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[Evil One]

Do you have any idea how many things the attribute system is tied to?

Personality, learning capabilities, crafting capabilities, skills, combat effectiveness, emotional characteristics, ETC... redefining the limits of the attribute system and then recalculating the entirety of all these things would be a lot more work than adding the proposed token.

Huh? What are you talking about? I never said that anything about that would be necessary except for changing how high the attributes can go. This should not result in any qualitative changes to the system, and if the system is designed remotely competently, allowing "memory" to go up to 10x instead of x (where x is whatever the maximum is now) should not cause problems.

Maybe not memory no, but what about strength or agility, the default max attribute improvement level is 2x normal for any attribute, with the max ceiling being at 5000, but many creatures already start with anywhere between 3000-5000 on their beginning attributes, so all of these creatures will now be able to eventually double that beyond the normal max, so you'd encounter things like superpowered dragons or cyclops with a strength stat that has gone above the previous hardcoded max, that would be extremely damaging for a fortress and for an adventurer.

Also, other things you're not taking into account are the stats that affect multiple things, spatial sense for example is directly tied to no less than 21 different skill based activities mining, wood cutting, bone carving, ETC... If you increase the max attributes you're going to end up with dwarfs (and other creatures) who can massively level up the skills because of the increased attributes, so then toady would have to create new ranges for those activites otherwise you'd end up with dwarves able to make perfect max items every time and the new ranges would require more powerful items to allow the higher tier dwarves to continue to improve, and what about the way attributes affect artifacts, the alterations to the system would also mean that artifacts are even more powerful with dwarves having creativity that can go even higher at max then it can now.

Even applying a global cap wouldn't work because then toady would have to go through each individual creature that he didn't want to obey the global cap and add in a whole set of attribute range alterations... Trust me I've encountered similar problems when modding, the whole attribute,skill and item system is intricately woven together.

So if the calculations were that a creature that had a body size of 70000 and a fist rel_size of 40 would hit for 10 damage and knock the creature back one square, the effective size token would not affect the first two arguments but would alter the next two, so the creatures physical size and relative sizes remain the same and all calculations regard those sizes also remain the same (IE how easy the part is to hit based on its size, is it easy to remove,ETC), but the combat effects normally associated with those sizes (how much actual damage a creature takes to the bodypart, how vulnerable is the bodypart to being severed or broken, how far a creature is thrown by the impact of the bodypart and what damage is done by it) are instead recalculated by the effective size token.

You're forgetting that a lot of these things would be handled by the same mechanisms. How wide a hole your spear (or a pointy claw on the end of your hand, or a horn on your head) makes, and how deeply it penetrates, is very much tied to how much damage it can do. The simulation is enough of, well, a simulation that you can't expect things to work reasonably, as there's just no way to simulate how much damage a minotaur's horn would do when he gores you without also changing how wide or deeply it penetrates, and other things directly related to actual size that you couldn't treat differently.

The game calculates damage quite simply from what I can tell during modding (including cock-ups), first is the size of the chosen creature say 70000 (for a human) then the relative size of the attacking part (80 for a hand), after it's identified that it goes over to the attack itself, checking the contact and penetration percentage, the hand has a contact of 100% and no penetration, then comes the interesting bit... The game calculates the damage that attack would do (in terms of penetration, physical damage, knockback effect, ETC) based on the attributes of the chosen creature, the type of attack and the creatures size (knockback is only calculated by size) as opposed to it's oppenent, and it's there that the new token would sit... The size of creature A to creature B would not be calculated by its normal size, but by the new token.

So when creature A attacks, the size calculationsm relative size of the hand and the chosen attack (along with the attacks default contact and penetration) are as normal, but when it calculates the attacks penetration, physical damage and knockback (based on attributes and size differential) it'd be calculated by the attributes and the new token instead.

Again: Allowing attributes to reach higher values shouldn't really mess anything up. The only reason that would happen is if the game uses fairly bizarre methods that make assumptions about the maximum attributes and fail to function properly above those maxima, which should not be, and probably is not, the case. The game should be able to scale well as attributes increase.

I'm afraid you're not thinking of all of the things that each attribute handles and in turn what those handle and so on, in addition to what I've put above there's the whole personality system that's also tied into some of the attributes.

As you said, the game is a simulation and as such many things are intricately woven together the only thing that I can see that exists as an independent entity is the combat system, and that's only because that is all it handles... Many things are attached to it, but it in turn isn't attached to very much else.

