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Old 03-25-2012, 01:16 AM   #1
Pluribus
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Default Torso overpenetration and damage.

(Eeeeh, this came out longer than I planned. So after the first paragraph you can probably skip to the "++++++++" without missing much.)

So, looking over page 408 of the basic set I found the rules for overpenetration a little ambiguous. Specifically, does having your torso overpenetrated carry the same damage cap mechanic as crippling a limb?

As I understand it, if a limb takes damage greater than half the owner's HP the limb is cut off or otherwise mangled. However, the maximum damage you can take from this is one more than half your HP, the rest isn't counted.

The section on overpenetration seems to say that a person has "overpenetration DR" equal to their HP plus whatever regular DR they're wearing.

I'll frame my inquiry with some examples. So lets go with Joe Unlucky, a 10 HP guy wearing a vest with 4 DR. Joe is being used as a human shield by an antihero named Blake, who is too cool to wear any armor.

Joe gets shot by a normal bullet. Dealing 20 pi. Joe provides 18 DR (vest front+HP+vest back) to Blake. So the bullet passes through doing 2 damage to blake. My question is, does Joe take 16 damage, or 10?

What's a bit odd is the same scenario with an armor piercing bullet (which is the type of example the book provides). If it's 20(2) pi- Joe only provides 9 DR to Blake because of the armor piercing divisor. Joe takes (20-(4/2) )/2 or 9 damage, and Blake takes (20-9)/2 or 5 damage once rounded down. So, the bullet passed through despite not doing full HP in damage.

So I would imagine that the reverse holds true. If Joe takes 20 pi++ he would take (20-4)*2 or 32 damage, the bullet would pass through and Blake would take (20-18)*2 or 4 damage. Or does Joe take 20 and Blake take 4?

So, by that logic I would say that overpenetration is based on the actual number on the damage dice with armor divisors. It doesn't care about damage after size multipliers.

I'm not sure if I really needed to say all of that to ask my question, but whatever. It helped me clear it out in my head.

++++++++++++

So in the end, my question is this. When shot in the torso, does damage cap at the overpenetration mark, pre size multiplier? Or does the person take all the damage, and more damage comes out the back of them to possibly hit something else?


This mostly came up in a TL 9 campaign where a person was shot with a rifle and a single bullet to the torso was enough to drop them to -5xHP, which is instant death with no saving roll. While I won't doubt that a single bullet can kill a man, I don't think it quite so utterly destroys the body either. After all that means two bullets that don't even hit vitals could lower someone to -10xHP, which means they are too damaged for the resurrection spell. A spell that only requires "most of" the body. Sure those would have to be two nasty bullets, but nasty enough to be on the same level as "Total bodily destruction"? (not necessarily BEING total bodily destruction, since the book acknowledges that 200 fire damage yields very different results from 200 arrow damage.)

That seems to make high TL settings rather difficult to survive, even with advanced armor.

On the other hand, overpenetration happens on 1/2HP on unliving targets like zombies. Meaning 20 pi damage to a 12 HP zombie would only do 2 damage. Because it overpenetrates at 6 and then you apply the 1/3 unliving mod for pi damage. Which, honestly seems to fit with zombies. Many movies and games agree that torso hits do almost nothing. Even worse for homogeneous creatures like golems where overpenetration happens on 1/4HP. But really, why would bullets to do much to the shambling pile of clay?

Funny, the book has a wonderful example of bullet vrs zombie combat on page 380, but none of the example bullets roll more than 1/2 the zombie's HP. Sigh...

Thank you for your time. I hope to hear your opinions.

Last edited by Pluribus; 03-25-2012 at 01:22 AM.
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Old 03-25-2012, 01:51 AM   #2
gjc8
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

You're right that overpenetration doesn't care about pi- versus pi++. Those are wounding multipliers, and should only apply when calculating the wounding done.

Although I can't find the reference right now, I'm pretty sure that Joe takes 10 damage, not 16, in your first example (and so forth for the other examples). Pi, Imp, and tight-beam burn damage to the torso is capped at HP (before wounding multipliers, so a pi- bullet caps out at HP/2 wounding, a pi++ bullet at HP x 2). If it hits the vitals, though, the damage is uncapped.

That should make it harder to reach the -10xHP threshold with pi/imp damage. If it's still to easy, consider a house rule to use the Unliving wounding modifiers below -5xHP (after all, the body is definitely not living at that point).

