Piercing vs Cutting vs Crushing damage

I forget which game I've heard these types of damage from but they revolved around weaponry and how they deal damage. However I had some questions around them.

1. Both piercing and Cutting are dependant on sharpness, but how are they fundamentally different? If a weapon can slash it usually is also able to pierce, and vice versa, where crushing is different since it depends on weight or force.

2. Are there other types of this kind of damage besides pierce/cut/crush?

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It's usually from tabletop games like D&D based on weapons. There's a pretty significant difference between piercing and cutting, or slashing as it's usually referred to. A lance is a piercing weapon. It has a point and is used to puncture armor, but most lances don't have cutting edges. The average sword is a slashing weapon, as it has a cutting edge and is used to cut flesh, but most armor such as chainmail and plate can deflect it, which is chiefly why there's different damage types. A guy wearing chainmail who is hit with a sword that does 10 points of damage may only wind up taking 5 or 6 points of damage. That same guy hit with a lance will take full damage.

The most common other type of damage is bludgeoning, which is blunt force....well I guess crushing is another term for that, but traditionally it's called bludgeoning. You basically punch a guy. In most cases, bludgeoning damage is always treated as nonlethal, unless you have some feats that allow you to treat it as lethal or are playing as something like a monk, who deal lethal bludgeoning damage just as a class feature.

Doesn't crushing/bludgeoning revolve around mauls, hammers, maces, things that can crush armor or bones.

But yeah. Slicing, puncturing, or crushing in are pretty mention what 99% of weapons do.

Ya got stabby, smashy, and choppy. Wot wun ya yooze depends on wot the utha git be wearin'. If they be a dead 'ard git, ya 'it em with the smashy or stabby.

Yeah. For instance, as bad as it was Two Worlds II advocated using blunt weaponry against skeletons, which would logically crush their bones.

A lot of games have those types of damage. My own guess would be Dwarf Fortress but it's far from the only one out there like that.

I think Mount And Blade uses the poke, cut, bludgeon damage types. Bludgeoning weapons are useful for knocking soldiers out with non-lethal damage so you can capture them after the battle, and then sell them into slavery or indoctrinate them into your army.

Piercing and cutting weapons are mainly different in where the enemy should be in relation to your horse when attacking. Piercing weapons are just variations on spears and lances so you want to run straight at people. If you use a couched lance you don't even need to press the attack button. When using cutting weapons you have to charge to the side of the enemy to slash at them as you pass. No big differences between them other than that.

Actually, I think all the ranged weapons in the game (arrows, bolts, javelins) deal piercing damage. So I guess they have that over cutting weapons. No chakrams in Calradia.

But that's a story for another time.

"Bludgeoning weapons are useful for knocking soldiers out with non-lethal damage so you can capture them after the battle, and then sell them into slavery or indoctrinate them into your army."

Or holding them for ransom if their family was loaded.

edited 19th Feb '15 8:24:25 PM by MrShine

Not so much in Mount And Blade. The only ones with loaded families are the Lords, and outside of some mods they're as unkillable as you are. Stab them through the face a hundred times. They'll still fetch you coin before coming back for revenge.

The momentum thing also helps, because the amount of damage that your swings do depends on how fast you're going on a horse. That and riding enough that your character can couch your lance also really helps with lances.

Y'know I actually played a game where these things actually factor in. That'd be Sword Of Mana.

See, the protags have a particular weapon they start with. Male gets a Sword, and Female gets a Rod. But along the way they can get other weapons (Knuckles, Sickle, Flail, Axe, Lance, Mace, Bow and Arrow). They just can't get each others weapons, but no need to worry about that.

The weapons have different attack properties (Slash, Bash, and Jab), which play into strengths and weaknesses just as the Summon's elemental properties. As well, there are these strange objects called metaballs that act as obstacles from time to time. The animations the metaballs lash out with when you approach determines what attack type you need to take it out with.

If it turns into blades and spins, hit it with a Slash-type weapon.

If it shapes itself into a 4 pointed star to strike, gotta Jab.

And if it strikes out with spherical appendages, Bash it.

Ah. I gotta dig up my DS Lite and play that again. Good times. I hope it hits the VC at some point.

edited 19th Feb '15 9:16:00 PM by GreatT

When you wish upon a side of beef, soon will come an end to all your grief

Actually, there are cutting and bludgeoning ranged weapons in Mount And Blade, not that you'd want to use them, since throwing axes/knives/daggers (ranged cutting damage) and piles of stones (ranged blunt damage) suck and you don't even get much ammo like with arrows and bolts.

