"Must Have At Least Class GJ Attacks To Matter": On Dealing Scratch Damage

[Angry_Dummy]

I've been doing a little lightweight research on how powerful a character with few feats might be by using fairly sensible gameplay mechanics for power-scaling ("This character is flat-out immune to attacks this weak or less").

Long story short, I'm trying to figure out how one would go about calculating a character that requires a somewhat hefty minimum amount of AP to do any harm, but can take astronomically more than that in one blow and hang in there by a thread, still able to keep attacking.

For a hypothetical example: Billy Bob Basher, the recurring villain for a low-budget western cartoon show, gets slugged repeatedly by expert martial-artists and hulking bruisers with crowbars and maces without a scratch, rendering our low-power superheroes useless when it comes to straight up fisticuffs or other forms of peak-human attacks. When the police fire at him, he hides behind walls and winces in pain when shot with a pistol, the bullets leaving bruises, paper-cuts, and other minor injuries, but nothing like a normal person would experience when pelted with gunfire. Later on, he gets into an enemy-mine situation with the heroes to defeat another villain, Flame Fondue, who blasts him with fireballs that blow up suburban houses. He manages to keep fighting after four explosions, but is gravely wounded and admits a fifth would have done him in. At the end of the series, he gets cornered by a horde of police and is knocked out after about seventy gunshots' worth of trauma and taken into prison for standing on the grass.

Where would Billy wind up?

Would we say he was merely a little tougher than the attacks he tanks without effort (wall level), as tough as the biggest attacks he's tanked (small-building level+), somewhere in-between (wall level+), or would just deem it too inconsistent to really work with and move on (at least wall level)?

I ask this because, though I'm not terrible at math, I loathe it. I'm a creative person, not an analytical one. I come here to imagine how each fighter reacts and strategizes, not merely totaling up points for each side and saying whoever has the bigger number is the winner. I was wondering how one might go about recording the story-element of a character surviving a big assault and powering through the pain.

 

[ThePerpetual]

This is always a tricky subject... I'm not really sure that I can help much here.

 

[Angry_Dummy]

Well, thank you for trying.

 

[Unclechairman]

Was he subdued by the cops immediately or soon after he tanked those building level fireballs? If so, it can be assumed he was weakened enough by the fireballs for the police to subdue him. Did he get a powerup in-between getting hurt by bullets and tanking building-destroying attacks? If so, it would especially help the case in rationalizing his being hurt by bullets vs tanking building-levelers.

If worse comes to worse, and no other explanation can be found, since he's shown being hurt by bullets more often than tanking building level attacks, his feat of resisting building level attacks would likely become an outlier and he would be rated as Wall level.

As for scratch damage itself, it is usually an RPG mechanic, and it is not even in all RPG games, so we usually just glance over that Bidoof being able to Tackle Arceus for one point of damage. By scratch damage logic, if you punched the hull of a ship enough times, it would eventually break. In reality, the more likely outcome is a hurt or broken hand and potentially a hefty hospital bill, since the hulls of ships nowadays are composed of nearly an inch of steel.

 

[Angry_Dummy]

In the example, the battle between Bob and Fondue happened at different times, approximately two months apart in in-universe time. Bob wasn't weakened at all during the time of his defeat, but rather tricked into running out in the open and getting flattened by gunfire over the course of an hour, according to the Obi-Wan-esque mentor figure for the kid hero.

There was no boost in power over the run of the show. It was an episodic series, and he remained threatening through scheming, traditional and gadgeteered weaponry, and traps. Despite sounding like an inbred Bruce Banner, he was a smart villain whose main power was being tough enough to walk off a bullet-wound or seven. He was about as strong as a heavyweight champion boxer, and was an average runner by our standards.

While Fondue's explosions were his greatest feat, he has survived everything from getting run-over by a train and shot with a cannon-ball, coming out looking somewhat mangled, but still alive, functioning, and able to escape while throwing out his trademark, "I'll be back to beat your butts!" threat at the end of every episode. Fondue was the limit of his durability.

This character is not real, nor is the show, but I'm using him as an example for an out-of-game scenario.


The reason I brought this topic up was in dealing with the final boss of a puzzle/RPG, who has an immunity, complete and utter laughter in the face of an assault, to attacks of a certain scale or lower. Specifically, in a game where your character hits harder the longer a word you spell, he was immune to words that had three or four letters.

Other bosses have a similar power that only stops the most piddly of assaults, only the three-letter minimum for acceptable strikes, and I reckoned that I could scale the resistance to one of the enemies who had it by virtue of something more tangible than magic, being the mama Roc, a colossal bird with no other extraordinary abilities.

I then realized, as I was pondering the minimum amount of force to injure a 60-something foot tall bird, that I had no idea how one would calculate that level of an attack. I assumed a bare minimum of wall-level for a four-letter attack, and that the final boss was completely immune to any attack of wall-level or less, hence the title. He had the traditional sixty hit-point maximum for a boss that you would have to chip through in order to defeat him, so he could survive much worse than that and keep going.


I think a better real life analog would be calculating the durability of the hull of a ship that we've seen block punches all day, get tiny holes punched into by armor-piercing rounds, and then keep manage to sail back to land over the course of fifteen minutes before the coffee table-sized hole in it drowned the thing.

...I'm bad at analogies...

Thank you for your help.