Fixed or Variable Armour Points?

[Atgxtg]

6 hours ago, RosenMcStern said:

That said, all these mechanics are interesting and well worth a try, but they have a big problem: they do not scale. You always have the same range of variation (0-9) for any kind of weapon, and it becomes problematic: a dagger and a troll maul are difficult to describe in terms of "0-9 damage plus appropriate modifier".

Sure the scale. And in several ways. One possibly would be to add a modifier for the weapon. Another would be to use a multiplier. 

 

5 hours ago, RosenMcStern said:

Dagger doing 9 points of damage might sound problematic to someone. Even I would find it problematic, if the mechanics is not carefully grounded in cases that occur in real combat.

A dagger can do 12 point ts in RQ/BRP. Yeah, it requires a special or critical success but specials come up pretty often. And that's before modifying for damage bonus.

5 hours ago, RosenMcStern said:

The big problem is that we would be adapting the damage to a fixed interval (0 to 9 or 1 to 10), rather than trying to study the various weapons and describe how much damage they deal, and of what kind. This sounds artificial to me. A multiplier could be better, but it decreases granularity and is annoying for people who are in bad terms with maths.

It is artificial. The whole concept of damage and hit points is artificial. As far as how much damage weapons do, it's also somewhat artificial. In real life it is not about quantity of damage so much as quality. A 5 point chest hit isn't as dangerous as as a 2 point eye hit, despite the "higher damage" value. That's one of the drawbacks to a hit point system. 

A wounding system, as opposed to a straight hit point system could help too. In the variant I was working on, I did want to be able to scale things, and used a logarithmic progression for values. I also used a wound threshold system, where the severity of the injury was linked to how much the damage score exceeded the wound threshold.

Now determining what kind of damage a weapon does is nice, but there is very little BRP for dealing with it. A sword that does 1D6+1 and a spear that does 1D6+1 are functionally the same in game terms. 

As far as things being annoying for people who are bad with maths- well, This variant isn't going to make things any worse. If they are playing BRP they are already capable of rolling a die and adding a modifier, since virtually every weapon in the game has some sort of damage add, not to mention db. BRP in general is going to cause problems for those people. The  Resistance table, special and critical chances, spell effects, situational modifiers, skill category modifiers The game is rife with math. Matter of fact, the variant actually simplified a lot of the math, since it could handle opposed rolls and got rid of the resistance table, and the need to calculate critical and special chances. 

 

BTW, the concept of coming up with a way to reduce the math in BRP to help streamline play and make the system more accessible to those who are bad with math has merit. It's worth it's own thread to figure just what we could get rid of and how. Anybody else interested? 

 

[Mugen]

14 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

BTW, the concept of coming up with a way to reduce the math in BRP to help streamline play and make the system more accessible to those who are bad with math has merit. It's worth it's own thread to figure just what we could get rid of and how. Anybody else interested? 

I think RosenMcStern's d100 Revolution actually does a pretty good job at it in its most basic form.

[g33k]

22 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

A dagger can do 12 point ts in RQ/BRP. Yeah, it requires a special or critical success but specials come up pretty often. And that's before modifying for damage bonus.

Absolutely.

The thing we sometimes forget is that even a "little" blade like a dagger can be a "1-hit / instant-kill" weapon, even against a big guy with human-maximum of HP's ...

Any system that doesn't include that result as one of the "reasonably possible" outcomes (particularly if the dagger-guy is highly-skilled) is doing a poor job of modelling combat.  Some games, of course, don't TRY to model combat "accurately;" but RQ mostly tends to the "more-accurate" end of that scale...

 

[Atgxtg]

On 2/10/2017 at 10:26 AM, g33k said:

Absolutely.

The thing we sometimes forget is that even a "little" blade like a dagger can be a "1-hit / instant-kill" weapon, even against a big guy with human-maximum of HP's ...

Any system that doesn't include that result as one of the "reasonably possible" outcomes (particularly if the dagger-guy is highly-skilled) is doing a poor job of modelling combat.  Some games, of course, don't TRY to model combat "accurately;" but RQ mostly tends to the "more-accurate" end of that scale...

 

Yeah. That's one of the drawbacks of using abstract terms such as "damage" and "hit points" to handle combat and injuries. A pole ax might hit harder than a dagger and tends to cause more tissue damage, but realistically it isn't about quantity so much as quality. A well placed blow can be far more effective and deadly. But also realistically, most people will be out of a fight long before the die (run out of hit points). Nor do wound effects hit all at once or that people would  know just how serious a wound is. 

 

In RPGs we tend to just go "3 points? okay." Ad then just sort of shrug off the fact that we've been injured.

Edited February 11, 2017 by Atgxtg