The rules are pretty explicit about drugs entering the bloodstream. No blood kind of makes it hard for that to happen.

Actually there is vector but there is no Canon rules (no just references) where there needs be blood for the drugs to work. Of course, by your logic, Blood Spirits are vulnerable...

I don't see a problem with that

All of the vectors are very specificly described as leading to the bloodstream. It doesn't explicitly forbid it from working on spirits, but there is also no implication that it does.

And I think you'd need a lot more than just implication to make toxins work on materialized spirits. Next thing you know, you'll be blasting your way through walls with Pepper Punch and shooting down aircraft with Fugu-8.

By Canon, you can but Pepper Punch does only Stun and Fugu isn't antivehicular, so you could stun that wall and try to down that aircraft with Fugu.

Can someone quote me a rule that says toxins don't work against vehicles? Because otherwise Seven-7 is a really great anti-vehicle weapon -- 5S and armor doesn't help at all.

Seven-7 goes right through everything and is Contact vector, so if there's any blood in that vehicle it's as good as dead.

I never had much success in Stunning a vehicle.

Edit: Sorry, not answering the qusetion here.

Seven-7 does 10D Physical. No Stunning going on here.

I found something that might be useful...

All vectors refer to Characters, so unless your vehicle is an NPC...

Yep, all the rules referring to vectors and chemicals that require those (generally the Drugs-section of Chemicals in M&M) refer only to characters and how they affect them. And A Clockwork Lime is absolutely right that materialized spirits gain immunity to toxins, and it's not the Immunity to Toxins power, so the whole thing won't work against spirits anyway.

I was going to use the character argument originally, but realized that many spirits could be considered NPCs (emphasis on the C) which would shoot holes in it. Thus I went with the blood thing, forgetting the text in the Materialization power

There's also the part where the rules go into detail about what each vector is and how it's delivered (M&M p. 105):

Contact: This drug [...] is absorbed through the skin and works its way into the character's bloodstream.
Ingestion: This drug is swallowed and absorbed through the character's stomach lining into the bloodstream.
Inhalation: This is inhaled and absorbed into the character's bloodstream through the lungs.
Injection: This drug must be physically injected into the bloodstream to affect the character.

Notice a trend? I'm pretty sure vehicles, spirits, buildings, and most other non-biological beings have the slight tendency of lacking a bloodstream.

Lime, maybe you should houserule some of that out? I mean, I think we can both agree it's completely crazy, and it's not exactly like this is the first time something in canon's been so.

Why? I have no real problem with simple solutions for keeping spirits in check, especially since people are always complaining about how uberpowerful magic is. It's not like characters are going to run around with their weapons loaded with water-filled capsule rounds 24/7. It's a pretty obscure ammo type. Just a cheap one.

Personally I don't bother with water-filled capsules. I go for acid when I'm expecting heavy spiritual opposition unless I have a character who prefers shotguns. But then I'm a fan of versatility, and acid works nicely on most types of targets.

So carry a professional pressure-washer with a "Zero" nozzle, it'll cut snakes, etc. into nice bite size morsels easily.

Right, rock salt has a density of about 1.3 (g/cm^3 or tonnes/m^3). It would absolutely suck as projectile material. The only way to make it semi-effective would be a solid slug, which might do about as much damage as a rubber slug, except at a range of few meters where it might do "Physical". Effective maximum range might be as much as 50 meters, probably less. You can forget about rock salt "shot".

Granite, averaging at 2.75 g/cm^3, would be a far better choice, although even that would prove pitifully weak compared to lead slugs. Even iron sucks, and that has a density of 7.87 g/cm^3.

There's that shotgun in CC which is pretty much designed to shoot garbage that you pick up off the floor. It has reduced range, maybe less damage, I don't remember exactly.

That's what I make people use to shoot rock salt.

So it seems. Street Sweeper, 10S(f), Taser ranges. That sounds about right for actual salt grains.

The range, I mean. The damage is way too high for that kind of ammunition. 4S(f) might be closer to reality.

I thought that elemental material halved the power of the immunity to normal weapons, but did not eliminate it. So a force 4 spirit has 8 armor against a bullet, and 4 armor against a water cannon, but in either case the base power of the bullet's got to be greater than 8, or the base power of the w.c. has to be greater than 4, for them to do any damage.

A shotgun shooting regular shot does base damage something like 8M at point blank range, right? GM fiat, you could say that shooting rock salt instead reduced the power by 2 and did stun damage and halved the effective range.

Using this against the force 4 spirit at point blank range:
Normal Shot: Base 8M, - 8pts of armor = No damage
Rock Salt: Base 6LStun, -4pts of armor = 2LStun damage (staged by successes)

Because it's shot, the power reduces with distance, and because it's rock salt, it would not be effective at all past a few meters out.

So you could damage the spirit this way, but you'd have to be right by it, and you'd be vulnerable to melee from it.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

(Edit:) Or rock salt!

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?

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

By that criteria, virtually anything should be elemental.

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

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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".

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).

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.

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.

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