Four Stat System.

[Username17]

So it's been suggested to get this basic concept into one place instead of scattered all over the palce, like it is now. So here it is:

1. You have four stats. Strength, Agility, Moxy, Elan.
They could just as well be Red, Yellow, etc.
These stats get abreviated SAME.
2. Attacking involves pitting your stats and modifiers directly against the same stats of your opponent.
Thus, if you are rolling to hit with Agility, I am dodging with Agility.
3. Everyone stops being able to fight when they suffer the same number of wounds. That number is ten.
People who are really tough take less wounds from the same amount of damage.
4. If you roll a good attack roll, you inflict extra damage.
For every two points your attack roll exceeds the number you needed to hit, you inflict 1 extra damage.
5. When damage is inflicted upon you, you get a roll to resist that damage. This is called a soak roll. If your soak equals the damage, you suffer no injury.
If you fail that roll by one or more, you suffer a wound. For every two additional points you fail by, you suffer another wound.
Remember that 10 wounds is incapacitating.
6. Different attacks can cause different kinds of wounds, which will do something totally different looing when they are incapacitating.
But they are all resolved in the same fashion with the same two dice, and 10 wounds is still incapacitating, regardless of kind or source.
7. I use a seven element system that absolutely everything fits into. Every attack is Air, Earth, Water, Fire, Life, Death, or Void. Everything.
Even physical objects, which are assigned an element based on the elemental associations of their primary constituents. Glass items do fire damage, iron items do void damage, your own fists do life damage.
8. The base DC to hit someone is 8 + (Moxy or Agility). A generic weapon does about 20 points of damage. Most people have about 6 points of defenses.

So how does this work in practice?
A swordsman is facing off against a woman with snakes for hair and a deadly gaze, the Swordsman has a stat line of Strength: 7, Agility: 8, Moxy 6, Elan 7. The swordsman is using a 19 damage weapon and wearing 8 points of armor against earth effects. The medusa, on the other hand, is attempting to transform the swordsman into a statue with her gaze attack, and using an ability that does a base of 22 points of damage, and has only 5 points of void armor. Her stat line is Strength: 6, Agility: 6, Moxy 8, Elan 8. Ignoring, for the moment, skills and circumstances, we have a situation in which:

When the swordsman attacks the medusa, he rolls a d20 and adds 8 (his agility), attempting to hit the medusa (which he does on a 14, 8 + her agility). If he gets a minimal hit (which he does on a 14 or 15), she suffers 26 damage (19 for the weapon, 7 for the strength, and +0 for the to-hit roll). On a maximum hit (where he gets a 28), she'll take 7 extra damage for a total of 33. In either case, she now rolls a d20 and adds 11 (her strength plus void armor), attempting to equal the damage to successfully soak all the wounds. If she fails, she takes 1 wound for every 2 points she misses the damage DC on her soak roll (round wounds up). So if the swordsman rolls a natural 20 on his attack roll and the medusa rolls a natural one on her soak roll, she takes 11 wounds and crumples to the floor - she's down, but not actually dead.

When the medusa attacks the swordsman, she rolls a d20 and adds 8 (her moxy), and is looking for a 14 (8 + the swordsman's moxy). Once again, she scores a minimal hit on a 14 or 15, and a maximum hit on a 28. However, her attack is inflicting 30 to 37 damage (22 + her Elan of 8, with up to 7 additional damage coming in from the to-hit roll), and then the swordsman has to soak - which he does with a d20 + 15 (his Earth armor of 8 plus his Elan of 7). Again, a 20 on the attack roll and a 1 on the soak roll would incapacitate the poor swordsman.

Why these numbers?

No reason. Seriously, I just like the way that spread comes out, with one-hit drop effects that are rare but happen often enough that you have to worry about them. If you want longer combats, jack the to-hit DCs up and the damage DCs down.

Why no Damage Rolls?

There's no particular reason to have damage rolls and soak rolls. The two display essentially the same thing: the amount of actual wounding you suffer when struck. The specific decision to have a soak roll instead of a damage roll comes from the desire to minimize player frustration. This way if you are the attacker you roll a die, and if you are the defender you roll a die. This way, the player never feels dissociated from events which concern them.

