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Old 09-19-2022, 07:46 PM   #1
Bathawk
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Default Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

Maybe not literally., but the best way to explain what I want to ask

Now in the game if you hit -5 x HP you die automatically not matter what your HT, levels of hard to kill, ect; so someone with HP: 10...who takes 60 points of damage is done, fini. a corpse....but there is still a corpse.

if this same person goes to -10 x HP.... 110 points of damage, there is nothing left of the corpse, before he may have a dozen bullet holes, but still may be able to a closed-casket funeral. He may have been run over by steel roller, fallen into a vat of acid, or taken a few thousand bullets over the course of the afternoon...heck he may have decided to eat a stick of dynamite.

But lets say i get hit my a mack truck going 100 miles an hour which somehow stops the instant it hit me, I may have takes 60 points of damage, I may be at risk of taking 110 points of damage, but I probably would have been catapulted 40 feet and landed a sack of broken bones, but I'd still have a body 75% intact (or whatever)

Think of a leaf, I can tear a leaf in two no issue...but if it's falling from the tree and I punch it in midair, it's probably going to be undamaged if I connect. likewise if the hulk hit me with a lamppost, it might launch me like a baseball, but my body probably wouldn't explode, or be torn in two.

So the question is, is there a point where blunt drama becomes superfluous? Like for example only the first 40 points "matter" then after that only 1/10th of the damage applies to damage, while still affecting knockback? (I'm just pulling numbers form my posterior to illustrate)
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Old 09-19-2022, 08:24 PM   #2
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

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Originally Posted by Bathawk View Post
So the question is, is there a point where blunt drama becomes superfluous? Like for example only the first 40 points "matter" then after that only 1/10th of the damage applies to damage, while still affecting knockback? )
I can think of no reason why this should be true in any realistic world.

Or at least not in the ranges you suggest. If the Huik punched you his fist might go through your torso and you get a certain sort of blowthrough but that wouldn't give you the result you're looking for. It might send the parts of your body above and below the fist-through flying but they'd take full damage even if you weren't in -5x HP territory already.

Now for straight falling there is a maximum point. It's called terminal velocity but that still result in blunt trauma so severe it causes huge blood pools around the body.

What you want only happens if the GM writes the world's rules to do that sort f thing.
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Old 09-19-2022, 08:55 PM   #3
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

Buy it as a perk that takes effect if you reduce a character to -5xhp.
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Old 09-19-2022, 09:25 PM   #4
JulianLW
 
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

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Originally Posted by Bathawk View Post
But lets say i get hit my a mack truck going 100 miles an hour which somehow stops the instant it hit me, I may have takes 60 points of damage, I may be at risk of taking 110 points of damage, but I probably would have been catapulted 40 feet and landed a sack of broken bones, but I'd still have a body 75% intact (or whatever)

Think of a leaf, I can tear a leaf in two no issue...but if it's falling from the tree and I punch it in midair, it's probably going to be undamaged if I connect. likewise if the hulk hit me with a lamppost, it might launch me like a baseball, but my body probably wouldn't explode, or be torn in two.
I think in both of those cases your body would, in fact, basically explode. The force of the impact of a Mack truck hitting a human body at 100 mph would nearly liquify most soft tissue and turn most of the bones into shards the consistency of gravel.
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Old 09-20-2022, 12:00 AM   #5
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

can only see this working with a big enough size diff where your punches are AE, otherwise you punch holes not the hole creature
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Old 09-20-2022, 07:06 AM   #6
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

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I think in both of those cases your body would, in fact, basically explode. The force of the impact of a Mack truck hitting a human body at 100 mph would nearly liquify most soft tissue and turn most of the bones into shards the consistency of gravel.
This article has someone landing at 75-80 mph on to a rock surface.
https://sjtrem.biomedcentral.com/art...757-7241-19-63
There are a lot of fractures, but the bones are not shattered (there are x-rays in the article). That an extra 20-25 mph should turn an impact from survivable to the person being mush seems unlikely. Sure the survival in this case is exceptional, but there is quite a lot of difference between being dead and the remains not being recognisably human.
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Old 09-20-2022, 07:26 AM   #7
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

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This article has someone landing at 75-80 mph on to a rock surface.
https://sjtrem.biomedcentral.com/art...757-7241-19-63
There are a lot of fractures, but the bones are not shattered (there are x-rays in the article). That an extra 20-25 mph should turn an impact from survivable to the person being mush seems unlikely. Sure the survival in this case is exceptional, but there is quite a lot of difference between being dead and the remains not being recognisably human.
Yeah. That is not normal at all - hence the extensive writeup in a medical journal.

