World of Styrofoam

[Anthony]

In a lot of cinematic genres (it's particularly visible in cartoons, but also appears in live action and comics), you get ridiculous scaling of objects, where a human can be thrown through a stone wall and be fine (or at least only moderately inconvenienced), lift man-sized boulders, and so on. This isn't a case of individuals being super-powered; it's just that in this world, it's just something about the world -- basically, objects are cinematic props rather than real.

Is there an easy way to represent this in a game? An advantage that says you treat the real world that way might also be of interest (it represents supers fairly well), but first I'm wondering what it is as just a setting rule.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Anthony

but first I'm wondering what it is as just a setting rule.

Objects have DR 0 and weigh a fraction of what they'd weigh in our world. Base HP off the weight accordingly.

[vierasmarius]

I think this is mostly a genre convention, and as such is best handled by a setting-wide cinematic rule. As long as the exceptional scaling doesn't provide mechanical benefits (ie, they can lift a huge boulder and hurl it a great distance, but the damage it inflicts is in proportion to their actual strength; they can strike through solid walls, but don't instantly destroy their opponents' shields, etc) it won't unbalance anything, and could be enabled with a Perk if not universally active. It's similar to the Cannon Fodder cinematic rule, where a single point of penetrating damage is enough to dispatch enemy mooks, but applied to background scenery instead of background characters. In high-powered Supers and Mehca games, the same could even apply to mook-piloted vehicles.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

I think this is mostly a genre convention, and as such is best handled by a setting-wide cinematic rule.

It mostly is; I was interested in how you'd write such a rule though.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It mostly is; I was interested in how you'd write such a rule though.

You could do as Sir Pudding suggests, removing object DR and dropping its mass (and thus HP). I'd use a simple across-the-board divisor; x1/8 would make things much easier to lift and cut in half their HP. It might vary by SM though, with small objects staying about the same but larger objects moved closer to the mid-range of values.

Alternately, you could leave the DR at around its present value, or drop it to some fraction of normal, but have any penetrating damage be sufficient to punch through / destroy the object. This mirrors the Cannon Fodder rule, and has the advantage that you don't need to track object HP.

[whswhs]

GURPS Supers addressed part of this by giving inanimate objects Easy to Kill 4.

Bill Stoddard

[Flyndaran]

Proving that the true heroes of super worlds are the incredibly fast invisible construction crews that repair all that damage before the next big fight.

[Maz]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Objects have DR 0 and weigh a fraction of what they'd weigh in our world. Base HP off the weight accordingly.

But in a typical action game you could pick up a chair an it would shatter as you hit someone with it an if thrown against a table it too splinters. (works fine so far), but if you then kick over the table and take cover behind it, suddenly it can withstand most small-arms. Additionally if people intentionally jump down on the table, even from great heights it tend to be fine.

Maybe it just has DR:10 vs. piercing.

----

More "seriously" I don't think you'll want a hard and rigid rule for stuff like this. Instead make it combat options. For instance "you may only use Mighty Blow if you first pick up an improvised weapon, the weapon will shatter if it hits". Or "pay one CP to halve damage for hitting a solid object by making the object crumble". And so on. You could probably get by with 2-4 houserules for CP- or Extra Effort-use that lets the NPC's and the PCs decide when they want to destroy things around them, and when they do not want it.

[digoraccoon]

In a low-power Supers campaign I ran years back, one thing I did was that a Super slamming into inanimate objects dealt the usual damage in a collision, but the Super took no damage in return.
This allowed the strong characters to essentially smash through doors and thin plaster walls with little impunity, but for the objects to still provide the usual DR against attacks.

[Mailanka]

This came up in a wuxia discussion. In a lot of wuxia, martial artists seem to be able to shatter objects (with ease!) that normal people cannot, endure phenomenal amounts of punishment, and wield improbably heavy weaponry. The simplest solution seems to be to simply grant wuxia characters +10 ST. It reflects the greater strength the characters have in comparison to other people (damaging objects, carrying huge items) and the enormous amount of punishment they can take (+10 HP).

An important element here is that it's only a "world of styrofoam" for certain characters. In that case, higher ST seems to be the way to go. This isn't always true, though. In comics, for example, things just seem to fall apart more readily and heroes often don't carry heavier weapons than normal. That might be a genuine case of a world of styrofoam.