Freezing Calcs, and Why they Make No Sense

[SuperAPM]

I'm with Dargoo on this one. I'd even suggest some other types of attacks that need this same level of scrutiny, but one step at a time

 

[Antoniofer]

I must say that I also agree with Dargoo, according to the our definition of AP, inducing cold do not generate energy, all the contrary, cold its the lack of energy in general. As for tye durability stuff from freezing, as I said before energy is change not damage, so increasing the temperature 5 degrees in 5 km could generate more energy, but incressing it 40 degrees in 5 m will cause far more damage.

At the end temperature works in the same way that electricity, one even may ask we even use energy to measure physical impacts when in the real world wi use force, or at worst, pressure

 

[Dr.Fix]

I agree with Dargoo for reasons above^.

 

[Muchacho_mrm]

I get that the ability to resist a certain amount of force doesn't mean you're suddenly heat resistant, just that as long as the verse shows that more power = more ability to harm, meaning those comparable to each other hurt each other because that's just how much power they have across their supernatural/real abilities, unless the author is thinking about or states all the different elements, pretty much exactly what you pointed out in OP. It's also fine to just have what is here now or maybe durability into separate categories, like heat resistance, blunt force resistance, freezing resistance, piercing resistance, electromagnetic resistance, etc. For freezing I agree that how it's treated needs to be evaluated properly.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

After talking with Bambu on discord, I will admit I got too heated near the end of my discussion with him and make some remarks which didn't reflect what he was saying, so I've removed those, and apologize.

 

[Agnaa]

I think that it makes sense to stop using freezing feats as AP, as energy is absorbed not output. In the same way that I think that absorbing a 6-A character should not be considered reason for scaling (obviously with the exception of cases where a character's stated to gain the 6-A's power from this absorption).

Heat feats in general should still be fine, as the character in question is outputting joules. I get that IRL there's objects that absorb heat well but are still brittle, but organizing the system like this is way too impractical.

 

[KLOL506]

Agnaa seems to make sense.

 

[Imaginym]

Don't authors often ignore & not consider physics? Them doing so is why we treat AoE how we do.

I'd be confident there are plenty of works where being able to produce more cold or ice or such is a show of power, & may treat it or use it as a basis for characters being on equal standing, even though breathing fire, breaking bricks & making ice all work differently under real life's physics.

& in some cases, the ability to produce things real life physics would attribute to the removal of heat or energy, the fiction may have powered by other forces, like magic.


And, as seems to have been said above, making things colder doesn't produce joules, but it does remove them from the system. Some kind of energy or force is still required to do that.

Is forcefully removing energy or heat faster than it would normally leave a system not notable? Why discard a yield we can deduce over it not being output, especially in circumstances where we can see icy attacks & such cancel out other significant amounts of energy & we know someone produced that icy force via their own power?

Ice/Cold feats also don't seem very realistic. How achievable is absolute zero in the real world? Doesn't that remove nearly all heat/energy from a system? (Albeit, in most cases, not on a universal scale.)

 

[Andytrenom]

I can agree with Ice creation not being scalable to other characters under normal circumstances, but not counting them as AP doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Such feats will usually be directly linked with a character's level of power and so it is better we try and quantify them so that the character's capabilities are indexed properly

 

[LSirLancelotDuLacl]

My main question was that, yes. Ice creation is many times used as a sort of measuring stick for power. So what do we do to establish the significance of said feats if we undertook these changes? Or we just don't?

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

Don't authors often ignore & not consider physics? Them doing so is why we treat AoE how we do.

Authors ignore physics, we decide not to, otherwise calculations as a whole is an opinion-based matter.

(Although nitpicking our pocket reality discussions, we've technically decided calc methods based on opinions before, but that's hopefully something the site doesn't do twice)

I agree with the majority of your post, though. I will note that if there isn't any signs of the heat that was removed from the area/object it's very likely the author is just ignoring the conservation of energy.

not counting them as AP doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Such feats will usually be directly linked with a character's level of power and so it is better we try and quantify them so that the character's capabilities are indexed properly

This is why I propose we index heat separately given how differently it works compared to more traditional forms of damage. I get we can't do this kind of thing on a whim, but I'd love to have lengthy discussions with DontTalk and other members of our calc team on making small fixes that can work into big changes.

