Skua

Mate come on. A person willing to protest the Russian government in Russia does not deserve your vitriol. Even if every Russian except Allero supported everything Putin did, it wouldn’t make Allero guilty by association

okay sure, but that wins you the round if you picked paper and I picked rock? That’s paper beating rock. That it does this by “covering” the rock doesn’t really clear anything up

Brave men. I can only wish them luck

Ahh fair enough, misinterpretation of your edit on my part then. I’m afraid whoever did downvote you isn’t on kbin, so you won’t see anything

I haven’t downvoted any of your comments. I’m on kbin, so you can check for yourself here https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/696813/EU-seeks-to-raise-15-billion-euros-for-Ukraine-from/comment/4073577/votes/down

let’s not get in a pissing match or dick-measuring contest about who’s ponying up more

literally your entire presence in this thread is dick-measuring about how europe isn’t doing enough

I get you don’t want to discuss that because its a problem with regard to your thesis

No, it isn’t. My point is that Europe is giving more to Ukraine and that while the European NATO members should meet the 2% commitment, doing so would not actually help Ukraine. If you want to have a general discussion about Europe’s defence capacity then sure, have fun somewhere, but I had figured that since you commented on an article you were commenting about the article

What does this have to do with the article?

And I’m saying that Europe is already doing that. Europe is not the backup because most of Ukraine’s aid is coming from Europe. America is a very large contributor and therefore important, and it has the biggest military industry to turn towards production, but to say that Europe “needs to stop playing poor and open their very dusty checkbooks” when Europe is already significantly outspending Ukraine’s other supporters only makes sense if you’ve just never looked at the actual numbers

I didn’t side-step the bit about individual domestic military spending commitments because I’m not looking to argue that part. 10 European NATO nations are meeting it this year. The others should do what they said they’d do, but it wouldn’t actually help Ukraine unless we’re all sending actual troops in.

The USA’s GDP is larger than the EU’s, but the EU has given more to Ukraine than America has. That’s without including contributions by individual nations in the EU or contributions by non-EU European countries like Norway and the UK either.

Who said the US is necessary for it?

You’d only treat playing tennis as attack rolls on the ball if you were trying to damage it, which I presume you’re not. What it would actually mean is that anyone coud eventually break a tennis ball by trying to crush it. But tennis balls do eventually break with enough use anyway, so if you do want to handle it that way then the problem just lies with the fact that we don’t have a way to make attacking something have a chance of success between 0% and 5%. That seems more reasonable to me than a brontosaurus being completely unable to squash a tennis ball by stomping on it, which is what immunity would mean

I don’t think it’s fair to say I’ve moved the goalposts. My original point was that force damage is poorly defined and described in game, which I stand by whether it should be distinct from bludgeoning or not; I’m not saying all force damage should just be bludgeoning. Only the examples where it’s clearly extremely similar to stuff that already does do bludgeoning. There is no actual description of the effects of force damage available, and many notable things that deal force damamge seem to be described in a way that would imply B/P/S damage. Bringing up AC is just me explaining why I think your example doesn’t work. What you’re describing already has a mechanic in game that is not related to damage types.

Magical B/P/S damage is pretty reliable. Magical bludgeoning is only resisted by about 50 published creatures, a good number of which are swarms, so it’s still almost as reliable as it is with force damage. Not to mention that the best part about magic missile is causing multiple guaranteed concentration saves, and that still happens if the target has resistance. A bludgeoning magic missile would even get to work with the vulnerability to that damage type that most skeletons have! And if that really does make the spell too weak to be useful… okay, buff it? Have it do 1d6+1 instead of 1d4. I don’t think you’d need to, but it’s clearly no trouble to make it stronger. Of course, you don’t need to make everything that does force damage into bludgeoning anyway. Have eldritch blast do different damage types depending on who your patron is, that’d be cool.

If you really think that losing a specific damage type that almost never interacts with resistance, immunity, or vulnerability, you could just give whichever attacks and spells you wanted a trait that says it ignores those things. That way everyone is actually clear about what it does too, rather than just expecting players to gradually learn enough of the Monster Manual and other books to realise that force does that. What we gain by dropping force damage is an easier time for DMs to properly describe injuries and more reason for everyone to actually pay attention to what damage types work against different targets (indirectly buffing sorc’s metamagic feature to change damage types too, since the elemental damage types are no longer strictly outclassed by force damage). All I want for this option is a clear definition of what the damage type does that is actually supported by the flavour text and mechanics. At the moment it’s weird that I’m not “supposed” to desribe steel wind strike, which literally requires the caster to wield a melee weapon, as actually cutting anything

I’d be fine with it if they actually described and treated it as, like, nuclear radiation or something. But they haven’t.

