Dime-Scale Strength, Damage, and Characters

[GreatWyrmGold]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

My suggestion for dealing with such minuscule scales is to go the Bunnies and Burrows route: the ST scores of the PCs of that scale are set to 10, and everything else is suitably adjusted.

This of course makes Nac Mac Feegles super-strong when everything else is also that size... but that's part of their charm, IMNSHO. :)

Well, yeah. That's more or less what's going on here, except that "of that scale" is set to a specific number and guidelines are given for adjusting things to and from said scale easily.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold

Well, yeah. That's more or less what's going on here, except that "of that scale" is set to a specific number and guidelines are given for adjusting things to and from said scale easily.

Part of the reason games don't have such guidelines very often is that they're basically arbitrary. Realistic scaling of humans by over about a factor of two tends to amount to stuff like "your brain is too small to be sapient", or "you die of suffocation from inadequate circulation". And with lots of key environmental parameters scaling differently from each other, properly done Microworld is the sort of radically alien environment few authors can pull off stories in. Such works all tend to have slightly different rules for the fantasy they use instead.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Part of the reason games don't have such guidelines very often is that they're basically arbitrary. Realistic scaling of humans by over about a factor of two tends to amount to stuff like "your brain is too small to be sapient", or "you die of suffocation from inadequate circulation". And with lots of key environmental parameters scaling differently from each other, properly done Microworld is the sort of radically alien environment few authors can pull off stories in. Such works all tend to have slightly different rules for the fantasy they use instead.

I could clarify, but I'm starting to get the feeling that nobody actually read the post before commenting on how pointless it is.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold

I could clarify, but I'm starting to get the feeling that nobody actually read the post before commenting on how pointless it is.

Not pointless, just completely setting dependent.

For most settings the micro-world works just like the normal sized one with everything except the PCs scaled up. For that I'd just treat the micro-scale characters as the standard and use the regular GURPS rules, figure out how tough you want giant (i.e. normal sized) things to be relative to that and multiply their ST, HP, DR and damage done by whatever factor you selected (linear in height works as well as anything) and their weights by its square (no, not cube, to preserve the ST to weight relationship). Compute range modifiers and SM from scaled distances rather than "real" ones. Done.

Yes, yes, I can here the complaints already that this isn't Generic and Universal, and lacks a complex scheme for calculating character point costs relative to full sized PCs. Those are the bane of many discussions of this sort, and if you aren't going to have both scale characters as PCs, they don't matter one bit.

[Anthony]

My solution is that scale is a campaign setting, and there are advantages (like TL) to change your scale.

[Infornific]

The basic problem you're running into is this:

1. You're expecting damage to scale consistently.

2. However, damage for ST in GURPS does NOT scale consistently with ST, mostly to allow more variation at normal human range.

3. Therefore, if you want a consistent 5 to 1 scale for damage, you can't have dST scale on a straight 5 to 1 basis.

Is that a correct interpretation?

If that is the case, remember you would want Lifting ST and HP to scale separately from Striking ST.

Personally, I would just ignore the wonky damage progression and simply go with straight 5 to 1 or 10 to ratio. That's how it works for D-Scale, C-Scale, etc. damage. If large creatures seem too vulnerable, Pizard has an interesting house rule here for impaling/piercing damage. Trying to make damage scale correctly is more trouble than it's worth. You'd be better off reworking damage progression.