Balancing Attack and Damage trade offs

[RandomCasualty]

I started to try to design a new hp/damage system and I found myself somewhat stumped at trying to balance attack bonus versus damage bonus.

Basically what I'd like to do is set up a system where hit points are fixed. Say 100 hp for all characters (this number will probably go down actually, but 100 hp gives me enough room to work with early on, until I find that I don't need that much).

The attack system is going to be the same as D&D at its core. Attack roll versus AC on a d20. Lets assume similar leveled opponents remain within a 5-15 spread on the d20.

What kinds of mathematical factors determine how much a -1 penalty to attack is worth in terms of damage? I'm trying to work things out such that trade offs between attack and damage are possible on some balanced basis, but I can't really figure out a great formula for determining what is exaclty mathematically balanced.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Murtak]

How high is your base damage going to be? Things like power attack get inherently less powerful the more damage you do on your own.

[Neeek]

Tables! Oh joy!

New number needed to hit/ damage multiplier to get the same result as the unmodified roll

3+/1.0556
4+/1.0588
5+/1.0625
6+/1.0667
7+/1.0714
8+/1.0769
9+/1.0833
10+/1.0909
11+/1.1
12+/1.1111
13+/1.125
14+/1.1429
15+/1.1667
16+/1.2
17+/1.25
18+/1.3333
19+/1.5
20+/2

So basically, it does not change at a constant rate, and therefore you really can't balance a Power Attack effect by either increasing by a straight number *or* by increasing a straight percentage. However, by making it a percentage increase, you could basically make an ability that's good in some circumstances and bad in others. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Username17]

My system works like this:

Step One: Roll to hit.
You roll an attack against a DC. For every Two Points that you exceed the to-hit DC, you add +1 damage. If you miss the to-hit DC, you miss entirely.

Step Two: Roll Soak.
Your Victim rolls a soak roll against a DC equal to the damage of your attack (which is base damage - a constant - plus the bonus for rolling a good to-hit roll as outlined above). For every two points they miss the DC by, they suffer one health level. If they hit the DC or exceed it, they lose no health levels.

What does this mean?

Imagine for a second that you hit on an 11+, and you inflict 11 points of damage against an opponent who has no Soak bonus. You hit on 10 numbers, of which 2 are +0 damage, 2 are +1 damage, 2 are +2 damage, 2 are +3 damage, and 2 are +4 damage.

Your opponent is then going to take a variable amount of damage, if he's looking at the +4 damage hit, he's up for as much as 7 lost health levels, and of course there's no guaranty he'll take any health levels a all. But his average blow from a hit is going to be 2.13 health levels. And natch, that's 1.065 health levels per attack.

If you add +1 to-hit, you have an extra 1/20 chance of connecting, and an extra 50% chance of adding +1 damage if you would have hit anyway. It raises the average health levels lost per attack to 1.235.

If you add +1 to damage, you have an extra 1/20 chance of each hit inflicting a health level, and a 50% chance of a hit that would inflict a health level of inflicting an extra one. And the new avaerage health level loss is 1.235.

Or something like that. The point is, it's pretty spot-on, whatever the bonuses you happen to be using are. And you can increase or decrease damage or the number of health boxes people have in order to fine tune lethality.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

After doing the math on your system Frank, I have to say it is really nice.

Much better than the current D&D damage system. With damage defined in that fashion, it's much easier to balance everything.

[User3]

Wow. That is completely different than I had invisioned the attack sequence, but it looks good.


How will base damage be determined?

[Username17]

Base Damage is Strength + Equipment, Soak is Strength + Equipment

or

Base Damage is Charisma + Equipment, soak is Charisma + Equipment.

I'm using "Equipment" in the V:tR sense where it includes combat manuvers and shit.

If you want a high drop-rate system, you set the total weapon bonuses to about 20 points bigger than the armor bonuses, and then every hit can potentially drop a foe (better hits do so more and more frequently). If you want a really low drop-rate system, you set the weapon bonuses to more like 2 points higher than the armor bonuses - and that way every attacks isn't doing more than about one health box even on a good day.

The lethality of the system can be set by moving around how many health levels people have between incapacitated and dead. I suggest going for about 10 to incapacitated and 10 more to dying. That way, it's pretty hard to kill people. But if you want a high lethality system, you could close that gap.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

Now I just have the problem of trying to balance something like reach versus attack and damage bonuses.

[RandomCasualty]

I'm also thinking you may want a damage roll, instead of a constant, solely so that you move the level for "can't be hurt at all" up a few notches. It wouldn't really hurt the math at all, so long as the damage roll averages to the same thing as the constant would have.