From 2007 to 2017, the Telegraph was actually one of four European newspapers that published Russia Beyond The Headlines (a project from Russia’s state news outlet) as a supplement.

The Telegraph Group has recently been in financial trouble and bailed out by a company run by the vice-president of the UAE Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. While Putin is visiting the UAE next week, Mansour is probably best known in the UK as owner of top-flight football team Manchester City, so him doing stuff in the UK is not anything new. On the other hand there is a government probe in to this acquisition, perhaps unsurprising considering that the Telegraph is one of the four newspapers of record in the UK despite how shit it is

Bludgeoning clearly doesn’t have to be rapid, since it is used to represent plenty of slower crushing damage. Every constrict attack is bludgeoning and so is the rug of smoethering’s smother attack, the rolling sphere trap in the DMG does bludgeoning when it runs someone over (it has to enter the creature’s space to do damage, it knocks them prone, and it’s going way too slowly for it to be the impact), Bigby’s hand does bludgeoning when you use it to crush someone with grasping hand, and Maximilian’s earthen grasp also does bludgeoning while restraining. So given the significant precedent, it seems far more reasonable to describe the tennis ball as having a higher AC than the skull, and maybe resistance to bludgeoning damage. You can absolutely still do bludgeoning damage to it.

So based on that, bludgeoning damage is just any physical force applied in a way that won’t typically pierce or cut a target; I can cut a block of soft butter by pressing a rolling pin through it, but edge cases (no pun intended) like aren’t really useful for general purpose rules, so we say a rolling pin does bludgeoning damage when you hit me with it. We can apply this to the oil jet just the same: is it focussed enough to cut in to most targets? Piercing damage, maybe with some necrotic damage if it’s some nasty oil that would be very bad to have getting inside you like that, as is often a complicating factor in high pressure fluid injuries. If it’s less focussed than that but still hitting with enough force to hurt you, then we say it’s bludgeoning, just like a marid’s water jet attack or the tidal wave spell. Either way it’s not doing some mysterious force damage that doesn’t have obvious parallels in the other mundane damage types.

If the American estimate of ~300,000 Russian casualties is accurate, it’s 1,000 killed or wounded every two days

There’s also armour of resistance and potion of resistance in the DMG, which can be force resistant. But that’s very few items, and in 5E the magic items you get are entirely dependent on your DM giving them to you. Note how they’re all in the DMG, after all. Compare this to, say, fire damage. Three player races have resistance, the 1st-level absorb elements spell gives most casters easy access to fire resistance, and two barbarian subclasses and two sorc subclasses can get it regularly. With force damage, I think the only option presented to the player is one of the aforementioned barb classes and a couple of abilities that give general resistance to all damage.

On the DM’s side, of the literally several thousand creatures published for 5E, there are 5 with immunity, 12 with resistance, and 2 with vulnerability. 19 total creatures out of over 3,000 have any unusual interaction with the damage type. Compare this to 90 for radiant, another very low one; 552 for fire; 671 for bludgeoning (including the ones that only interact with mundane bludgeoning). 19 creatures is so vanishingly rare that I don’t think my description is an unreasonable one.

We know what the damage type of a crushing force is in 5E, though. It’s bludgeoning. That’s why the grasping hand effect of Bigby’s hand does bludgeoning, as does any constricting attack from the likes of giant snakes.

High-pressure fluid jets can cut through things if sufficiently narrow and fast, but at that point you’re still just looking at piercing or slashing. The injury isn’t different to being poked with a sharp stick other than that you are also wet now. If it’s not enough to cut with… well that’s bludgeoning again

See, as an example, water jet cutting

Force damage in D&D 5E is too poorly-defined to be a good part of the game and exists solely for when the designers don’t want any characters or creatures to have access to resistance against the thing in question. Either we need an actual description of what happens to a thing that gets hit by it or it should be cut; the vast majority of the things that deal it could perfectly easily be magical bludgeoning / piercing / slashing. Spiritual weapon and Bigby’s hand are particularly egregious

I’m with you on this one. I will admit that there is also a degree of appeal in winding up two specific friends of mine that hate it