Am I missing something on the Object Resistance table, or does a mage who casts a Force 6 PowerBall at a group of security guards, and gets at least a single 10 take out the floor they're standing on to?

Yes you did, see attacks against barriers, you'll be lucky just to drop the barrier rating of the floor by one.

Ahhh.. So assuming the lowest rating, the floor rates a 12, but thats doubled against combat spells to 24, and since the spell is only force 6 which is not greater than half the barrier rating, its nothing but cosmetic damage.... OK. I got it now. Thanks.

Mm, melted tile.

Put plaster walls with gas lines in them. Nothing beats it.

Can't damage a gas line in a wall with a combat spell, you didn't have LOS to it when you cast the spell so it is immune. The wall itself however, is flipping toast.

I don't know if I'd consider a floor structural material. Most floors in modern buildings are still wooden. I'd consider structural material to be something like concrete or granite. I'd consider most floors, unless they are designed to hold vehicles, to be heavy material (BR6). Even then the powerball would only lower barrier rating by 1 though.

Depending on the building of course, you might very well have a wooden floor - but between that and the level below you there might very well be armored concrete, or something similar.

I seriously doubt most facilities would have "armored concrete" floors. At most there might be some plasticrete girders in anything larger than a home somewhere, but they'd only be there for support.

Now structures such as military bunkers, hardcore R&D facilities, and prisons are another story.

@snowRaven:
True, the surface might be pitted and wrenched though.. I'd make it count as difficult ground (just for fun).

The pic on P139 of MitS is one possible visual effect... I think that's supposed to be ball lightning though, so cut the lightning bolt and it's cool.

A F6 or so Ball Lightning spell could definately have that effect. They are vulnerable to the gas-main-behind plasterboard technique, but if you cast it at light damage it has no elemental effects so can't ignight the gas .

Still, do keep in mind, if the Red Samurai find you in a rickety lay-lowhouse in the Barrens, and you Powerball them, it may well take out the worm-eaten and water-damaged floor below them.

If a floor was covered with cheap plastic or industrial rubber substitute tiles wouldn't they provide the object resistance of cheap plastic or industrial rubber substitute even if underneath the tiles was wood? After all you can only effect what you can see, and you can't see the wood.

You could always just target the entire building, too. There is no size limit for most spells. There's even a canonical reference for doing this somewhere in the Ritual Sorcery rules where they mention having a brick from a building is enough to target it through the process.

Floors are considered structural. Anything with a load rated of 100 to 200 lbs. per square foot should be structural. However, it is rare in an office building to see the structural material. Carpets, doors, door frames and plasterboard are all fair game for the first combat spell.

I think defining things into components only is rather... I don't know... unworkable. A floor is a floor. That includes the carpet, subfloor, supports, and any insulation that might be there. You might as well declare that you can't target a wall without first destroying the paint covering it, and then the plaster, and then the drywall, and then the studs and the same in reverse on the other side.

Someday I need to make a SuperBall spell.

I don't know what it will do yet. That's not the important part.

~J

How about a Happy Fun Ball spell?

Rule number one: you do not talk about Happy Fun Ball.

~J

Postscript: for those who care, rule number one was set down long before Fight Club hit the presses, let alone movie theatres.

Normal reinforced concrete used in usual civillian buildings is Grade 35.

You can use higher grades, but I do not see any city council accepting anything less than Grade 30 concrete in their buildings. Especially any city prone to earthquakes.

My thought on this ( and I don't have any house rules I'm just stating how I would handle it. )

You hit the floor with some really powerful powerball.
You take the object resistance of whatever is covering the floor.

If the powerball was strong enough to take out covering you move on to what was under the floor.

If what is under the floor has a greater or equal object resistance you use that, you recount your successes using that as the new target number.

If what is under the floor covering has a lesser object resistance you keep the object resistance of the floor covering and the number of successes you got against it when determining how much damage you do to that.

The force of the spell will decrease as it continues to blast its way through the floor. Keep going down until the spell no longer has the force needed to blast through the next layer of floor.

