Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Squishing and Pinning

Edit: Ran some more numbers and revised the system I'd use for squishing & pinning in Scion. It is as follows:

When trapping someone under a mass of 1,000 lbs or more, treat it as an environmental effect, with:
Damage = 4 + (dots of Epic Strength required to lift it) B / minute
Trauma = 4 + (2 x(dots of Epic Strength required to lift it))

The trauma roll may be made with Stamina+Fortitude as per normal "sucking it up", or with Strength+Athletics to represent that you are "pushing back".

Remember that soak does apply to environmental damage, but armor does not.

So parking a Semi-cab (9.5 US Tons, requiring Epic Strength 5 to lift) on someone does 9B/minute , trauma 14. A fully-laden Semi (37.5 tons) with all of it's weight somehow applied only to them would be 10B/minute, trauma 16.

It conveniently works out to the level of Epic Strength necessary to lift the truck is roughly the same as the level of Epic Stamina necessary to lay under the wheels and survive indefinitely. It breaks down a little at higher levels of Epic Stamina, but the result is just that if you want to hurt a God, you have to swing a mountain at them, not just bury them under one.

For example, if I drop all 6,000 tons of the foundation of the Space Needle on my PCs next weekend it'll do 13 dice of Bashing with a Trauma rating of 22. You need Epic Strength 9 to lift the Space Needle, but Epic Stamina 7 will let you survive indefinitely pinned beneath it's mass. Call me evil, but I like being a possibility in my game.

Using this math, if you put a 1-ton weight (damage 5B/minute, trauma: 6) on a mortal for a minute they could get lucky and emerge unscathed, but it remains a potent danger vs even the best mortal athelete.

It's neither a terribly complicated nor horribly broken system, so I think it'll work.

Link to the extremely useful table of weights of big things with which you can squish.

1 comment:

rbbergstrom said...

The reason I let the Trauma roll be made by Strength + Athletics in addition to Stamina + Fortitude was so that you'd never be killed by a weight you were strong enough to just push off on your next action.