Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Isawa Sideshow" data-source="post: 238731" data-attributes="member: 1107">Trimmed a bit because, well... your method of quoting responses makes quoting back quite annoying! Nothing personal. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Ah, but there's a problem. Unless we're talking about an incindiary grenade, which is meant to start a prolonged fire, comparing a fireball to a grenade doesn't work. Fireballs deal fire damage, indicating that they're massive balls of, well, fire... fire that's hot enough to burn people to death in a couple of seconds.  To flash-burn someone to death, you've got to be talking fires in the thousands of degrees.A grenade, on the other hand, does its damage with concussive force and shrapnel, so it's completely different. A creature that's immune to fire wouldn't be hurt by a fireball, but could still be injured by a grenade.Right, but a laser sight isn't meant to put a hole in anyone... it just aids you in making a hole in them with something else. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The problem remains, though. Do you treat leather armor as having a different DR against lasers than it does against punches? What about kevlar? How would it handle against a laser? Or really well-polished plate mail? Would the laser reflect off of it (raising its DR significantly) or would it punch right through?See, that's what I'm talking about. There's so much extra complexity in how you're handling different kinds of damage/armor interatctions that trying to be realistic is an excercise in futility, or at least one in frustration. I certainly wouldn't have fun trying to juggle all of that either as a player or a GM. I know your argument is that the game designers should do all the work, but the people playing have to actually use the resulting system. If the results are another set of abstracts (which seems to be what you're suggesting), then you're just trading one abstract for another. In that case, it's not a flaw in the system, it's just personal preference for a different set of abstracts.Which sci-fi and fantasy are filled to the brim with. Trying to fill in the physics for all of them is a job I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

Verification