a spirit's death, sams can't kill spirits. or can they? ;) Options

[Apathy]

The next question: flecette damage is reduced by twice the armor value anyway. So using elemental shot you'd still require a power = twice the force of the spirit. I guess that means using normal shot you'd require a power over 4 times that of the spirit's force.

[Zazen]

I was just going to say that. The flechette aspect keeps it quite subdued.


ed- I think I should go into more detail about how that works, though, because it's not what you describe. The spirits armor rating is normally twice its essence. However, the hardened aspect of its Immunity to Normal Weapons power is not directly connected with its armor rating. The power of the attack is compared with twice the creatures essence, which just happens to be the same as the armor rating here.

Now, that's halved versus elemental attacks like this rocksalt, so the power of the attack need only exceed the spirits essence to harm it, although the spirit will have double-essence worth of armor due to the flechette rules.

This makes a power-10 rocksalt blast effective against spirits up to Force 9, although the resistance TN will be 2 for Force 4-9.

[Nikoli]

What substances qualify as "elemental" in this case?

Could one make or carve a spike out of salt and fit it into a shotgun shell, making it more of a solid slug than a flechette?

[Arethusa]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Traks]

I am sure spirits usually get beaten to death by baseball bats.
"Look mommy, Bad Lad gangers are beating up another poor Mantis spirit"

And good thing my players don't know how to deal with spirits.

[Eyeless Blond]

Ooh, now that would be interesting; a baseball bat made out of granite! :D

(Edit:) Or rock salt!

[Apathy]

Don't wujens consider wood an element? In their case, I would think a wooden bat should work fine, unless we say it needs to be 'virgin' material', in which case a broken tree branch should do the trick.

What's a valid metric for determining how 'natural' a substance has to be in order to do elemental damage? Does quarried granite work? Iron smithed into a crowbar?

[A Clockwork Lime]

There is no measure. Regular tap water, complete with all the heavy processing and crap they put into it, works like a charm.

[Apathy]

By that criteria, virtually anything should be elemental.

[A Clockwork Lime]

It's not my criteria. It's the oddity in the rules on the subject. They're very much mucked up.

[Cain]

[TinkerGnome]

The problem is that the elemental manipulation rules muck things up. Blast, metal, and sand, for instance, shouldn't be real elemental damage since they all rely on impact to deal their damage rather than an elemental action (ie, heat, cold, electricity).

[Kagetenshi]

Though they do manipulate the elements to do that.

As for rock salt, it is traditional. Good for peppering the backsides of the punk kids when they walk on your lawn again, too.

~J

[TinkerGnome]

Yes, an element is used to deal damage, but the element isn't dealing the damage. If using an element to deal damage made it elemental damage, there'd be few things which weren't elemental damage. A lead pipe would deal metal elemental damage, for instance.

[Austere Emancipa...]

What, then, would you consider to be "real" elemental damage? Acid, cold, electricity, fire, and that's it? (The "Other Game Elements")

[TinkerGnome]

Any time the damage is dealt through an intrensic, independant facet of the element itself. If you have to apply an outside force for something to deal damage, it's not elemental damage. Toxic waste, acid, electricity, cold, fire, light/laser, and smoke all would fall under that classificiation.

I don't mention blast because "blast" as an element is just silly.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Toxic waste = Poison. Intense light harms most objects mainly through heat, so that falls indirectly under fire. How does smoke do damage? If you mean that it's hot, then that's Fire again. You could even rename Fire into Heat.

So you've got electricity, temperature extremes, poison.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's pretty far removed from the original idea of elements.

[TinkerGnome]

[Austere Emancipa...]

Original idea of elements, ie the 4 substances which form the basis of all matter: Air, Earth, Fire, Water. You'd only be taking fire from those four.

Limiting the damage done to spirits with kinetic energy while allowing electric and thermal energy as well as chemical reactions (acid) to effect them as normal is not a bad idea at all. But it has little to do with the classic meaning of "elements", and perhaps a better name should be used for those effects.

The "choking" effect of smoke doesn't affect spirits, so it's only the heat (thermal energy).

Sonic damage is a bit weird. Don't know what to call it. If it deals damage to objects, it's more about the intense pressure waves and not the sound that does damage, which basically goes back to "blast".

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: May 13 2004, 02:11 PM

[TinkerGnome]

Using a broad definition, Fire covers heat and flame, Air might cover electricity (since it is the action of electricly charged air currents which can cause it), Earth can cover many toxins and poisons (particularly that caused by heavy metals and the like), and Water could cover acids. The distinction I would make is that the element itself has to actually be doing the damage to count as elemental damage. If there was a way in which air could cause damage without exerting force, I'd let that be elemental damage, or if water could do the same thing (drowning would be elemental damage, actually, but it definitely doesn't affect spirits that way).

[Austere Emancipa...]

I strongly disagree that drowning would be elemental damage. It chokes you. Dust should do elemental damage by that definition, because if fills your lungs and makes it difficult/impossible to breathe. Actually, dust would be even more "elemental", since what really kills you when drowning is the lack of (elemental) air.

Of course you can draw similarities between what's being discussed here and classical elements, but they're still far removed. The Acid - Water thing is most glaring. They're both liquids, and they both include hydrogen and oxygen. And that's about it. I seriously doubt the people who "discovered" the elements would have attributed electricity directly to air, and it's certainly a bad idea in a modern world where the majority of electrical threats from something other than lightning.

Likewise, most poisons in the modern world have nothing to do with the classical element Earth. On many levels, they are close to Acid for this purpose.

Fire is the only one that really works in this respect. The classical element was attributed with heat and the ability to change materials (the chemical reactions of burning).

Anybody got ideas what to call this kind of damage? It could be "microdamage", because it mostly works on a molecular or smaller level (heat, electricity, oxidation), but poisons screw this up in many cases.

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: May 13 2004, 03:23 PM

[TinkerGnome]

Go with the HERO system and consider damage either Physical or Energy. Energy covers most of what we're talking about here (acid and toxins being an exception). I guess you could call a damage type Chemical, too, to take care of that.

[Austere Emancipa...]

That's not very accurate or scientific either, though. The effects of electricity, heat and chemical reactions are decidedly physical. ;)