Diffuse and armor

[naloth]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

That one in particular is just odd and might not have been intended. I could see ruling that RoF can't do more than 2 damage with all shots combined to line it up with other damage types.

It would have to be on a per second basis. Per attack doesn't make sense, since it shouldn't matter if bullet damage comes from 1 person hitting it or 3 different people in the same round.

Such a ruling certainly makes Diffuse a lot more powerful.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

A cloud of butterflies couldn't but that's because it's ST 0

Depends on how big a cloud... nobody ever suspects...

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

You could of course struggle to break free of your swamp monster assailant but you wouldn't have anything to grab onto to suplex it.

I think one of the major differences between "I can break free of but can't grapple" is that first establishing a grapple on a foe can be an asset in breaking free of them, at least in TG terms.

Say for example if a foe for some reason didn't care about defending against you grappling them ("you're too weak to lift me! haha!") but WOULD care about you breaking free of the grapple: so they might spend an active defense to stop you removing CP from their grapple on you, but not opt to spend an active defense to stop you adding CP to them.

TG5 allows CP to be spent to win a grappling contest, including feints, which means if you build up CP and then spend it on a feint preceding your Break Free, the foe might not be able to defend so well against that Break Free.

TG also allows CP to be spent on the "damage roll" of Break Free itself, if the attack isn't successfully defended against.

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

To me it's the other way around. I just find it bizarre that regular attacks (aka not AEs) can do any damage. Most of the time in fiction one of two things is happening with 'Diffuse' beings;

A) Your attacks seems to have no effect on them. Your sword might get stuck in a swamp monster. Your spear just annoys a group of bees.

B) You're not so much attacking a diffuse being as the magic that binds them, thus why water elementals might go down as easily as anything else (and I'd rule that particular type of being wouldn't put Diffuse on their sheet).

I guess it can make sense of Diffuse beings made up of tiny creatures, but I don't get how an RoF10 gun is doing any damage to an air elemental, let alone a useful amount.

In the first case, you might occasionally be killing some of those bees composing the bee monster.

I imagine a swamp monster is a lot like a water elemental.

In those cases and even air elementals: these beings are still composed of molecules (H20 for example) or at least atoms, and force can displace those atoms from the arrangement which provides the advantages of "being alive".

What perhaps we're having troubled with isn't so much the "your HP is below 0, you can fall unconscious!" issue (an elemental scattered against it's will probably shouldn't be able to act) but rather how this results in irretrievable "death" for them.

That I guess makes sense if they're a vulnerable energy pattern which can't rearrange itself (needs "resurrection" ie rearrangement/reprogramming by a mage using Create Elemental, for example: the atoms/molecules lost their "spark" so to speak)

If we want more "eternal" kinds of elementals then we could give them stuff like Unkillable or Supernatural Durability to represent it. I'm liking Unkillable 3 since "scattered atoms" would not leave an indestructible corpse, and air/water currents could carry the "sentient particles" to various other places where the elemental might reform.

The unfortunate thing for UK3 is it's purely GM so there's no mechanics for that reformation. If there's something like 2 chars fighting to collect more molecules to reform the elemental in 2 diff spots, there's no rules to resolve that. Anyone have ideas on what could work?

Another idea too, since there's an enhanced version of Diffuse which effectively functions a lot like Insubstantiality (Swarm) would be to look at modifiers for Insubstantiality for ideas on how to create Swarm variations.

One of those is "Reversion" in Horror, which caps damage you can take in a substantial or insubstantial form (pick one) to HP reducing to 0. Excess is lost (UNLESS it is capable of harming BOTH forms) and you're forced to revert to "native" form until fully healed (much like Unkillable 3).

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

That one in particular is just odd and might not have been intended. I could see ruling that RoF can't do more than 2 damage with all shots combined to line it up with other damage types.

I think maybe the problem is the "minimum 1" threshold of injury which even Diffuse has.

If we ignored minimums (or at least set lower ones) then we wouldn't need to use "1 or 2" and could just use massive injury divisors instead.