The main thing I'd be worried about, thinking of such a system would be the point where your DR roll gets so high that nobody can hurt you, unless you planned on always having people take damage on a nat 1, much like nat 20 is always a hit. I guess that could work too.

Also, another question. What happens if you fail the DC by 1 on a soak roll? If my damage DC is 20 for instance, and I roll a 19, what happens. I normally take 1 damage per 2 points I failed the roll by, so does that mean I lose no hp since I only failed by 1, or is it rounded up?

[Username17]

Oddly enough, that would severely screw up the math.

1> A d20 doesn't average 10 - it averages 10.5, meaning that on average damage would then be either 1/2 a point ahead or 1/2 point behind to begin with. Not a massively big deal by itself, but it wrecks the repricicocity of the whole thing.

2> A far bigger deal is that damage then becomes massively more random. But hitting doesn't. This means that the damage side has two dice and a +19 to -19 bellcurve while rolling to hit has a 1 to 20 straight curve.

The net result is that a point of damage bonus or soak bonus doesn't mean nearly as much as a dodge or to-hit bonus, because the result is more random. If you wanted to have a damage roll and a soak roll, you'd have to also have a to-hit roll and a dodge roll.

That's fine, it works OK, but I personally find it to be more of a pain in the ass. It's OK to double the amount of die rolls, but it's not mathematically sound to add one to the number of die rolls.

---

From a practical standpoint, as you go towards more die rolls, the bonus presented by a relative advantage goes down and becomes harder to estimate. At one to-hit roll, a +1 relative bonus is a straight 5%. At one to-hit and one dodge roll, a relative +1 bonus has a scaling value depending upon how big a relative bonus you already had.

---

Even with just one roll for to-hit and one for soak, you have to be a seriously bad dude to drop someone's chance of damaging you to zero. Personally, I really find that to be plenty. There's a point at which the party Wizard is actually immune to the Pixies, and he can only be scratched by the enemy line soldiers (and the party warrior is vice versa). And I'm really OK with that.

-Username17

[Username17]

Also, another question. What happens if you fail the DC by 1 on a soak roll? If my damage DC is 20 for instance, and I roll a 19, what happens. I normally take 1 damage per 2 points I failed the roll by, so does that mean I lose no hp since I only failed by 1, or is it rounded up?

It's not important which way you defined it, since the important part is that people with "average stats for your level" are supposed to hit and damage each other on the same number of numbers. If you defined it so that people took 1 wound level when they failed by 1 you'd just set the basic damage DC to one less than if you defined it the other way.

Personally, I find it easier to think about if you always consider the die roll to be rounded down to the nearest breakpoint. So if you fail the Soak Roll by one, you round that roll down to the nearest breakpoint which is failing by 2. If you hit someone with one extra point you round that roll down to the next nearest breakpoint which is hitting exactly.

But if you think it's easier to think about in some other way, go for it. It's not actually important since it's just a universal shift of 1 point it can be accounted for in the Base Target Number Constants one way or the other.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1108853905[/unixtime]]
Even with just one roll for to-hit and one for soak, you have to be a seriously bad dude to drop someone's chance of damaging you to zero. Personally, I really find that to be plenty. There's a point at which the party Wizard is actually immune to the Pixies, and he can only be scratched by the enemy line soldiers (and the party warrior is vice versa). And I'm really OK with that.

The problem is that it totally invalidates armies when you do this ,at least in a fantasy setting. Nobody will ever use an army if your army can get raped by one guy. And that's actually a pretty huge world design concern.

There's a big difference between mass archers firing on a dragon and doing minor damage each round, to archers firing and doing nothing. In the former case, if you get enough archers, you'll be ok. In the latter case, you just can't use soldiers at all, and they mean absolutely nothing.

And it's a tough paradox to deal with.

I'm thinking that if you put in a natural 20 always hitting and a natural 1 always taking 1 damage minimum, it might be ok, though I'm not sure how that screws with the math, though I wouldn't think it'd do much damage, though I could be wrong.

I'm very reluctant to confer absolute invulnerability in a game system though, since it tends to completely change the way the world works in a fantasy game.

In a high tech game you just don't have that problem. Someone can be immune to pistol fire, so you just equip your forces with heavier weapons and armies are still viable, they just need something heavier than pistols.

In fantasy though, it's really tough, since your armies as a whole tend to be a relatively fixed power level which is entirely based on their skill, and somehow I'd like simple numbers to be still be reasonably fearsome.

