Question on using RoF + Cyclic + Resistible

[ghezbora]

I'm trying to create a character that launches poison stingers, so I have an innate attack and a follow-up attack, like this:

Innate attack (stinger) 1d pi, RoF 1x7

Innate attack (poison) 1d tox, follow-up (stinger), cyclic (1" interval, 5x), resistible

So I'm delivering (if all goes well) 7 poisonous stingers. I should, I think, get up to 42 ticks of toxic damage from this, right? 7 hits * (1 + 5) cycles of poison. Does that also mean 42 HT rolls to resist? That would be very tedious during play, but any other answer seems to be making the points spent on cyclic and/or RoF wasted.

[Nereidalbel]

The first successful resistance roll against a Cyclic attack ends the attack. So, let's assume all 7 hits from the "carrier" attack passed DR in the first place, allowing the poison to ignore DR. The target makes 7 HT rolls vs your poison, making 3 of them. You now roll 1d damage 4 times for the poison, averaging 14. On the next Cycle, they roll to resist again, and let's say they make 2 of their HT rolls, leaving you with rolling for damage twice. Your target is in very bad shape, but, you are far from guaranteed to get 42 "ticks" of poison.

[ghezbora]

Sure, I didn't mean to imply all 42 ticks were guaranteed, but what you're describing is what I thought, which is (up to) 7 independent HT rolls, one for each cyclic attack, repeating each turn (as needed). That makes sense, it's just a lot of rolls. And even if it's not guaranteed, that damage is very cheap, points-wise. I wanted to make sure I was understanding it correctly.

Thank you for the quick reply!

[mlangsdorf]

If the damage is resistable by a straight HT roll, then the expected injury for all 7 stingers hitting an unarmored HT 10 target is 24 (for the 7 pi attacks) and 7 from the follow-up cyclic toxic*. Against a foe with HT 12 and DR 2 - which isn't unreasonable in many GURPS games - that injury goes down to 11 from the pi and about 5 from the toxic. Against a foe that can dodge the attack so less of the stingers hit, and it's even worse.

If it's a cheap attack, it's cheap because it's not very effective in the real game.


* Half of the stinger toxin damage is resisted on the first HT roll, half of the remainder on the next, and the summation of N/2 is 1.

[Captain Joy]

Originally Posted by ghezbora

Sure, I didn't mean to imply all 42 ticks were guaranteed, but what you're describing is what I thought, which is (up to) 7 independent HT rolls, one for each cyclic attack, repeating each turn (as needed). That makes sense, it's just a lot of rolls.

A HT 10 individual will succeed on their HT roll 50% of the time. For HT 10, the chance for a specific number of successful HT rolls out of seven attempts would break down as follows:

0 0.8% 0.8%
1 5.5% 6.3%
2 16.4% 22.7%
3 27.3% 50.0%
4 27.3% 77.3%
5 16.4% 93.8%
6 5.5% 99.2%
7 0.8% 100.0%

A +/-2 bonus/penalty to 3d6 on a target roll of 10 amounts to about a +/-25% to success.

To that end, a rough (very rough) estimation would be to make one HT for all seven darts with a success meaning 4 saves; for each +/-2 margin of success/failure, add/subtract 1 save.