As for needing to index statistics properly, our need to index accurately should trump our need to index for the sake of indexing. We'll still list the power, we just can't compare it with how stuff is traditionally destroyed - think of it like hax with some additional working parts. We don't calculate stuff like mindhax as AP because we can't compare it to AP - if we can't compare freezing to AP then calculating it is just throwing on a value for the sake of it.

 

[Spinoirr]

so unless special things are met, no freezeing calcs

like it could be used if a chararter feezes something by aborbing the heat or putting it somewhere else?

 

[DontTalkDT]

As for freezing: Unless the character freezes stuff by taking ice from a pocket dimensions or something (at which point I would believe it doesn't scale to AP either way), the work necessary to cool something down is equivalent to the work (i.e. usage of energy) necessary to heat it back up by the same amount.

One can justify as much over thermodynamics I believe, but it is easier to see if one considers the following: Fundamentally, reducing the temperature of an object is the act of decelerating the movement of the objects molecules.

Doing that is in essence no different from slowing down a rolling boulder by pushing at it. Yes, it reduces the boulders KE, but it clearly needs work in equal amounts to do that.


As for the Dura/AP thing: I could now go on to argue that very powerful attacks would technically produce a large amount of heat as well and that the super durable molecular structures necessary to support these ridiculous kinds of durability would likely grant resistance to heat and vise versa.

However, that isn't how I like to argue things.

Instead, I will reveal the big open secret: Our durability rating doesn't actually hold up to engineering standards.

Shocking, I know, despite of course something that was already publicly debated in the past.

In reality you would probably need 20 different kinds of durability to decide which attacks can damage what.

There are just a few problems with this:

1. Without studying engineering for 2 years you probably don't know which they are or how to calculate them. (And I'm not sure if anyone on this website has that kind of knowledge)

2. The fictional portrayal of feats makes it probably very diffcult to actually figure them out.

3. Most characters probably lack feats for a few of them at least.

4. It isn't very well suited for fictional debates.

Sooo.... I expect most people to be aware of the fact that our durability systems is heavily simplified, but arguably it's for the better and we ain't gonna change it at this point either way.

So yes, technically heat, electricity, gravity, blunt impact and cutting are not strongly related (as said above, one can technically argue some relation), but our system is simplified to unify things into a single AP and Durability value. We won't start to make a separate durability for every engineering variable we can come up with.

Tbh, much of battle fiction kinda has a linear damage scale to begin with.

 

[KLOL506]

I mean, pretty much what DT said. It's fiction after all and IRL physics can only take you so far here.

 

[Antoniofer]

Hmm, is kind of a lazy solution to do anything for a wiki that that pretends to be accurate. Isn't like dividing durability in several types would have been difficult back then (temperature, current, force and pressure) it would have been similar to my european trpg's too.

 

[Agnaa]

DT makes sense, I find myself inclined to agree with that now.

@Antoniofer It would have been difficult back then to list enough to actually have it be accurate.

 

[Hizack123]

Can we stop try to fully use IRL logic and rule on fictions??

The author is not a scientist nor magical IRL

Does that mean the characters is not stong at it said to be?

No ofcouse not.

 

[Andytrenom]

I definitely agree with Dontalk in regards to treating Ice manipulation as AP.

Whether someone's resilience to ice attacks can be equated to his overall durability tho, I might side with "No". I don't think being able to take cannon balls, laser beams or explosion without breaking would usually imply they have the ability to keep heat from leaving their body as well, equating different types of durability for simplicity's sake is fine, but if the method of attacking is different enough it cannot be assumed to be stopped by the same type of durability

Now, this concept is in fact something we already follow, but I'm not quite what our official stance is for equating durability against cold and durability against other attacks

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

Hoo boy, got a lot to say now.

Work and heat are two different things, unless you're not using the term work in the thermodynamics sense. And while, yes, it would be the same heat as you'd need to put back into it to heat it back up, that... doesn't change that it's removing energy from the object, not adding energy, as the definition of AP states. The fact that we can't evidence where this energy is displaced, too (as realistically if X biggatons of energy was displaced in the environment it'd heat up to ridiculous levels) likely just means the writers forgot about the conservation of energy, so the heat removed doesn't need a second thought.

