Tor wrote:Killer Cyborg wrote:Phase weapons are described as harming living beings, no matter what they are made of.
Borgs are living beings.
Ergo, phase weapons damage borgs, no matter what they are made of.
There's living beings with non-living parts attached to them though.
ALL living beings have non-living parts attached to them.
In fact, ALL living beings are ultimately composed of non-living parts.
If you are shooting a headhunter then they would normally be hurt, but if you made a called shot to their bionic arm with a phase pistol, that should not damage the arm. It is not 'them', it is simply a robotic body part which they control.
Incorrect, and not just on a philosophical level, but in actual game terms.
Cybernetics and bionics don't function the same as their robotic equivalents. Telemechanic Mental Operation, for example, will work on a robotic arm. It will also work on a bionic arm that's lying on the table. But once that bionic arm is attached to a living being, Telemechanic Mental Operation stops working on it.
It's different once it's attached to a living being; it's no longer just a machine.
Same with a number of other powers, spells, and abilities, not just with TMO.
The game world does not treat bionics as just robotic body parts that a person physically controls- they treat them as both a machine AND as a part of the person.
Killer Cyborg wrote:I find it implausible that a person who is essentially reduced to a brain would have anywhere close to the same number of hit points as a normal human.
I get what you mean but there's a couple ways to interpret that:
*the "life force" thingy (ie why do 90 year old level 15 characters have more HP than 20 year old level 1 ones)[/quote]
Doesn't matter. The "common sense rules" for firearms is that if you shoot somebody in the head point blank, no matter how many HP they have, they're dead.
*assume that the phase weapon only wings the brain/spine on a normal main body shot, the majority of it missing since it's fired at the main body which has no organic components, effectively giving the character similar survivability
Huh?
Killer Cyborg wrote:I'll point out that phase weapons don't bypass inorganic stuff. They damage living beings, no matter what those beings are made of. If there's a living rock-man, or a living metal-man, for example, they're still harmed by phase weapons, even though they're inorganic.
Point taken, I am prone to wrongly using living/organic interchangably sometimes, need to keep in mind silicon life-forms like the Star Hives
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/smile.gif)
That said we are told it is:
"useless against inanimate objects like .. robots"
"not disruptive enough to damage metals"
If we assume the bodies of borgs are made of metal then they should be immune to them, regardless of being living.
Again, phase beams damage living creatures no matter what they are made of.
If you have a HU character with APS Metal, and he's hit by a phase beam, he takes damage.
If you have a metal statue that is physically identical to that character except it's not alive, then it doesn't take any damage.
Whether or not the target is metal doesn't matter as much as whether or not the target is alive.
Killer Cyborg wrote:I'd say that having your torso removed should do the trick. Especially if the limbs and skull are also removed.
In Dead Reign zombies get a separate HP pool for their brains after you deplete skull SDC, could write that off as a magical oddity I guess but it gets you wonderin'. I seem to recall severed heads in TTGD (druid spell) having some decent (weirdly IQ-based) HP but again, magic so I can't assume it applies to normal... but it gets one thinking.
For that matter, body armor in Rifts originally just had one damage pool, just like most creatures Hit Points/SDC only had one damage pool.
So back in the day, we decided, "Well, if the entire armor has 60 MDC, then the helmet itself must only have like 10 MDC or so," and we did a lot of headshots early on to take out enemies rather easily.
But then the books printed newer stats for the armor, showing that the listed damage pool was just for the Main Body, and that helmets and limbs each had their own damage pool.
So for all we know, the same COULD hypothetically apply to the damage pools listed for creatures; they could be intended to only represent the main body (in creatures with just the one pool), with any heads and limbs having their own, separate, never-mentioned damage pools.
I am not sure if there is evidence that a phase beamer could harm an APS metal character since it says metals aren't affected.
I'd say that the "damages any living creature, no matter what they're made of" trumps the "cannot damage metal" clause.
For one thing, that way everything makes sense, and the other way, it doesn't.
When choosing between two interpretations, I go with the one that fits as many facts as possible unless proven otherwise.So it makes no sense to me to assume that:
-The passage that states that ALL living things are damaged, no matter what they are made of is wrong.
-The rule that phase weapons affect Borg's bodies is wrong.
-The rule that Borgs are MDC creatures who lack Hit Points is wrong.
-The rules that cybernetics/bionics aren't treated like normal machines, but more like parts of a person's body, is wrong.
Instead of assuming that:
-The passage that states that phase weapons aren't powerful enough to damage metal is an over-statement referring to nonliving metal objects, not to living beings or body parts composed of metal.
If it helps, though, "most bots, borgs, and power armor are composed of non-magnetic metal alloys, ceramics, and other non-magnetic materials." (CB1 48)
Which indicates that most borgs are at least partially composed of ceramics and other non-metal substances (although, yes, they are at least partially made of non-magnetic metals).