[G-Flex]

Maybe not memory no, but what about strength or agility, the default max attribute improvement level is 2x normal for any attribute, with the max ceiling being at 5000, but many creatures already start with anywhere between 3000-5000 on their beginning attributes, so all of these creatures will now be able to eventually double that beyond the normal max, so you'd encounter things like superpowered dragons or cyclops with a strength stat that has gone above the previous hardcoded max, that would be extremely damaging for a fortress and for an adventurer.

Then you make some minor tweaks to the raws. That really isn't a big deal.

[/quote]Also, other things you're not taking into account are the stats that affect multiple things, spatial sense for example is directly tied to no less than 21 different skill based activities mining, wood cutting, bone carving, ETC... If you increase the max attributes you're going to end up with dwarfs (and other creatures) who can massively level up the skills because of the increased attributes[/quote]

Not really, no, because attributes being capped at 20,000 instead of 5,000 doesn't mean dwarves are going to get that high. They won't. We're talking about basing the maximum allowed attributes; that doesn't mean all individual creature types will be able to get them. Dwarves and other normalish creatures would be completely unaffected.

and what about the way attributes affect artifacts, the alterations to the system would also mean that artifacts are even more powerful with dwarves having creativity that can go even higher at max then it can now.

See above. It doesn't matter. We're talking about the maximum value for attributes in general, not the value dwarves or other normal creatures would have. I can't believe you're this far into the discussion and don't seem to grasp how the system works.

Even applying a global cap wouldn't work because then toady would have to go through each individual creature that he didn't want to obey the global cap and add in a whole set of attribute range alterations...

Wait, what? Creatures already have their own caps set, effectively. There's no reason to need any other cap involved; in fact, that's what is presumably causing the problem here in the first place.

The game calculates damage quite simply from what I can tell during modding (including cock-ups), first is the size of the chosen creature say 70000 (for a human) then the relative size of the attacking part (80 for a hand), after it's identified that it goes over to the attack itself, checking the contact and penetration percentage, the hand has a contact of 100% and no penetration, then comes the interesting bit... The game calculates the damage that attack would do (in terms of penetration, physical damage, knockback effect, ETC) based on the attributes of the chosen creature, the type of attack and the creatures size (knockback is only calculated by size) as opposed to it's oppenent, and it's there that the new token would sit... The size of creature A to creature B would not be calculated by its normal size, but by the new token.

You completely missed my point. Many of those aspects involve creature size in a way that you can't fudge. How much "damage" an attack does is based on how big of a cut it makes, or how deeply it penetrates, or how wide of a hole it makes, and that sort of thing. We are not living in an age of hit points anymore; how "damaged" a creature is consists of what injuries are sustained, and to what severity, and where. Let's say you have a vampire with sharp claws. He's human-sized, and his claws are about what you'd expect (think very sharp human fingernails). If you treat his size such that his claws penetrate as deep and wide as they could physically go, then damage isn't really going to be effected (except that maybe there is a more blunt force involved). If you treat his size such that damage is seriously affected, then you wind up with a human-shaped vampire whose fingernails can cut off someone's torso, or penetrate a foot deep, or other ridiculous things, since that is the sort of thing that determines damage. Having to figure out this kind of absurd behavior and correct for it using two different values for creature/bodypart size is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and the system is by no means equipped to handle it.

So when creature A attacks, the size calculationsm relative size of the hand and the chosen attack (along with the attacks default contact and penetration) are as normal, but when it calculates the attacks penetration, physical damage and knockback (based on attributes and size differential) it'd be calculated by the attributes and the new token instead.

See, this isn't even how it works. For one thing, how deeply an attack can penetrate is still limited by the size of the body part. It doesn't matter how strong you are, you aren't getting your own fingernail (or a tiny knife, or a short horn) to go through twenty inches of flesh, and for good reason. Also, see above: "Physical damage" is primarily determined in many cases by how large the physical trauma is.

I'm afraid you're not thinking of all of the things that each attribute handles and in turn what those handle and so on, in addition to what I've put above there's the whole personality system that's also tied into some of the attributes.

It doesn't matter how much they handle. No reasonable system would fall apart completely once a character gets "too strong" or "too willful" or anything like that. There are balance issues, but that's why creatures already have their own attribute ranges and caps applied. The only creatures that would ever be affected are the ones you actually want to be superpowerful.

[Evil One]

Then you make some minor tweaks to the raws. That really isn't a big deal.

