Aberrant RPG - Claws + Explosive + Mega-Strength = ?

[BlueNinja]

I got to thinking about this when revamping a character for the Phoenix Rising post-apocalypse game starting soon. Explosive makes a power deal damage in decreasing amounts going out from the point of impact. Quantum Bolt seems the obvious choice to tack this power onto, of course, but then I considered - how would that work with Claws? Because if it includes the automatic damages from Mega-Strength, then within two or three punches, everyone without multiple soak-adding powers is going to be dead. But if it only counts as the damage dice from the Claws power itself, then it's a waste of experience.

[Fae Dreamweaver]

AFAIK, it's just the damage from the Claws. Like with the Aggravated Extra... you can't kick so much ass with that power... it's lvl 1, after all.

[The White Rat]

Just remember, area and explosive attacks are indiscriminate. Friend and foe will be damaged by the blast. Better to take ranged + agg on the claws, or agg + burning.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

Claws already has "ranged" (kenetic?). So we already have an example of this sort of thing.

The damage from the Claws is Explosive.

The damage from Strength is not.

Claws stacks with Strength.

Strength does not stack with Claws.

On the other hand your Strength damage is still lethal.

[The White Rat]

Kinetic discharge is different from a ranged claw attack. Kin. Discharge allows you to add claws damage to melee weapons, and if you spend a point of quantum, charge a thrown object with the claws damage. Ranged claws would be an attack which hits with claws damage at a distance. You would not get the benefit of using claws in melee, or charging thrown objects. Think of Ranged Claws as a Quantum Bolt in which you do strength damage instead of the Quantum damage.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

Claws does several things:

1) It converts Strength damage to lethal.

2) It does a point of lethal damage per dot. This damage stacks on Marital Arts or Brawl attacks.

Note that normally you *never* attack with "Claws". You do Strength attacks with Martial Arts or Brawl. This is a very important distinction because the Claw power by itself only does 1D per dot in damage.

If you want to attack with the Claw power itself, you can. Claws + Ranged, or Area, or Explosive, or even Aggravated. But now you're just attacking with the power itself.

[The White Rat]

You could use Dex + Power rating for the attack dice, like you would with a Q-Bolt. For the Range Extra, you either use the normal attack die for the power or, if none is available, Dex + Power.

[jameson (ST)]

Quote:

Originally posted by David 'Dr. Troll' Smith:
If you want to attack with the Claw power itself, you can. Claws + Ranged, or Area, or Explosive, or even Aggravated. But now you're just attacking with the power itself.

Without my books in front of me I cannot look thsi up. Is there a fundamental difference to how claws would work with Explosive versus Area Effect? I would think that they would function the same.

[The White Rat]

In an Area attack, everyone within the area will be subject to the same attack and damage die. In an Explosive attack, the damage lessens the further out you get from 'ground zero'. The area of an Explosive attack, however, is much greater than that of an Area attack.

Think of an Area attack as being like the Fireball spell from D&D. The Explosive attack would be like a bomb, in which those closer to the point of detonation would take more damage.

[jameson (ST)]

Yeah ok, I just couldn't recall off the top of my head if explosive had a reduction over radius effect. It's not an extra I've ever used *shrug*

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

You could use Dex + Power rating for the attack dice, like you would with a Q-Bolt.

True. It can be done and that'd be the way to do it. But the issue BN is worried about (correctly) is he'd lose the Strength damage. Ranged claws is a lethal die per dot with maybe an accurancy bonus.

He's paying the same nova points as Q-Bolt... on the other hand, the q-cost would be less since it'd still be a maintenance effect.

The area of an Explosive attack, however, is much greater than that of an Area attack.

Usually much greater. In this case since the base damage is so much smaller, intuition tells me the area would be much lower, maybe much lower than area.

[The White Rat]

I guess that is what makes the Kinetic Discharge Extra, unique. You can add the Strength and Claws die to the 'ranged' power of the attack. It's ranged attack is really a throwing attack, which you add you Str-Mega-Str to anyways.

If you added the Area or Explosive extra to Kinetic Discharge, would that thrown object, then gain the Strength Benefits? Would it would be like a grenade that explodes on impact?

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

Quote:

The White Rat:
I guess that is what makes the Kinetic Discharge Extra, unique. You can add the Strength and Claws die to the 'ranged' power of the attack. It's ranged attack is really a throwing attack, which you add you Str-Mega-Str to anyways.

My book isn't here, and it's been a long time, but I don't remember that you can add in Strength (what I vaguely recall is being disappointed that you can't). If that's right, then you have the choice of using Claws for ranged attacks OR making the standard thrown mega-strength attack.

Note that this wouldn't be totally useless, you could also put Armor Piercing on that and Kenetic does add to bullets and the like.

Again, assuming I'm remembering this correctly, the logic behind this would be to prevent thrown Mega-Strength objects from also getting Armor Piercing (or Aggravated for that matter).

[Gregory]

The Ranged Weapons Chart on page 275, says that you do add Mega-Strength to a thrown object. However, the damage from strength can differ +/- 1-3 die depending on whether the object is brittle/non-aerodynamic or aerodynamic/dense.

