Combat dials for different genres

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 1:28 am

So I'm in this game that's... it's a fantasy game running on heavily homebrewed/handwaved Mage the Ascension. So... yeah.

Anyway, the combat rules as they currently are have:
Attack Score - Defense Score = Attack Pool
Successes on Attack Pool - Armor Score = Damage

The problem here is that we're using d10s with TN 6 (except for the unbelievably broken called shot rules where you get -N dice for a harder shot but -N TN on your remaining dice) and attack scores from unremarkable enemies easily approach double the PC's health levels. And there are more things added to try to make it work in runtime like how you can go down to negative health levels with a stam+survival roll, but you're still taking the -3 wound penalty to everything, etc. etc.

But the upshot of it all is that, without massive armor, you die very shortly. And with massive armor, you are invincible and everything is hax. There's not a good middle ground where, as I put it to the ST last night, 10 enemies are a viable challenge but 20 aren't. (Especially with like 7hp total, at which point even one point of damage per attack is enough to murder you long before you cut through them).

Point is, this made me think about how attack-defense -> damage-soak -> hp can fit very different genres with very different proportions. I personally feel like my experience here indicates that damage~=hp isn't a good setting for high fantasy, for instance, but it seems like an ok setting for a detective game where getting shot is A Big Deal and combat isn't a Thing. Similarly, DR>damage can feel powerful briefly but it seems like it quickly becomes pointless (faster for the people trying to attack). I'm pretty sure that separating attack and damage is a meaningful change, but I'm not sure that rolling both sides of attack-defense and damage-armor does anything that rolling just one side doesn't except mildly change the shape of the curve.

So, after all this rambling... What are some good settings here for various genres? The gunshot in the detective game I mentioned earlier might be something like this (for generalities)...

Attack < Defense (counting relevant things like rain and running away)
Damage ~= HP
DR < HP/2 (so a bulletproof vest can keep you alive, but not unhurt, and a second shot before recovery is gonna suck ass)
Rolled: Attack, Defense, Damage?
Static: HP, DR, Damage?

Whereas a high fantasy game would have things like
HP >> Damage
Attack > Defense
...other things? I'm not sure how this should work, really

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 1:49 am

High fantasy also involves cutting down hordes of orcs.

Though the odd thing is in mythology fairy tales though they usually one-shot monsters like the dragon gets stabed riiiiight in the heart, or the chimera gets hot lead shoved down his throat and chokes.

I figure it mainly depends on how long you want combat to last in your game.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 1:59 am

Yeah, this isn't just a genre thing, it's a combat flow thing. An action movie gumshoe is going to be able to survive/dodge more than the noir gumshoe, but in noir you want to model the gumshoe getting roughed up but still going. Fantasy can go anywhere from shit covered peasants to demigods, and the timeframe that combats take place in relies as much on what you want combat to feel like as much as the assumed genre.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 3:00 pm

Okay, fair. Note to self: stop pretending you have any idea how noir works because yeah.

Cutting down hordes of orcs: Is the issue I'm looking at here a difference between units? That is, should the PC's hp not only be higher than the orc's damage, but higher than the orc's HP, and the PC's damage should be higher than the orc's? I mean, that makes sense. If two of us should be able to fight seventeen of you, including two minibosses (this was a thing a couple weeks ago - and the mook's damage pools were about the same as ours or maybe a bit bigger; it's just that they 'only' had 4hp to our 7), then our numbers need to be bigger than yours across the board. But that needs to happen in a way that doesn't just make us invincible because then what's the point?

OgreBattle wrote:Though the odd thing is in mythology fairy tales though they usually one-shot monsters like the dragon gets stabed riiiiight in the heart, or the chimera gets hot lead shoved down his throat and chokes.

Yeah, but if I'm gonna play a game where I'm hopelessly outmatched and then I win because of luck and because that's what the plot needed, I'd better have won with metagame currency, goddammit. If that's just all the GM's Deus Ex Machina, I don't have a reason to be at the table. And while I'm all for metagame currency, it seems to be shunned by most of the people (and systems) I've encountered.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 3:41 pm

You don't need bigger numbers.
You can also give your PCs special abilities instead. Say dominate humanoid at-will or improved invis + fireball.

It depends what you want the game to be.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 4:15 pm

Right, but that ties back into invincibility, and 20 not being more of a challenge than 10 are. In order for 10 to be scary but beatable, they have to be able to hit us, ever, but not be able to kill us immediately when they do.