I think that the reason overpenetration is not based on full HP for Unliving and Homogenous targets is because Unliving and Homogenous targets of the same mass/weight will have more hit points, if you're calculating hit points based on mass. It doesn't make much sense to me that a zombie of a person would provide less cover DR than that same person would when they were alive; if the zombie of a 10 HP person has 10 HP, you should probably treat them as living for overpenetration purposes (just use Unliving wounding multipliers). Or give zombies 20 HP, to make them that much tougher.
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Old 03-25-2012, 01:54 AM   #3
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

The rules in the book are really pretty clear:

Objects, including people, give cover DR, which acts like other DR.

This potential overpenetration has absolutely no effect on the damage to the object hit. And the wounding factor has no effect on the value of the DR.

Body Hits (optional, HT162) limits injury from torso hits. That means that it puts the same cap on a 30mm APDU shell and a .22 AP bullet. I do think multiplying this limit by the wounding factor would be reasonable as a house-rule.
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Old 03-25-2012, 03:14 AM   #4
Pluribus
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

Quote:
Originally Posted by gjc8 View Post
I think that the reason overpenetration is not based on full HP for Unliving and Homogenous targets is because Unliving and Homogenous targets of the same mass/weight will have more hit points, if you're calculating hit points based on mass. It doesn't make much sense to me that a zombie of a person would provide less cover DR than that same person would when they were alive; if the zombie of a 10 HP person has 10 HP, you should probably treat them as living for overpenetration purposes (just use Unliving wounding multipliers). Or give zombies 20 HP, to make them that much tougher.
When my group has dealt with zombies in the past we assume that parts of the zombie template don't apply right away. For instance, if he died two minutes ago he hasn't had time to gain the "bad smell" disadvantage. So maybe you don't apply the halved DR until they've had some time to get good and rotten. Or, if you don't want to do that you could just say that the zombification process changes the body. IE a fresh body becomes prematurely rotten as a result of the spell.

Skeletons, now there's a tricky one. Even half HP DR seems excessive for them. Not to mention how much more difficult they'd be to hit with a gun. The moral is, don't hide behind the skeleton in a firefight.

Homogeneous targets are hard to pin down. I could see a golem made of heavy clay stopping bullets much better than a walking suit of armor.

I guess even GURPS can't be ultra-specific about everything.
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Old 03-25-2012, 03:36 AM   #5
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

Quote:
Originally Posted by gjc8 View Post
I think that the reason overpenetration is not based on full HP for Unliving and Homogenous targets is because Unliving and Homogenous targets of the same mass/weight will have more hit points, if you're calculating hit points based on mass. It doesn't make much sense to me that a zombie of a person would provide less cover DR than that same person would when they were alive; if the zombie of a 10 HP person has 10 HP, you should probably treat them as living for overpenetration purposes (just use Unliving wounding multipliers). Or give zombies 20 HP, to make them that much tougher.
This is exactly right. As for zombies, a zombified 10 HP creature should have 20 HP.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pluribus View Post
When my group has dealt with zombies in the past we assume that parts of the zombie template don't apply right away. For instance, if he died two minutes ago he hasn't had time to gain the "bad smell" disadvantage. So maybe you don't apply the halved DR until they've had some time to get good and rotten. Or, if you don't want to do that you could just say that the zombification process changes the body. IE a fresh body becomes prematurely rotten as a result of the spell.

Skeletons, now there's a tricky one. Even half HP DR seems excessive for them. Not to mention how much more difficult they'd be to hit with a gun. The moral is, don't hide behind the skeleton in a firefight.
Zombification should instantly kick in with Unliving and the HP to match, resulting in no change in cover DR provided. Other elements might appear later, but being an unliving object is sort of fundamental.

Skeletons might be tricky. Two factors immediately show up though. On the one hand, a skeleton is much lighter than a person on zombie, so they should have less HP accordingly (unless they're supernaturally resilient, which would also probably make them stop bullets better). I don't know if being skeletal would actually be worth any increased difficulty to hit...there are relatively few places you can shoot through someone with no bones likely to get in the way. It doesn't seem like it would be equivalent to an SM reduction, and a modifier that amounts to less than -1 to hit is below resolution.
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Originally Posted by Pluribus View Post
Homogeneous targets are hard to pin down. I could see a golem made of heavy clay stopping bullets much better than a walking suit of armor.
A golem made of heavy clay probably vastly outmasses, and thus has far more HP than, an animate suit of armor.

