[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

THe problem is that it is trannsfering too much energy. The major advantage of ballasitc armor is that it spread out the enrgy over a wider area, resulting in much less serious injury. If the armor doesn"t get penetrated, the victim isn't going to die. Sure, there will be some brusing, and in exterme cases a cracked rib or two, but as long as the armor isn't penetrated, not much is getting through, perhaps a D4.

I think the degree of damage from a broken rib is probably greater than a D4 represents. If you've got a vest that _genuinely_ will stop the top output of a non-impaling handgun, the impaling one isn't liable to get much through either.

Example: Let's say you've got ballistic armor that stop 9 points, the max damage for a D8+1 handgun. If the weapon impales, it does 2d8+2--but it also gets a much flatter output because of the two die curve. Sure, under occasional results you can get as much as 18 points, but that's one in 64 results for something that only occurs one in 5 hits. Given the necessary coarseness of damage, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and I'd be very suprised if it doesn't mirror occasional top end results under those circumstances). The _average_ result will be about two points of damage, which easily lands in the "heavy bruising" category to me.

Yup. Addtionally, "damage value" has two other problems.

First, it reflect both penetrating power and disruption of tissue. So something that can punch through armor also does a lot of structural damage (something that isn't always true).

Yup. An interesting tact was taken if a fairly obscure old game called Space Quest was to have a die roll representing penetration and a damage multiplier you used on the penetrating points to get damage. It allowed you to easily distinguish between high penetration/low damage weapons and the inverse. Its downside was it did require multiplication in every damage result, and it only worked with a system that used a fairly large numerical value for damage tracking.

Secondly, is that with the way hit point work, damage is handle by attrition, where more realistically it is more a factor of just what part/organ was fdamaged rather than a running total.

Yeah, hit point models (other than to some degree covering blood loss) aren't a great model for injury; they're just simple.

For instance, you can shoot right through most cars with a 30-06 and the only effect the damage will have is against the vehicles resale value, waterproofing, and wind resistance. Start shooting through the engine block and one or two hits will cause any vehicle to eventually stop working.

Of course part of that is that a large amount of most vehicle space is, in the end, little more than a box to hold things.

That's hard to reflect with BRP. Maybe a Luck roll could be one option. If the driver makes the Luck roll, then damage is only cosmetic? TO reflect the effect of overkill, we could alter the LUCK roll by how much damage the attack inflicts. So something that does more damage that the vehicles HP in one attack might roll against POWx3% or just half the LUCK roll.

Well, being me, I'd be prone to just going back to hit location, but I realize that's not a direction most people want to go to.