Questions about Innate Attack (Wall)

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Do Walls follow the general GURPS trend of having each hex be essentially a 1 yard wide by 4 yard tall hexagonal prism?

Anyone know a page for the "4 yards" thing?

B101 "area is a circle 2 yards in radius (and 12’ high, should volume matter)" is the closest that comes to mind (3f per yard x 4 yards = 12ft)

Originally Posted by Varyon

When a Wall is defined as being rigid, how difficult should it be to climb it?

Whatever it is, I'm thinkin should be specified at creation as possibly a 0pt feature (ie can't modulate for convenience)

If they're super-slippery you get the benefit of "my enemies can't easily climb over it" but the drawback of "I can't use it as a ramp to climb over my enemy's wall"

Originally Posted by Varyon

Would it be appropriate for such Walls built from Cutting/Impaling attacks to risk cutting the character as they climb?

Conceptually yes but it feels like something one ought to pay points for.

If we had rules for accidentally cutting yourself when grabbing cutting weapons by the blade we could maybe apply those to people who grab walls?

Originally Posted by Varyon

And how would we adjust difficulty, if there's one character who makes walls of rough stone and another who makes them of mirror-polished metal?

An all-around interesting idea to make everything more expensive and harder to buy would be to require the "Create" advantage to be linked to whatever innate attacks you buy.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Yet another for rigid walls would be weight. Should walls be considered as having a weight, and if so, how much? Is this a case where we should simply back-calculate from HP, assuming a homogenous target?

Sounds like the best approach.
Plus then you'd know how much to charge for Create :)

Originally Posted by Varyon

PK had a great suggestion here for determining how much weight a Wall can support, but it also seems like a terribly strong foe might be able to pick up and throw a Wall aside, rather than smashing through it, so a weight for the actual Wall might be appropriate.

Yeah, although there should also be some way of anchoring your wall to heavier objects so that it can't be lifted w/o lifting what it's anchored to or breaking the anchorage.

Perhaps a linked Binding?

Originally Posted by Varyon

And how about hybrid walls - say, a wall of crushing force that deals damage to those who try to pass through it and requires them to physically break through? I think the RAW would be to build two different Wall abilities and Link them together, but would it be legal to have them exist in the same hexes?

It's conceptually pretty weird.

As a start, instead of "crushing and crushing" we could think of something a bit different like "a crushing rigid wall and a burning permeable wall".

Firstly: what would actually stop the rigid/crushing wall HP/DR from taking damage from the burning? Would you need to make sure your rigid wall had adequate DR to avoid self-destruction from the burning damage?

If you wanted something like "a flaming wall appears inside the gap if you bust a hole through the rigid wall" possibly something like "Triggered Delay" enhancement? That would avoid the problem of coexisting.

To get the effect of "my rigid wall is on fire" I think maybe you could just set the flaming wall just outside the boundary of the rigid wall so that it burns those climbing it but does not burn the wall itself.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Related to that, how about transparency? Is transparency/opacity a Feature? What about a Wall that is, say, opaque to visual light, but transparent to IR?

I would assume that like other innate attacks they are obvious (visible) unless you take No Signature.

Originally Posted by Varyon

EDIT: From the other thread, do walls - be they permeable or rigid - require contact with the ground, or could they be made to simply hover in the air until they expired or were destroyed?

Originally Posted by Varyon

And one I had initially forgotten about - do walls have a minimum thickness

*checking B109
"a three-yard-long by one-yard-wide wall per yard of radius in your area"

Length/Width seem like the footprint (9ft x 3ft = 27 square footage) while for HEIGHT presumably B101's "4 yards tall" thing takes effect (though I don't know how that works indoors with low ceiling)

To modulate the measurements of your wall I think you would need either Selectivity (choose how many levels of Area Effect you are using) or maybe Selective Area.

Selective Area lets you omit hexes within AE normally, so having it allow you to lessen the length or width or height of your wall sounds reasonable.

"thickness" I guess would be the lesser of the two footprints, so "one yard wide" could be perceived as the thickness of the wall?

I never remember how 3x1 multiplies for multiple yards of radius, I think some examples in Powers clarified it?

P147 "The barrier is 6 yards long and 1 yard thick, arranged in any shape the user likes" for 2y AE seems to mean "you get a pair of 3ft-long walls (1 yard "thick" = 1 yard "wide") but I think they need to be attached together.

S44 "3 yards x 2 yards" appears to show that instead of "tip to tip" you could layer them "face to face" to maybe a wall twice-as-thick instead of twice-as-long.

Only thing I'm not sure about comparing S44 and P147 is if Wall-makers need to specify this arrangement and it's fixed, or if they can freely fluctuate between 3x2 and 1x6.

Sorcery: Protection and Warning Spells really confuses things for me and seems to work against the "assume that the wall is three dimensional and four yards high" approach.

PAWS pg 7 "Force Wall":
"a maximum area of six square yards, with each additional level doubling that"
" Force Wall 3 has a limit of 24 square yards, allowing the sorcerer to conjure a wall six yards long by four yards high, 12 yards long by two yards high"

We're talking 'area' (2 dimensions) instead of 'volume' (3 dimensions) and it's talking about "high" and "long" which makes the wall seem two-dimensional (no thickness whatsoever) which seems to contradict P147's "Long and Thick" which does not use height as one of the specific dimensions.