Body Hits and Unliving

[Plane]

I was wondering how the Body Hits rule (HT162) would interact with Injury Tolerance: Unliving (B61 explained B380)

We have a situation where the Impaling modifier drops from x2 to x1

We also have a situation (we're using Bleeding rules) where injuries cannot exceed HP.

The question is whether to "halve then apply cap" or "apply cap then halve".

So let's say for example we have a skeleton (M152) who has 9 HP who gets hit for 11 thrusting damage.

A normal person (10 HP) in Basic Set would take 22 injury from that (there's no cap). A skeleton would take 11 injury.

Now, if we apply HT 162, the normal person takes only 10 HP of injury... the extra 10 he might've taken if he were a higher HP guy is lost.

The skeleton though... does he take 9 injury (the extra 2 damage is lost) or would you first cap it to 9 and then halve it to 4 or 5?

I'm wondering if this might be a major difference between "changing the multiplier" (pre-cap) and "adding a divisor" (post-cap?) via the "Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction" introduced in Powers?

In the case of a skeleton there's just a lack of stuff in that rib cage to poke, you'll chip the ribcage maybe but that's probably not going to much, right?

[sir_pudding]

Why are you halving it? It doesn't have Danage Reduction. 11 damage ×1= 11 injury. It takes HP=9 of it.

It also has DR vs. Impaling though, which you seem to have missed...

[Ulzgoroth]

Are you using the by-the-book Body Hits rule where the injury cap is independent of damage type? Or the variant where it is modified by the wounding multiplier?

If the latter, I'd just use the wounding multiplier fitting the Unliving target and leave it at that. If the former...I'd probably halve it, because otherwise high-power bullets would do twice as much injury to a zombie as a human (since unliving has twice the HP for the same weight).

Skeletons are a tricky case anyway. You could plausibly give them effectively reduced SM against thrusting attacks and small missiles due to how much of their body is holes you can shoot through for no effect...

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

You could plausibly give them effectively reduced SM against thrusting attacks and small missiles due to how much of their body is holes you can shoot through for no effect...

That's an interesting idea, especially if you're fighting a giant skeleton, it's almost like Insubstantiality except maybe with a random chance of it happening, like with the Bombardment enhancement on Aura except like taking Bombardment on Insubstantiality?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Plane

That's an interesting idea, especially if you're fighting a giant skeleton, it's almost like Insubstantiality except maybe with a random chance of it happening, like with the Bombardment enhancement on Aura except like taking Bombardment on Insubstantiality?

I previously suggested a variant of IT:DR that, rather than divide Injury of all (applicable) attacks by some factor, made it so that such attacks simply had a percent chance of outright missing. That could work well to represent "piercing and impaling attacks have a chance of going right through me without hitting anything." However, treating it as an attack penalty probably works better, given the attacker can (and almost certainly will) purposefully try to hit your bones, rather than where your flesh would be if you had such. One of the suggestions I was given in that thread (because my suggestion was deemed "not GURPSy enough") that would work well for this was Obscure (Anti-Targeting -20%), which functions just like Obscure but gives a penalty only to hit the target, not to detect them in the first place. Self-Only would be needed (so the skeleton is the only one affected, not everyone within a yard of it); canonically that's -5%, but personally I'd go with -20% - helping your allies is a big benefit of Obscure (with or without Anti-Targeting). Limited: Piercing and Impaling Attacks would need to be tacked on; I'd call that roughly -35%, for a net -75% (although I think you'd also need to add on some more modifiers for it to be always on).

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I previously suggested a variant of IT:DR that, rather than divide Injury of all (applicable) attacks by some factor, made it so that such attacks simply had a percent chance of outright missing. That could work well to represent "piercing and impaling attacks have a chance of going right through me without hitting anything." However, treating it as an attack penalty probably works better, given the attacker can (and almost certainly will) purposefully try to hit your bones, rather than where your flesh would be if you had such.

Didn't someone break down the cost of SM into components so maybe if we limited attack penalties like obscure to apply moreso to narrow-beam attacks and piercing/impale?

It occurs to me though that a really giant spear couldn't fit in between the ribs of a small skeleton, though maybe it would transform it into a blunt attack?