Glass Bottle vs. 9 mm Parabellum

[jacobmuller]

For the Hollow don't mean homogeneous argument
The box on Basic pg380 definition includes

uniformly solid or hollow objects

Just a pity the example at box bottom rounds damage down otherwise that 1.6 damage would round to 2 and be 2/3 HP and call for a HT check. That Would resolve it (sometimes it do break, sometimes it don't).

As for falling bottles breaking, I work in a recycling center; folks drop 'em, oft-times they bounce. I've never seen one survive the fall from the truck; at 4yds, wouldn't that be 1d-1 crushing?

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by Gurps Fan

Anyone knows that any commercial 9mm handgun round can easily destroy any of glassware in your house in one shot. But does this happen in GURPS?

A small (1/4 cup = 2 fluid ounces) glass bottle has DR 1 and HP 3 (Low-Tech, p. 34). It's a piece of glass with no moving parts, so it's obviously Homogenous. The bottle is going to match against an iconic 9mm handgun, Beretta 92F (High-Tech, p. 100), which does 2d+2 pi or 9 points (on average). On hit, the glass bottle above takes an injury of (9 - DR 1) * 1/5 (for Homogenous) = 1 point, rounded down.

Yes, only one point per round --you need to shoot the bottle three times with 9mm handgun to force it to roll a unconsciousness check (partial destruction), and six times to force it to roll a death check (total destruction)! This is clearly a murphy. How can you destroy glassware with a handgun in one shot in GURPS, just like in the real life?

Look at B558, last sentence of the first paragraph:

The GM may alter HP for unusually frail or tough objects.

I small glass bottle, IMO, counts as "unusually frail", and so would have either 1 HP, or zero (meaning any slight impact could break it).

Also on the same page, the DR1/3HP is for a 10-square-foot section of 0.2 inch thick (5-6mm) plate glass. A small glass bottle is none of those.

Personally, I'd say that a small glass bottle has DR0, and less than 1 HP.

[Gurps Fan]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Hollow glass objects need something like a Vulnerability to impact (crushing, cutting, impaling, and piercing damage, as distinguished from burning, corrosion, fatigue, and toxic damage). Such objects' listed HP work fine when it comes to standing up to flame, acid, etc.; for working out collision damage when you chuck one at someone; and for most other uses of HP. However, said HP do seem too high against impacts if such objects have Homogenous and no other wounding modifiers.

The catch is that we don't really have the space to give inanimate objects character sheets. That's why we have rules like the ones on p. 224 of Martial Arts and p. 28 of Dungeon Fantasy 1, which cover situations where glass breakage is liable to be important to the plot.

That sounds like an elegant and easy-to-play solution. However, doctor, unfortunately, members of my gaming group (including me) like to create sapient objects as PCs. I often need to improvise racial templates of various inanimate objects.

Originally Posted by DocRailgun

It seems to me that GURPS is written with a lot of assumptions that the GM is an active part of the game rather than a simple referee.
So, just as we are free not to allow M.U.N.C.H.K.I.N, you are free to have a glass break even if the damage doesn't process the way you may like.

Sorry, but see this post.

Originally Posted by ectropy

Look at B558, last sentence of the first paragraph:


I small glass bottle, IMO, counts as "unusually frail", and so would have either 1 HP, or zero (meaning any slight impact could break it).

Also on the same page, the DR1/3HP is for a 10-square-foot section of 0.2 inch thick (5-6mm) plate glass. A small glass bottle is none of those.

Personally, I'd say that a small glass bottle has DR0, and less than 1 HP.

Yes, small glass bottles are surely "unusually frail" in comparison with many other homogenous objects of the same mass, but I don't think the authors of Low-Tech, who assigned the "DR 1 and HP 3" specifically to 2-fluid-ounce glass bottles, didn't consider frailty of small, hollow glass objects when defining these stats.

[Gurps Fan]

Thank you all for replying!

