bare-fingered digging and damage to hands?

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Pretty much no. GURPS is mostly interested to damage to creatures, it does a terrible job modeling damage to large homogenous objects you have to just chip away at. Which is a perfectly valid game design decision, chipping away at large inanimate objects isn't exactly dramatically interesting, but is something to remember.

For some reason I'm thinking dirt-as-characters would be very Dwarf Fortress.

Originally Posted by Varyon

In this case, we're going with the assumption (not a bad one, and certainly would work in a cinematic campaign) that you may be able to dig faster with your bare hands if they're sufficiently armored, or you're willing to accept the risk of hurting yourself.

Yeah, especially if there's stuff like sharp stones mixed in with soft soil. I know personally when I'm digging barehanded I instinctively go slower and feel my way around to avoid pressure points.

There's also stuff like when you pull out roots growing in your yard. Those can pinch bare flesh if you're holding them in a rope-grip, gloves help avoid abrasions w/ that.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Certainly, there should be some level of DR where this isn't the case. Metal tools can work just fine without risk of breakage by the rules, and metal tools often have DR 4, so let's go with DR 4 to be more-or-less proof against damage from this rapid digging.

Probably don't need steel gauntets and stuff (that would limit gripping dexterity) I was just thinking 1 DR because I can't imagine digging w/ more force than it takes to deliver a "5 crushing" basic damage, which 1 DR protects from Hurting Yourself.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Digging without regard for damage to your hands is roughly comparable to digging with bone tools (that's basically what you're doing, you just have some fleshy bits around it), which should be comparable to wood, which is itself canonically half speed. A quick balance check tells us this puts this option right smack dab between default and the Burrower Perk, which sounds about right.

So you figure the Burrower perk implies the steel tool rate and not the wood tool rate?


So, if you have DR 4+ on your hands, you can dig barehanded at double speed compared to normal, while a character with dedicated digging ability is at 4x default (for Burrower) or faster (for those with Tunneling). Quick, easy, done.

Originally Posted by Varyon

... except we want characters with DR less than 4 to be able to benefit. So, thinking about it, on average DR 4 will prevent 1d of damage. That means putting 1d cr damage to the hands somewhere in the equation will accomplish what we need (note if you dislike using averages and want to use maximums instead, you'll either need DR 6+ to avoid the damage or reduce the damage to 1d-2 cr). My inclination is to say you suffer 1d cr for every 20 minutes - or fraction thereof - of digging, and DR protects normally. Determine which hand this affects randomly.

You rarely get 1d crushing from hurting yourself, were you thinking Collision rules for damage?

Originally Posted by Varyon

As for digging through stone and the like with bare hands, a normal human can't really do that with bare hands alone. However, I'd treat that as a case where the character is instead prying out a loose stone (which typically is doable with bare hands) and using that to beat on the other stone to break it up. His improvised tool isn't likely to survive terribly long, but that's fine - by the time it's too worn down to use further, he'll have basically created a new one from the stones he's been beating on with it.

There's this gradual GURPS scale to superheroes who probably could dig through stones (although cleaving them in two w/ a crushing attack is a bit off-base, much like we lack rules for severing arms via Wrench Limb, you need a custom Cutting Attack from Fantasy to do it)