@toturi:
I'm guessing you're talking about some form of concrete grading system rather than barrier rating... Otherwise most buildings will be off the barrier rating scale.

Does amyone have any canon examples of how strong particular materials are? There are examples of glass ratings, but no real idea about how that compares with wood, concrete, and building construction...

If BR 12 is 250mm RC, then 500mm RC would be about BR 14, IMO.

There's nothing wrong with deciding something like that, obviously, but you might as well say it's 13 or 15 or 16. 50cm of reinforced concrete might well be "Heavy Structural Material".

Heavy Structural Material is not RC... or at least not normal RC.

The type of concrete used to build bunkers can easily be twice the strength of normal concrete.

And for the really important beams and columns (heavy structural material), civil engineers simply increase the size. A normal slab may be only 200mm thick, but a beam can easily reach over 1m thick.

Bunkers definitely fall under "Hardened Material" which is BR 32.

I don't know anything about engineering, so I won't argue with you. However, I'd say Heavy Structural Material would be a really silly name for just columns and beams. It makes sense to me it should also apply to heavy supporting walls in large structures, and I've never seen those being a meter thick. And isn't a beam something horizontal when discussing construction? Why would you need a beam a meter thick made of reinforced concrete? I'm not saying you wouldn't, I'm just asking because I don't know.

A slab is something horizontal too... the beam is the bone if you will, the slab is kind of like the flesh.

The slab or floor is usually actually lying on top of the beam (for all intents and purposes, they are 2 seperate things although they can look like a single piece), the weight of everything on the floor (plus the weight of the floor itself) is transfered to the beam which in turn transfers all that load to the columns or pillars. And those columns tranfer all that weight (the whole building's weight) to the piles.

You can usually 1m thick beams in carparks, but in other places, those beams are gonna be concealed.

When I first wrote this, I had the image of a mage casting the spell at two security guards who happily managed to survive the initial F6 Deadly Powerball, only to get knocked out by falling 6 meters once they realized the floor had been disintigrated.... Think Wile E Coyote... and add in a moment before gravity re-asserts itself and you have a comic moment. Then for good measure send down some computer gear on top of their heads that managed to survive the spell since it has a higher object resistance.

I don't buy the "You don't have LOS to the inside of the wall" theory. By that logic Mental Manipulations are impossible because you don't have LOS to my brain, only my skin, much less the fact that magic can affect me even if I'm wearing a suit of full-body armor.

Also note that with a single piece of a building as a material link you can target the entire building with ritual sorcery spells.

Mon dieu! You mean we missed out killing Deus? A single peice of the Arcology was all we needed!

But you still wouldn't allow someone to demolish a skyscraper with a Powerbolt (at Force 500), would you? So you draw a line somewhere. I don't see any particular problems with allowing a Powerball to affect every part of the building within the radius, whether you see those parts or not. Others might not rule like that.

Personally, I'd probably rule that it could, at best, take out the whole room or length of corridor, up to the maximum set by its radius, but not the floor below. In a weak enough building with a strong enough Powerball, the targets might drop one floor, but that's it.

A Powerball strong enough to knock out a floor (one that would pass inspection as an apartment in a civilized western country) will generally be strong enough to fuck up any living people standing on that floor.

Although, if you want a Wile E Coyote effect, you obviously shouldn't feel tied up by logic or anything.

the example run in the SR3 book clearly describes mages ruining the floor in a facility with a "small powerball"
That convinces me that a powerball should be able to demolish a floor without extraordinary successes.

The odd thing about all this is the number of successess never count for damaging objects. Once the mage gets one success against the objects resistance target number, the object is affected based on the force of the spell and the barrier rating of the material.. Damage level and additional successess never matter. It might be worth upstaging spell "force" on additional successes in regards to objects.

