03-25-2012, 01:16 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Dec 2010
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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. |
03-25-2012, 01:51 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Oct 2005
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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. |
03-25-2012, 01:54 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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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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03-25-2012, 03:14 AM | #4 | |
Join Date: Dec 2010
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Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.
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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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03-25-2012, 03:36 AM | #5 | |||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.
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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. Quote:
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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03-25-2012, 11:59 AM | #6 | ||
Join Date: Dec 2010
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Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.
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Last edited by Pluribus; 03-25-2012 at 12:03 PM. |
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03-25-2012, 12:20 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.
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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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03-25-2012, 12:55 PM | #8 |
Join Date: Dec 2010
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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. |
03-25-2012, 01:13 PM | #9 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Torso overpenetration and damage.
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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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03-25-2012, 01:44 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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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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