In one section of City and Guilds, there is a portion describing objects taking damages. They get "body" levels based upon size and have to role a stress die + quality vs target of 15 or take one of these "Body" levels.
The problem my troupe is having is this. One member is casting Incantation of Lightning at a Inn. We had no trouble deciding the Inn was size +6 and it was in standard condition. But wouldn't an Inn have a soak (or a ship or a wagon for that matter)?
I think these two pages could have been fleshed out a little bit more to give troupes general guidelines on what type of soak these objects would have. I can throw an axe at a house and if it botches it's die roll, it takes two "Body" levels. That seems to be a little ludicrous. Anyone have any guildlines that they would like to share or maybe a page in one of the supplements that I missed that has this sort of information?
I'd say wing it. Personally I'd waive soak for inanimate objects and instead use graphical cues for recording damage. My fear is that the opposite would bog the game to much and become to inaccurate.
A lightning bolt hitting an inn could do the same amount of body levels as a boulder rolling through the wall, while in reality a boulder would do a lot more.
The problem with winging it, is that it opens the table to too many variables. We have seven troupe members, four of which play storyguide at one point or another, and I was looking for something definitive rather than winging it, since so many others play SG.
I guess our only option, unless others chime in, is to take part of game time and figure out soaks for various objects and then apply the rules in C and G.
Thanks for the input. My fear was exactly the same. That a house with a soak of 25 (but what about doors and windows?) would turn the game into D & D and that is not what we all want to play.
Instead of defining body and soak for a large object like a house, define it for pieces of the object that are small enough to be targeted by a single attack. For a target-Structure spell, the whole house is a single object. For a grog with an ax, the target might be a door or door-sized segment of wall. For a tree cut to fall on a two-storey house, it's a series of targets, first the roof, then the top-floor walls, then the upper floor, and finally the lower-floor walls -- with the obvious limitation that most of the damage would be limited by the shape and size of the tree. For a rolling boulder, it would be the near wall, anything on the path inside, then the far wall.