Indeed it is. ODE handles it all a bit like school level physics, and once you know the scale that's being used in TB you can toss that into a basic equation to work out how hard something hits.

Size is all done in meters, weight is in tons, velocity is meters per second, and force is measured in newtons.
Also -9.81 is Earth gravity as far as the phyiscs engine is concerned, not -30.00; Toris just happen to be giants that can leap over planets...
(have fun with "realistic Toribash" arguments once you know the real numbers)

Basically being hit by a slight tori slap is approx the same as smashing a 2 year old with a truck, and a kick is somewhat close to moderately large bomb explosion.

That aside, ODE also does weird things with the bony parts of a Tori, where forces are applied from it onto adjoining joints. Kick the shin - it applies equal force to the knee and ankle on the next turn frame and will completely vanish the frame afterwards. That is specifically where things get wonky with the so called "random dismemberments"

So say for argument that a knee is sorta half way towards breaking point (100 DM in this example, so it's got a slight pink tint) and you get kicked in the shin. On the frame that the kick hits nothing happens, since the knee wasn't hit directly it gains no additional bruising...

...Until the next turn happens when the force that was applied to the shin is distributed to the knee and ankle. POP! The knee just broke while only slightly bruised - and it was a turn after it was hit making it seem completely random.

The following turn all the force that hit the shin has been removed because that's how the physics engine works, but you probably wouldn't notice because DM = relax all which generally lowers the force applied on joints.

tl;dr

1. get hit on a boney part
2. next frame force from that impact is spread to the joints attached to it
3. frame after that the force spread from the bone has been removed again

So yeah, something can suddenly break unexpectedly due to something happening the frame before.

It's all part of the many quirks real physics engines have, and incidentally it's also how boom hits work - force being transmitted down a bone to adjoining joints. Since some joints have a bone inside them (eg around the chest, and glutes) they become areas that tend to explode.

I dunno, you could go on forever about the mountains of weirdness ODE brings to the game and I'm pretty shit at explaining it, but at least it's not like Havok or Physix where things start spinning and spazzing out uncontrollably.

Y'all should read the engine's wiki/docs, it's pretty detailed.

Oh man thanks for the info, that's actually pretty useful.