DR: Non-Flexible Tough Skin & 0

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Originally Posted by Varyon

No, there isn't.

It's literally the topic of discussion. I don't actually know, so argue with the OP and others, not me.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Say, it isn't that bad!

There is a difference, as you noted, between the DR0 of something like shins, and the DR0 of, say, the vitals.

Namely that shins were described as DR0 where I've never seen DR0 described for the shins?

One idea I did have here...

In GURPS Low-Tech the 'Damage to Armor' rules describe armor HP being protected by it's own DR minus 1... so say a DR 2 armor protects wearer with DR but it's own HP is protected by merely DR 1

If we were statting up armor as a character/ally, then we would just give them DR 1, and then someone have another DR+1 which doesn't protect them, but rather only protects those wearing them as PAYLOAD.

So if that were just some universal rule rather than some special ability 'armor characters' have, then DR0 could provide no protection to "shinbone HP" but protect the thing the shinbone protects (the leg HP, let's say the calf muscle or something) at DR0+1?

That still doesn't explain how it's hard enough to emulate DR3 though.

Applying this to the skull might though, since DR2+1 is 3.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Plane

That still doesn't explain how it's hard enough to emulate DR3 though.

Applying this to the skull might though, since DR2+1 is 3.

Since something being hard enough to hurt you is such a flat number (DR3), I think it works best as a feature for some parts of a body to be like it (shin and skull on humans) with a perk that it affects the whole body. You basically have a really bad version of Reflective DR.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

Since something being hard enough to hurt you is such a flat number (DR3), I think it works best as a feature for some parts of a body to be like it (shin and skull on humans) with a perk that it affects the whole body. You basically have a really bad version of Reflective DR.

I kind of like the idea that rather than having a DR 3 cutoff for "hurting yourself" as a generic rule which applies to infinite damage (ie if I punch a DR 3 armor for 5000 damage bare-fisted, I take 1000 damage to my hand?) that yeah "hard hurts" just gets defined as Reflexive. That's avoidable if you give super-strong giants enough DR to cover 1/5 their punching damage, of course, but you'll still have people moving towards weapons/strikers in case HYS coincides with auras.

Rather than a perk though, it could be a limited form of it.

Like for example if Reflexive +100% bounces back 100% of the damage, let Reflexive +20% bounce back 1/5 of the damage. If it only bounces back crushing damage then Limited Enhancements applying -20% to +20% reduces it to +16%.

This deals with the strangeness of assuming "doesn't hurt attackers" is a limitation built into Flexible -20%, even though that's not a drawback at all if you have DR 1 or 2 since that's not enough to hurt them anyway.

Reflexive has a built-in "can't reflect more damage than it stops" (a +100% cutoff) avoiding problems like DRless giants breaking their hands on turtles who are pulped by 1/100 the punching damage.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Plane

if I punch a DR 3 armor for 5000 damage bare-fisted, I take 1000 damage to my hand?

I totally thought the damage was capped at some percentage of DR (or just DR itself).

[Plane]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

I totally thought the damage was capped at some percentage of DR (or just DR itself).

*rechecks B379*

For every 5 points of basic damage you roll, you take one point of
crushing damage, up to a maximum equal to the DR of the target you hit.

You're right, I forgot about that part, guess it wasn't as unbalanced as I misremembered. So punching someone in the spine (DR 3) could only inflict a maximum of 3 damage to your hand, if you rolled a basic damage of 15+ (or 30+ for Elbow Strike)

Also consider two techniques:

B404 Lethal Strike:

the Hurting Yourself rule (p. 379) applies if your target has DR 1+ (as opposed to
DR 3+).

MA71 Exotic Hand Strike

Hurting Yourself (p. B379) applies if your target has any DR – not just DR 3+.

I figure that's roughly the same meaning, unless you were dealing with fanmade rules for fractional DR or considering DR 0 to qualify as "any DR".

Normally EITHER of these techniques introduce two possibilities absent in normal punching:

taking 1 crushing to the hand on 5-9 damage to 1 or 2 DR
taking 2 crushing to the hand on 10-14 damage to 2 DR

We see this applied on MA72 when an Eye-Poke has a miss-by-1

That's one thing I don't really like about this optional rule: if we apply "Hurting Yourself" to ANY unarmed attack against stuff less than DR 3, then we're effectively removing the relative drawback of things like Exotic Hand Strike. The bottom left of B91 defines this as a +1 technique drawback!

I think if we ignored the DR 3 cutoff universally then these techniques either need to be 1 harder (-3 and -2 respectively) or we need to come up with some other kind of drawback for them.

One idea I have is to give them Armor Divisor 0.5 so that DR is multiplied by 2 for anything they hit. Too extreme? This would make it super easy to do lots of damage to your hand with them since you're doubling the maximum Hurting Yourself could do to you.

Of course the skull/shin realism rule doesn't UNIVERSALLY do that. B558 assigns DR 1 or 2 to wood 1 or 2 inches thick (B559 it's ablative against crushing, so first hit to DR 2 lowers it to DR 1) and you can NEVER hurt yourself punching either of these, since it's not DR3 and has no special "I'm a skull" benefit.