Contrarywise, in D&D (for example), a Wizard generally does not roll dice to have their spells work (because instead the target rolls a saving throw), and generally does not roll dice when attacked (since these are usually attack rolls rolled by the enemy). The net result is that a player character might kill and be killed without ever getting to personally touch the dice at all.

While there is no objective difference between the player rolling the dice and the DM rolling the dice, it is generally desirable to keep players from feeling that they can/should wander off and go pllay smash brothers until their turn comes up...

Why those elements?

No reason. If for some reason you were really wedded to a system with five elements, you could do that. There are literally thousands of magical paradigms to draw from, with "elements" that include "heart", "breath", "metal", "bone", "light", "darkness", "hatred", and "mind". They are variously numbered from 2 all the way up to 13 in different magical traditions that people actually believe in to this day.

The game mechanical needs of a system of elements are only that it be varied enough to keep from stifling the story and odd enough in number to be unbalanced.

Did you just say UNbalanced?

Yep. Despite the fact that the proposed system is scrupulously balanced at every level up tot the element system, I am actually encouraging, nay demanding that the element system be inherently unbalanced. And why is that? It's to divert all the inherent game-balance altering DM generated stuff to a single part of the game. That is, all the favored enemy bonuses, resistances, immunities, and circumstances that DMs can use to make characters situationally superior/inferior can go into the elemental resistances/damage types. It's simple and direct enough for DMs to be able to figure out exactly who they are screwing and by how much.

-Username17

[Aycarus]

Cool! Thanks. Has this been play-tested at all?

[Joy_Division]

I've been playtesting the idea since it was posted. It works well if you tune your numbers to a pace you feel comfortable with.

[Username17]

Has this been play-tested at all?

Only really basic stuff. So some basic combats have been done with some powerful characters vs. some more weak characters in different proportions. The number of gremlins that it takes to drop a hero varies depending upon their relative strength.

In general, a character who goes even steven on their stats is able to handle more weak opposition, and characters who split their stats strongly between physical and mental stats are relatively more dangerous to higher level enemies.

The more you allow people to diverge their stats, the more the game looks like rocket launcher tag, and therefore the more advantageous it is to split your stats.

Currently, I am looking for names to give the active skills. There are eight of them, and they all are generally associated with one of the stats.

Strength skills are Survival and Something Else.
Agility skills are Stealth and (probably calling it Precision).
Moxy Skills are Perception and Tinker.
Elan skills are Something and Another Thing.

There's a whole set of math about how things which have only two as a factor are balanced as choices and things which have any other factor are not. And that's why there are four stats and eight active skills, and seven elements and unlimited backgrounds. The elements are there to make things unbalanced, and the backgrounds don't make a lick of difference to balance any way you slice it.

To prevent things from degenerating into rocket launcher tag, I use the rule that the maximum possible skill is no more than 4 more than your lowest active skill, and your highest stat is no more than 2 more than your lowest stat. This way you can determine the variance you want to see in party members by how you define the test: a pure stat test has a bonus to the roll of power level +/-1; a pure skill test has a bonus to the roll of power level +/-2, and a skill + stat test has a bonus of power level +/-3. And these can, of course, be modified by equipment and/or circumstances, so that +/-3 is about all the game can take (remember that a +/-10 variance is the difference between one character automatically succeeding while another automatically fails - or is a simple automatic takedown on any attack).

The backstory I'm using for this is that the PCs are all badasses and in order to be a legendary hero you have to keep yourself in balance. So the PCs, by virtue of the fact that they get XP points are much more generalized than giants.

-Username17

[User3]

Whoever was suggesting to put this all in one place was using his or her noggin.

I think I'll just Copy/Pase this straight into my Houserule.txt file, right above Redarkhan, Hive Acatl, Atayala, and so forth.

At gut level I don't like some of the numbers you're using (20 damage, 8 base to hit, high average for ability scores), but as you said that doesn't really matter. And only playtest will really tell.

[User3]

So 0 HP = Death.

