Bruised Knuckles and Misses/Dodges/Diffuse

[Plane]

MA124 talks about how full-power strikes inflict whatever shock your accumulated wounds would inflict, but that you can mitigate that by doing lower-power strikes.

For example, if you have suffered a loss of 4 HP to your hand (it's not crippled, you have 19 HP so it takes 7 HP to cripple) your full-strength 1d+4 crushing punch will inflict -4 DX -4 IQ on your next turn, but by taking a -4 penalty (doing only 1d crushing) you prevent that.

(which interestingly leads to an outcome where you an inflict 6 crushing suffering 0 shock, or 5 crushing suffering 4 shock)

I'm not sure if "striking at full power" refers to "launching the strike" or "landing the strike" though. Does it still inflict shock to punch with an injured hand even if you whiff (miss, get dodged) ? If no-contact means no-shock then what about blocks or parries where there's contact but it's with the limb (arm) rather than extremity (hand) ?

If it's actually landing a hit then it makes me wonder if we should have special considerations for things with can only take a limited amount of damage. Should it cause a full -4 shock to deliver a "4 damage" attack to a Diffuse character, when the most they can actually suffer is 2 crushing per blow?

This is especially a consideration when you have "Swarm" Diffuse targets (Powers 53). They can technically be "hit" by a punch, but not injured, since only AE/cone/explosion attacks injure them.

It sounds like in Swarm case the "otherwise treat this state as Insubstantiality" policy would basically treat punches as similar to misses/dodged where contact doesn't happen, so if misses/dodged means no shock then punching an insubstantial/swarm character probably would too.

I guess with high SM creatures since they effective have AE melee attacks they might possibly harm themselves attacking a Swarm though...

Originally Posted by Kromm

A critter big enough to do large-area injury to a human would have SM +7; it would look up SM -4, get 1.5', and attack everything in a single hex. To affect two rings of hexes would require SM +10.

Also as a side note am wondering a couple things about Hurting Yourself:
1) as damage is capped by DR when punching Ablative DR do you cap it at the DR prior or after being ablated?
2) how come HY doesn't apply only to Tough Skin but still applies to non-skin flexible DR?