Punching someone into a "Fine Red Mist"

[Bathawk]

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)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Bathawk

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.

[Not]

Buy it as a perk that takes effect if you reduce a character to -5xhp.

[JulianLW]

Originally Posted by Bathawk

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.

[Plane]

can only see this working with a big enough size diff where your punches are AE, otherwise you punch holes not the hole creature

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Bathawk

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)

There are no rules as written to cover that situation, largely because it will so rarely be important that the body you strike will be obliterated rather than just dead and you actually can do enough damage to in theory obliterate the target rather than just instakill it. This is one of the situations where a GM's judgement call comes in. Reasonably speaking unless you have an area effect attack relative to the size of the victim, a single attack that does that much damage will probably blow through with the excess force wasted.

[Bengt]

Originally Posted by JulianLW

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.

[Varyon]

A few things to consider here.

The -10xHP = nothing left honestly doesn't make much sense. Sure, it's RAW, but consider the case of a human, and that same human raised as a zombie following a heart attack. If the human had 10 HP, then the zombie - being Unliving - should have 20 HP. If the human gets hit hard enough to take 110 HP of Injury, his or her body is "completely destroyed." If the zombie - who has the same body, but is unreliant on functioning organs - takes the same Injury, it is most likely "killed" (it's at -4.5xHP), but the body is largely intact. Determining the status of a body should look at where it would be if Homogenous, Unliving, and Living. Something that would be at -10xHP if it were Homogenous is truly and utterly destroyed - reduced to ash or splatter marks, shattered into tiny pieces, etc. Something that would be at -5xHP if it were Homogenous is too damaged to stay together. Something that would be at -5xHP if it were Unliving is too damaged to mechanically function. Something that would be at -5xHP if it were Living is too damaged to sustain life. So, to actually reduce an HP 10 human to a red mist or similar, said human would need to be hit with around 440 damage (that's the average damage of a ~126d cr attack).

For collisions, damage to both sides should be based on the mass of the smaller subject. A mack truck going at 100 mph (~Move 50) shouldn't cause more damage than falling at 100 mph onto a comparable surface, as in either case you're looking at the body being suddenly accelerated, changing its velocity by 100 mph (either going from 0 to 100 or 100 to 0). So, to reduce an HP 10 human to a red mist or similar, using average damage, said human would need to be involved in a Move 1260 collision, which is around Mach 3.4. Interestingly, this isn't too far off from what we'd expect from physics - I believe a collision exceeding the speed of sound in the material will utterly destroy it, and the speed of sound in the human body appears to be somewhere around Mach 4.

For attacks, what you're looking at is the pressure generated at the point of impact (and the follow-up). If it's high enough to go through the target, it goes through; if not, it pushes it back. A sufficiently-high-pressure punch will leave a hole in the target's chest (and arguably makes the damage type more akin to piercing than crushing). The Hulk swinging a telephone pole wouldn't actually pulp you unless the pole is being moved at somewhere around Mach 4 (probably higher, but I'm not certain) - but if there's enough force to go through, it may well bisect you.


Honestly, I think just keeping the first part in mind will handle your issues. Against an HP 10 human, 60 Injury will kill them, 100 Injury will mangle their corpse, 200 Injury will break their corpse apart, and 440 Injury will completely and utterly destroy their corpse. It's not strictly realistic - GURPS is not a reality simulator, after all - but should avoid logical disconnects.

[JulianLW]

Originally Posted by Bengt

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.

[whswhs]

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.