Damage over time.

[ways and means]

After following the Lightsaber thread a question came to my mind  that was how to stat damage over time to structures, in the typical example a gun bullet would probably deflect of a bulkhead door but contious drilling or melting of the same door with with a blow/ welding torch would work over time.  Now I was wondering how you would stat the benfits of extra time in doing an action would a certain amount time give a bonus to the role or would the damage slowly stack up until it reaches a fixed point.    

[devonapple]

Fred Hicks weighed in on something similar, and I posted his response here (check for the bolded line "On the subject of ongoing environmental damage:").

Ultimately, I would treat it in a variety of ways depending on the desired challenge.

What I recently became comfortable with was letting players attack items as if they were characters. In the Breaking Objects section, items generally have the same shifts of Armor as they have Stress Boxes, so any attack against an object is applied as if hitting a character with Armor.

After that... ummm... I'd use the Time Duration scale to add shifts to that attack, allowing the player to Take Out the object or section after a certain amount of time. You could also let the player build up Maneuvers, but that could get boring.

[ways and means]

Thank I suppose if I think someone can do something overtime I will just make them roll an endurance or conviction roll to be detirmined and have enough stamina to actually do it.

[devonapple]

Ultimately, go with what's going to work out well. If there's no real narrative benefit for failure or the chance of failure, don't make it a challenge.

[Haru]

If time is not an issue: why bother with a roll at all? Just set up an approximate time it is going to take and declare it done.

If there is only little time, you can do it as a challenge (YS324) with the length of the exchange appropriate to the action. Or even as a Cat and Mouse roll, to see if the player can open the door before whoever is trying to stop him arrives.