[Username17]

The problem is that it totally invalidates armies when you do this ,at least in a fantasy setting. Nobody will ever use an army if your army can get raped by one guy. And that's actually a pretty huge world design concern.

It's way too early to get all chickenlittle about this just yet. First of all, there is a point at which the standard attack has a chance of a one-hit takedown. And when your relative bulge rises a bit there's no chance of a one-hit takedown. And when your relative bulge continues to rise, eventually the chance of a single enemy doing any damage drops to zero as well.

But consider: Someone with a relative bulge on those fools that you have a larger relative bulge on has a smaller relative penalty than that. In short, when you become such a badass that the grunts can't hurt you anymore, the tough grunts still can. And socially speaking, if the tough grunts are meaningful militarily (and they must be, since they can hurt the great heroes), the fact that the normal grunts can hurt them makes them still meaningful.

The fact that small arms can't penetrate tank armor does not mean that small arms have no place on the modern battlefield. Small arms can still very much kill people with AVMs, and people with AVMs can still kill tanks. Those people with assault rifles are very useful - even though there are many things on the battlefield that they can't do dick against. Modern armies have a lot of dudes with assault rifles, despite the fact that there are submarines and tanks and bombers and battleships against which neither the weapon nor the soldier can directly do anything.

In Stratego, the 2 automatically defeats every number of 3 or higher. The 2 is totally there, but in no way does that mean that all your 4s and 7s and 6s and 5s are useless.

---

If for some weird reason you thought it was really really important that large groups of incompetent and hopelessly outclassed people with shitty weapons should be able to take down legendary monsters with claws so sharp and hard that they could give a close shave to a glass monkey - then the way to do that still sure as hell isn't to allow each individual attack to have a chance of hurting the dragon. That's straight up crazy talk.

Even if you have only a 1 in 400 chance of inflicting a wound level, that's way too fvcking high for large groups of shitty troops. That means that 800 dudes with slings (who I remind you, can probably be fit inside your house) would drop Tiamat in five rounds. More importantly, it means that if you fill up a santa sack with rats and throw it at people it's basically an instant-kill no matter how awesome they are. That's not cool. At all.

Every time people get themselves in a knot about how each individual untrained and unmotivated conscript is supposed to be important, it always ends up with the Bag Of Rats sooner or later. Don't go that way.

No, if you really want lots of shitty people to make a difference, utilize the Aid Another concept. Just allow people to add a bonus to a single attack for every twice as many of them that there are. So 1000 or so guys might be +10 attack and damage - which means that collectively they could really cause some minor damage to the massively powerful dragon lord.

But really, why should a bunch of crap troops do anything to a dragon lord? It's the equivalent of a tank, and they are the equivalent of those Rwandan guys with machetes. There are knights and wizards who are themselves inferior to the dragon lord who can still hurt it, they are like combat engineers or something. Enough of them will stop the tank, but one will probably just get shot. Meanwhile, enough crazy mofos with machetes will wipe out that whole engineer unit even though the tank that the engineers can stop can pretty much run over knife wielding genocidaires until it runs out of fuel.

I'm very reluctant to confer absolute invulnerability in a game system though, since it tends to completely change the way the world works in a fantasy game.

I don't understand this sentiment. Absolute invulnerability exists in the real world. If you are on a ship or a helocopter, or driving around on an armored vehicle, and some jerk is waving a knife at you, you are absolutely invulnerable to him. It doesn't mean that he is completely strategically unimportant, only that there is literally no way he can do anything directly to you.

Numbers get really big really fast. Every Roman Legion was over 5000 people in the days of Augustus Caesar. So if there's some sort of auto-success system in place they are going to chew through absolutely any monstrosity no matter how terrible in one round. So Augustus can just send out Legio XV Apollinarius and be pretty sure that they'll take down the Dracochimerae without losing more than a couple of dudes. That's crap.

In fantasy though, it's really tough, since your armies as a whole tend to be a relatively fixed power level which is entirely based on their skill

Wha...? That's completely backwards. In Fantasy, skill levels of your minions varies greatly, so if only your most skilled warriors can do anything to the Hydrapard, then that's OK, because you actually have a skill gradient amongst your soldiers and the rest of them can go off and fight the Knights of Ulm, who your crap troops can at least trade themselves poorly with.

In modern, your skill means pretty close to nothing. If you don't have an antitank missile, it pretty much doesn't matter who you are.