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 4:53 pm

If your defenses decay as you get more attackers, you can have a situation where a 1:1 fight is no big deal, a 2:1 fight is a definite struggle, and a 3:1 fight is a potential TPK.

If you also throw in some kind of damage threshold, you can get swarmed by waves of mooks that can't reliably damage you (even though they can reliably hit you). But a mob of worthy opponents can both hit and get through your armor, so they're very much a threat.

I don't know how to do any of that in a mutant Storyteller derived game, though. Good luck.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 5:21 pm

In Exalted, there is a hard cap on the number of people you can defend against, and after that you can't apply your DV any more. In addition, each attack degrades your DV until you act again.

I';m not sure what storyteller system you're using (no really - even though the systems are nominally the same, all the details change from one to the next), but if an increased number of opponents doesn't increase your challenge, you might be doing it wrong.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 5:46 pm

mlangsdorf wrote:Good luck.

Thanks.

fectin wrote:I'm not sure what storyteller system you're using (no really - even though the systems are nominally the same, all the details change from one to the next), but if an increased number of opponents doesn't increase your challenge, you might be doing it wrong.

It's oMage with nMage combat hacked in and then everything heavily modified. I don't know what system I'm using either, at this point.

But the only way to survive (let alone win) combats with the numbers we've been looking at these past few weeks is to have an Armor score high enough that nothing does any damage. I mean, I mentioned the 2v17. Assuming we're killing one each a round (we're so not), that gives them 81 attacks total. They're doing at minimum 1/7 the hp of whoever they hit each time they hit, so for us to be able to win without being completely invulnerable to their attacks (high Armor, which works as DR) they need to have less than a 9% chance of hitting. And they're rolling something like 10 exploding d10s at difficulty 6, so we have to have Armor 9+ or die horribly. And once we're sitting on the steep falloff of that curve like that, varying the armor by 1 in either direction breaks everything. It's just not a good setup.

Defense is a static number that subtracts from the attack pool, so increasing my defense (the lower of my Dex and Wits, btw, so tiny) by 2 would drop their attack pool down to 8, leaving me with the ability to possibly get away with Armor 8, while losing my defense entirely to hordes or flanking or whatever gives them something like 13 dice, requiring Armor 11 - meanwhile, the Armor 9 that let us handle 17 guys previously will now keep us alive vs 4.

I think my complaint is that I want to play on the top of the curve where things can vary some and have somewhat notable results, rather than on the side where getting it wrong by even one makes everything fall apart completely.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:22 pm

1. Any form of WoD combat is an exercise in failure. And that includes the system I myself have a playtest credit on. Among these various failures, Mage has a reputation as one of the bigger ones.

2. If you are playing with anyone who thinks that even the tiniest part of a dicepool system where both Target Numbers and number of successes required can vary without being horribly broken; then you have no hope of winning any argument based on probabilities.

3. The idea of setting the numbers different for genre emulation is sound, but a lot of non-interactive fiction has combat that works very differently than the usual results RPG engines give. Noir detective movies have a lot of henchmen pulling a revolver and getting "the drop" on Sam Spade and leading him through a different scene or conversation instead of actually shooting him. 80/90s American action movies have Ah-nold getting punched and scraped and singed by jumping away from exploding fireballs, but never getting hit by a bullet into act 3, where one and only one round from the main villain hits him causing a fatal-looking injury which invariably turns out to be a flesh wound in the shoulder.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:37 pm

momothefiddler wrote:Right, but that ties back into invincibility, and 20 not being more of a challenge than 10 are. In order for 10 to be scary but beatable, they have to be able to hit us, ever, but not be able to kill us immediately when they do.

Not really. If you die to a single face-stabbing, but you have dominate humanoid at-will, you're not invincible.
The challenge is in setting up the situation so you don't get face-stabbed.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sun Dec 14, 2014 3:54 pm

Josh: Good points.

ishy: But once it's over you're either dead or untouched. I may have been unclear, but I wasn't talking about actual immunity to damage (after all, the dick NPC with 9 armor still took damage when my partymate blew up the fucking boat).

I suppose since "you" are taking damage by losing (the hp of) your dominated humanoids, it might not be so egregious to end the fight unhurt as when they can just hit you all day and you don't care.