Basic Action Super Heroes!

The base Knockback procedure in BASH is the best I’ve seen.

There are two aspects where I am considering house rules to suit my slightly realistic taste:

1. Secondary Damage- when impacting a solid object
2. Mass/Brawn Relationship

Separate post for each will follow. Given my limited experience with BASH, I appreciate any thoughts on how this might skew the game and what to watchout for...

Secondary Damage:
BASH treats knockback damage as falling damage, but for my world it differs in a couple of significant ways:
• The “knocked” character is actually decelerating.
• The Damage Multiplier (DM) suffered from knockback, should not exceed the force of the blow that caused the knockback.

With those two points in mind, when a character is knocked back, he is carrying the most force in the first square of movement. The DM of the secondary impact is based on the DM of the attack relative to the amount of potential distance travelled.

Simplistic Example: An attack at DM 5 causes 50-foot knockback. The decreasing DM for impacting a wall would break down like this:

10 ft = DM 5
20 ft = DM 4
30 ft = DM 3
40 ft = DM 2
50 ft = DM 1

I think it would be reasonably easy to fudge this as a narrator. Example: DM 4 causes a 72 ft knockback result to a target that travels 40 ft before hitting the wall? No problem. He travelled about half of the potential distance; therefore DM 2 applies to the secondary damage roll.

Mass Factor:
Most of the time, I believe the basic Brawn works fine. In odd cases, however, I may adjust the knockback factor based on the mass of the target affected. For instance, you could have Brawn 4 “mighty mite” kind of hero that weighs 120 lbs or a Brawn 3 bruiser that weighs 400 lbs. So my thought is to treat the 120 lb terror as if he had a Brawn of 1 for knockback purposes, whereas the 400 lb tough guy matches his Brawn 3 rating. An archetypical paragon, 240 lbs with Brawn 5, would actually be brawn 2 for figuring knockback, but a world class brick, weighing 800 lbs with Brawn 5, gets the full benefit of his brawn for knockback. Growth (Density) and Shrinking adjustments would still apply normally.

This amounts to a “ballpark” approach to knockback, but with a system as simple and elegant as BASH, I don’t see why it would not work.

for damage, why not just do 1 DM per extra square left of knockback?

knockback of 5, 3 squares later you hit. 2 squares of leftover knockback so 2 DM

dugfromthearth wrote:for damage, why not just do 1 DM per extra square left of knockback?

knockback of 5, 3 squares later you hit. 2 squares of leftover knockback so 2 DM

Sorry, I've been away from this forum for too long and just now saw this reply.

Anyway, your suggemstion could work in most cases, but it doesn't address this issue for me. I was trying to avoid instances where the knockback DM could totally outclass the DM of the attack that caused it.

Or am I concerned about something that doesn't really happen in practice?

I, too, decided to tinker with KB, but for different reasons. We all felt that it happened just too often for our tastes.

Thus, I am incorporating the following:

Intentional Knockback

As it is, Knockback is a little too ubiquitous and slightly annoying. In this campaign, you must intend to do knockback with an attack, and you must spend a Hero Point (the GM must spend a Setback) to grant the chance of Knockback. After rolling to hit, you may declare Knockback intent and spend the Hero Point (before rolling damage). All other rules apply as normal.

The Push power is exempt from this; it's very nature is to do Knockback.

"Normal" combat (non-superstrength fists, normal guns, normal swords, etc.) cannot be used to do Knockback; you must have a Brawn of 3 or be using a Special Attack to cause Knockback.

Regarding the "more damage from KB than the attack..."

Yeah, that is an interesting point. I suspect the answer is to simply cap the damage at whatever the core multiplier was that hit the character in the first place.