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I will be checking in on a weekly basis to make sure the site is happy, the supply of cookies is replenished, and things are working normally.

Again, apologies for the hiccup! Thanks for being fans of BTRC!

 - Trentin C Bergeron (site admin thing)

What is damage in an RPG?

Maybe more than anything else, how a role-playing game approaches damage and its effects shapes a gameworld and the way players approach hazardous situations. The old cartoon panel "Murphy's Rules" often poked fun at this, like the ability of high-level D&D fighters to survive a fall from any height just because they had so many hits. Or the first edition of Twlight:2000, where a character could take an M-16 bullet to the gut and suffer zero impairment from it.

But this article is not so much about damage mechanics that lend themselves to in-game heroism, but about the actual energies involved. Here's a scale of energy (using the scientific measurement of Joules) for various weapons. All of these will have some variance, but take the figures as an average:

5.5mm BB gun: 30 Joules

 Punch*: 100 Joules

Sword swing*: 200 Joules

Crossbow (85kg draw): 150 joules

.22 rimfire: 200 Joules

.45ACP: 500 Joules

9mm: 500 Joules

.357 Magnum: 850 Joules

.44 Magnum: 1400 Joules

5.56mm NATO: 1800 Joules

7.62mm NATO: 3800 Joules

12.7mm HMG: 18,000 Joules

25mm cannon (Bradley IFV): 110,000 Joules

120mm cannon (Abrams): 12,000,000 Joules

*This depends on how strong the person is, their level of training and to some extent how the energy is measured. Say half this for the lower end and double or so for the upper end. Exceptional individuals would be even higher.

If you compare these energies to games you play you can get a feel for the level of scaling used and whether the designer intended there to be any sort of logical consistency in the way damage was approached.

Once you get past a few hundred Joules, what matters most to a person (like your adventurer) is realistically going to be "how much energy do you feel?". To be brutally frank, any energy that goes out the other side is wasted since it is doing no damage to you. This is why we have things like hollow-point bullets. They are designed to widen out and slow down when they hit something, depositing as much energy as possble in the target. The reason we have weapons with such huge energies and/or armor-piercing rounds is two-fold: 1) You need to penetrate armor, and 2) you need more energy to start with if you are shooting something a long ways off, since your bullet will slow down from friction with the air. The amount of hurt a person can take from something hitting them depends on how well it can penetrate and will end up being a fixed amount of energy or a percentage of the total energy, whichever is larger. A 9mm solid point bullet might leave 50% its energy (250 Joules) in a chunk of meat and have the rest go out the other side. A 25mm cannon might only leave 5% of its energy in the same target, but this would be 5500 Joules. Ouch.

The other things that matters is "how much area is the energy distributed over?". A punch will give you a bruise or possibly a cracked rib or busted nose. A mere .22 rimfire (or sword) will go in one side of your body and out the other. A .44 Magnum penetrates body armor far less effectively than a 5.56mm rifle. Not only does it have less energy, the area of the front of the bullet is 4 times as large on the .44 Magnum, so the bullet energy is spread out more. This difference in area is pretty much the difference between lethal and non-lethal damage. For body armor, spreading it around it what it does. A sword edge (small area) will cut you up, while a sword edge hitting a flexible armor will distribute the same amount of energy hitting you over a larger area. Same for a bullet and a soft bulletproof vest. Spreading a .44 Magnum impact over the size of a saucer could still crack ribs, but that is to be preferred over what would happen with no armor at all.

In game terms, you have to deal with this energy from the standpoint of not instantly killing your adventurers, while at the same time making sure they have proper respect for the peril they place themselves in if they get into a firefight. EABA v2 does it one way, other games have their own take on it. This short article is just to give you some numbers and ideas in case you wanted to compare things or were thinking about designing your own system.