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Old 08-08-2020, 02:36 PM   #31
Ottriman
 
Join Date: Apr 2015
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

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Originally Posted by Plane View Post
Without this, we need some other explanation of what happens to water if you teleport into the water. If you push aside water like you presumably push aside air, then you presumably could push aside leaves or a wall to make space for yourself.



How much force do you think moving aside air molecules or water molecules would take, compared to teleporting into a vacuum?
Moving fluids aside is thankfully far easier than moving solids. Quickly displacing enough air (at earth pressure) to make room for a human would cause a small blast of wind or maybe a small thunderclap if it happens fast enough. Shouldn't do anything more than stun an unprotected person.

Water is trickier, it has much higher density but is still a fluid. My gut instinct is that it could deal serious damage to an unprotected person but with protection it shouldn't be too deadly.

Neither have concrete hp stats per wall section because they're fluids, so those gut instincts would prolly have been how I handled it.
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Old 08-09-2020, 03:38 AM   #32
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

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Originally Posted by Ottriman View Post
Neither have concrete hp stats per wall section because they're fluids, so those gut instincts would prolly have been how I handled it.
Well, they do have mass, and the amount of mass displaced by a person would be a function of the person's volume and the fluid's density. We can work out the HP involved from that - for air, which is roughly 0.1% the density of a person (approximating a person as around the density of water, which is pretty close), this means a character who weighs 160 lb would displace 0.16 lb of air, which (being diffuse) has an HP of around 4. In water, the character would displace roughly an equal amount of water as his own weight, so 160 lb, which is around 43 HP. This is where timing can come into play. For air, it's diffuse, so it can't really cause much damage in such a "collision" - it should be limited to around 2 HP to both the air and the character. Water is different, in that it doesn't really compress - while at low speeds it's diffuse, if you're going fast enough it's homogenous (the comparison is typically to concrete). If the water can't get out of the way fast enough, the teleportation-collision has to "destroy" it to make room for the character, which would take a minimum of 86 crushing (enough to force a "death check" for that chunk of water) and possibly up to 473 crushing (enough to reduce the water to -10xHP). Either will pulp the human fairly readily.

Of course, that's not the way Warp functions, nor need it be. It is a justification for Warp not allowing you to teleport into a body of water without an appropriate Enhancement, such as Underwater (although I'm not certain if that's actually required by RAW).
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Old 08-09-2020, 04:34 AM   #33
Ottriman
 
Join Date: Apr 2015
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
Well, they do have mass, and the amount of mass displaced by a person would be a function of the person's volume and the fluid's density. We can work out the HP involved from that - for air, which is roughly 0.1% the density of a person (approximating a person as around the density of water, which is pretty close), this means a character who weighs 160 lb would displace 0.16 lb of air, which (being diffuse) has an HP of around 4. In water, the character would displace roughly an equal amount of water as his own weight, so 160 lb, which is around 43 HP. This is where timing can come into play. For air, it's diffuse, so it can't really cause much damage in such a "collision" - it should be limited to around 2 HP to both the air and the character. Water is different, in that it doesn't really compress - while at low speeds it's diffuse, if you're going fast enough it's homogenous (the comparison is typically to concrete). If the water can't get out of the way fast enough, the teleportation-collision has to "destroy" it to make room for the character, which would take a minimum of 86 crushing (enough to force a "death check" for that chunk of water) and possibly up to 473 crushing (enough to reduce the water to -10xHP). Either will pulp the human fairly readily.

Of course, that's not the way Warp functions, nor need it be. It is a justification for Warp not allowing you to teleport into a body of water without an appropriate Enhancement, such as Underwater (although I'm not certain if that's actually required by RAW).
But of course, this was just a limitation I had on teleportation in my particular setting.

Also interesting to see you doing object math on air and water, I would have never bothered to do that myself.

