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Old 05-08-2017, 01:39 PM   #6
Mark Skarr
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Default Re: Ramming Speed vs Throwing Speed with a side order of Log ST

Quote:
Originally Posted by vitruvian View Post
Even if you're keeping HP the same for convenience's sake (although I wonder about that, at the high end you could have someone capable of lifting the planet unable to knock down a wall in one hit), I think you need to adjust the collision/Slam rules, since the ones from Basic have dice of damage increase roughly as the square root of increases in kinetic energy (I say roughly because HP standing in for mass may be overvalued, but it's linear with velocity), whereas the ST that's now determining thrust damage - including throwing damage - determines force/power logarithmically, so of course you're going to see lower numbers of dice for the same mass and velocity of thrown object vs what you get from calculating it as a collision in Basic.
While I realize you were being hyperbolic, a character who could lift the planet (1.32x10^25 lbs) would have a LogST of about 224, and do 54d thrust damage. I'm pretty sure they could take a wall out in one hit.

Revamping Slam damage for LogST:
Should we take slam damage as a flat function of Thrust, and say, add the modifier from the speed/range table (as it's also a log function)?

The LogST 35/68 HP van, moving 50 mph (25 yps) would then do
(base thrust would be 7d-1, rounding damage down to +6, 7d+5 or) 8d+1 slamming damage for the collision? That does seem rather anemic for a 50 mph collision. While it could, potentially, kill a person (but not likely), it wouldn't be able to reduce the van's HP to 0.

[edit]
The van's original slam damage would be 17d.
[/edit]

Or, if we add the speed bonus as +x per die . . .
+6 / die becomes +42 in our example above. Which would make the collision 19d-1. Average damage is almost enough to reduce the van to 0 HP (61 hp of damage after DR 4).

If we extended that to throwing:
Pink Light throwing a van 20 yards (40 mph) would do 8d + 6/die and would inflict 23d+2 for the damage.

If we cap the damage something can inflict in a slam/throw to, say, HP in dice, that prevents her from being able to throw a HP 10 person (who, with the base LogST throwing range 122 yards) for 30d+3 damage, it's capped at 10d. While that would not be sufficient to kill the person outright (on average, taking them to -2xHP), it is sufficient to put them out of the fight. And, assuming they hit something hard the damage would be doubled for the target and they would take 20d, killing them on average.

Last edited by Mark Skarr; 05-08-2017 at 02:39 PM. Reason: Added base slam damage.
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