Question: What would the damage code be if one were to have a levitation spell(any force below 10 ie 9-1) lift and toss a car at a person.

I know that the Damage code in the book is Movement rating(Magic Rating x successes) but using that since pens will have a Tn of 4 and cars 13(assuming they are 2 tons...roughly 900 Kg) the pen would do more damage even if 2 successes were scored with the pen and one with the car this doesn't seem appropriate due to the weight difference.

any thoughts


my assumptions on the spell are listed above if anything is unclear then ask about it.
Thanx

That's just for the impact - the crushing weight of the car would do contual round-by-round damage if someone got stuck under it - which the pen would not. Speaking from a kinetic physics point of view, the pen *should* do more initial damage; a small object moving fast will, at the right balance of weight and speed, do more damage than a large object moving slow. That's why bullets do more internal damage (assuming you're not also trying to pull out a barbed arrowhead) than arrows.

I don't know the actual formula, so I don't know how fast the pen's going. It might still be broken.

Well lifting and trowing a car at a person wouldn't be all that effective since levitate don't allow you to move objects very fast. Unless of course your magic rating is huge but then you should have way better ways of putting the hurt on people than tossing cars at them.

There's a difference between throwing an object and dropping it on someone's head. When throwing an object, if it's too heavy you're not able to impart as much force, thereby reducing the overall damage.

If someone managed to drop a car on a target's head, I wouldn't use the Levitation damage rules. I'd probably use the Ramming vs. pedestrian rules, honestly.

Or just use the rules for falling damage.

thanx for the input

I don't imagine that levitating a pen, even at a high force would do much damage. The falling car - instant street pizza.

I've used the opposite - levitate a bad guy out of the fight to 30-40 meters above ground, then drop the spell

Think of the pen this way, its not like throwing a pen where the pen only has its own inertia and little weight, its like getting stabbed with a pen because the pen has an active force trying to push it through you.

First, we are clear on the disturbingly high target numbers involved with picking up a car?

You get +1 to you TN for every 100kg. Which for an average RL car is about +10 to your TN (14). Multiply your success by your magic rating and that'll give you the speed it's moving at. If it's moving sideways into the target then use the ramming rules but the speed would be too low to really be "slamming" into anyone, it would be more like shoving someone.

However dropping a car on someone... ouch.

Sunday

Actually the average car weighs only around 300-750 kg according to R3 p. 62, eventhough it would still flatten you good if dropped from 30 meters up. So the TN would be between 7-11, certainly doable.

Cars got an awful lot lighter then, I didn't bother looking up the weight of a car in SR, figuring it would be close to RL where the average car is about 1000kg, my bad.

Sunday

I dropped a motorcycle on a guy using Levitate once... I'm not sure exactly how Dalassa calculated the damage, but he went -crunch- nicely...

We found in our group it's just easyer to levitate the enemy in question and drop him from several hundred feet. *Splat* Instant street pizza.

i remember my mage once levitating a car carrying himself and the dwarven rigger, but that was just to look cool and get some transportation (no, i'm not that stupid, the car didn't work to begin with ).

and to be honest, i'd never consider a car a very plausible projectile to launch at an enemy...
bullets are as dangerous as they are 'cause they're small and travel at very high speeds.
a pen (as in question in this thread) would do more damage based on the same principles as a bullet.

so the damage seems fair (it'll most likely be reduced to nothing; it'll just shove the opponent back, like Sunday said).