4th Ed Whole Body Damage from Explosives

[mmartin798]

The physicist in my always knew the game mechanics for whole body damage from explosives was wrong. Until I recently ran some numbers, I did not realize how badly it was broken.

My case study was the effects of an M19 Antitank mine surface explosion on Biff, a resilient test subject who has STR: 30, CON: 30, and MASS: 10. I put him at various distances and looked at the effects on his body. The attached image shows the results.

When I looked for various safe distances from the real world, the Missile Hazard Safe distance for an M19 is 300m. If we treat the M19 as a breaching charge and calculate the minimum Stand-off Distance, which should equate to little or no whole body damage, it comes to 50m.

Comparing the two, Biff being vaporized out to 191m and dying in less than 10 round at 203m using game mechanics seems very broken. There are formulas in the Department of the Army Pamphlet 385-63 that could be used, but I will have to work out a way to simplify it for game play.