revisiting Backbreaker from a Realistic instead of Cinematic angle

[Varyon]

Roughly speaking, lifting something up into the air and then throwing it down (rather than dropping it) would add the speed at which you can throw the thing to whatever speed gravity imparts on it. For the former, if we assume Max Range corresponds to a 45-degree throw over flat ground with negligible wind and air resistance, that means this speed (in yards per second) is (20*Max)^1/2, if we round the acceleration due to gravity down to 10 yards/second/second* (from ~10.7). Note this ignores differences in how well one's musculature supports a given vector of throwing (I think humans actually throw things straight forward a little more easily than straight up or straight down).

I don't think you can normally throw a character very far, of course. If you can throw one 10 yards (which would be impressive), that gets you a speed of around 14 yards/second. Simply lifting them straight up probably puts them about 3 yards above the ground, which would make a simple drop to the ground around 7 yards/second, so you're going at around double the speed of a fall (the fall itself only adds +1.7 yards/second - gravity has less time to pull on the target before they hit the ground if they're already moving at 14 yards/second; you can work this out via a sum of squares of the two speeds; in general, you can probably just say it's the larger of (1.5*lower speed) and (higher speed)).

Slamming them into your knee rather than onto the ground subtracts about a yard from the fall, although if you're strong enough to actually lift someone above your head, gravity probably isn't contributing much to the attack. While a knee is hard, I think this would count like a fall onto a normal surface (rather than a soft or hard one), much like falling onto another person would be; maybe you could call for 1.5x normal collision damage (rather than the x2 of "hard surface"). I'd say this uses the lower of whichever Grappling and Striking skills you're using (probably Wrestling and Brawling, respectively), at -4 to hit (half the normal penalty to target the spine). If you're enough stronger than them to pull this off, you probably have enough control that their defense is going to be pretty poor (if using TG/FDG), so you could probably get away with Telegraphing your attack, for net +0 (but +2 to the opponent's defenses). On a Failure, you need to roll against DX to avoid falling (balancing on one leg while throwing someone down isn't easy); optionally, the GM may require a second roll against your striking skill to manage the knee-bit properly; failure here means the foe still takes the calculated damage... but so does your leg!

I'm away from my books, but I'll leave it up to you to play around with this to see what sort of damage a character would be able to manage. I suspect that within human ranges of ST, against human opponents, the result will be... disappointing.


*Again, setting G = 10 yd/sec^2, throwing something straight into the air at 10 yards/sec would take 1 second to slow to zero, then 1 second to fall back down, giving it a final velocity of 10 yards/sec. Throwing it at 20 yards/sec takes 2 seconds, for final velocity 20 yards/sec, and so forth. Throwing something at a 45-degree angle means you can work out the vertical and horizontal velocity vectors using the Pythagorean Theorem for an isosceles triangle
2*a^2=c^2
with a being both the vertical and horizontal speeds (which are equal), and c being the actual speed. We can figure out a from Max - Max is the speed of the horizontal vector (a) multiplied by the amount of time it takes for it to fall (a/10). Thus,
Max = (a^2)/10
and so
a = (10*Max)^1/2.
Plugging this in, we get
20*Max = c^2
and thus
c = (20*Max)^1/2