But are there any status effects attached to 1 to 9 HP?

I'm assuming you're going to treat the effectiveness of status effects by the equivalent damage they deal (a Medusa gaze dealing 10 dmg = petrified, but maybe 5 dmg = just slowed?).

And because of that, it seems only logical to have the levels of 'wounded' carry associated status effects. In fact, because the number of HP is largely arbitrary, woulden't it make sense for each HP to count as a sort of status?

This might mean that 4 or 5 HP makes more sense than 10, but that makes things even simpler.

So then you just need to find a status that seems equivalent to the level of damage inflicted, and voilà,, you've got a fairly balanced effect system. Of course, the fewer the HP the easier it is to come up with new abilities.

...

Another thing: How does Initiative fit in with this whole thing? The standard of making it a function of Agility seems like it would be unbalancing.

Are you going to do away with Initiative in favor of simultanious action and the accompanying "karmic strikes"?

[Username17]

So 0 HP = Death.

Well, 10 wounds = Incapacitation, which is similar, but there's still several wounds you can pick up before you actually die. I'm not planning on having raise dead at any stage of this.

But are there any status effects attached to 1 to 9 HP?

Not at 1 to 9, because that turns out to be way to big of a deal. Remember that a penalty shift of 10 is often enough to throw you right off the RNG. I like picking up a -1 penalty at 5 and a -2 penalty at 8 wound levels. That way people have a buffer region where they can still fight OK.

Another thing: How does Initiative fit in with this whole thing? The standard of making it a function of Agility seems like it would be unbalancing.

My plan is currently to have Initiative modifiers be Intelligence + Moxy. That way the people who usually go first are the people who are dodging defensive specialists, whose attacks are likely to land but do less damage. Those are the people for whom going first is least unbalancing, and it's really easy to justify people whose perception and speed are high going first. So it's a nice meeting of game balance and flavor text.

Are you going to do away with Initiative in favor of simultanious action and the accompanying "karmic strikes"?

One thing I was thinking of is to drop the random number generator on init tests in order to make that happen more. After all, an init specialist is only +4 on Slowy McSlowSlow, and is quite likely to be only +2 on any particular focused character of the same power level. So if you drop the RNG of initiative anywhere that isn't smaller than a d6, you'll get Karmic Strikes 1/N times, where N is the size of the RNG.

Half a d20, rounded down is nice because it entails no extra dice from the rest of the system (which is all on an Icosohedron), and a d6 is nice because it's really small. I'm leaning towards the d20 myself.

-Username17

[User3]

So under this damage system there is no reason, other than redundancy, to beat on guys with fists and swords because they do different types of damage right? In other words, either the party members find ways to do the same damage type or square off against separate enemies.
Also, how do you handle things with the same element that have different effects, such as domination vs. paralysis (or whatever). Or is there no effect other than straight out incapacitation?

[Username17]

So under this damage system there is no reason, other than redundancy, to beat on guys with fists and swords because they do different types of damage right? In other words, either the party members find ways to do the same damage type or square off against separate enemies.

No. Fists do physical life damage, and a metal sword does physical void damage, but they both inflict physical wounds at the end. These physical wounds add up to death eventually, and incapacitation in the short term.

On the other hand, every element also has a special form of magic damage that causes its own kind of wounds - for a total of 8 kinds of wounds. At 10 total wounds, you are incapacitated, and cannot fight. But it still takes 20 wounds of one type to actually kill you. So combining Fear blasts or paralyzation attacks with sword strikes is actually a way to keep your opponent from fighting while running a minimum chance of actually killing your opponents. In short, if you use combined arms, you maximize the chance that you take someone alive.

Also, how do you handle things with the same element that have different effects, such as domination vs. paralysis (or whatever). Or is there no effect other than straight out incapacitation?

Mental Fire attacks cause terror and eventual death. Mental Earth attacks cause paralyzation and eventual stoning. Every attack has a thing it does when there are ten wounds from it and a thing it does when there are 20 that is essentially fatal. But each element on the mental scale is its own thing.

-Username17

[User3]

Ok, thanks for clearing that up. It was difficult for me to understand the other concepts without understanding that. It sounds like a better way of doing things than flat out save-or-dies that exist in D&D.