Both only contribute 1/4 HP as cover DR, because they have 4 times as much HP as the same mass of flesh. Both also are presumably going to have some DR of their own.
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Last edited by Ulzgoroth; 03-25-2012 at 03:44 AM.
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Old 03-25-2012, 11:59 AM   #6
Pluribus
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
This is exactly right. As for zombies, a zombified 10 HP creature should have 20 HP.
The zombie template (Magic 152) specifies that it gives +4 HP. Not double. So a 10 HP creature would become a zombie with 14 HP. Skeletons do not have that +4, so they would have the same HP they had in life.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
A golem made of heavy clay probably vastly outmasses, and thus has far more HP than, an animate suit of armor.

Both only contribute 1/4 HP as cover DR, because they have 4 times as much HP as the same mass of flesh. Both also are presumably going to have some DR of their own.
The golem spell (Magic 59) says absolutely nothing about a correlation between mass and HP. It suggests that a more powerful golem would require more durable materials, but a material like titanium would be more durable while being much lighter. Though I could see houseruling mass/hp as it does make a certain sense, it's just not RAW. The clay golem template they provide only has 10 HP and is SM 0. They don't say how much it weighs, but I doubt it has 1/4 the mass of the average human.

Last edited by Pluribus; 03-25-2012 at 12:03 PM.
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Old 03-25-2012, 12:20 PM   #7
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pluribus View Post
The zombie template (Magic 152) specifies that it gives +4 HP. Not double. So a 10 HP creature would become a zombie with 14 HP. Skeletons do not have that +4, so they would have the same HP they had in life.

The golem spell (Magic 59) says absolutely nothing about a correlation between mass and HP. It suggests that a more powerful golem would require more durable materials, but a material like titanium would be more durable while being much lighter. Though I could see houseruling mass/hp as it does make a certain sense, it's just not RAW. The clay golem template they provide only has 10 HP and is SM 0. They don't say how much it weighs, but I doubt it has 1/4 the mass of the average human.
It actually should have 1/64th the mass if it's homogeneous. HP scales with the cube root of mass. I agree that the golem is probably not meant to weigh about 2 pounds...

When you're talking about templates from Magic, though, the first thing I'd say is that Magic isn't really fully ported to 4th Edition, so it not playing nice with the HP-mass relation (which is in the Basic Set) is not really surprising. Of course, it's also about magic, which can excuse any peculiarity if you want it to.

On the other hand, the GURPS system will work nicely if you treat a corpse as an Unliving object with HP equal to double what it had in life. Insofar as a zombie has the mechanical properties of a corpse, I'd recommend giving them the same treatment.
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Old 03-25-2012, 12:55 PM   #8
Pluribus
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

*edit*


On another look I found a table of HP in inanimate objects for breaking them and use as DR (558). But it's based on weight, not mass. The relationship is cube root * 4 for unliving and *8 for homogeneous.

Since the general discussion is based on cover DR mechanics that seems to make sense with what you've said.


Of course this would have the side effect of making golems and zombies much more powerful than they were perhaps intended to be. So I'll probably stick with those templates as Magic defines them.

Last edited by Pluribus; 03-25-2012 at 01:21 PM.
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Old 03-25-2012, 01:13 PM   #9
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

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Originally Posted by Pluribus View Post
Could you tell me where you're getting that from? I have 4E Basic Set on PDF, and I just did a search of both books for the word "mass". There doesn't seem to be anything in there on a hp-mass relationship. Closest it comes is that higher size modifier can lower the cost of buying HP.

In fact the skinny, overweight, fat and very fat disadvantages have no stipulation on a change in HP.
Character-building is not constrained to follow this guideline. Reasons include that it isn't actually realistic to assume that objects adhere perfectly to the model, and they really really didn't want to dictate to players what their character's physique says about their capabilities regardless. See BS 18-19 for some examples of the latter.
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On another look I found a table of weight and HP in inanimate objects (558). Even there though homogeneous only has a X2 modifier over non homogeneous.
Yes. Homogeneous has a x2 modifier over Unliving. Unliving has a 2x modifier over living, in turn...note that Unliving runs 20 HP at 125 pounds, which is sort of the archetypal weight for the ST 10 baseliner.

I don't know if there is a page reference for the weight to HP/ST relation in living objects in the Basic Set, I don't find it in a cursory examination. I'm not even sure if it's clearly published in any book though some have certainly poked around it.
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Old 03-25-2012, 01:44 PM   #10
Polydamas
 
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Default Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.

Its pretty clear that all the animal templates in the Basic Set got ST (and HP) based on their mass. This tends to underestimate animal capabilities, probably because animals usually have an "athletic" build not a "average person" build.

See pp. B557-559 for the rules to derive HP from object mass.
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