09-24-2021, 11:01 AM | #11 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Damage to Force (in Newtons or any other unit)
Damage is [ridiculously] abstract.
It takes dozens of bad things that can happen to people (and other targets) lumps them on one scale and calls it close enough. To think about the weeds you'd have to get into in GURPS terms, look at the diversity of rules for disease, starvation and radiation, all of which could have been, arguably should have been, and in various others systems are modelled with the same damage mechanic as (the several kinds of not necessarily any more equivalent types of) wounds, and realize that if you are going to justify "damage" you need multiple other systems at least as involved as any of those for every one of the other dozens of bad things, and then somehow equate the results.
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09-24-2021, 12:32 PM | #12 | ||
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
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Re: Damage to Force (in Newtons or any other unit)
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While Luke is doubtless correct about the specific physical regimes involved, having pulled from quality literature for them, for a game-relevant model, needing only KE and caliber is a fine abstraction, and with that simplification it also happens to get you within spitting distance of published values for both GURPS existing damage as well as matching real-world results. Much like Luke's model, mine also diverges for cannon, though the penetration of armor steel by the 406mm "AP" shells of the Iowa-class battleships are used as a fitting input to mine, the regime-dependent effects are enough that letting THAT go out of the model is the better choice. In short: he ends up with his model pretty much where I end up with mine for most game-weapons (from a points of damage perspective), and "all models are wrong, some are useful." So pick one, go with it, and that is likely to suffice for your game as long as the results are believable (both are) and consistent (both are). Quote:
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09-24-2021, 02:10 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Damage to Force (in Newtons or any other unit)
Quote:
The big one, with applicability over a very wide range of weapons, is that if you multiply all linear dimensions by N (resulting in multiplying weight and energy by N^3), you can apply the same multiplier to the hole it makes (N times deeper, N times wider, etc). It tends to break down at extreme scales but it's probably going to work okay over a couple orders of magnitude. There are also cases where you can say "I don't know what the optimal solution is, but there are certain things you can say about what that solution will be". For example, the mass of elastic material in a well-designed bow will be linear in draw energy. |
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09-24-2021, 07:11 PM | #14 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Damage to Force (in Newtons or any other unit)
Some versions of D&D embrace "hit points as abstraction" by having nasty effects work on a certain number of Hit Dice or Hit Points of victim. Its a little hard to explain why the death spell can kill 20 veterans or 100 raw recruits, but its hard to explain everything about death spells.
Quote:
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