[Pyramid #3/83 Alt GURPS IV] Redoing Strength

[jacobmuller]

I was doing up a New to Old comparison table and wanted to include Spaceships. The largest spaceship, SM+15, is ST 10,000.

Am I doing it wrong or would that now be about ST 71?

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by jacobmuller

I was doing up a New to Old comparison table and wanted to include Spaceships. The largest spaceship, SM+15, is ST 10,000.

Am I doing it wrong or would that now be about ST 71?

Well ST 10,000 gives a BL of 10,000^2/5 = 20,000,000 lbs., from the table in the article ST 20 is BL 200 lbs. and every +10 ST multiplies this by 10, so you'll need +50 ST on ST 20 to get BL 20,000,000 lbs. so you're looking at exactly ST 70.

Yes, that is a mind-blowingly huge difference, that's logarithms for you.

[jacobmuller]

Thank you.
Massive changes:(
I looked at something before, Gun-scale ST(?), supposed to make the ST based damage more "realistic" but you had to re-price ST and everything derived.
As much as I like the Knowing Your ST (KYS?) article, I think I'll KISS my ST table.
+8 ST, for [80], gives +2d damage is what I've based my table off and that's near enough the Basic so no repricing.
For that matter, if "realistic" ST based damage means repricing ST, that means Basic ST has a cinematic cost and rightly gives cinematic damage.

What I will do is recalculate the Th damage values in-line with the KYS comment that Swing damage should be only 50% better than Thrust. Lions, tigers and bears? Oh, my:D

[Anthony]

The thing log ST gives you is convenient workings for contests of ST and letting you replace 'BL*X' with 'ST+X' -- i.e. instead of BL*5, you can use ST+7. It doesn't really help with damage unless you do major redesigns of GURPS.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The thing log ST gives you is convenient workings for contests of ST and letting you replace 'BL*X' with 'ST+X' -- i.e. instead of BL*5, you can use ST+7. It doesn't really help with damage unless you do major redesigns of GURPS.

I suppose one thing it does potentially do is concentrate HP levels into a much smaller range, and provided you do the same for DR, damage continues to scale to a degree, the biggest problem is perhaps the randomness of damage since there's now such a colossal relative difference between 1 pt and 6 pts of damage.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

I suppose one thing it does potentially do is concentrate HP levels into a much smaller range, and provided you do the same for DR, damage continues to scale to a degree, the biggest problem is perhaps the randomness of damage since there's now such a colossal relative difference between 1 pt and 6 pts of damage.

It largely decouples HP from ST for charbuilding (not sheet-notation) purposes. I'm not sure what the damage problem is with LogST: lower damages are linked to higher BLs as compared to the default Basic Set configureation.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

It largely decouples HP from ST for charbuilding (not sheet-notation) purposes. I'm not sure what the damage problem is with LogST: lower damages are linked to higher BLs as compared to the default Basic Set configureation.

The main problem is that you only need ST 250 to move the earth, but at that point you're only doing 61d of damage, a lot, but absolutely minuscule compared to your lifting feats. The scaling is just out of whack at higher levels.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

The main problem is that you only need ST 250 to move the earth, but at that point you're only doing 61d of damage, a lot, but absolutely minuscule compared to your lifting feats. The scaling is just out of whack at higher levels.

Oh, so basically it's skewed in the opposite direction now. Well, the good news is that you can get Striking ST for cheap now and adjust to whatever proportion is proper.

[Bruno]

I'm not totally convinced the damage is out of whack to the lifting strength, but since I'm quite happy with buying ST in bits and pieces (particularly since this version has essentially decoupled HP anyways) I'm more concerned about cost.

Given the price for Innate Attacks, the price for Striking ST seems a lot better with this scheme. The 2400 points for Earth moving seems legit, and at 4pt/die of damage, if you want more than 61d damage (which I can certainly understand if you haven't tweaked anything else, that's not enough to bounce around a tank but you can shove worlds?) it's really affordable now.

I think the price for damage is good under this system. Rescaling the amount of damage so you have 600d or 1200d or whatever at ST 250 means giving more damage per level, which means your ST should cost more per level, which throws off the 10/level scheme. And/or you depart from the +1 damage/level flat 10/level scheme.

Which is totally fine, but it's going in another direction than the article.

[Kromm]

The idea that feats of lifting and damage ought to be comparable is iffy. Most seriously lifting-optimized machines and beings are not impressive at striking on a one-second time scale, which is what ST-based thrust and swing damage rate. They're usually good at dropping, toppling, and throwing things into which they've invested energy over time. If you can shift planets, you can make them collide with your enemies, and that's a lot of collision damage. Other fun tricks include crushing enemies between planets and sending their planet into a star.

What's missing here is probably a cumulative prep-time rule for winding up for high-damage hits. This would factor in scale (SM). The following is not a good rule, but I'm talking about things like: "You can double damage by doubling prep time, to a maximum number of doublings equal to SM/2, round down." A human with SM 0 could do no better than ×1 after 0 seconds (i.e., do listed ST damage every turn), while a planetary-scale being with SM +43 could manage ×2,097,152 damage after about 25 days of investing energy in some heavy object, which would turn 61d into 127,926,272d, or a ~57-gigaton blast.