All of the raws, for any creature that has a stat with a default roll of 3000+ would have to be edited to prevent it overwhelming everything during world gen.

See above. It doesn't matter. We're talking about the maximum value for attributes in general, not the value dwarves or other normal creatures would have. I can't believe you're this far into the discussion and don't seem to grasp how the system works.

In case you hadn't noticed dwarves would also be affected by the adjusted maximum, as would every other creature in the game.

The ranges you see in a creatures stats are only the base starting attribute ranges, all they affect is the beginning creature, the improvements beyond that are controlled in-game by (among other things) the hardcoded 5000 point attribute max... by increasing this cap, your going to allow creatures to go beyond what is normally the maximum, and that's going to cause problems.

Wait, what? Creatures already have their own caps set, effectively. There's no reason to need any other cap involved; in fact, that's what is presumably causing the problem here in the first place.

No, most creatures use the global stat improvement cap (default 200% of starting value up to the 5000 point max), I'd suggest you do a search in the files for PHYS_ATT_CAP_PERC you'll find that few if any creatures use it... They all rely on the global cap and the base ranges, the upper limits of which YOU want to change.

You completely missed my point. Many of those aspects involve creature size in a way that you can't fudge. How much "damage" an attack does is based on how big of a cut it makes, or how deeply it penetrates, or how wide of a hole it makes, and that sort of thing. We are not living in an age of hit points anymore; how "damaged" a creature is consists of what injuries are sustained, and to what severity, and where. Let's say you have a vampire with sharp claws. He's human-sized, and his claws are about what you'd expect (think very sharp human fingernails). If you treat his size such that his claws penetrate as deep and wide as they could physically go, then damage isn't really going to be effected (except that maybe there is a more blunt force involved). If you treat his size such that damage is seriously affected, then you wind up with a human-shaped vampire whose fingernails can cut off someone's torso, or penetrate a foot deep, or other ridiculous things, since that is the sort of thing that determines damage. Having to figure out this kind of absurd behavior and correct for it using two different values for creature/bodypart size is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and the system is by no means equipped to handle it.

Actually we are and have been living in the age of hitpoints for a long time in DF, the only difference is that you don't see the hitpoints, also penetration doesn't affect the relsize... If a creatures weapon doesn't have a relsize greater than the target part relsize then you can't cut it off, no matter how high the penetration value is.

This is to prevent daggers (no matter how high you set the damage) from chopping off limbs.

See, this isn't even how it works. For one thing, how deeply an attack can penetrate is still limited by the size of the body part. It doesn't matter how strong you are, you aren't getting your own fingernail (or a tiny knife, or a short horn) to go through twenty inches of flesh, and for good reason. Also, see above: "Physical damage" is primarily determined in many cases by how large the physical trauma is.

Yes but it would allow the fingernails or fists of a supernatural creature to go through armor that would have otherwise deflected it, this can already be done, as I have a modded creature with generally human appearance that can scratch through armor.

Also see above, we ARE living in the world of hitpoints.

It doesn't matter how much they handle. No reasonable system would fall apart completely once a character gets "too strong" or "too willful" or anything like that. There are balance issues, but that's why creatures already have their own attribute ranges and caps applied. The only creatures that would ever be affected are the ones you actually want to be superpowerful.

All creatures have base attribute ranges, but no creatures use anything other than the global cap.

It seems to be you that doesn't understand how the system works.

[G-Flex]

All of the raws, for any creature that has a stat with a default roll of 3000+ would have to be edited to prevent it overwhelming everything during world gen.

This is really not a big deal. Seriously. It beats a rather absurd suggestion that, quite frankly, has no way of working because it boils down to forcing monsters to cause more damage even without boosting what the damage is (how do you cause more damage with a sword without cutting deeper or wider? More blunt force?).

In case you hadn't noticed dwarves would also be affected by the adjusted maximum, as would every other creature in the game.

The ranges you see in a creatures stats are only the base starting attribute ranges, all they affect is the beginning creature, the improvements beyond that are controlled in-game by (among other things) the hardcoded 5000 point attribute max... by increasing this cap, your going to allow creatures to go beyond what is normally the maximum, and that's going to cause problems.

I'm not sure you know how the attribute caps work. A creature's attributes cannot go above double their starting values. A dwarf who starts off with a strength of 1000 cannot go above a strength of 2000, ever. Therefore, a higher cap only matters for creatures whose stats can start quite high.