If Diffuse was written with HP10 in mind for example, that'd be 1/10 from 1dmg types or 1/5 for 2 dmg ones

[Anthony]

Realistically, if you shoot a diffuse swarm that is filling one hex, you kill everything in your bullet path. As the swarm has a cross-section of about a square yard, and your bullet path has a cross-section of about a tenth of a square inch, this means you kill about 1/10,000 of the swarm, which is way below the threshold of "worth tracking". Stabbing it with a sword is similar except there's a risk of not even killing something you hit because its mass is so low relative to your sword's mass, hacking at it with a sword is slightly better but is still unlikely to kill more than 1%.

This translates to 'functionally immune to single target damage', and would obviously make Diffuse much more powerful (and expensive).

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Realistically, if you shoot a diffuse swarm that is filling one hex, you kill everything in your bullet path. As the swarm has a cross-section of about a square yard, and your bullet path has a cross-section of about a tenth of a square inch, this means you kill about 1/10,000 of the swarm, which is way below the threshold of "worth tracking". Stabbing it with a sword is similar except there's a risk of not even killing something you hit because its mass is so low relative to your sword's mass, hacking at it with a sword is slightly better but is still unlikely to kill more than 1%.

This translates to 'functionally immune to single target damage', and would obviously make Diffuse much more powerful (and expensive).

A 1-hex swarm might be 100 bees or 1000 bees though. 100 bees have more gaps than 1000 bees. Plus we don't know how big the bees are.

Maybe we can reverse-engineer Bombardment somehow to determine how likely you are to hit a relevant aspect of the swarm?

Bombardment implies gaps in the AE so I'm not sure how that would affect Diffuse chars either.

Given that a swarm takes 100% damage from AE if consolidated to a single hex (same as non-enhanced diffuse) I'm guessing that might be how Diffuse works normally? IE like AE 1y +25% occupying 1 hex

"best applicable move" for concentrate maneuver is 1 step (1 hex minimum) so I figure that first time you use Swarm you can spread outer perimeter 1 yard away from middle so you become an AE of 2 (middle hex + reach 2 out in all 6 directions) like the +50% enhancement.

+80% for max 1/2 mile makes me wonder if we could used Reduced Range to cut that back a bit for swarms who can't spread outer perimeter so much.

Where the 80 points spent on this differs from the 80 points spread on Swarm I figure is a tradeoff between "can still be injured" drawback and "focus senses on any point" benefit.

A similar thing to note is P67 "Meld 1" (discreete) or "Meld 2" (distributed) for Permeation. Has identical use of Ready to shift viewpoints. Also has scaled-down damage except it's % of HP loss by host object, not % of hexes occupied.

They unfortunately don't say what to do with fractions there. Like in the 100HP tree 10 HP man example they only use 10 dmg, but don't say what happens if 1 damage or 5 damage is done to the tree. That's fine if you want to keep fractions intact (love it) but not if we need to know 0 or 1. If it rounds down then merge (Earth) is sort of immunity to damage, and you're pretty resistant to afflictions too (add SM to your HT)

There's mention of Emanations doing scaled-down damage. Since there's no comparison to insubstantiality I figure you don't need the 'affects substantial' enhancement in this case.

I'm not sure if you could use other attacks normally (I assume based on wherever your senses are located?) you can clearly use Afflictions (but maybe only with Emanation?) since there's mention of your targets getting a bonus to resist them equal to the diff in SMs (basically the same bonus you get to resist, people get to resist you)

There's mention of Possession giving "control" but what example would using Possession on the Earth do? The earth isn't normally mobile so you'd either have to afflict mobility to it as a character (perhaps DX+1 +200% and Negated Disadvantage Paralyzed +1500% ?) or use TK with animation?

Makes me wonder if there should be SM bonuses to resist Possession like with resisting Afflictions so people don't go around casually possessing and animating planets.

Maybe "distributed objects" like Earth (ie several mountains, they're just touching not really 1 object) can't be collectively possessed? Or maybe you could do "collective possession" (ie "I am possessing 10 rats' bodies" but if you lacked Compartmentalized Mind to do it one by one then you'd need to buy AE on Possession and define them as a collective entity like a Swarm? (see, gone full circle!)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Plane

A 1-hex swarm might be 100 bees or 1000 bees though. 100 bees have more gaps than 1000 bees. Plus we don't know how big the bees are.

