Is temperature tolerance really that expensive?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

Exactly my point. Armor that you wear, that's gear, has certain inherent limitations to it. Swarms can crawl through it given enough time, certain types of damage (other than Corrosive) are assumed to get you through any gaps in it, etc. Damage Reistance you buy as an advantage with CP, however, does EXACTLY what the advantage text says (which includes the eyes being a vulnerable spot, etc.) and is not limited AT ALL except with regard to the Limitations you actually take on it. If you didn't take Ablative or Semi-Ablative, and the damage type isn't Corrosive, it continues to protect you to its full value indefinitely.

And while cyclic damage may be a kind of wonky way of representing damage from heat/fire, that and FP loss are the two ways we have from the rule book of dealing with it. Furthermore, the fact that the fire elementals from Dungeon Fantasy are presented as being able to live in both their home environments and the dungeon environment with just Immunity to Metabolic Hazards and DR good against fire/heat, but no Temperature Tolerance whatsoever, means that is all they need and TT is superfluous once you have that combination. Otherwise, logically, if the idea of applying FP losses from temperature outside one's comfort zone to permanent HT instead to creatures with ItMH were correct, then even with the +15 to HT for resistance rolls, these creatures would be rolling 18s often enough that they would pretty rapidly die either in their home environment or in the dungeon - but there are no notes about them being unable to survive for long periods of time in either environment.

Anybody who thinks I'm wrong is free to submit errata for those creatures explaining that they either need to have Temperature Tolerance up the wazoo or a note about their survivability.

I would not really assume that DF reliably pays attention to such things. DF Monsters entries frequently have both Temperature Tolerance (often 10) and Immune to Metabolic Hazards, but whichever book you got that from (DF9?) could easily have just ignored the subject. Or could have point-optimized away the temperature tolerance which they should have because the rules as written at the time didn't include even the token 'roll with +15' which seems to have come from GURPS Zombies.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

Which is completely non-ablative to anything that's not Corrosive. So, until there's a new edition of Basic that redefines long-term heat/fire exposure to be in effect, Corrosive, unlimited DR - that's innate to your body, not the consequence of something you're wearing - will protect you from it indefinitely.

Natural DR is DR. It protects you from any effects that DR protects you from. There is no guarantee that long term heating is an effect that DR protects from -- at least certain types of long term heating are explicitly not in the category of things GURPS DR protects from.

Originally Posted by vitruvian

Bottom line, the Damage Resistance does what it says.

Which is not to say, stops any attacks that are affected by damage resistance.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

No, but cat scratches penetrate human flesh without causing HP injury.

My reading of the GURPS rules is that this is not the case unless the human has a level of DR with Tough Skin; 1d-4 cut or whatever still counts as 1 damage before DR even on a roll of 1, and thus causes an unarmored human who is hit by it to lose 2 HP from injury. The only damage type with an exception to this rule is Crushing.

You can even be an ST 1 pixie with an SM-6 sword, rolling something like 1d-11 damage or whatever, unless your sword has an unfavorable armor multiplier you still cause 1 cut or 1 imp to an unarmored human when you strike him.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

My reading of the GURPS rules is that this is not the case unless the human has a level of DR with Tough Skin; 1d-4 cut or whatever still counts as 1 damage before DR even on a roll of 1, and thus causes an unarmored human who is hit by it to lose 2 HP from injury.

1 unless it's Impaling; you do drop fractions when applying the wounding multiplier for cutting. This rule of course has its own realism issues.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anthony

1 unless it's Impaling; you do drop fractions when applying the wounding multiplier for cutting. This rule of course has its own realism issues.

It does bring up the issue of granularity and damage from low strength.
A house cat would be unlikely to ever cause HP damage except through infections of minor wounds. To a healthy adult that is.

1 HP is 1/20th the damage required to cause 50% lethality in ST 10 HT 10 adult males.

Sorry for the derailment.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Natural DR is DR. It protects you from any effects that DR protects you from. There is no guarantee that long term heating is an effect that DR protects from -- at least certain types of long term heating are explicitly not in the category of things GURPS DR protects from.

Which is not to say, stops any attacks that are affected by damage resistance.

Long term heating causes Fatigue.

There is no one way to decapitate. It's merely a special effect of cutting damage to the neck that results in death.

So why not have melting be a special effect of heating damage that results in death?

DR protects you, then you aren't taking enough heat to melt.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Long term heating causes Fatigue.

There is no one way to decapitate. It's merely a special effect of cutting damage to the neck that results in death.

So why not have melting be a special effect of heating damage that results in death?

DR protects you, then you aren't taking enough heat to melt.

Because that's comically unrealistic for reasons which have been beaten utterly to death in the thread.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Because that's comically unrealistic for reasons which have been beaten utterly to death in the thread.

I disagree. No one lists the lbs per square inch required to automatically decapitate someone. They just eyeball damage, and HT rolls.

It's just an artifact of using DR, and damage in the first place.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I disagree. No one lists the lbs per square inch required to automatically decapitate someone. They just eyeball damage, and HT rolls.

Uh. The subject is the heat thing, not the decapitation thing.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's just an artifact of using DR, and damage in the first place.

It's an artifact of using DR and damage in a place that's totally inappropriate for them...or are you talking about something else?

You don't have to determine when things melt by Burn damage versus DR and HP (and HT). That was your suggestion. It's not an artifact of using DR, it's an artifact of using DR and several other things in a specific way.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

So why not have melting be a special effect of heating damage that results in death?

If I pour tap water on a chunk of ice, that chunk of ice will eventually melt.

If I pour tap water on a human, nothing happens, at least on any moderate time scale.

How much burning damage is the tap water doing, then? Other than being at a temperature that happens to be harmless to humans, this isn't any different from 'how much burning damage does boiling water do' or 'how much burning damage does lava do' -- it will eventually destroy any object that can't withstand being raised to whatever temperature it is, and won't meaningfully harm any object that can.

Now, you might want to say something like "1d6 per X degrees of temperature difference", which would make a clear connection between temperature and damage -- but if 200F water can do a point of damage (100F more than human body temperature), which it certainly can, this implies that a candle (temperature at flame core ~2500F) should be doing 7d damage, which is obviously ridiculous, and tends to result in DR vs heat that is essentially uncorrelated with DR vs other effects (actually, the equivalent for physical attacks is something like "what's the Mohs hardness of your armor").

I actually wrote a relevant blog post a while back.