And as I recall, it there are a few other differences, such as how much effect armor has (armor is best against cutting damage (though not by enough to save even a noble or Swadian Knight from being cut down in a single stroke of a war cleaver or bardiche from someone charging on a spirited courser) and worst against bludgeoning.

The Souls games also have the three types of damage. Though Dark Souls 2 turns blunt damage into King Damage and the other two kinda fall off.

My ideal would be, in games with a more abstract damage system: Piercing given highest crit damage, slashing given highest base damage, blunt given the greatest ability to bypass armor.

Should've checked the list.

As mentioned, this comes from D&D, the grandfather of all RPGs. The basic idea behind it is that it doesn't really make much sense for am animated skeleton to be damaged by a sharp blade or an arrow, so the players are asked to pull out a mace for some smashing. Arguably a heavy enough sword can also smash pretty well, but that might be asking for a bit too much complexity in a game.

In modern computer games, they traditionally serve the role of "physical elemental attacks". Just creates some variety. Different enemies are weak or strong against different ones, so different weapons feel different.

For reference, bullets would deal piercing damage.

I'm far from an expert, but I'm not sure that you're correct there: if I'm not much mistaken, kevlar may stop a bullet, but still be pierced by a knife. I would more likely class bullets as "impact"/"bludgeoning" weapons.

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You're correct about Kevlar. The knife blade is thinner than the bullet so it gets between the fibers in the vest and stabs into the wearer. That being said, I've also heard it said that axes tend to be heavy rather than sharp, and their cutting power is more due to the force of the blow than piercing. I'm sure that's not true for all axes, but in cases where it is, they're in the same boat as the bullet.

I'd hazard saying that axes are basically fancier bludgeons made harder to defend against. Even blunt ones can split someone's head open due to the force of the blow.

As for the two questions: as said, piercing weaponry has a point that makes it able to work. Slashes are about the entire piece bring sharp enough to cut. Regarding other damage types, I haven't seen even mixed ones - like axes being both slash and blunt - but sometimes there is a neutral type of physical damage, kinda like non-elemental for magic.

edited 20th Feb '15 6:41:14 AM by FergardStratoavis

grah

Cutting can further be divided into chopping Vs. slicing - the former uses the momentum of the swing, while the latter uses the movement of pulling the blade along the skin.

Also, bullets should count as piercing, but kevlar would lessen the damage and convert it to bludgeoning.

Standing on the edge of the crater...

^ Or maybe you could divide the type into more damage types...

Give me cute or give me...something?

Vagrant Story uses those three damage types. In general, piercing is good for enemies with armor or scales, blunt for skeletons and the like, and slashing for plain old fleshy critters. Of course, then there's a ton of other damage modifiers like elements and creature affinity on top of all that too...

Somehow you know that the time is right.

In Dwarf Fortress Piercing is good for sticking your weapon in and widening the damage by twisting the weapons around inside the enemy's body. Crushing is good for dealing with armor, also for pulping body parts so they become useless. Which is the only good way to deal with a zombie with any method of reanimation available. Slashing is great for taking off body parts, which is the only way to kill some of the harder enemies, like Husks.

edited 20th Feb '15 8:19:26 PM by Journeyman

Slicing and piercing are two different things. With slicing you're effectively using the edge of the weapon to cut them while piercing uses the point or tip of the weapon to stab them. Like typical VG logic goes that slicing a dragon isn't as effective(because of their scales) while piercing them instead works a lot better(hence dragoons in FF using spears or yorgh's spear in Sihn's body from Dark Souls).

Persona uses this system I think, well PQ at least. Crushing is easy as it maces/warhammers were designed specifically to fight against heavy armor since heavy armor is more resistant to stabbing/cutting.

What armors would be good against piercing/stabbing and what would be good against crushing/bludgeoning?

What was said actually makes a lot of sense. Slashing can decapitate or dismember, crushing can pulp and squash limbs, and piercing can puncture vitals.

So how would a Hollow-point bullet work?

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A hollow point bullet would deform as it entered the body, resulting the bullet's width increasing, thus resulting in more tissue damage. So, I'd go for piercing with hints of secondary slashing.

edited 21st Feb '15 1:03:40 AM by Krieger22

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Against piercing, the best kind of armor would be something rigid with a curved surface. If the attack doesn't hit dead-on, it's more likely to be deflected than to pierce, since that's the path of least resistance.