A fall from 300 feet will normally turn someone to pulp, since they'll probably be going much faster than 80 mph when they land (i.e. no intermediate impact to slow the fall, as with this lady). I think she ended up rolling 8d for damage and got well under the average.

A normal HP 10 person getting hit by a 100 mph Mack truck is going to take 10d crushing damage according to RAW (collision with a "hard" object - unless you want to call it a Slam by the truck, in which case the damage will be much higher). That's going to be an average of 35 damage - not enough to go to -10xHP. And yet, in real life, that kind of collision would cause enough damage to pretty completely destroy the body. Would there be a corpse left to resurrect? Possibly. In real life, however, getting hit by a Mack truck at 100 mph is almost certain to obliterate a human body.

You can also find internet reports - far more common than reports of people surviving 200 foot falls - of truckers hitting deer in the road at moderate highway speeds - and how it completely obliterates their bodies.
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Old 09-20-2022, 08:48 AM   #8
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

In the words of The Science of Life, by H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G.P. Wells,

"A mouse can be dropped down a mine-shaft, however deep, and arrive at the bottom dazed but unhurt. A cat or a dog will be killed, however. A man will be not only killed but smashed; and if a pit pony happens to fall over, the speed at the bottom is so terrific that nothing is left but a few of the hardest bits of its bones and a splash on the walls."

In the case of falls, this is a function of terminal velocity, which depends on air resistance. But with being hit by a truck, the relative velocity doesn't depend on the size of the man or animal.
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Old 09-20-2022, 09:01 AM   #9
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

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"A mouse can be dropped down a mine-shaft, however deep, and arrive at the bottom dazed but unhurt. A cat or a dog will be killed, however. A man will be not only killed but smashed; and if a pit pony happens to fall over, the speed at the bottom is so terrific that nothing is left but a few of the hardest bits of its bones and a splash on the walls."
Or the shortened version: "A mouse bounces, a dog dies, a man is broken, and a horse splashes."
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Old 09-21-2022, 06:36 PM   #10
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Default Re: Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

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Originally Posted by JulianLW View Post
Yeah. That is not normal at all - hence the extensive writeup in a medical journal.

A fall from 300 feet will normally turn someone to pulp, since they'll probably be going much faster than 80 mph when they land (i.e. no intermediate impact to slow the fall, as with this lady). I think she ended up rolling 8d for damage and got well under the average.

A normal HP 10 person getting hit by a 100 mph Mack truck is going to take 10d crushing damage according to RAW (collision with a "hard" object - unless you want to call it a Slam by the truck, in which case the damage will be much higher). That's going to be an average of 35 damage - not enough to go to -10xHP. And yet, in real life, that kind of collision would cause enough damage to pretty completely destroy the body. Would there be a corpse left to resurrect? Possibly. In real life, however, getting hit by a Mack truck at 100 mph is almost certain to obliterate a human body.

You can also find internet reports - far more common than reports of people surviving 200 foot falls - of truckers hitting deer in the road at moderate highway speeds - and how it completely obliterates their bodies.
A ~330-foot fall will (ignoring air resistance) give you about 100 mph collision velocity with the ground. That doesn't obliterate bodies, and nor do 100 mpg collisions on motorways. They kill people, and make a mess of their internals, and people do survive them from time to time.

As for the OP's concerns, consider the descriptions of the effects on the body in the rules to be fluff, aside from the game mechanics - they are what matters. Thus, -5 x HP means "You're dead, no saves", and -10 X HP means "You're dead, so saves, and no comebacks" and that's it, the rest is colour.
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