Actually we are and have been living in the age of hitpoints for a long time in DF, the only difference is that you don't see the hitpoints, also penetration doesn't affect the relsize... If a creatures weapon doesn't have a relsize greater than the target part relsize then you can't cut it off, no matter how high the penetration value is.

I think you're still missing the point entirely. The relative size of a body part does, in fact, affect how deep or large of a cut it can make. If a horn is wider, that means there is more contact area, which means it can sever more parts. It also means it can penetrate more deeply. Both of these matter and would be adversely affected by what you propose.

This is to prevent daggers (no matter how high you set the damage) from chopping off limbs.

Except if the dagger's contact area is wide enough (which, in the case of a body part, happens if the body part itself becomes larger), then it can chop off limbs.

Yes but it would allow the fingernails or fists of a supernatural creature to go through armor that would have otherwise deflected it, this can already be done, as I have a modded creature with generally human appearance that can scratch through armor.

Missing. The point.

Yes, you can have fingernails go through armor by sheer force. However, you cannot get them to go more deeply through armor. I've run extensive tests on this in the arena; the depth of penetration, and the size of a wound in general, is limited by the size and contact area of the attacking object or body part. This is why blowgun darts have trouble getting through clothing and skin no matter how good they are.

[Evil One]

All of the raws, for any creature that has a stat with a default roll of 3000+ would have to be edited to prevent it overwhelming everything during world gen.

This is really not a big deal. Seriously. It beats a rather absurd suggestion that, quite frankly, has no way of working because it boils down to forcing monsters to cause more damage even without boosting what the damage is (how do you cause more damage with a sword without cutting deeper or wider? More blunt force?).

It's not absurd in fact its entirely possible, just adjust the velocity and force of all attacks.

In case you hadn't noticed dwarves would also be affected by the adjusted maximum, as would every other creature in the game.

The ranges you see in a creatures stats are only the base starting attribute ranges, all they affect is the beginning creature, the improvements beyond that are controlled in-game by (among other things) the hardcoded 5000 point attribute max... by increasing this cap, your going to allow creatures to go beyond what is normally the maximum, and that's going to cause problems.

I'm not sure you know how the attribute caps work. A creature's attributes cannot go above double their starting values. A dwarf who starts off with a strength of 1000 cannot go above a strength of 2000, ever. Therefore, a higher cap only matters for creatures whose stats can start quite high.

However you don't seem to have noticed that 'most' creatures attributes would be boosted by your idea, that means creatures would become stronger and smarter than they normally should be, which in turn would unbalance the worldgen.

Actually we are and have been living in the age of hitpoints for a long time in DF, the only difference is that you don't see the hitpoints, also penetration doesn't affect the relsize... If a creatures weapon doesn't have a relsize greater than the target part relsize then you can't cut it off, no matter how high the penetration value is.

I think you're still missing the point entirely. The relative size of a body part does, in fact, affect how deep or large of a cut it can make. If a horn is wider, that means there is more contact area, which means it can sever more parts. It also means it can penetrate more deeply. Both of these matter and would be adversely affected by what you propose.

I've already said that RELATIVE SIZE wouldn't be affected because that'd be controlled by the normal size token, the effective size token would simply allow a horn to pierce through a targets armour more easily and make it harder to block or parry (as well as smacking some poor victim across a room and inflicting additional damage from the landing).

This is to prevent daggers (no matter how high you set the damage) from chopping off limbs.

Except if the dagger's contact area is wide enough (which, in the case of a body part, happens if the body part itself becomes larger), then it can chop off limbs.

That's only because contact area doesn't yet take into account weapon size... it will in the future (although even if it does, the dagger is still two thirds the length of a shortsword and so if swung with enough force would probably be able to hack a limb off anyway... Unless the dagger is made of wood).

Yes but it would allow the fingernails or fists of a supernatural creature to go through armor that would have otherwise deflected it, this can already be done, as I have a modded creature with generally human appearance that can scratch through armor.

Missing. The point.

Yes, you can have fingernails go through armor by sheer force. However, you cannot get them to go more deeply through armor. I've run extensive tests on this in the arena; the depth of penetration, and the size of a wound in general, is limited by the size and contact area of the attacking object or body part. This is why blowgun darts have trouble getting through clothing and skin no matter how good they are.

The size of the wound, yes, the depth of penetration, no, Have you ever tried increasing the velocity and force of the blowgun?

With increased velocity and force the blowgun darts can even pierce armour, although the wound is still small because the limited contact area vs relative bodypart size.