Yes, it decelerates the molecules on a microscopic scale. That, fundamentally, is very much different than macroscopic movement, such as rolling a boulder down a hill. The two really can't be compared as the spread the energy in such different ways. Anyone taking a basic course in thermodynamics would scratch their head at the idea of equating work to heat (in that context, that is), as they are the two main branches of how energy is spread around.

"Very powerful attacks" produce different amounts of heat and force, that's the issue. The two aren't the same outside of some miraculous coincidence. So while yes, if an attack produces both force and heat and it hits a target, they resist both forces, equating the two makes no sense.

>In reality you would probably need 20 different kinds of durability to decide which attacks can damage what.

Two things.

1. This is just outright wrong. Even as it is now we have had and agreed in discussions that have separated electricity (tanking a lightning bolt isn't a durability feat, etc etc) and durability, and we have characters with resistances to Heat, Gravity, Electricity, et cetera, despite that if your claim were true these would all just be extensions of their durability ranking. Unless, of course, users who put these abilities on profiles are unaware of what you're talking about, and we need to go back and edit hundreds of profiles.

2. We don't need to list out 20 different kinds of durability. I do think heat should be separate given that it's so fundamentally different than force that it deserves this, but that's besides the point. I'd like to point out hax, which doesn't interact with durability as we define it at all, but someone's "hax durability" to specific kinds of mindforkery/soulforkery/etc is never listed, we just say "resistance to X, Y, and Z" and then give feats. We could easily apply this for electricity and heat.

 

[Agnaa]

"Resistances to Heat, Gravity, Electricity, et cetera"

I thought that these had to be explicitly stated resistances, not just tanking those things. e.g. I gave a character resistance to heat for being stated to regenerate from high temperatures to lower ones. Another character I asked about being resistant to gravity manip for tanking huge gravitational forces that immobilized similar characters, and I told it was just a lifting strength feat.

Tanking lightning isn't a feat because we don't know how much energy gets tanked, but we know it's not the entire energy of the strike. But creating lightning's still a feat, and you're arguing against creating ice being a feat.

"We don't need to list out 20 different kinds of durability"

Well ability to tank shear forces, cutting forces, blunt forces, etc are all very different.

 

[Antoniofer]

20 types of durabilities its kinda excessive, as I said above, you can resume all of them in force (measured in newtons, or pressure if any), acceleration (m/s^2), temperature (range between cold and heat), electricity (current), cutting/piercing (pressure) and explosion (energy, although kinda a mix between pressure and heat).

 

[LSirLancelotDuLacl]

Can we stop try to fully use IRL logic and rule on fictions??

The author is not a scientist nor magical IRL

Does that mean the characters is not stong at it said to be?

No ofcouse not.

Don't do that here, because you will get nowhere. We divorce ourselves from the authors a lot in here. If we don't use common sense and normal physics to the degree that it's possible, we have literally nothing yo stand on beyond empty guesstimations approaching wild subjective guessing. What the author knows matters squat, what happens in the story does.

 

[KLOL506]

Yeah but we can only go with IRL physics in fiction so far before we hit an upper limit.

 

[LSirLancelotDuLacl]

And this isn't that, far from it. Now let's not derail more.

 

[KLOL506]

Well, DT and Bambu still seem to make the most sense.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

I thought that these had to be explicitly stated resistances, not just tanking those things.

I'm sorry, but what's exactly the difference? If someone is stated to resist temperatures 1 bagillion degrees high and someone demonstrates walking around in 1 bagillion degrees weather, there's no real demonstrable difference, execpt maybe the second being slightly less impressive since they wouldn't immediately go up to that temperature.

But creating lightning's still a feat, and you're arguing against creating ice being a feat.

For reasons that don't apply to lightning, as sending out an electrical current is an output of energy.

Well ability to tank shear forces, cutting forces, blunt forces, etc are all very different.

While entirely true, not nearly to the degree that heat and work are different, as those are all examples of work/force.

Considering that we already separate two kinds of force (Striking Strength and Lifting Strength), separating something that isn't even related to force barring being energy (like everything else in the universe) seems perfectly reasonable.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

Yeah but we can only go with IRL physics in fiction so far before we hit an upper limit.

You act as if all fiction treats all physics equally. Some verses are more inclined to follow physics, while others aren't.

This is why I say "RL physics should be assumed until proven otherwise" on a specific verse-by-verse basis, as obviously anything we come up for "all of fiction" doesn't actually apply to all of fiction since not a single user here is familiar with every verse here.