[Essence]

So what determines what stat you soak with?

And how is it that Int+Moxy makes you a "defensive specialist" (in the example, the Medusa was soaking with Strength, and dodging with the same stat the swordsman was attacking with)?

[Username17]

An attack always rolls to hit with moxie or agility. If it rolls to-hit with moxie, the DC is target's moxie dependent. If it rolls to-hit with agility, the to-hit DC is target's agility based.

If it rolls to-hit with moxie, the damage DC is elan based. And the target soaks with elan.

It it rolls to-hit with agility, the damage DC is strength based. And the target soaks with strength.

If you have your numbers split across the Moxie/Agility axis, you are essentially a defensive specialist. Your attacks are going to suffer relative to the physical or mental focused character, but you always have something of a defense against whatever gets thrown at you. Game mechanically, you're the paladin, and people put you in front.

So if people have only 4 stat points to assign, the following characters are eggshells with hammers:

S2
A2
M0
E0

S0
A0
M2
E2

And the following characters are Defensive in nature:

S1
A1
M1
E1

S2
A0
M0
E2

S0
A2
M2
E0

It's a little weird, but it does work.

-Username17

[rapanui]

This is an excellent system.

Quick Question: Do characters gain stat points? How? By level, magic items, both? And I'm not quite sure I understand the logic behind making the elents unbalanced. It seems like everyone and their grandma will want to play a Fire user (for example) if you do that.

[Username17]

Do characters gain stat points?

Sure do. Gaining stat points, skill points, abilities, and backgrounds is your advancement. The DM, at the conclusion of the adventure hands out a number of each (that number may be zero), and the players spend those however they want.

It has been shown conclusively that the ability to trade backgrounds for raw numerics is essentially never ever balanced. As such, I'm not suggesting that the player be allowed to do that. Instead, games which emphasize backgrounds rather than ninja skills will hand out more backgrounds for people to have.

There exists the possibility of making a level-based system out of this. One in which you hand people defined lump sums of stats, active skills, backgrounds, and abilities in predefined ratios. I think that will be put in as an optional rule called "simplified experience". Heh.

And I'm not quite sure I understand the logic behind making the elents unbalanced.

In that people investing in Water will end up being inherently unbalanced against people invested in Fire. Not because Water is better in the abstract, but because their Fire defenses don't do anything against your water attacks specifically.

In short, the elemental system is there to make individuals perform abnormally well against specific individuals. It's not there to make some people better or worse in general.

It's a one-on-one imbalance, rather than a whole game imbalance that I'm putting in here.

-Username17

[rapanui]

Oh, OK. That makes absolute and perfect sense.

Here's another question: D&D 3e seems to try to handle small size as 'negative power' and larger sizes as 'positive power'. Now it does it badly for a plethora of reasons, the arbitrary nature of HD being the first and foremost.

How will your system handle small creatures? Will a beetle be a Level -2 character? If said beetle is Awakened somehow can it stay the same size and make up for its lack of power somehow?

I ask because I'm currently struggling with scaling the system up and down for my own project.

[Username17]

Smallness is currently just a special effect for having a smaller strength score. Bigness is just a special effect for having a larger strength score.

Currently, there aren't particularly any "size control" powers anywhere. No shrinking, no growth, no density increase. People are all just "people sized", and the only creatures that get spectacularly larger are various NPCs.

A perfectly balanced thing to do would be to trade Agility for Strength at the rate of 1 for 1. If you wanted it to be an advantageous power it could trade better than that, and a curse could trade off worse than that. But in any case that leads to a state in which people can break out of the mold of normal character considerations, which can run perilously into rocket launcher tag or padded sumo.

Example: if two people have no relative bulge on each other and hit/wound each other on 10 numbers, and then one of them grows 10 strength at the cost of 10 agility, then neither of them can hurt each other. OTOH, with a 9 point shift, the big guy is looking at connecting only 1 in 20 hits and only needing to connect a couple of times (like maybe one) to end it all. And this second spot leads to an unfortunately large advantage to people who have the ability to withdraw from combat, since they know they have a degree of freedom to hope for lucky events.