[3]

However you don't seem to have noticed that 'most' creatures attributes would be boosted by your idea,

No, they wouldn't. Raising the maximum cap for attributes doesn't need to have any effect whatsoever on the default value (which is always 1000 for all uninitialized attributes). Even if the max cap is raised, all of those creatures with unset attributes will still be capped at 2000.

It's not absurd in fact its entirely possible, just adjust the velocity and force of all attacks.

Fyi, this can already be done in regard to unarmed attacks. ATTACK_VELOCITY_MODIFIER.

[Neonivek]

"and smarter"

There isn't anything to make them smarter.

Anyhow, "Effective strength" attached to size shouldn't immitate size perfectly.

YES it means somewhat that a Vampirelord can have his finger chopped off with a good knife swing. At the same time the Vampirelord is a much smaller target. The trade off is shield of flesh for less flesh to strike

[3]

Anyhow, "Effective strength" attached to size shouldn't immitate size perfectly.

Then what's the point of it existing at all? There are already other mechanisms in place to make things weaker or stronger.

Edit: Wait, I think I misinterpreted your post. Ignore this.

[Mel_Vixen]

However you don't seem to have noticed that 'most' creatures attributes would be boosted by your idea,

No, they wouldn't. Raising the maximum cap for attributes doesn't need to have any effect whatsoever on the default value (which is always 1000 for all uninitialized attributes). Even if the max cap is raised, all of those creatures with unset attributes will still be capped at 2000.

To make it more concrete a modiefied cap would be a own tag for creatures that need it or an extension of already existing tags thus either something like

[CAP_MULTIPLIER:Agility:10]

or

[PHYS_ATT_RANGE:AGILITY:150:600:800:900:1000:1100:1500:CAP:10]

This way only the creatures which get the new tag/extended tag have modified caps.

Throwing people doesnt need a size modification to work proper. It would have to check if you have good grip and if you can lift the enemy with this grip.

[Bohandas]

You completely missed my point. Many of those aspects involve creature size in a way that you can't fudge. How much "damage" an attack does is based on how big of a cut it makes, or how deeply it penetrates, or how wide of a hole it makes, and that sort of thing. We are not living in an age of hit points anymore; how "damaged" a creature is consists of what injuries are sustained, and to what severity, and where. Let's say you have a vampire with sharp claws. He's human-sized, and his claws are about what you'd expect (think very sharp human fingernails). If you treat his size such that his claws penetrate as deep and wide as they could physically go, then damage isn't really going to be effected (except that maybe there is a more blunt force involved). If you treat his size such that damage is seriously affected, then you wind up with a human-shaped vampire whose fingernails can cut off someone's torso, or penetrate a foot deep, or other ridiculous things, since that is the sort of thing that determines damage. Having to figure out this kind of absurd behavior and correct for it using two different values for creature/bodypart size is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and the system is by no means equipped to handle it.

This is unrealistic by real world standards, yes, but there are strong precedents for it in fiction. Go out and rent pretty much any kung-fu movie or action based anime series and you'll see most of the characters doing stuff like this, usually without even having the benefit of being a vamipre like in your example. For a particularly graphic example of this, I recommend watching the final fight scene from the movie Kung-Fu Hustle, paying particular attention to the effects that the "Buddha's Palm" move/technique used at the end of the sequence (at time 6:29-7:29 and again at 7:50-7:56 in the youtube clip I've linked to here) causes.

[3]

To make it more concrete a modiefied cap would be a own tag for creatures that need it

There are tags that exist for this purpose. MENT_ACC_CAP_PERC and PHYS_ATT_CAP_PERC control how much improvement on the base level can be made.

[Bohandas]

You completely missed my point. Many of those aspects involve creature size in a way that you can't fudge. How much "damage" an attack does is based on how big of a cut it makes, or how deeply it penetrates, or how wide of a hole it makes, and that sort of thing. We are not living in an age of hit points anymore; how "damaged" a creature is consists of what injuries are sustained, and to what severity, and where. Let's say you have a vampire with sharp claws. He's human-sized, and his claws are about what you'd expect (think very sharp human fingernails). If you treat his size such that his claws penetrate as deep and wide as they could physically go, then damage isn't really going to be effected (except that maybe there is a more blunt force involved). If you treat his size such that damage is seriously affected, then you wind up with a human-shaped vampire whose fingernails can cut off someone's torso, or penetrate a foot deep, or other ridiculous things, since that is the sort of thing that determines damage. Having to figure out this kind of absurd behavior and correct for it using two different values for creature/bodypart size is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and the system is by no means equipped to handle it.