That's pretty weird IMO (I could totally hurt my fist punching wood) which is why I like "20%" instead of "1 per 5" and applying 0.2 per 1 damage. So if you wanted to do 2 crushing to inflict 1 HP to wood with the minimal 1DR, you could take 0.4 damage to your hands or 0.2 damage to your elbows. Fractional DR is an easy fix for those less prone to hurting themself: DR 0.2 [1] would reduce dmg-to-hand from 0.4 to 0.2 and dmg-to-elbow from 0.2 to 0

That's whole-body DR, if someone wanted to take Hands-Only -40% then I guess they could take two levels of Hardened, or maybe something like "Extra Protection +40%" to increase final output 0.20 DR to 0.28 DR (if you can handle two decimals... probably too crunchy even for me).

- - -

Given the maximum crushing damage one can take via Hurting Yourself is equal to the DR of the target, this is a problem, because that means with DR 1 the maximum damage you can take is 1 (for example: someone with Thin Skull quirk) and for DR 0 the maximum damage you can take is 0...

For this to work out, we need to actually define the shins as having DR greater than 0: at least 1 if you want to have someone possibly suffer 1 damage from hitting it.

That or we define some kind of "counts as DR for HYS but not for protection". We know it's -100% for "provides no DR" (Bladeturning in PAWS) so it would be something less than this for "DR is not subtracted from basic damage to that location, but still counts as DR for "hurting yourself" to that location.

I've posited that "reflects 1/5 damage" could be +20% so that would make it a -80% net limitation, enough to make each point of DR a perk.

It's also against ALL damage too, you'd get another -40% for Limited, Unarmed.

That's for whole-body, you'd get another -20% for "Legs Only" and I think "shins" are actually less than the entire limb. Apparently there's only a 1 in 6 chance of hitting the shin when you target the leg (or 1 in 2 if the target failed a leg parry) based on MA124.

Low-Tech 100 has shins composing 50% of the cost/weight of leg armor. Note 9 says "Roll 1d; on 1-3, the armor is hit."

This makes for a strange comparison. It seems like the 'knocking shins' situation uses standard Low-Tech rules for hitting shins (1-3 on 1d or 50%) only on unsuccessfully attempted leg parries, otherwise there's a mere 1 in 6 chance of hitting the shin instead of the leg (presumably the thigh)

This somehow makes shin kicks to the leg much better at targetting the thigh than any other attack targetting the leg, which unavoidably will hit the shin 50% of the time no matter your skill?

If 3-in-6 chance of random hit to shin assumes a lifted leg (failed leg parry) and the 1-in-6 situation is assumed when foot is planted, there's probably also some intermediate situation with 2-in-6 odds of hitting it?

I would think there should be some kind of option for intentionally targeting limb sub-locations, like maybe -3 to hit a shin or thigh: harder than "hit anywhere on the leg" but still easier than the foot.

Pectorals (Instant Armor 20) is the closest I can remember to this. LT100 initially defined RHL 9-10 as "chest", then IA20 clarifies RHL 9 is "upper chest" which can be targeted at -1 (same difficulty as abdomen)

It's not exactly clear WHY you would target the upper chest (unless you WANTED to hit pectoral armor, perhaps to damage armor for followup attacks to vitals?) since you could still presumably target the "lower chest" (presumed name for RHL 10) with no greater difficulty (higher odds of rolling 10 than 9, after all), and there isn't any "lower chest only" armor.

Since the chest as a whole is targeted at -0 it's also unclear how you determine whether that counts as a 9 (upper) or 10 (lower). Presumably something like rolling 1d with 1-2 or 1-3 being upper and 3-6 or 4-6 being lower?

The pattern basically seems to be "-1 to target a ~50% sublocation" so that's what I want to go with. -1 is applied to even smaller %s elsewhere (jaw/nose are -6 apiece sublocations of the -5 face, for example, neither taking up 50% of real estate)

[kirbwarrior]

Two small thoughts;

If you are untrained, then anything with DR can hurt yourself. That seems to line up much closer with reality and its not like untrained people want to punch hard things much anyway. This gives another tiny benefit to the first point in Brawling.

Anything that counts as 'Hurting Yourself' that has below DR3 can deal up to 3 damage to someone. This might be a little good, but I don't think it's terribly unfair, it's still worth targeting the skull with a 10+ damage attack even if you'll take 3 damage from it.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

Two small thoughts;

If you are untrained, then anything with DR can hurt yourself. That seems to line up much closer with reality and its not like untrained people want to punch hard things much anyway. This gives another tiny benefit to the first point in Brawling.

Rather than Brawling buying this off, using ST-Based Abilities to make Armor Multiplier disadvantages that people buy off could be a legal way.

B16 has 1d-2 thrust for ST 10, which is Crushing Attack 0.4 [2]
DR Multiplier 5 -50% (see B110) would thus only be worth a quirk in that case, and result in DR 2 skulls providing DR 10, surpassing the DR 3 cutoff and allows you to take up to 10 damage to your hand if you can somehow inflict 50 damage with a punch (probably only speedsters subbing Slam damage could do that)

I'd just give shins DR 1 so muggles with this quirk hit it as if it's DR 5.

We could probably also come up with some kind of "DR Multiplier 3" and "DR Multiplier 4" priced somewhere between -31% and -49%

All you actually need to get skulls over the hill is DR Multiplier 1.5 which would be worth somewhere between -1% and -29%.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Plane

Rather than Brawling buying this off, using ST-Based Abilities to make Armor Multiplier disadvantages that people buy off could be a legal way.

That's a really cool idea, I'd take that on a noncombatant character and I'll think about how that will work on npcs.