-Username17

[User3]

Have you made any attempt at balancing miniature-scale combat?

Things like AoOs, Reach, and terrain-related modifiers.

The above seem more multiplicative in power than additive, so I am interested to see how you would incorporate them in a scaling, balanced system.

[User3]

Maybe this belongs in another thread, but I have another question.

This one is based around damage types:
What about attacks which aren't strictly incapacitating?

Ex: I want to use a Disarm/Sunder attack on a guy (basically to temporarily disable one of his attacks). Would this be an attack using a specific element, but with a different (probably greater) base damage and a different ultimate effect?

What if I want to Dominate someone? Mental fire dealing less base 'damage' and with a different '10 damage' effect? What if I scare the pants off him first? How would the damage stack?

Thanks.

[Username17]

Have you made any attempt at balancing miniature-scale combat?

Sort of. Here's the thing: the more restrictive zones of control you impose on the battlefield, the more the game is tilted towards having a mixed party. The less restrictive zones of control you impose on the battlefield, the more the game is tilted towards having a monochromatic party.

Extreme 1: If any attack can be directed against any opponent, a group of all Strength/Agility maniacs or all Moxie/Elan maniacs is super-awesome, and usually beats a similar sized group of anything else.

Extreme 2: If the defender gets to direct any attack to himself, a mized group usually beats anything else.

So if you don't have a battlemap, the palyers should all be berserkers. If you allow "taunt" effects, the players should mix berserkers and spelljockies.

Personally, I like each group to have a Berserker (high SA), a Wizard (high ME), and a Paladin (medium SAME). In this spirit I actually prefer this set-up:

Shooting into melee is not a huge penalty.
Shooting past melee is.
Withdrawing from melee or moving past melee is free if you don't attack at the end.
Withdrawing from melee or moving past melee draws attacks of opportunity if you want to attack afterwards.

So if you put the Paladin in front, you can be reasonably sure that your enemies are going to either have to engage him in combat (which is never going to be their most efficient target), or suffer some AoOs from the Paladin, or open themselves up to a good smackdown from your relative offensive specialist.

This setup gives about the sort of "best case party" that I want - one of each.

----

What about attacks which aren't strictly incapacitating?

That's a hard one. Honestly, I've never seen any game for which such attacks weren't a horrible kludge and I don't have any great ideas. Most games do something like "everyone involved rolls skill checks and then the DM makes up some shit" - and I currently don't have a better way.

What if I want to Dominate someone?

In this system, dominating the minds of others actually takes a long time. Here's the order:

1. Confuse the crap out of someone.
2. Give them new ideas.
3. Let their mind reform and restructure itself on this new scaffold.
4. Now you have a new sleeper agent!

Game mechanically, you throw in some Mental Water wounds, and if they add up to 10 total wounds with anything else you've inflicted on them, they can't do anything anymore. If you get them to 10 total mental water wounds, they become pliable and catatonic - and they effectively "mentally bleed" and may die unless someone puts them back together. If they get to 20 mental water wounds, they are dead, a mindless husk.

Essentially, it's just like if you chopped them down with a sword, except that while they are lying there bleeding you have the option of sticking them together with a new viewpoint.

---

But if you've seen a good Disarm system in any system, I'm all ears, because I've honestly never ever seen one.

-Username17

[rapanui]

Disarm need not necessarily be a balanced combat option. It can simply be an option for those who wish to dissuade someone from fighting by removing their weapon, or bad guys that want to make their defeated opponents feel impotent before slaying them.

As long as it isn't possible to become a "Disarm Specialist" by spending skills or feats, its balanced. A character might gain disarm bonuses from the weapon he is using, or perhaps as a minor side-benefit from one of his other feats, but it shouldn't be a strategy he uses against the BBEG (unless the BBEG is a kobold getting all his power from a magical sword artifact, but I dunno, that's kind of ghey and anticlimatic).

[User3]

If you're temporarily disabling one of an opponent's attack forms, it is hard to balance, because it affacts characters based on their level of specialization.