And yes Water being deadly to an unprotected human (read: not wearing power armor like most of my PCs do) does make some sense when thought about. Water can be deadly to fall into from great heights, so similar levels of force applied to it would cause quite the recoil.
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Old 08-09-2020, 07:56 PM   #34
transmetahuman
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

But the air and water don't need to be destroyed, just pushed aside. Figure the mass of a you-shaped volume of whatever is in it, and maybe give the (here postulated) expanding field a ST equal to the skill or controlling attribute. That way air is no problem, water may well be, and if you really need to you can figure out whether there's strength enough to push the water, a few inches of mud, or whatever out of the way. You might even knock a person or small furniture aside.

If I was doing this, I'd probably figure out whether they can port into water, assume they can do it with air, and then ignore the math - it's mainly a way to explain what happens when you teleport, not something that needs to be held over the player's head.
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Old 08-09-2020, 08:28 PM   #35
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

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Originally Posted by transmetahuman View Post
But the air and water don't need to be destroyed, just pushed aside.
If you come in too quickly, it doesn't have time to be moved aside, and thus must be "destroyed" (whatever that means in this context). Air can accommodate pretty quick movement, probably up to the speed of sound, but trying to get water to move faster than around 60 mph runs into the "cement wall" effect. Assuming each molecule moves in the most efficient route to evacuate the area, a warp that has the character materialize over the course of roughly 0.0005 seconds has enough time for all the air to have moved and formed a human-shaped vacuum for them to inhabit. That's short enough to be a complete non-issue. With water, given the water can't really be moved out of the way faster than 60 mph or so, the minimum safe time is 0.006 seconds, which honestly is probably short enough as well - but if we assume Warp normally uses the 0.0005 second time frame, quite a bit of water will still be around (only ~8% of the necessary safe time has passed) to cause problems. And of course this depends on the water taking the most efficient route - if instead it just shifts away from center of mass, the water traveling down the "leg" will take around 6x as long (although that's still less than 1/20th of a second).

Quote:
Originally Posted by transmetahuman View Post
If I was doing this, I'd probably figure out whether they can port into water, assume they can do it with air, and then ignore the math - it's mainly a way to explain what happens when you teleport, not something that needs to be held over the player's head.
While working out the math is fun, in practice this is the route I would take as well.
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Old 08-09-2020, 09:27 PM   #36
Plane
 
Join Date: Aug 2018
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
If you come in too quickly, it doesn't have time to be moved aside, and thus must be "destroyed" (whatever that means in this context). Air can accommodate pretty quick movement, probably up to the speed of sound, but trying to get water to move faster than around 60 mph runs into the "cement wall" effect.
Maybe one option would be that teleporting into a pool of water, rather than hurting the person using Warp, takes more time to do?

It sounds like the difference of a less than a second. I don't know if there's some kind of "I vanish but don't re-appear at my destination until 1 minute later" sort of thing, unless we borrow 'Onset' from Innate Attack and tweak it
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Old 08-11-2020, 10:54 AM   #37
transmetahuman
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
If you come in too quickly, it doesn't have time to be moved aside, and thus must be "destroyed" (whatever that means in this context). Air can accommodate pretty quick movement, probably up to the speed of sound, but trying to get water to move faster than around 60 mph runs into the "cement wall" effect. Assuming each molecule moves in the most efficient route to evacuate the area, a warp that has the character materialize over the course of roughly 0.0005 seconds has enough time for all the air to have moved and formed a human-shaped vacuum for them to inhabit. That's short enough to be a complete non-issue. With water, given the water can't really be moved out of the way faster than 60 mph or so, the minimum safe time is 0.006 seconds, which honestly is probably short enough as well - but if we assume Warp normally uses the 0.0005 second time frame, quite a bit of water will still be around (only ~8% of the necessary safe time has passed) to cause problems. And of course this depends on the water taking the most efficient route - if instead it just shifts away from center of mass, the water traveling down the "leg" will take around 6x as long (although that's still less than 1/20th of a second).
I don't think it messes up much of anything to say that teleporting may take, oh, say, a whopping 0.05 seconds even. Instantaneous power dodges could be explained as the warper spending that 20th of a second in some extradimensional vacuum. That also allows him to change positions en route, so he can 'port into that famous moving car from a standing position - though that posture change will take much more time than simply scooting air or water aside would. Even a whole second in vacuum is pretty trivial.