 

[Agnaa]

"What exactly is the difference."

One scales to durability, and one scales to resistance. I was responding to you appealing to how we do things right now, to show that that's not how we do things right now.

This is just outright wrong. Even as it is now we have had and agreed in discussions that have separated electricity (tanking a lightning bolt isn't a durability feat, etc etc) and durability, and we have characters with resistances to Heat, Gravity, Electricity, et cetera, despite that if your claim were true these would all just be extensions of their durability ranking.

"For reasons that don't apply to lightning"

True, but you brought up the example of lightning and durability. I'm fine with dropping this comparison.

"While entirely true, not nearly to the degree that heat and work are different,"

Great, then we're both choosing slightly different arbitrary distinctions, and there's no objective reason to choose one over the other.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

I was responding to you appealing to how we do things right now, to show that that's not how we do things right now.

That was for the removal of freezing from AP, not for my largescale revisions to heat.

When I made that point I was asking what about them is different outside the context of distinctions we made up for the sake of making them up, as the two situations I pointed out above are functionally and logically identical.

The fact that our system would distinguish that but not heat and work astounds me.

True, but you brought up the example of lightning and durability.

Since you're dropping this I won't go on too long, but I've said numerous times at this point that I'm arguing two things. 1. Discounting Freezing as AP under our current system and 2. Planning largescale edits to our system in separating heat and work from durability.

The lightning comparison is for the latter argument, not the former.

Great, then we're both choosing slightly different arbitrary distinctions, and there's no objective reason to choose one over the other.

"Slightly different" greatly downplays the distinction between heat and work, just saying. Separating shearing/piercing/blunt force would be like separating animals by species, separating heat and work is like talking about multi-cellular life versus single-cellular life.

Not that we already separate different kinds of force, but that's besides the point.

Finally, no. I'm choosing to apply physics uniformly until they're ignored by the verse itself. That isn't an "arbitrary distinction", it's just following the same physics by which we evaluate feats. Otherwise we'd be just fine making up equations for calculations (something I've seen done multiple times here, too) and making feats be as high as we please them.

 

[Agnaa]

The arbitrary distinction is the point where you're choosing to stop by not separating shearing/piercing/blunt force. We're choosing to apply physics uniformly until they're ignored by the verse itself, or to the point where we'd distinguish heat and work. You're choosing to apply it uniformly until they're ignored by the verse itself, or to the point where we'd distinguish shearing/piercing/blunt forces.

I don't have anything particularly important to say to the rest of your post, just that this thread should probably be focusing on freezing as AP rather than separating heat and work from durability.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

The arbitrary distinction is the point where you're choosing to stop by not separating shearing/piercing/blunt force.

There is no "arbitrary distinction". Heat and work are not differentiated "arbitrarily", they're two entirely different concepts and deal with the two basic forms by which energy is transferred.

I will also note that piercing and blunt force are both force, with the difference being the area by which it is applied on. They both, as a result, spread in the same way, on a macro-level (comparative to the way heat spreads). So, an object with sufficiently high blunt force resistance will eventually resist piercing forces, while the same can't exactly be said for heat, which measures the movement of the collection of individual molecules of an object. So piercing/shearing/blunt forces are differentiated by angle and area, heat and work are differentiated by... so many things you'd need to have a degree in thermodynamics just to list them off. Again, if Lifting/Striking is enough of a distinction for us to seperate, heat would be well above it in the list in terms of how different it is when energy is transferred.

Additionally, blunt force can, in real life, be converted to piercing force and vice versa. You actually can't completely convert heat into work, and the ways you can convert minuscule amounts of it into work are done so indirectly.

I don't have anything particularly important to say to the rest of your post, just that this thread should probably be focusing on freezing as AP rather than separating heat and work from durability.

I'm fine with continuing the discussion just on that (I noticed a lack of responses from my points on freezing early in my debate with you), while we can discuss heat over discord, although I'd still like this thread to be something I can refer to when discussing changes to the system and how it treats heat.

 

[Spinoirr]

so unless a charter aborbs the heat or puts it somewhere else it wont work?

 

[Dziga]

GG 8-C+ Avatar. It was nice having you in the same tier as Jojo.

 

[Newendigo]

Dziga+ Fire benders can absorb heat and disperse it to another place.

