How do you do a beam?

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless

Does anyone have any simple solutions or suggestions? Has this problem already been solved elsewhere?

You could use the cone enhancement, the dissipation limitation, and a modification on the selective area enhancement that lets you choose the width of the cone rather than which targets are affected. Conceptually, this might be a tight beam, but you are swinging it around to incinerate foes over a wide swath.

Take it as an alternate attack to a tight beam burning attack without all the limitations (or vice versa) if you also want to hold your beam with laser focus on just one foe.

Luke

[Anaraxes]

It seems like one feature the OP wants is to divide total damage (or conversely, be able to stack all the damage dice on a single target). The point of modelling the attack as a stream of "damage points" would be to allocate the damage points around as desired. So, it's good for mowing down lots of mooks, but can still punch hard enough for a boss. A regular AE (or cone, etc) is overkill for the mooks. It does equal damage to everyone in the area, rather than being cheaper.

I haven't thought it through, but at first thought, I'd probably just do it with an AA group, single target plus an AE attack. The single-target attack has a high cost because of high damage; the AE attack has lower damage, but has to pay for the AE. A more polished solution would have a knob trading off damage for AE radius. (In fact, it might not be unfair just to treat the ability as a pool of CP that can be allocated either to damage or levels of AE, and then just add on the +25% "AA" charge for the flexibility.)

[Bicorn]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, nothing in Innate Attack requires the attacks to be instant; you can do an RoF X attack and declare that each 'shot' is actually 1/X of a second. I would generally recommend RoF 15. You can make it cumulative against DR by giving it armor divisor 10, Limited: cannot exceed the number of hits (this is probably around +150%).

I agree that a beam attack should probably be modelled as autofire - that it's a continuous beam rather than a series of discrete projectiles is essentially a special effect. Not sure if the limited armor divisor is the best way to model cumulative damage, though; I'd be more inclined to go with a custom enhancement.

[Rupert]

I'm not sure that in a combat situation anything short of a fairly heavy, powerful, and sophisticated powered mount (like a AA gun turret of the sort armies mount on tank chassis and navies on warships) would be able to hold the beam on a single point well enough to get cumulative 'burn through', so for most weapons the question is really moot anyway - it's just autofire, and any ability to burn through armour quickly is best represented by good damage or high armour penetration modifiers, and the better the firecontrol is at holding the beam on a single (dodging, probably) point, the higher the damage and (paradoxically) the lower the RoF.

[oneofmanynameless]

All of this makes me wonder if there are rules anywhere for armor heating up under sustained AOE burning attacks? Like... someone wearing medium plate armor over their whole body (DR 6) may not take any damage per second from standing in 5 dps Fire Cloud. But sooner or later their armor is going to heat up and start causing them damage right? Should you use "making things burn"?

Also, other examples that could be included besides just lasers are dragons fire (typically modeled as a cone but I've always found that unsatisfying. Dragons do strafing runs, concentrate fire on buildings to make them crumble, and in other ways use it the way that a helicopter uses it's machine guns), and wizards shooting 1-2 meter wide beams of magical energy.

[oneofmanynameless]

Using the making things burn formulas a person (composed of 'highly resistant' material requiring 30+ points of incendiary damage in one second to light them on fire) wearing armor over their full body that was twice as strong as full heavy plate (9x2=18 dr) in a field of magical ultra intense fire doing 3d damage a second (average 10.5, sufficient to ignite any 'resistant' materials in one second, and one step down from 'highly resistant') would take no damage on a second by second basis, but after 10 seconds their flesh would catch fire on a 16 or less, causing them to take 1d-1 burn damage a second inside their DR.

A wizard firing a 2 meter wide beam of arcane energy doing a sufficient amount of damage per second could cook a warrior inside his armor if he could sustain the beam on the warrior for 10 seconds.

It sort of seems like the warrior should be taking some damage from the extreme heat before fully catching on fire...

