Dodging the dragon's breath

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

If you want detailed large-area damage, you could distribute the total damage among all affected locations (either equally, which is simple, or in proportion to their hit modifiers, if you like using your calculator at the table). That still does the same amount of HP, but means the damage to any one hit location will be low enough that you're unlikely to cripple that location. So, it's mostly compatible with the RAW method of just not worrying about crippling. Only truly large amounts of damage will manage to cripple exposed hit locations -- and that at the point where the target is likely not to survive anyway.

Hands moved from 7 (15/216) to 15 (10/216) reducing chances of hitting them randomly from round 6.9% to 4.6%, and since it's a 50/50 chance of hitting either you'd halve that to 2.3%. Since it takes over HP/3 to cripple a hand, a creature with 2 HP could have their hand crippled by 1 damage, and 2% of 50 damage is 1 damage, so it could come up if a ST 2 creature with magical 50 DR armor was missing a glove.

More often than not it's a consideration for those without Force Field DR since the eyes aren't protected and you only need to do more than HP/10 to cripple an eye, which is 1 damage for anyone with base 9 HP or less. Since the face is hit on a 5 (6/216 or 2.7%) and the Grand Unified chart says there's only a 1/6 chance of hitting the eye (reducing to 0.46%) it'd take about 220 damage for that percentage to amount to 1. There might be some supers out there with 200+ DR.

[Black Leviathan]

Blocking Dragon's breath with a shield may not be realistic but it is iconic to the genre. Upholding that rule would likely mean an argument from any player with a shield. I'd allow a successful med-or-larger shield block to add the shield's DR to your own when resolving the Large Area Damage of the cone.

[Plane]

A shield might qualify as full cover for some body parts, partial cover for others, depending on size of shield, size of person, posture and direction of attack. GM probably has to call all this on the fly.

[Bruno]

if I were to mess around with shields blocking cone attacks, I absolutely would require a minimum of a Large shield, and frankly I'd want something rather bigger if it were me. Getting your feet cooked because they're sticking out from under the shield might not kill you immediately, but it does leave you on the ground and terribly vulnerable to a dragon.

Also, +1 for referencing the Grand Unified hitlocation table.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

Blocking Dragon's breath with a shield may not be realistic but it is iconic to the genre. Upholding that rule would likely mean an argument from any player with a shield. I'd allow a successful med-or-larger shield block to add the shield's DR to your own when resolving the Large Area Damage of the cone.

There's a power up in DF for Knights that allows this. It's 15 points, but it also adds to their Dodge against Large Area Injury attacks...

[evileeyore]

Now I'm wondering what would be a good penalty for Dodge and Drop or Dodge 'and Crouch' with Shield involvement. I'm thinking...

Dodge and Drop: Dodge -4 + Shield DB.

Dodge and Crouch: Dodge -6 + Shield DB.

If successful you interpose the Shield and gain it's DB as DR. The Shield's DB does not add to Dodge.


My thinking is on a Dodge and Drop, a Large Shield is almost a 'gimme' to hide behind. But in a crouch an awful lot of the body remains uncovered.

[Anthony]

I wouldn't rely on the grand unified hit location table, since the hit location table is significantly tweaked. The fairest option is probably to use the same weighting as is used for armor weight -- if you're using low-tech armor add up percentages and divide by 3.05, if you're using ultra-tech tailored armor add up the coverage multiples and use the result as the wound modifier. This is, however, likely to be rather tedious in play. If you've got a shield, add the shield's DR to any areas that would be behind the shield.