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Dark Fire Lily
d36af7
>>118789
>If I get a limb severed before taking regeneration, would regeneration regrow that part?
As an innate ability, yes. There are magic items that provide the same basic benefit but only apply to injuries taken after you put them on.
>How effective at disrupting slashing weapons are these enchanted spidersilk wrappings? I'm not experienced enough with GURPS to comprehend "DR4 sparkly jacket". Can you put that in system-agnostic terms? I'm not sure exactly where on the attack/defense arms race that falls.
Key distinction is between 'damage,' mostly meaning how much energy is behind that incoming attack and what form it's in, and 'injury,' meaning how many HP you lose. Crushing damage (I also use 'blunt' and 'bludgeoning' interchangeably) gets reduced by DR and then converts 1:1 to injury. Cutting damage that penetrates DR is multiplied by 1.5, or 2 if it targets the neck or a major blood vessel, but armor is particularly good at preventing it from fully penetrating. Impaling damage is multiplied by 2 on most living targets, but that depends quite a bit on what's deeper inside the target.
Let's say Yisheng Ji has 12 hp and is wearing enchanted silk robes with DR 4. A ninja appears as if from nowhere, throws a flurry of shuriken at him. None roll more than four cutting damage, or strike unprotected parts of his body, so they either get caught in the cloth or bounce off ineffectually.
Frustrated, the ninja draws a sword, closes to melee range, and chops at the doctor's hand (covered by a long flowing sleeve) for 8 cutting damage; this is reduced by DR to 4, and fails to fully penetrate the armor. The doctor is not exposed to any poison on the blade, and takes 4 hp of injury to the hand, which is exactly equal to 1/3 his HP; to cripple an extremity would require one more than that. So, his hand is badly bruised but remains functional. He'd be taking a -4 penalty to any non-reflexive action on his next turn from the pain, but that goes away after one second, and doesn't affect active defenses. Basically a flinch.
If the damage roll was a 9 instead, then the 5 penetrating damage would cause 7 injury to the hand, and cripple it (at least for the duration of the fight, duration of crippling injuries is a separate roll), but actual loss of HP would be limited to 5, the same as the crippling threshold. There would also be poison, infection, and other such matters to worry about at that point, since the blade's actual cutting edge touched flesh and blood rather than being blunted by silk. Crippling threshold for a limb is based on HP/2, so 7 with 12 max HP. Any crippling effect, as well as any hit over HP/2 even to the torso, or any noticeable damage to the head or vitals (heart, lungs, kidneys) can cause stunning: no deliberate actions at all for multiple seconds, reflexive stuff like active defenses at -4. That's the level of damage which usually puts somebody 'out of the fight,' even if they're still conscious and mobile. Good time to offer the opportunity to surrender.
Automatic permanent crippling due to amputation or destruction of a limb or extremity requires twice as much injury as would be required to cripple it. If magical healing is applied before the 'duration of crippling injury' roll would have been made, meaning either during the fight or in the immediate aftermath, it can undo this damage before it fully sinks in.
The wounding multiplier for impaling damage depends heavily on what part of the body it's targeting. On a limb, it's only x1, same as crushing - but it does break the skin if it penetrates armor DR at all, causing blood loss, delivering poison, etc. On the torso it's x2, and it can even target the vitals inside for x3. Lots of swords can be swung for cutting or thrust for impaling, and a swing does more base damage at the same ST, but against armor the thrust is often more effective because it can target weak points and then multiply whatever damage does slip through. A cut across the chest for 7 damage would leave no more than a painful bruise through DR 4 enchanted silk, chainmail, or scales, while a stab to the heart for only 5 damage against that same armor causes the same amount of immediate lost HP, plus stunning, and bleeding which for most practical purposes would require rapid magical healing to survive. First Aid would be useless, and treatment with Surgery would be at -4, as would HT rolls for natural clotting.
Skull hits have an x4 wounding multiplier for all damage (except toxic), since the brain is about as fragile and mission-critical as organs can be. Good news is, it also gets DR 2 for free, thanks to the bones involved. That's fully cumulative with armor, and fitting armor onto the head is fairly straightforward since there are so few moving parts. Eyes get that same x4 wounding multiplier, and no natural DR, but they're much harder to target. Unfortunately they're also extremely difficult to armor effectively with low-tech materials, so mainly the solution there is expensive magical force fields. As a cultivator, though, you could put some points in the Blind-Fighting skill and then wear a helmet without eyeholes, like Daredevil or Toph Bei-Fong. If you're opposed to protective headgear on an aesthetic basis, you could buy something like this http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/props which functions just like the force field bracers, apart from providing mundane DR 6 to the skull rather than the forearms.
Muscle-powered personal weapons hit diminishing returns somewhere around 10 damage. Reliably doing more than that usually means a big buff guy swinging a heavy two-handed weapon with everything he's got, wide open to counterattacks, and even then it wouldn't be too much more without superhuman strength or heavy-duty magic. Somebody with DR 10+ is a tank, functionally immune to almost anything but crits and specialized anti-armor weapons (meteoric iron for magical forcefields, starmetal for mundane plates, siege engines for anything that can't dodge, etc.) DR 4 or 5 on at least the torso and skull is a sensible minimum for counter-assassination and protection from random battlefield hazards. At that level, you'd still want to avoid getting hit, but any random arrow or knife is likely to be more of a painful inconvenience than mortal danger.
Azarthraine of Hollowfall's highest-circle direct damage spell, Supreme Disintegration, deals 30d6 corrosion damage, or 5d6 to those who pass a fort save or are generally resistant to magic (such as golems, Minoan ox-men, or items made from cold iron), or obliterates a thousand cubic feet of relatively homogenous inanimate material, and in any case ignores most DR. That's enough to reduce most mortal creatures to a wisp of ash and regrets, though meteoric iron or other dead magic areas thwart it outright. Six castings (the most he can manage in a typical working day, with no other high-end spells) could slay a 300-ton kaiju. A magical force field can absorb it and thereby protect whatever's on the other side, but is disrupted by doing so. Rather than waste that kind of power on cracking 1st circle Mage Armors off a squad of mooks, he might use it to cut the floor out from under them.
Inerrant bolts of force (magic missiles) ignore most protection apart from specialized countermeasures, but they only do 1d4+1 damage each and can't target specific hit locations.
Lightning is usually five or six d6, half on a successful dodge. Metal armor's no good, but silk would protect with it's full DR.
Being on fire, due to a direct hit with a molotov cocktail for example, deals 1d6-1 damage per second for about 30 seconds. This damage is spread across most of the body, so armor DR doesn't help much unless it's a full sealed suit. After ten seconds, your clothes will probably also be on fire, so the damage might continue even after the initial fuel is exhausted. After (3xDR) seconds, you start rapidly losing FP due to heatstroke. Incendiaries can be a very efficient way to deal with heavy armor, by simply turning the whole tin can into an oven rather than trying to find a weak spot, but in melee combat time it's also perilously slow. A lot of stuff could happen while you're waiting for that killing heat to percolate inward through layers of protection.
Meteoric iron weapons would treat enchanted spidersilk robes as mundane silk, effectively reducing DR to 2, but that's still better than nothing. Starmetal weapons rip through mundane protection easily, but magical DR is worth five times as much, so against those the silk robes would have DR 10.
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