It might be possible to balance it by allowing a re-arm action, in which case you can really just call it 'unbalance' and the resonse is 'refocus.'

It is particularly effective against a single foe with a powerful attack who is facing many characters. In the opposite situation it would be practically useless. It therefore falls into the category of 'conditional' damage, and somewhat breaks the 4-stat system of Balance/Unbalance by adding a new unbalancing factor.

And I don't know how to fit in or balance tactical/situational modifiers. Sorry

But I do have another question: Do you allow for AoE attacks?

And what values of elemental resistance do you use to demonstate immunity (against same-level characters) and resistance (the old 50% deal)?

[Username17]

But I do have another question: Do you allow for AoE attacks?

Sure. Here's the basic idea: you give the "area" attacks a damage and/or to-hit penalty, and then you let them hit more than one enemy. This is a great character ability to introduce, because it directly makes the character better by having it without pushing the character towards leaving the RNG.

And what values of elemental resistance do you use to demonstate immunity (against same-level characters) and resistance (the old 50% deal)?

That depends upon where they were to begin with.

But let's take an example where they hit you on an 11+, and their attacks have a base damage code that exceeds your soak bonus by 11. This means that on average a hit is going to be getting you for 2.13 wounds, with a maximum of 7 wounds with extreme wounds. (And btw, that's 1.065 wounds per attack, if you are interested)

So now, at 2 extra points of resistance, you take 1.53 wounds per hit. At 4 points of resistance, you take 1.03 wounds per hit. At 6 points of resistance, you suffer 0.63 wounds per hit. At 8 points of resistance, you get stuck for only 0.33 wounds. At 10 points of resistance, you are safe except for a mere 0.12 wounds on each hit. At 11, that drops to only .07 wph. At 12, they need to get a very good hit for you to have the slightest chance of being hurt - and wounds per hit is down to .03. At 13, you only deal with one wound every 100 hits, a mere .01 wph. At 14 extra resistance, you actually can't take any damage under any circumstances.

So what constitutes "immunity"? A relative pile of 10 resistance pushes you towards the RNG pretty well, and a relative pile of 20 resistance makes you impossibly far off the RNG.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1113349163[/unixtime]]
Sort of. Here's the thing: the more restrictive zones of control you impose on the battlefield, the more the game is tilted towards having a mixed party. The less restrictive zones of control you impose on the battlefield, the more the game is tilted towards having a monochromatic party.

This is ultimately why I'm not so certain having a balanced starting stat system is all that helpful.

The thing is that balancing tactical combat is more about balancing roles instead of stats. At this point you're going to be talking about armored tanks, light armored berserkers, slow short range artillery, long range artillery, Mobility troops, balanced unit, archers, ambusher, recon and support units.

And it doesn't necessarily always matter what beats what. Whether you want archers to beat long range artillery for instance is entirely up to you. The thing is however that you end up requiring to fit someone into a role, and this is tough in an RPG, because unlike a wargame you have characters who are constantly growing. Characters in RPG can fit multiple roles at a time and cover all the grey areas inbetween. And some of those combinations are really unbalancing. For instance, Combining a mobility troop with a long range artillery is a balance disaster waiting to happen.

I've come to the conclusion that to balance this stuff, you absolutely need a sliding scale of cost. That is taking certain roles makes other roles more expensive to you. Getting a lot of movement as a meleer should be much cheaper than getting a lot of movement as a ranged attacker. So if all you can do is use a sword, then it's ok to give someone flying at a cheaper price than a ranged caster or spellcaster. Basically the cost to combine roles that complement each other needs to be very high or possibly not allowed at all.

This is something that no system that I know of has really tried to do, and I think that's why many have failed.

[Username17]

I've come to the conclusion that to balance this stuff, you absolutely need a sliding scale of cost.

No... sliding scales end up with there being "better" and "worse" characters. Just check every sliding scale system ever made. +1 is worth +1. The whole point of the four stat system is that it arranges a point in which actually just trading your bonuses around at 1 for 1 is totally balanced and acceptable. Sliding scales would ruin that balance and make everything suck, just like it does in White Wolf, and Shadowrun, and every other game ever made.