---

The similarities between ancient and modern warfare are there. The difference, of course, is that the limited resource is "skillful warriors" instead of "heavy weaponry". Only badasses are going to do anything to Achilles or Richard the Lionheart or the Basilisk. Only Big Guns are going to penetrate the armor of the T-34 or the Panzer. You only have a limited amount of badasses to distribute in ancient warfare, you only have a limited amount of anti-tank guns to distribute in modern warfare. The rest of your guys are there to hold territory and make sure that someone on the other side doesn't wipe out all of your badasses/antitank nests by expending large amounts of untrained religious fanatics with spears so that they can run roughshod over the rest of your army with their T-34/Cockatrice.

If the answer to absolutely all military problems is "Send more idiots with spears" there is no purpose served in investing in elites, new technology, or even tactics. It's just a question of who has more people to expend. And that's dumb. For there to be meaningful tactics and strategy in fantasy warfare, there has to be a reason why you have to throw in the Rat Ogres or Thunder Knights every time the enemy throws up a Niefel Giant or Sirrush.

If numbers alone mean anything than the great heroes and the legendary weapons mean nothing. Less than nothing.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

The whole army versus hero debate should probably be a new thread, since I think it warrants its own discussion.

[Username17]

As for multiple attacks against extra damage. That's relatively easy. If you have an ability like "shoots at range" or "has reach" or "hits multiple enemies" you figure that it should do about the same damage as an attack without those powers. So you consider about how many attacks its going to have (for example, a ranged attack might have 6 attacks for every 5 attacks that a melee attack would have, an area attack might hit about 2 people per attack, and so on), and then you multiply through by the amount of damage the attacks are doing without such hoodwinks, and then you reduce the attack and damage bonus accordingly so that it ends up at the same place.

And you know what? When you go up against weaker enemies, the extra attacks weapon will then be advantageous, and when you go up against a strong enemy, the single attack weapon will be advantageous - exactly as you'd suspect. And then, it won't end up be being "balanced" - but rather "advantageous" to have the multiple attack types, because you'll use the one that makes tactical sense at any particular time. But any particular attack type you have won't be overpowered.

What I really need to do is to make a 20x20 chart that shows average health loss for every to-hit and damage disparity that's inside the RNG. I'll probably have one up this evening.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1108928630[/unixtime]]
And you know what? When you go up against weaker enemies, the extra attacks weapon will then be advantageous, and when you go up against a strong enemy, the single attack weapon will be advantageous - exactly as you'd suspect. And then, it won't end up be being "balanced" - but rather "advantageous" to have the multiple attack types, because you'll use the one that makes tactical sense at any particular time. But any particular attack type you have won't be overpowered.

Yeah, I figured you probably couldn't make extra attacks versus attack/damage bonuses totally equal in all situations. But that's good to have some things in game which work better it certain situations anyway, as it adds some tactical and counter value to the game.

[User3]

So, would it be fair to have all mundane (i.e, buyable/non-power affecting) armor subtract a flat amount from one's dodge roll and add a flat amount to one's soak (within a certain numerical limit, say -4/+4)?

And would it be balanced to have all weapons subtract from attack and add to damage or add to attack and subtract from damage?

Or would that lead to too much tailoring?

[RandomCasualty]

1109014855[/unixtime]]
And would it be balanced to have all weapons subtract from attack and add to damage or add to attack and subtract from damage?

Or would that lead to too much tailoring?

Unless there's something I'm missing, that should be ok within reason. Really the problem you've got to worry about is the cases of invulnerable DR and someone unhittable. Which is kinda why I worry about having situations without some kind of autosuccess for attacks.

Though as frank said, having auto damage and auto hits can be somewhat problematic in the case of just tons of rats or something similar. However, I think you could get around that by capping the number of attacks that can be directed at one target in a round. You can create some kind of "group attack" mechanic where at some point you get say 4 attack rolls max from one side, and you get bonuses to attack and damage based on numbers. So if you have a swarm of rats you pretty much must divide them into groups for your attacks, and that way the most someone could take would be 4 damage (assuming he rolled 4 straight natural 1s for all his soaks).

There has to be some way for dealing with swarms and mass numbers anyway, since nobody wants to be rolling 200+ attack rolls regardless. So you might as well just add to some other problems that way.

Somehow you'd have to deal with min/maxing to push the other guy off the RNG, cause otherwise you're always better off being either slow as shit, but so tough nobody can hurt you, or super fast and fragile but so fast nobody can hit you.

Being inbetween doesn't really help you much.

[RandomCasualty]

Ok, so how about we do a size catagory like this:

As you grow bigger:
-1 attack and AC
+1 damage and DR.

As you grow smaller:
+1 attack and AC
-1 damage and DR.