The Claws Power only says that the damage from normal punches and strikes is converted to lethal. The Enhancement: Crush, which does essentially the same thing as claws, will add Mega-Strength damage.

,,

As to whether Aggravated damage would not apply, I could not find anything. Logic would dictate that due to the nature of Aggravated damage, it would do the same amount of damage, regardless of strength. It may be a ST judgement call however....I will keep looking.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

There's Errata on Claws+Agg somewhere around on this site. Basically it got nerf'ed really hard.

However even without the errata it wouldn't have been as bad as many people have thought.

Aggravated (the extra) doesn't say "replace the word lethal with the word Aggravated". So the power claws would *still* convert Strength damage to lethal, it would just be doing Aggravated for it's own damage.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

OK, reading what the book says, it's clear that with the Kinetic Discharge Extrayou can add "the extra point of damage" to pretty near anything. Melee weapons, bullets, thrown objects.

However they do keep stressing that what you are doing is adding that extra die of damage to an existing attack.

Translation: Claws + Explosion would be 1 die per dot.

RE: Radius Effect Coverage

Area is 5m x (Q+Dots).

Explosion is 3m x (levels + dice of damage) (damage reduced by one every 3m)

Assuming Q=3 and Dots=1, for Claws:

Area: 20m radius

Explosion: 3m radius.

Q-Bolt would be significantly larger for Explosion (30m) but for Area it won't change.

[BlueNinja]

Quote:

Originally posted by Fae Dreamweaver:
AFAIK, it's just the damage from the Claws. Like with the Aggravated Extra... you can't kick so much ass with that power... it's lvl 1, after all.

Adding an extra makes it a level 2, which should raise the damage level a bit more than it seems to - just not quite as much as, say, 15 auto-successes to damage does.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

Quote:

Originally posted by BlueNinja:
Adding an extra makes it a level 2, which should raise the damage level a bit more than it seems to - just not quite as much as, say, 15 auto-successes to damage does.

Let's assume for a moment that we had a way to put an extra on Mega-Strength. For 3 dots of Mega-Strength, it should cost 6 nova points, and do nothing but add that extra.

For one dot Claws makes your Mega-Strength lethal. That's roughly equiv to Crush which costs 3.

The problem is Claws isn't built to be very good by itself. However, if you are really determined to hammer a functional attack power out of Claws by itself, it CAN be done. Burning (which again only affects the extra die) can work wonders.

Example: With 5 dots of Claws+Burning+Aggravated you have a maintenance power that at Q1 can do 21 dice of Aggravated damage to anyone you touch (I assumed 1 succ for accurancy). Better still this combines with Quick and multiple actions.

[Ashnod]

Quote:

Originally posted by David 'Dr. Troll' Smith:


Example: With 5 dots of Claws+Burning+Aggravated you have a maintenance power that at Q1 can do 21 dice of Aggravated damage to anyone you touch (I assumed 1 succ for accurancy). Better still this combines with Quick and multiple actions.

I might be coming in on the wrong part of a convo...but wouldn't Claws+Burning+Aggravated be a Lvl 3 power thus requiring more than Q1? I mean, I don't think there's any documentation stating it HAS to require a higher Q level, but that seems to be a quick way of getting around the Q limitations for lvl 2 and lvl 3 powers otherwise. It's something that just seems necessary and required, if it's not in the book to back it up.

[Zac]

IIRC, applying the second extra on a power requires Q5.

[The White Rat]

You are almost correct Zac. An extra raises the Quantum requirement by one. A level 1 power with two extras would require Q3. A Q3 level two power with an extra would require Q4.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

Quote:

Originally posted by Ashnod:
...wouldn't Claws+Burning+Aggravated be a Lvl 3 power thus requiring more than Q1? I mean, I don't think there's any documentation stating it HAS to require a higher Q level, but that seems to be a quick way of getting around the Q limitations for lvl 2 and lvl 3 powers otherwise. It's something that just seems necessary and required, if it's not in the book to back it up.

Unless someone has a page number, from what I can tell, the book has nothing to indicate Claws+AP has an increased Qunatum requirement (ditto for all the other extras including the general rules for extras).

Whether it would be a good idea or not is a different question.

Although there is a strong linkage between the level of a power and it's Q-min, that's not a hard and fast rule. Warp (L3) has a Q-min of 3, and then the other big exceptions would be the extras which don't seem to raise the Q-min (and yes I know, that makes this argument circular).

I'm not sure there is a real need to make the various extras also increase the Q-min. The level 1 powers are pretty weak. 5 dots of Claws + Burning + Agg is getting up there, but it'd be cheaper and more effective to buy Q5 and Disin.

The only real advantage I can see to running a character like this is you could be both a Stealth nova and have a killer attack... although something that takes 6 rounds to kill someone, thus giving them a chance to throw down on you, isn't the kind of gun I'd like to have. I've never seen this as a house rule because I've never seen the issue come up... which is probably suggestive right there.