respects like when resisting knockback.

I don't think being Very Fat helps much in a slam. And the damage increase it gives would be adequately reflected with the Sumo Wrestling damage modifiers. The reduced move would more negatively-impact the damage than the additional mass would improve.

Best case, I would assume that being Very Fat would give a +1 per die of damage, but, would work as a -1 per die to determine who inflicts more damage for case of knockdown. Being really heavy doesn't help you stay balanced, it actually hurts it.

Unless you're a slug, like Jabba, then I'd figure you're really hard to knock down. Or a weeble.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I don't think being Very Fat helps much in a slam.

+2 and +3 to resist Knockback... I can see that being 'added' to your damage during the "compare" damage part of a Slam to determine who gets knocked down.

Sumo gives it's bonus to Slams regardless of the sumo's 'fatness'.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I don't think being Very Fat helps much in a slam.
And the damage increase it gives would be adequately reflected with the Sumo Wrestling damage modifiers.

You don't need Very Fat to take Sumo though, nor would everyone with VF have that.

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

The reduced move would more negatively-impact the damage than the additional mass would improve.

Very Fat doesn't reduce your move though.

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

Best case, I would assume that being Very Fat would give a +1 per die of damage, but, would work as a -1 per die to determine who inflicts more damage for case of knockdown. Being really heavy doesn't help you stay balanced, it actually hurts it.

Are you referencing this from B371?

If your damage roll equals or exceeds that of your foe, he must
make a DX roll or fall down.

I think who does more damage is more an issue of who has the most force to maintain their forward momentum, the lower-force guy basically getting similar to the DX check for knockback, except it doesn't actually require knockback to occur.

If Very Fat is meant to be less decent balance, than I'd rather apply a penalty to the DX roll, or just instate a DX cap for Very Fat like how there's a HT cap.

[AlexanderHowl]

I do not think that it would be unreasonable to modify maximum HP for smaller and larger people (+20% above ST for Skinny, +30% above ST for normal people, +40% above ST for Overweight, +50% above ST for Fat, and +60% above ST for Very Fat). Since it is only a perk to go +100% above ST, I do not think that it would be unbalanced.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

+2 and +3 to resist Knockback... I can see that being 'added' to your damage during the "compare" damage part of a Slam to determine who gets knocked down.

That sounds like a great way of doing it. I would also suggest subtracting it from your knock down roll if the fat person was initiating the slam.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Sumo gives it's bonus to Slams regardless of the sumo's 'fatness'.

I apologize for not being clear. I realize that Sumo doesn't require any level of weight, however, having it at a high level does increase damage in a slam, and that was what I was referencing.

I keep forgetting that Move changes for weight are not part of the disadvantages, and just a sidebar. We don't see them in my games a lot, and when we do, everyone just takes the move modifiers, so I'm used to fat characters moving slower.