Any commercial building will have it's bottom floor constructed of concrete, or whatever SOTA equivalent. This actually holds true for our houses that have basements. Past the first floor you can see wood and/or metal structure. I VERY MUCH doubt that building built in SR times would use real wood, as real organic materials are by definition expensive. Even now most new house nolonger use raw wood in their floors, but engineered beams constructed of wood parts glued together. Cheaper and more uniform.

Highrise buildings have been constructed for the last 40+ years using post & tension, which is to say they have 4 or more colums going up through the building, and each floor is approxiately 6" of concrete that has strength added to it by compressing it horizontally using cables imbedded into it. The floor is a very structually important part of the building, so it must be very rugged. This design allows you to get away from relying on beams and a large (heavy) exo-skeleton structure. It is what has allowed the wide proliferation of highrises.

Sorry to break this to you, but you're all wrong. Powerball and powerbolt target Object Resistance which is a totally separate attribute to barrier rating.

Now, taking a look at SR3, object resistances for building materials range from about 5 to 10, so really a force 6 powerball should be able to take out floors in just about any building, excepting hardened bunkers and car parks. (Strictly speaking even these should be fair game since the scale goes from 3-10, but you can always add armour in as per targetting cars where appropriate).

This can easily work for and against the players, a) it can provide a nice destraction as the surviving targets of such a spell disapear through the polystyrene ceiling tiles of the floor below, but can b) also be a complete pain in the arse if the group was planning in making their escape down that particular corridor.

Darkest Angel,

Combat spells target object resistance to determine success/failure... Barrier rating is used to determine the effects of the spell on the object.



Edit: Which also brings up the point that a Light Force 6 Powerball is just as effective against objects as a Deadly Force 6 Powerball... Hmm. Maybe I *will* modify the Spell's Force in regards to objects based on successes and base damage like I mentioned previously.

Barrier rating is used for physical attacks, nowhere in SR3 or any other book is Barrier Rating used where magic is involved (save for creating/improving it). The walls, floor, and peoples visible equipment all count as valid targets in the area of effect of a powerball, and are thus subject to powerball targetting rules. That means, 1 success at deadly, or sufficient successes to raise the damage to deadly is enough to destroy the inanimate object - and that success goes off object resistance, which may be modified by armour where appropriate.

Unless someone has access to the BBB at the moment, I'll give you the page number tonight that mentions it. It's under the section concerning Sorcery tests, and it refers object damaging spells to the barrier rules.

That only applies to elemental manipulations. Read page 182. There is no specific spells against barriers section, because they simply count as inanimate objects and therefore use object resistance.

I do seem to remember seeing that barriar ratings are doubled against Combat spells though. The inter - references are bogling.

Yep, they are. Which is why a predator with ex-ex rounds is about 4x as effective against barriers as a force 6 powerball.

P124, Barriers, Breaking through. It says that against combat spells, barriers have twice their normal rating. It also gives rules for damaging barriers, comparing the power of an attack to the barrier rating. Whilst I agree that you could do deadly damage to a wall if you rolled well enough with a high enough force spell, the barrier would remain at its full barrier rating unless the force of the spell was particularily high or the barrier rating low.

Going back to the whole targeting thing: I don't think there's a reason why a Powerball wouldn't be able to affect the subcarpeting of a carpeted floor, or the concrete below the tile below the grout, just because it's not in a mage's LOS. As previously stated, that's like saying you have to see a brain to target it with Control Manips, and the actual skin of a person if their back is turned in FFBA with combat spells. It's a silly application of a rule not intended for that big of an extension.

Now, I'd argue that the underlying substructure of the entire floor itself wouldn't be damaged, it's almost another seperate entity from the "tiling" or "carpet floor" itself. To an extent that cracking tile and shattering mortar won't damage it, it'll be OK. Therefore, unless your security guards are standing on one rotted floor of wood and wood alone, it's gonna be difficult to crack the ground beneath them with a Force 6.

I'd say that the floor and substructure are a single entity the same way that a car is a single entity. Most folks would tend to lump the two together. So I think a powerball would try to damage the floor beneath the spell and the suspended ceiling above, but not the suspended ceiling below or the floor above.

Am I making any sense?