I came to support the view that this question relates to wounding multipliers -- as pointed out by Kraydak and Kromm -- as opposed to HP and DR. The "Homogenous or not?" view is essentially an issue of wounding multipliers, but lacking Homogenous seems to open another can of worms: Do bottles have brain and vitals? Where is the borderline between "*1/5 vs. pi" (Homogenous) and "*1 vs. pi" (lack thereof)? This would be a sudden, big gap.

The simplest way to assign a boosted wounding muliplier is to give Vulnerability disadvantage (p. B161). Vulnerability is a leveled trait (*2/*3/*4), so we can fine-tune the multiplier, e.g., from *0.2 through *0.4 and *0.6 to *0.8 (vs. piercing damage) by combining it with Homogenous, without adding any moving parts or living organs to inanimate objects.

For example, if we assume the glass bottle in question (DR 1 and HP 3; Low-Tech, p. 34) have a Homogenous and Vulnerability (*4; cr, cut, imp and pi), it takes an injury of (9 - DR 1) * 4 (for Vulnerability) * 1/5 (for Homogenous) = 6.4 points. An injury of 6 points is necessary and sufficient to force the said bottle to make a death check.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Gurps Fan

The "Homogenous or not?" view is essentially an issue of wounding multipliers, but lacking Homogenous seems to open another can of worms: Do bottles have brain and vitals? Where is the borderline between "*1/5 vs. pi" (Homogenous) and "*1 vs. pi" (lack thereof)? This would be a sudden, big gap.

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.

However, that wouldn't do anything to address frailty to crushing damage, which is probably the most common fate of glassware! Making it easy to break a glass bottle with a bullet but hard to break it with a baseball bat wouldn't be very good.

[Rocket Man]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

However, that wouldn't do anything to address frailty to crushing damage, which is probably the most common fate of glassware! Making it easy to break a glass bottle with a bullet but hard to break it with a baseball bat wouldn't be very good.

If the bottle's braced and fixed in place, sure. But in a normal situation, I can easily see a bat swiping a bottle off a counter, intact, where it then hits the floor and either breaks or rolls.

[Ed the Coastie]

I still don't see how it makes much difference what happens to the bottle unless it is integral to the adventure for some reason.

For example, let us assume that there is a glass Mason jar sitting on the kitchen counter during a gun battle. For all practical purposes, it is simply there for decoration; whether or not stray gunfire shatters it is irrelevant and a description of such fate is best relegated to "color commentary".

However, if our old friend Sentient Blueberry Muffin decides to get inside of the Mason jar and use his telekinesis ability to fly around in it, then the DR, HP and IT: Homogenous would likely come into play. Not to mention making for a rather bizarre game...

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Rocket Man

If the bottle's braced and fixed in place, sure. But in a normal situation, I can easily see a bat swiping a bottle off a counter, intact, where it then hits the floor and either breaks or rolls.

The bottle has DR 1. If it can survive taking 1 point ofpenetrating crushing damage, then enough damage to break it is also enough to cause a human brain trauma. We're not talking about an inadvertant shove here.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Ed the Coastie

I still don't see how it makes much difference what happens to the bottle unless it is integral to the adventure for some reason.

For example, let us assume that there is a glass Mason jar sitting on the kitchen counter during a gun battle. For all practical purposes, it is simply there for decoration; whether or not stray gunfire shatters it is irrelevant and a description of such fate is best relegated to "color commentary".

However, if our old friend Sentient Blueberry Muffin decides to get inside of the Mason jar and use his telekinesis ability to fly around in it, then the DR, HP and IT: Homogenous would likely come into play. Not to mention making for a rather bizarre game...

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.

[Lord Carnifex]

I would not give glass IT:Homogeneous. I guess when I think of unliving things as having IT: Homogeneous, I think of things where poking a hole in it does not destroy the functionality thereof. You can shoot a tin (Dr. Watson's dispatch box, perhaps) box or a wooden barrel with a 9mm, and probably put a hole in it. However, you haven't destroyed the box's ability to hold papers or the barrel's ability to hold dried fish. You'll have to put a lot more holes in them before they break down enough to no longer be functional. OTOH, it should be pretty easy to shatter a glass bottle with one decent shot. Thin glass probably should not be IT:Homogeneous.