Now, the only problem is still trying to fit reach into all that... since it'd still be better being bigger with the reach. Then again, I suppose we could say the extra size constraints counterbalnace that.

Any ideas?

[Neeek]

1109565685[/unixtime]]Ok, so how about we do a size catagory like this:

As you grow bigger:
-1 attack and AC
+1 damage and DR.

As you grow smaller:
+1 attack and AC
-1 damage and DR.

Now, the only problem is still trying to fit reach into all that... since it'd still be better being bigger with the reach. Then again, I suppose we could say the extra size constraints counterbalnace that.

Any ideas?

We're still on Frank's system, seen again here(that is the system we're talking about, right?):

Step One: Roll to hit.
You roll an attack against a DC. For every Two Points that you exceed the to-hit DC, you add +1 damage. If you miss the to-hit DC, you miss entirely.

Step Two: Roll Soak.
Your Victim rolls a soak roll against a DC equal to the damage of your attack (which is base damage - a constant - plus the bonus for rolling a good to-hit roll as outlined above). For every two points they miss the DC by, they suffer one health level. If they hit the DC or exceed it, they lose no health levels.

So for a -1 to damage, you need a +2 to hit to balance. And a -1 to DR is the same as a +2 AC, as far as I can tell. So the balance is reached if you are getting shafted on the numbers by growing, with say a +2 damage and DR and -5 AC and to hit. Or course, I may just not understand the system.

[RandomCasualty]

1109567384[/unixtime]]
So for a -1 to damage, you need a +2 to hit to balance. And a -1 to DR is the same as a +2 AC, as far as I can tell. So the balance is reached if you are getting shafted on the numbers by growing, with say a +2 damage and DR and -5 AC and to hit. Or course, I may just not understand the system.

If I understood Frank correctly, +1 to hit is the same as +1 to damage. So if you add one to damage and subtract one from attack, you end up the same.

Since AC is nothing more than a penalty to hit to the other guy and DR is nothing more than a penalty to damage, it should work out where you're more or less balanced so long as your penalties and your bonuses add up to 0.

Now the only abberation with that is if you get so extreme as to push someone off the RNG, though assuming we controlled that, it seems to be balanced enough.

[Username17]

So for a -1 to damage, you need a +2 to hit to balance. And a -1 to DR is the same as a +2 AC, as far as I can tell. So the balance is reached if you are getting shafted on the numbers by growing, with say a +2 damage and DR and -5 AC and to hit. Or course, I may just not understand the system.

I think you are missing a key point of the system. While +2 to-hit always gives 1 damage, it also has a 10% chance of causing you to inflict damage at all when you otherwise would not have. The net result is that +2 damage and no corresponding chance of hitting is actually equivalent to +2 to-hit (including the +1 damae that brings).

If I understood Frank correctly, +1 to hit is the same as +1 to damage. So if you add one to damage and subtract one from attack, you end up the same.

Yeppers.

The only problem, of course, is that as you push the specialization you eventually get to the point where you are invincible and/or explode. The breakpoints are a bit odd. If your Dodge TN is 21 points higher than their to-hit AC, they never hit you. If your Soak Bonus is within 1 point of their biggest damage TN, you never take any damage.

But scaling yourself into near invulnerability is really a bad palce to be. Imagine for the moment that someone was going to hit you on ten numbers and wound you on ten numbers. Then suddenly you decide to shift 11 points of soak into dodge - they can't hit you anymore. But if they get a circumstance bonus of +1 to-hit, they hit you on a twenty. Then they would you on twenty one numbers - which means that any hit will automatically strike, and alot of them will just drop you.

In short, it's still balanced in that people are taking the same number of lost health levels per attack - but they are getting them all in one big lump sum. The game has become more like Rocket Launcher Tag.

-Username17

[Prak]

Wow, I'm necro'ing a thread that's nearly old enough for an OSSR.

So, in Frank's system here, Atk is presumably derived in roughly the same manner as D&D (attack skill+attribute+d20). But did I miss, in my skimming, what the DC to hit is, and what the soak is derived from?

[CatharzGodfoot]

Wow, I'm necro'ing a thread that's nearly old enough for an OSSR.

So, in Frank's system here, Atk is presumably derived in roughly the same manner as D&D (attack skill+attribute+d20). But did I miss, in my skimming, what the DC to hit is, and what the soak is derived from?

Look back up a bit. AC is base + attribute + 'equipment' bonuses. Soak is d20 + attribute + 'equipment' bonuses (a different attribute).

[Prak]

Ok, I thought so. Thanks.