If there's 100 bees you have a 1% chance of hitting a bee. If there's 1,000 bees you have a 10% chance. Either way, the expected result is 0.01% damage.

In general the best way to handle swarms is to ignore Diffuse and just give them Insubstantial (vulnerable to area effects, -xx%).

[naloth]

I've never quite liked the swarm enhancement for Diffuse. If a normal target suffered injury on 1/4 of its body, it wouldn't be further divided. It seems like an area attack that hit a quarter of a swarm would have similar consequences. You could cap damage with blow through, but that should be based on a % of the swarm's HP rather reducing the area attack's damage.

The 1/2 mile radius also seems rather arbitrary. If a swarm of 100 bees spread out like that, it certainly wouldn't seem like a swarm. Even 1000 at that range would be fairly inconsequential.

Last, having all attacks treat you as Insubstantial opens up the possibility of an Affects Insubstantial attack ignoring your IT entirely. That's worse than if you were just Diffuse. I can just see it: "My blessed ghost shooting pistols were no match for you until you spread yourself across the room. Now that there's less to hit, they do full damage!"

I'd simplify: Swarm +50%. Area, cone, and explosion attacks do normal injury. All other types of inflict 0 injury. Infiltration can be bought separately for +40%. Swarms that can cover more area should buy both Infiltration and Growth (no ST increase needed).

[David Johnston2]

It does raise the spectre of a ghost wrestling a swarm of bees. If you didn't want to do swarms as "diffuse" then one might simply make up a new advantage. GURPS isn't Hero. We aren't required to build everything from scratch out of generic building blocks and modifiers.

[naloth]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

It does raise the spectre of a ghost wrestling a swarm of bees. If you didn't want to do swarms as "diffuse" then one might simply make up a new advantage. GURPS isn't Hero. We aren't required to build everything from scratch out of generic building blocks and modifiers.

Effectively that's what "Swarm" could be... IT:Swarm - you only take damage from area attacks. The only thing is assigning the Infiltration cost.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Realistically, if you shoot a diffuse swarm that is filling one hex, you kill everything in your bullet path. As the swarm has a cross-section of about a square yard, and your bullet path has a cross-section of about a tenth of a square inch, this means you kill about 1/10,000 of the swarm, which is way below the threshold of "worth tracking". Stabbing it with a sword is similar except there's a risk of not even killing something you hit because its mass is so low relative to your sword's mass, hacking at it with a sword is slightly better but is still unlikely to kill more than 1%.

This translates to 'functionally immune to single target damage', and would obviously make Diffuse much more powerful (and expensive).

Considering that +50% can remove the minimum damage on Injury Divisor, I feel like that might work for Diffuse (you're basically spending 50pts for really good DR2). How this would interact with Swarm I'm unsure since I'd have to go look that up.

Originally Posted by naloth

It would have to be on a per second basis. Per attack doesn't make sense, since it shouldn't matter if bullet damage comes from 1 person hitting it or 3 different people in the same round.

Such a ruling certainly makes Diffuse a lot more powerful.

True, which is just as odd. I could see making it "You can't take more than 2 damage a round or 1 damage from specific attacks" but that is quite good. I think I can just use the above idea and call it "Particulate". For diffuse beings made up of discrete objects (such as a swarm of bees) it is playable enough that you can do damage, but for things like elementals that can't seem to be hurt by anything that doesn't fully envelope them they would take Particulate and just ignore small attacks.

[Plane]

Discovered an interesting precedent for the grappling Q today

"You can use your TK Grab on liquid as if it were a solid object, without the need for a container"

This is a perk called Hydrokinesis on PP56.

The implication here I think being that diffuse things like water are "non-solid" and thus immune to grappling.

Yet there IS some way to grapple it, with whatever this perk is meant to represent.

Unfortunately there's rarely an 'under the hood' for the perks so we could be left guessing as to the coding for them.

Since this is for a leveled trait, I'm thinking maybe somehow a 'rules exemption' perk?