Slam Damage

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Still, a 150lb dude running at you at 10mph is going to hurt, so equating this to a punch, as ACTUAL INJURY, might not be too far wrong an approach. We'll see. Only issue I see there is that it required 8pts of damage (like a swung mace) to do one hex of knockback, but 8pts of damage is a stove-in chest and multiple broken ribs. It doesn't take that much trauma to slam someone back a hex or two. So some sort of injury reduction would have to apply.

If I was basing Slams on the knockback / knockdown rules, I'd give it double knockback like Shoves (with the houserule of 1 hex of knockback per (ST-2)/2 dmg, rather than 2 hexes per ST-2 dmg). Further, if damage wasn't enough for 1 yard of knockback, but still over some threshold (yet to be determined) it would have a chance to knockdown. Perhaps damage over ST/4, half of what would be to needed inflict a Major Wound.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

First, you REALLY have to work hard to eke out more than 1d slam damage. For a normal human of 8-15HP, you'll need to be at Move 7+ to even THINK about getting a full 1d damage without AoA (Strong).

So, assuming one DOES do All-Out Attack (Strong), you get a range of 1d-1 to 1d+2 for all but someone who's HP 15 and Move 10 (!). [snip]

Also, that All-Out Attack (Strong) in the human range is a MASSIVE boost to slam that the defender doesn't get. It's +2 or +1/die, which will be +2 in nearly all "regular human" cases.

Yep. Real(istic) people don't usually knock each other down easily through sheer impact without really committing to it, which is reflected in the RAW. The low dice involved makes that +2 huge, as well as the bonus for Brawling or Sumo, which means that someone with one of the appropriate skills at a high enough level as well as the willingness to hurl themself full-tilt at someone else can achieve knockdowns pretty consistently. If they really mean business (or have Ground Fighting), Drop Kick also works really well between mere mortals.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

[moved] For the case of 1d-1, if you roll a 1, you do zero damage, right? Slam damage isn't one of the cases where you automatically get a 1.

Yes. This is true of all Crushing damage.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Has anyone run games with lots of slams [snip] in which the various permutations of this have been worked through in-game. I don't have a feel for if this feels believable or not.

Some of my sessions have involved a lot of slammage, especially my Shadowrun games (where the Sumotori PsysAdept Troll knocks people through walls) and the more realistic stuff. I also played in a Supers game GMed by somebody else (*expends 3FP and sacrifices an underage girl to cast Summon Mark Skarr*) that included a Sumo Speedster, who could knock multiple people around like pinballs in a second. Assuming that you take precautions against hurting yourself, I'd say that the RAW Slam rules work pretty well at the highest and lowest levels of power and cinematicism that I've tried.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Which are? the house rules say as much or more about RAW than RAW.

I actually have no idea what the replacement rules are. He has a little spreadsheet - numbers go in, results come out, badguys get knocked hat over teakettle with a big horn hole in them, and then a minotaur gores them a few more times for good measure.

[Kuroshima]

The thing with Slam rules, is that they're not worth it at low levels (where they do comparable damage to an untrained punch), unless you want to knock down someone, but at high levels, they're probably a cheap way to do damage: Each level of Enhanced Move doubles (cumulatively) your damage for a flat point cost. You need to survive the impact, though. Of course, this pales when compared to Super Strength, and it becomes viable at about the same point levels...

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

The thing with Slam rules, is that they're not worth it at low levels (where they do comparable damage to an untrained punch), unless you want to knock down someone, but at high levels, they're probably a cheap way to do damage: Each level of Enhanced Move doubles (cumulatively) your damage for a flat point cost. You need to survive the impact, though. Of course, this pales when compared to Super Strength, and it becomes viable at about the same point levels...

I think my fundamental mistake in considering the slam rules is confusing them with shoves. These do (effectively) swing damage, knockback only (reality is they do thrust/crush, doubled, KB only).

A slam is trying to injure someone first, and there's a reasonable likelihood they will be knocked down. A shove is trying to do what I thought a slam was trying to do: move them and knock them down (though again, knockdown seems a side effect).

I was thinking of a slam as an archetypical NFL or Sumo move, but now I wonder if those are really shoves instead. For American Football, in most cases this is certainly true - you're not striking and can't grab. The initial impact might be a slam . . . and the DR 3 vs. crush that you get vs. your own slam. Seems, though, that if NFL players were doing that many slams (esp on the line) there'd be way more injuries. Guess the damage is mutually absorbed by the pads.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Seems, though, that if NFL players were doing that many slams (esp on the line) there'd be way more injuries. Guess the damage is mutually absorbed by the pads.

Also in general you don't see full-speed impacts in the NFL. The line move less than a yard towards each other, and even when you have a guy slip through and tag the QB he generally isn't coming in at a straight shot and hasn't had several seconds to accelerate up to full speed.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

Also in general you don't see full-speed impacts in the NFL. The line move less than a yard towards each other, and even when you have a guy slip through and tag the QB he generally isn't coming in at a straight shot and hasn't had several seconds to accelerate up to full speed.

By and large I agree, though the velocity of the impact is more than one yard per second (though in GURPS this is a very useful abstraction)

Having studied sprinters and world-record splits, and looking at some NFL 40yd times, these guys are hitting about Move 9. In one second, really fast guys can usually get up to about Move/3.

Still, the difference between Move 1 and Move 3 in these cases mightn't be very large, and your original point stands: they're slamming for less than 0.5 dice of damage (1d-3 to 1d-2) in nearly all cases, while wearing DR 3 shoulder-m-pads.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

Also in general you don't see full-speed impacts in the NFL. The line move less than a yard towards each other

Accelerating for 1 yard at 0.5 G will give a speed of 3 yards per second.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Yeah, I've had similar problems with it for awhile. Plus slams don't seem to get any bonus from things like the character being in lots of armor, despite the fact that the same person moving at the same speed but with lots of added weight (potentially hundreds of pounds, in the case of power armor) doesn't seem to do any additional damage RAW.

Well, it's more than a little of a problem to adjust for...

Essentially, you need to determine the effective collision HP (or ST?) of the loaded character. It would be nice if this was a simple function of combined mass. Unfortunately, it's not.

It's intentional that collisions are based of HP/ST, not off mass directly. The effect of wildly different HPs for objects of the same mass is supposed to represent their respective squishyness. But while a man in armor is clearly neither Unliving nor Homogenous, the likely conclusion that the armor would hit harder empty than occupied is obviously nonsensical.

It's also going to get weird if the PC's attributes don't match well to their official mass, which can happen pretty easily.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

(*expends 3FP and sacrifices an underage girl to cast Summon Mark Skarr*)

*POOF! Gold & Appel Inc has summoned the Forum Pervert!*

Ah, yes, Tetsuo. Sumo-Flash. Awesome character. For all the humor, he was played so straight it was awesome. Nearly got his butt kicked by a bunch of guys with AK-47s though.

We get a lot of slam attacks in my supers games: Micron, Tetsuo, Heaven, Pink, Shade, The Patriot, Vitaly . . . the list goes on.

I haven't seen any problems with the slam rules, even in my non-supers games. The damage is low (in non-supers), but you don't do slam attacks to inflict damage, you do it to knock someone down and pin them.