This is unrealistic by real world standards, yes, but there are strong precedents for it in fiction. Go out and rent pretty much any kung-fu movie or action based anime series and you'll see most of the characters doing stuff like this, usually without even having the benefit of being a vamipre like in your example. For a particularly graphic example of this, I recommend watching the final fight scene from the movie Kung-Fu Hustle, paying particular attention to the effects that the "Buddha's Palm" move/technique used at the end of the sequence (at time 6:29-7:29 and again at 7:50-7:56 in the youtube clip I've linked to here) causes.

Or that scene from Kung-Pow: Enter the Fist where the Chosen One punches a hole clean through that one guy's stomach.

[iceball3]

Spoiler: developing quote pyramid (click to show/hide)

You completely missed my point. Many of those aspects involve creature size in a way that you can't fudge. How much "damage" an attack does is based on how big of a cut it makes, or how deeply it penetrates, or how wide of a hole it makes, and that sort of thing. We are not living in an age of hit points anymore; how "damaged" a creature is consists of what injuries are sustained, and to what severity, and where. Let's say you have a vampire with sharp claws. He's human-sized, and his claws are about what you'd expect (think very sharp human fingernails). If you treat his size such that his claws penetrate as deep and wide as they could physically go, then damage isn't really going to be effected (except that maybe there is a more blunt force involved). If you treat his size such that damage is seriously affected, then you wind up with a human-shaped vampire whose fingernails can cut off someone's torso, or penetrate a foot deep, or other ridiculous things, since that is the sort of thing that determines damage. Having to figure out this kind of absurd behavior and correct for it using two different values for creature/bodypart size is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and the system is by no means equipped to handle it.

This is unrealistic by real world standards, yes, but there are strong precedents for it in fiction. Go out and rent pretty much any kung-fu movie or action based anime series and you'll see most of the characters doing stuff like this, usually without even having the benefit of being a vamipre like in your example. For a particularly graphic example of this, I recommend watching the final fight scene from the movie Kung-Fu Hustle, paying particular attention to the effects that the "Buddha's Palm" move/technique used at the end of the sequence (at time 6:29-7:29 and again at 7:50-7:56 in the youtube clip I've linked to here) causes.

Or that scene from Kung-Pow: Enter the Fist where the Chosen One punches a hole clean through that one guy's stomach.

Which makes absolutely no sense. An impact like that would more just send him flying across the room.

[G-Flex]

You're right, some of the combat from "Kung Pow: Enter the Fist" makes no sense. Also, tongues can't really talk.

[Bohandas]

Spoiler: developing quote pyramid (click to show/hide)

You completely missed my point. Many of those aspects involve creature size in a way that you can't fudge. How much "damage" an attack does is based on how big of a cut it makes, or how deeply it penetrates, or how wide of a hole it makes, and that sort of thing. We are not living in an age of hit points anymore; how "damaged" a creature is consists of what injuries are sustained, and to what severity, and where. Let's say you have a vampire with sharp claws. He's human-sized, and his claws are about what you'd expect (think very sharp human fingernails). If you treat his size such that his claws penetrate as deep and wide as they could physically go, then damage isn't really going to be effected (except that maybe there is a more blunt force involved). If you treat his size such that damage is seriously affected, then you wind up with a human-shaped vampire whose fingernails can cut off someone's torso, or penetrate a foot deep, or other ridiculous things, since that is the sort of thing that determines damage. Having to figure out this kind of absurd behavior and correct for it using two different values for creature/bodypart size is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and the system is by no means equipped to handle it.

This is unrealistic by real world standards, yes, but there are strong precedents for it in fiction. Go out and rent pretty much any kung-fu movie or action based anime series and you'll see most of the characters doing stuff like this, usually without even having the benefit of being a vamipre like in your example. For a particularly graphic example of this, I recommend watching the final fight scene from the movie Kung-Fu Hustle, paying particular attention to the effects that the "Buddha's Palm" move/technique used at the end of the sequence (at time 6:29-7:29 and again at 7:50-7:56 in the youtube clip I've linked to here) causes.

Or that scene from Kung-Pow: Enter the Fist where the Chosen One punches a hole clean through that one guy's stomach.

Which makes absolutely no sense. An impact like that would more just send him flying across the room.

Not if he punched him hard enough...

Put enough force and speed behind that punch and it might even pull him closer