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless

Using the making things burn formulas a person (composed of 'highly resistant' material requiring 30+ points of incendiary damage in one second to light them on fire) wearing armor over their full body that was twice as strong as full heavy plate (9x2=18 dr) in a field of magical ultra intense fire doing 3d damage a second (average 10.5, sufficient to ignite any 'resistant' materials in one second, and one step down from 'highly resistant') would take no damage on a second by second basis, but after 10 seconds their flesh would catch fire on a 16 or less, causing them to take 1d-1 burn damage a second inside their DR.

A wizard firing a 2 meter wide beam of arcane energy doing a sufficient amount of damage per second could cook a warrior inside his armor if he could sustain the beam on the warrior for 10 seconds.

It sort of seems like the warrior should be taking some damage from the extreme heat before fully catching on fire...

The flame is inflicting no damage at all, not merely 'not enough to ignite', so there is no chance of ignition as long as the flame and heat are blocked.

Note however that unless they have something protecting the eyes, that wide area attack is going to do damage unless the armour is much thicker.

Then there's the matter of heat (B434). This is where that suit of plate fails.

Also, though I don't think it's in the rules anywhere, if the person in the armour has to breathe, and lacks a self-contained air supply, their throat and lungs are going to get burned.

[Kax]

Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless

All of this makes me wonder if there are rules anywhere for armor heating up under sustained AOE burning attacks? Like... someone wearing medium plate armor over their whole body (DR 6) may not take any damage per second from standing in 5 dps Fire Cloud. But sooner or later their armor is going to heat up and start causing them damage right? Should you use "making things burn"?

Yes, but not in any reasonable combat time; remember the gambeson.

Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless

Also, other examples that could be included besides just lasers are dragons fire (typically modeled as a cone but I've always found that unsatisfying. Dragons do strafing runs, concentrate fire on buildings to make them crumble, and in other ways use it the way that a helicopter uses it's machine guns), and wizards shooting 1-2 meter wide beams of magical energy.

Nothing wrong with a dragon pursing its lips and doing a 1 yd wide cone--and that actually matches the descriptions and depictions of a dragon point target breath. All it needs is the Variable enhancement on the Cone effect.

And as a wizard/super I like the idea of a 1 yd cone, as that's a 'free' AE that's very narrow that allows me to target an individual by hitting the hex they're in. A different defence, of course, but still useful.

[Kax]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Note however that unless they have something protecting the eyes, that wide area attack is going to do damage unless the armour is much thicker.

Then there's the matter of heat (B434). This is where that suit of plate fails.

Also, though I don't think it's in the rules anywhere, if the person in the armour has to breathe, and lacks a self-contained air supply, their throat and lungs are going to get burned.

Covered under the stuff on both Sealed armour and continuous Area attacks.

[Kax]

Eye Beamer
A concealed UV laser weapon built into the arms of a pair of sunglasses, using built-in eye trackers and target recognition to determine targeting and a phased-array laser to stay on target for a full burst. The lenses, of course, are tuned to avoid backscatter.

Burning attack 2 point [=0.5 dice=3 pt. base cost] (Accurate 10 [+50%], Armour Divisor 2 [+50%], Cosmic: damage per to-hit roll accumulates to a max of RoF for a singe target only (as a reduced form of Irresitable) [+100%], Low Signature [+10%], Rapid Fire 15 [+100%]) [3 +310% = 13 pt.]

AA: same thing without the Cosmic but with Cone 5 yd 13 pt./5 = 3 pt. so total 16 pt.

2 pt(2) burn acc 13 1/2 10 max 100 roF 15 *damage for a single target based on number of effective shots hitting the target is accumulated before applying it to armour.

Add modifiers for it being a stealable but not obvious object.


There. :) On an averageish user and a close single target that should go through about 30-40 points of armour (but unlikely to set light to it as it's a tight-beam attack) and still do enough damage to really hurt, and if you spray it across a group wearing no armour it's still doing enough damage each to get them to back off.