Hmm. Speaking of warping into cars, just how explosive a shockwave would a 0.0005, 0.006, or 0.05 second displacement of a human volume of air be in such a confined space? Blow out the windows bad? Blow the roof off the car bad? That's adding an intrinsic (if situational) attack ability to Warp, a definite no no.

So maybe we should just rule that warping is a castling effect, but the boundary surface doesn't have the energy to sever solids. Maybe not even liquids, so you can only Warp into gasses (or vacuum... or probably plasmas if your heart is set on it).

Or that the speed of your materialization automatically adjusts to the situation and the energy available, even if that sometimes means it takes longer than a second.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that supernatural abilities don't get along with natural laws, and at some point you just gotta handwave it. I love looking at and defining the consequences of power use as a way of adding flavor and maintaining consistency, but in practice in a game you just can't look too closely at this stuff.
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Old 08-11-2020, 11:15 AM   #38
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

[QUOTE=transmetahuman;2338176

Hmm. Speaking of warping into cars, just how explosive a shockwave would a 0.0005, 0.006, or 0.05 second displacement of a human volume of air be in such a confined space? f.[/QUOTE]

An air molecule would only have to move 9 inches to get clear of a human body. So only the 0.0005 transition would have to exceed the speed of sound (if that's even possible).

Also, your car would lose its' airtight seal in only one place before the pressure was vented. The Mythbusters tried very, very hard to blow out the windows of a car. They built a sub-woofer 6 feet across and powered driectly off the car's engine and didn't manage to do more than push out one cormer of the sunroof.
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Old 08-11-2020, 01:48 PM   #39
chandley
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Default Re: Blind Teleport into a Wall

Kuroko Shirai from "A Certain Scientific Railgun" can teleport anything she is touching into solid objects (if she chooses). She has used it to sever load bearing reinforced concrete pillars to bring down a building (using glass windows that reoriented from vertical to horizontal no less).

She explains it in universe as simply displacing whatever is where she is going to the side. Another teleporter in the universe isn't quite as good at that, and has lost their skin accidentally teleporting into an object, but Shirai doesn't appear to have that limitation. They have never showed her teleporting just a part of another person, but she has threatened it multiple times and seems to believe she COULD. She's also 13, and maybe the authors don't want to show a 13 year old dismember a human being in gory fashion.

So a Warp + build that can do that is actually interesting for building her in GURPS. Seems like this is a linked Cutting / Impaling attack, cosmic ignores DR, ranged the same as her Warp (she is fairly short ranged, for what that is worth) and a bucket of dice.

Im borrowing the Cutting / Impaling attack idea from Innerportation from GURPS Psionic Powers, which is an attack meant to describe teleporting a chunk of your enemy away.

I don't know that it is strictly necessary for this "displacement" attack to destroy the moved mass in game terms. In practice, the moved mass is still there, just somewhere else (covered by Warp), and the damage done is to the remaining mass/structure, so some estimate of how much damage moving a statues worth of material out of something is probably more accurate. If harder perhaps to judge. I also don't think it strictly necessary to worry about how fast the material is displaced... it is teleported away, not shoved away. Well, in this construction anyway, not meaning to dampen discussion on the other way.

It takes a lot of points to get enough dice to hole punch statues out of common construction materials, but it seems like one way to answer the OP Warp question: If you teleport into something, you attack it and hope to do enough damage to carve out space for yourself. Any space not carved out is taken out of YOU instead. So if you buy no dice... don't teleport into things.
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