We've tried this concept exhaustively, and it has never worked.

Getting a lot of movement as a meleer should be much cheaper than getting a lot of movement as a ranged attacker.

That's honestly the worst idea I've heard this year.

People are only "an archer" in a board game. In a role playing game, people are only an archer if they happen to be holding a bow right now. Do you intend to somehow refund peoples' points when they leave their bow in the closet? Do you intend to penalize peoples' other abilities when they pick up a damned rock to throw?

That's just not workable. People have a dynamic interaction with the world that cannot be sumarized effectively into combat roles for the purpose of making some sort of crazytastic algebraic formulae to determine the costs of individual upgrades. With this proposal, you are going to have situations where archers are going to buy extra points in battle axe skill to get themselves to count as a less archery oriented character category in order to save net points on their flight. Fvck that!

This isn't a workable idea. It's an idea which is way too complicated for a non-computer based system, and one in which there are going to be algebraic breakpoints that allow you to make characters that are better than others all over the place.

This is something that no system that I know of has really tried to do, and I think that's why many have failed.

Where have you been for the last 30 years? Hell, old Champions used to charge you more for Martial Arts the higher your Strength was. It's not that noone has done this before, it's that it's never worked very well, because this idea is stupid.

The goal is to make a system in which people taking anything from Column A is actually roughly as powerful as anything else in Column A and then letting people take anything out of Column A. Weird accounting systems where people are supposed to be able to self generate Column A is a complete non-starter. If you use point systems at all, those must be static systems where people spend small numbers to get specific known bonuses at a constant rate. Anything else is unworkable and almost universally less balanced.

-Username17

[User3]

1113807963[/unixtime]]

But I do have another question: Do you allow for AoE attacks?

Sure. Here's the basic idea: you give the "area" attacks a damage and/or to-hit penalty, and then you let them hit more than one enemy. This is a great character ability to introduce, because it directly makes the character better by having it without pushing the character towards leaving the RNG.

OK, that should have been obvious to me.
An AoE seems much harder to balance numerically than a multi-target affect, however.

If you're hitting a set # of foes, you could just divide the damage (which is beneficial when fighting a horde or orcs).

If you're hitting a set # of squares, I really have no idea how effective you're going to be, even with environmental effects/damage.

1113807963[/unixtime]]

And what values of elemental resistance do you use to demonstate immunity (against same-level characters) and resistance (the old 50% deal)?

That depends upon where they were to begin with.

But let's take an example where they hit you on an 11+, and their attacks have a base damage code that exceeds your soak bonus by 11. This means that on average a hit is going to be getting you for 2.13 wounds, with a maximum of 7 wounds with extreme wounds. (And btw, that's 1.065 wounds per attack, if you are interested)

So now, at 2 extra points of resistance, you take 1.53 wounds per hit. At 4 points of resistance, you take 1.03 wounds per hit. At 6 points of resistance, you suffer 0.63 wounds per hit. At 8 points of resistance, you get stuck for only 0.33 wounds. At 10 points of resistance, you are safe except for a mere 0.12 wounds on each hit. At 11, that drops to only .07 wph. At 12, they need to get a very good hit for you to have the slightest chance of being hurt - and wounds per hit is down to .03. At 13, you only deal with one wound every 100 hits, a mere .01 wph. At 14 extra resistance, you actually can't take any damage under any circumstances.

So what constitutes "immunity"? A relative pile of 10 resistance pushes you towards the RNG pretty well, and a relative pile of 20 resistance makes you impossibly far off the RNG.

-Username17

Heh. I was having trouble getting to sleep the other night and calculated out the same 14 for immunity in the 11/11 system. Sure beats counting sheep. Anyway, that seems like a good number for 'immunity.' A fire elemental probably won't be damaged by characters of the same level, but can still be singed by its higher-ups.

There is another thing I've been wondering about: Healing? Does it even exist? Is it treated the same as an attack? Is it disallowed in combat and abstract out of combat?

I've seen a number of your...discussions of the [im]balance of healing effects, so I'm interested to see how you treat them here.