Area Effect and Wall height

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Agent

You make an intriguing case there. Especially if one were trying to hand off a method to the players. Personally, I think I will play around with both methods before deciding one way or another what works for my purposes. Messing with V indeed doesn't terribly appeal to me, but then I haven't really dug into the idea yet, so I'll just have to see.

It's not bad if you're doing computer assisted gaming. You can just shove the formula into Excel or Calc and plug in R and H to find V and a conveniently calculated percentage, for example. Change two cells, new V and new percentage. Ditto with a programmable calculator.

But if someone's waffling back and forth or trying to jiggle a few points out somewhere, and doing it by hand, I could see them getting really annoyed.

It's different if you're aiming for an exact shape and you don't care what it ends up costing you - you don't go back and fiddle with numbers under that circumstance, so you only do the steps once.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

A volumetric rule of thumb is: A cylinder, a hemisphere, and a cone of the same circular base and the same height have relative volumes of 1, 2/3, and 1/3. The same ratios hold even if the central height axis is increased (making the hemisphere oblate like a meat patty, or prolate like watermelon) and/or angled to one side (like the shapes were piles of deli sliced meat that was bumped into). You can stack these shapes atop their mirror images and get the same ratios under the same conditions for a cylinder, a full sphere, and a spindle (two cones base to base, like a smooth d10).

Aha, thanks!

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

IMO, these ratios are not particularly worth different amounts of enhancements since an ability's use case will often exploit the non-zapped adjacent areas for allies or priceless Ming vases to occupy. YMMV.

The same argument could be made for affecting a smaller radius, but GURPS charges you less for that.