Simon Smith wrote:
> Peter Knutsen <peter@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>I thought you had made deliberate decision to treat 2d6+1 and 2d6+2 the
>>same as 2d6, for the purpose of damage and armour penetration?
>
> No, I'd just chosen cases where everybody happened to have whole
> numbers of die codes. Pardon me for the misunderstanding. Like strength
and
> damage, armour can have +1s or +2s as well, but it gets messy for very
> little perceptible gain so it's not usually recommended. In practice the
> incoming damage is usually far larger than the armour, so there's almost
> always some damage leakage. But 1D6 of armour could block 1D6+2 of
incoming
> damage, +2 armour could block 1D6+1 of damage and +1 could block 1D6, in
> each case by reducing it to the point at which there's nothing left to
roll.
> This does save time comparing a couple of points of damage against a
> strength roll that will usually be at least 2D6, and avoids having to
make
> another damage comparision that has a high likelihood of a no effect
result
> anyway.
Well, you need to ask yourself whether you want player characters to
ever wear armour, or not.
I've needed different answers for Sagatafl and for Modern Action RPG.
Sagatafl is intended to model any period, but with particular attention
to medieval technology levels, so I've needed armour to be useful, while
still involving a mobility tradeoff, so that unarmoured fighting styles
are valid choices.
Modern Action RPG differs. It can be used for medieval, but it works
best for periods with firearms, whether they are primitive one-shot guns
or futuristic laser guns, and I'm not particularly interested in seeing
PCs wear armour. If they do, or when NPCs wear armour, it'll almost
always be torso only, and even though the damage/armour mechanic is
primitive, it is well able to model the fact that highly skilled
shooters can hit non-torso body parts, while armour gives very good
protection against low-skill enemies. Also, modern bullet proof vests
are fairly light and so don't slow you down much, leaving little room
for tradeoff mechanics. So it's a very different dynamic from Sagatafl
(which also hasn't yet got a damage model that even tries to model
modern firearms against modern armour).
What kind of dynamic do you want for your Star Wars campaigns?
[...]
>>I'm not convinced that we need as many 16 different trait values, but I
>>sincerely believe that we need more than 5, in order to cover all of
>>human variety.
>
> Well, human range is 1D6 to 4D6, so that's ten granularity steps. I do
think
> that's reasonable for a broad-brush system like Star Wars.
10 steps can be enough. They just have to cover the *entire* span of
human variety, and not just the kind of largely ordinary people with
whom the designer is personally familiar.
I'm not sure whether a human maximum of 4d6 does that, assuming 2d6 is
the human average.
Sagatafl has 3d as the human average, in attributes, and 8d as the
maximum, although raised to 9d in cinematic worlds.
MA RPG has 2d as the human average, and there's no human maximum,
although I sometimes wonder whether I should impose a high maximum just
to protect players from screwing themselves, e.g. by paying for
Perception 15d or 20d, or Will 15d. A good limit might be 8d for most
characters, but 10d for the character subtype who gets to buy attributes
cheaply.
Another option could be to impose a "double cost after X" rule, but that
might just get some players to assume that extremely values are very
useful, while the fact is that after a certain point, you've already
become a borderline superhero and spending more points is just wasteful.
As for descriptive terms, they stop at attribute values of 7, with the
description for a 7 in Perception being "Sherlock?", e.g., so any
reasonably thoughtful player should be able to realize that one almost
never needs more than that.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
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