Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 07-22-2011, 02:50 AM   #41
Gurps Fan
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Japan
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Ah, I'm not really seeing worms here. You know perfectly well that bottles don't normally have brains, vitals, eyes, or blood, and there are ITs to represent those properties just fine already. As for the borderline, I would be disinclined to assign Homogeneous to any object of a material which tends to shatter, including glass and most materials with rigid crystalline structures. I could be very wrong in doing that. I certainly don't have any data about the effects of bullets on glass statuary.
For simplicity's sake, I'm inclined to interpret the Homogenous advantage as "being composed of more-or-less uniform substance and having no moving parts", regardless of resilience/frailty of that substance. Your argument sounds acceptable, but "having No Vitals/Brains/etc. and lacking Homogenous" is functionally equivalent of "having Homogenous and Vulnerability", at least as far as wounding multipliers be concerned. To me, the Homogenous-and-Vulnerability modeling is much easier to understand than giving Homogenous to some substances and giving only the No Vitals (etc.) part of it to other substances.

Think of it as designing Body of Glass meta-trait (solid glass): I'd give it Homogenous and perhaps a low level of Vulnerability. I'd define "being a hollow container made of glass" as a lens that includes a higher level of Vulnerability.
__________________
Gurps Fan,
a rules lawyer from the mysterious country of ninja, samurai, and magical girls,
the inventor of M.U.N.C.H.K.I.N.
Gurps Fan is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 03:12 AM   #42
Verjigorm
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Charlotte, North Caroline, United States of America, Earth?
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

So why not play with HP and DR then, so that you get the desired effect? We know what we're looking for: bottles break when shot. So what do you need to change to make the bottle broken?
__________________
Hydration is key
Verjigorm is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 03:27 AM   #43
Michele
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Udine, Italy
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

The bottle described in this thread was produced since TL2. It's not a piece of delicate and elegant home tableware: it was meant for "long-term transport". I suspect that it has HP 3 because its glass is way thicker than the average modern-day small bottle's.
__________________
Michele Armellini
GURPS Locations: St. George's Cathedral
Michele is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 07:11 AM   #44
Figleaf23
Banned
 
Figleaf23's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele View Post
The bottle described in this thread was produced since TL2. It's not a piece of delicate and elegant home tableware: it was meant for "long-term transport". I suspect that it has HP 3 because its glass is way thicker than the average modern-day small bottle's.
The description says 'small', but HP is supposed to be based on size. If the idea is that it is small and robust, should they not increase the DR rather than the HP?
Figleaf23 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 07:15 AM   #45
Ulzgoroth
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

Quote:
Originally Posted by Figleaf23 View Post
The description says 'small', but HP is supposed to be based on size. If the idea is that it is small and robust, should they not increase the DR rather than the HP?
3 HP is roughly right for its listed mass.
__________________
I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident.
Ulzgoroth is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 08:25 AM   #46
Danukian
 
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: MI
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele View Post
The bottle described in this thread was produced since TL2. It's not a piece of delicate and elegant home tableware: it was meant for "long-term transport". I suspect that it has HP 3 because its glass is way thicker than the average modern-day small bottle's.
Yeah, even 19th Century glass was significantly thicker than the machine-blown stuff around in most uses today.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kraydak View Post
The problem comes with the wound multiplier. GURPS implicitly assumes that the cross-sectional radius of the impactor is much smaller (but not much, much smaller) than the cross-sectional radius of the target. In the case of bullets vs. small targets, the effective cross-sectional radius of the bullet/temporary wound cavity/whatever is often larger than the target, and the wound multiplier should rise way above the GURPS maximum of 2, even for non-living targets.
I can agree with this. I was thinking that if an object couldn't survive the impact of a force poking through it's surface, it isn't homogenous - otherwise bullets won't break bottles and scissors would do half damage to construction paper. I have long house ruled that brittle objects take 1.5 or 2x (depending on the size of both the target and the striking object) from crushing and sonic attacks, It must have slipped into my memory banks as RAW!
__________________
"My Dirty Girls on Bikes Calendar ends in December: it doesn't mean the world is going to end, it means it's time to order a new calendar!" ~Burt Chance
Danukian is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 09:22 AM   #47
Ed the Coastie
 
Ed the Coastie's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Sierra Vista, Arizona
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
For a less bizarre game where it matters, souls may be imprisoned in jars in a lot of fantasy fiction. Universal Solvent or ultramagicacid may be carried in a glass bottle, in which case it is a matter of the acutest interest for the character carrying it how much damage is needed to shatter it.
Yup. At that point, the glass bottle exits the "dungeon dressing" category and becomes something integral to the adventure. That's why I made my previous comment about the PC sniper shooting the glass jar of acid that Mook #3 was about to throw rather than simply shooting Mook #3; it actually happened in one of my games. (As it was, the sniper missed...but so did Mook #3 when he threw the jar.)
__________________
"It's never to early to start beefing up your obituary." -- The Most Interesting Man in the World
Ed the Coastie is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 09:38 AM   #48
Figleaf23
Banned
 
Figleaf23's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
3 HP is roughly right for its listed mass.
Hm. There's something odd that I wonder whether it was intentional.

The OP's example canonically applied the injury modifier for Homogenous to the HP3 bottle.

But HP of objects is calculated using the table on page B558 which already addresses Homogenous as a factor in HP.

Is there an inadvertent 'double-counting' of Homogenous?
Figleaf23 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-22-2011, 10:09 AM   #49
Ulzgoroth
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

Quote:
Originally Posted by Danukian View Post
I can agree with this. I was thinking that if an object couldn't survive the impact of a force poking through it's surface, it isn't homogenous - otherwise bullets won't break bottles and scissors would do half damage to construction paper. I have long house ruled that brittle objects take 1.5 or 2x (depending on the size of both the target and the striking object) from crushing and sonic attacks, It must have slipped into my memory banks as RAW!
Erm, stabbing holes in construction paper with scissors doesn't do much damage to it. The 1x for impaling is too much, not too little, for that case. And cutting damage is unaffected by either Unliving or Homogeneous.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Figleaf23 View Post
Hm. There's something odd that I wonder whether it was intentional.

The OP's example canonically applied the injury modifier for Homogenous to the HP3 bottle.

But HP of objects is calculated using the table on page B558 which already addresses Homogenous as a factor in HP.

Is there an inadvertent 'double-counting' of Homogenous?
I don't think it's double counting, no.

Homogeneous objects have IT:Homogeneous and have more HP for a given mass. The IT doesn't make them generically more resistant to damage, it makes them more resistant to certain types of damage which are disproportionately ineffective against homogeneous objects (or equivalently are disproportionately good at rendering creatures or machines non-functional as opposed to re-arranging bulk matter). However, they're also just plain more resilient.

When a living entity dies, it may be in more or less the same structure as when it was alive. When a homogeneous object 'dies', it's been massively disrupted if not outright smashed to pieces.
__________________
I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident.
Ulzgoroth is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 03:19 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.