 

[PhantomØ4]

Would this result on another statistic being added or just heat manipulation resistance with listed feats and that sort of stuff.

 

[Agnaa]

There is no "arbitrary distinction". Heat and work are not differentiated "arbitrarily", they're two entirely different concepts and deal with the two basic forms by which energy is transferred.

I never said that heat and work were differentiated arbitrarily. Let me put it in bold so you'll stop misunderstanding.

The arbitrary part is not separating every single different type of attack.

Yes, separating heat and work because they have 50 difference points between them and not separating piercing/blunt because they have 5 difference points between them is still arbitrary, because you are arbitrarily choosing how much of a difference matters.

Again, if Lifting/Striking is enough of a distinction for us to seperate, heat would be well above it in the list in terms of how different it is when energy is transferred.

More characters have both lifting/striking feats than characters that have heat-based feats. Therefore that distinction's more worthy of getting a spot on every single page on the site. Lifting strength also isn't a power or ability, so without its own section there's nowhere to put it. There's a lot more to something being a part of every single profile on the site than it being distinct, hell, tier's the exact same thing as AP.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

The arbitrary part is not separating every single different type of attack.

That and "separating heat and work is arbitrary" are not mutually exclusive, one. Two, if you weren't trying to claim the former, you wouldn't have claimed this:

If your point is "everything is arbitrary so we can decide things arbitrarily" don't backtrack on your previous statements, or pretend they didn't happen. I feel like you were making your point clear here, or this is a really severe case of miscommunication.

arbitrarily choosing how much of a difference matters.

Actually, no, I'm not. I'm going by the precedence of what this site has decided is different enough to matter, not my opinion on what is different enough to matter. There's a difference; if you notice I keep on using the Lifting/Striking example because it's so easy to point out how we separate much less different concepts. Lifting/Striking is more different than Piercing/Blunt but is less different than Heat and Force. Simple logic.

So yeah, I'd like us to be internally consistent. Is that a lot to ask for, or nah?

More characters have both lifting/striking feats than characters that have heat-based feats.

You have no standing to make that claim, unless I'm mistaken, and you are intimately familiar with every character on the wiki, or in fiction as a whole.

Basically you can't actually evidence that claim if I ask you to. I'll refrain from quoting your conclusions based on this assumption since their foundation is so brittle. There's no point in debating these made-up 'fictional trends' because neither of us have a concept of them to begin with, just what we've specifically experienced.

 

[Agnaa]

The first two statements you quoted from me aren't contradictory.

I think you're misreading the site's precedent, and I'd point to the separation of power and ability pages as an example.

If you believe that we can't make claims on fiction as a whole, then we can't separate power & ability pages based on how common they are in fiction, which I think is necessary. Some powers and abilities are on the same page despite having a fair amount of differences, and some are on different pages despite being fairly similar, all because of how we think fiction treats them.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

I think you're misreading the site's precedent, and I'd point to the separation of power and ability pages as an example.

We've talked this extensively on discord and all I really have to say is I've contacted DontTalk about the specifics of why the two are separated, seeing as your understanding of the criteria and my understanding are fundamentally different.

I will note, however, that if we want to be internally consistent we should naturally separate something fundamentally and factually more different than something we already separate. And even then, I've said this already, when I mean "separate" I don't mean, "list as a different stat", I just mean for it to be left out of AP/Durability and discussed based on heat resistance/application feats, like we do with hax (not that I'm calling heat hax, just an example of how we'd implement it without overhauling the entire site).

We even already do this a lot when verses are more specific about the resistance, we just need to change our baseline assumption.

If you believe that we can't make claims on fiction as a whole, then we can't separate power & ability pages based on how common they are in fiction, which I think is necessary.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Our power/ability pages are shorthand that applies based on what we see of the specific characters, not fictional trends. Unless you're talking about something else?

Again though, I thought we had this discussion in full on discord.

 

[Andytrenom]

I do agree that generally you can't make accurate claims about fiction as a whole, but there are cases where we use what's common in fiction to determine our standards that are unlikely to change. The most notable example I can think of is not treating high speed movement as AP by default, since usually fiction doesn't abide by real life rules of kinetic energy. The question lies in when exactly we can make broad assumptions about fiction ignoring real life physics and when we can't, which is something I myself would like a solid answer for