Shadowrun-esque hit box opinions

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Shadowrun-esque hit box opinions

Post by RobbyPants »

I've never played Shadowrun or After Sundown, but I've been reading up on the combat of several systems. They largely seem pretty similar:
  • Everyone has ten hit-boxes.
  • Roll your attack, subtract the defense. Any net hits get added to damage.
  • Damage is static, but reduced by defender's soak roll.
Now, in some systems, the damage seems to be applied on a 1-for-1 basis. Three damage fills three hit-boxes. In other systems, the damage appears to be cumulative (1 damage = 1 box, 2 = 3, 3 = 6, and 4+ = 10).

So far as I can tell, the purpose of the second approach is to make things more "realistic" or gritty. Combat is always dangerous because you're one good attack roll and/or bad soak roll away from being killed. Does the first approach (1-for-1) make things feel too padded-sumo-like? What are your opinions of each approach?

Part of why I'm asking is I've been kicking around some ideas for a while. I think one way to keep the PCs alive would be to have PCs and major NPCs use the first approach, while all the minor NPCs would use the second approach. It wouldn't be quite the same as 4E D&D's one-hit minion rules, but it'd make it so weaker enemies drop faster while keeping PCs alive long and keeping boss fights from being one-shots.
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Post by Ancient History »

Shadowrun's variation of the system had something called damage codes for weapons. So there were four damage levels (Light =1 box, Medium = 3 boxes, Serious = 6 boxes, Deadly = 10...I think, it's been a while). And then the number in front of the damage level was how powerful the attack was. So a 10L hit was really hard to resist, but the ultimate damage if it penetrated was fairly light, and a 3D attack did serious damage if it got through, but was easy to stop. There were a number of fiddly bits as far resisting damage, staging damage up and down, etc.

But the main idea was: it's not like D&D where you have fistfuls of fucking hit points. You can't grind in SR the same way you do in D&D; your characters just can't keep taking hits. Likewise, damage is scaled more to the weapon than the individual: how hard you can swing the sword is largely irrelevant if the pencil-neck geek in front of you has a shotgun. (There are some special cases to this - a magically-augmented troll with a bow for example - but most people don't care.)

Of course, one of the mechanics of the SR1-3 (?) system that most people just ignore is that most Shadowrun NPCs don't fight until they're dead. They have a rating which literally says how much damage they'll take before they fuck off and run away or surrender. It's a bit like the Loyalty stat that nobody bothered to roll in AD&D.
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Post by Username17 »

The key for Shadowrun hit boxes is that they scale because of Soak. A weapon with a higher Strength will do more damage than a weapon with a lower Strength. A target with a higher Soak will take less damage than a target with a lower Soak. These cancel!

This means that if you give +1 damage and +1 soak to both sides the amount of damage inflicted will be the same. Which in turn means that the number of hits things can take will be the same. You can scale this system as far as you want without ever really having to make ridiculous numbers.

In D&D if you double the damage, enemies need double the hit points to keep up. This very rapidly moves things into hundreds or thousands of hit points being shuffled around. In a strength versus soak system, the bonuses to strength and soak can be completely linear. Our galaxy dragon only needs enough strength and soak to linearly push goblin archers off the RNG. Which means that your numbers can look like Armor Class where the space gods are only a few dozen points higher than the shit farmers, and not like D&D hit points where the mountain titans have thousands of hit points.

Hit boxes means never have to track and subtract four digit numbers.

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Post by Dean »

What is it about Shadowruns damage system that made vehicles and vehicle weapons particularly hard to track, as I've heard about that failure point many times despite never having actually played the system
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Post by Stahlseele »

Because vehicular / hardened armor was both weak and OP at the same time.
They more or less tell normal weaponry to take a hike and play with something smaller but as soon as something big enough touches it, it is usually a one hit kill.
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Post by Username17 »

Dean wrote:What is it about Shadowruns damage system that made vehicles and vehicle weapons particularly hard to track, as I've heard about that failure point many times despite never having actually played the system
Hoo boy. That depends on the edition.

1st through 3rd had a horribad variable target number system. So while the damage thresholds were in theory capable of handling any level of strength and toughness, the strength and toughnesses weren't capable of doing that. Specificall strength increased target number and toughness increased dice rolled against that target number and it all got very stupid very quickly.

Now in 4th edition they removed variable target numbers, so it could have worked fine. But instead they decided to give out vehicle armor that depending on circumstances is worth one hit or one die on damage soak. And since it takes about 3 dice to roll one hit that's just fail.

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Post by RobbyPants »

Ancient History wrote:Shadowrun's variation of the system had something called damage codes for weapons. So there were four damage levels (Light =1 box, Medium = 3 boxes, Serious = 6 boxes, Deadly = 10...I think, it's been a while). And then the number in front of the damage level was how powerful the attack was. So a 10L hit was really hard to resist, but the ultimate damage if it penetrated was fairly light, and a 3D attack did serious damage if it got through, but was easy to stop. There were a number of fiddly bits as far resisting damage, staging damage up and down, etc.
Ah, so it looks like I was misunderstanding that part. The 1=1, 2=3... part wasn't a lookup-table for converting damage rolls, but rather a specific rating per weapon? So, if it overcame the soak, that was that, and it did a set amount of damage?

Ancient History wrote: But the main idea was: it's not like D&D where you have fistfuls of fucking hit points. You can't grind in SR the same way you do in D&D; your characters just can't keep taking hits. Likewise, damage is scaled more to the weapon than the individual: how hard you can swing the sword is largely irrelevant if the pencil-neck geek in front of you has a shotgun. (There are some special cases to this - a magically-augmented troll with a bow for example - but most people don't care.)
So, in a system where 1 damage = 1 box, how many hits do people typically take before going down?

FrankTrollman wrote:The key for Shadowrun hit boxes is that they scale because of Soak. A weapon with a higher Strength will do more damage than a weapon with a lower Strength. A target with a higher Soak will take less damage than a target with a lower Soak. These cancel!
Yeah, I got the part about scaling like that. I guess what I don't have much intuition for is how much variability you see in a system where each side is rolling 5-9 dice and taking a difference. Basic math tells me the largest possible difference would be 9, but that would be astronomically rare. Does that typically result in differences of 0 - 2, with an occasionally higher result?

I suppose I could just take 20 minutes to write up a simulator in .net and call it a day...

FrankTrollman wrote: This means that if you give +1 damage and +1 soak to both sides the amount of damage inflicted will be the same. Which in turn means that the number of hits things can take will be the same. You can scale this system as far as you want without ever really having to make ridiculous numbers.

In D&D if you double the damage, enemies need double the hit points to keep up. This very rapidly moves things into hundreds or thousands of hit points being shuffled around. In a strength versus soak system, the bonuses to strength and soak can be completely linear. Our galaxy dragon only needs enough strength and soak to linearly push goblin archers off the RNG. Which means that your numbers can look like Armor Class where the space gods are only a few dozen points higher than the shit farmers, and not like D&D hit points where the mountain titans have thousands of hit points.

Hit boxes means never have to track and subtract four digit numbers.
Yeah, from what I understood of the system, that was a lot of the attraction for me.
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Post by Ancient History »

RobbyPants wrote:
Ancient History wrote:Shadowrun's variation of the system had something called damage codes for weapons. So there were four damage levels (Light =1 box, Medium = 3 boxes, Serious = 6 boxes, Deadly = 10...I think, it's been a while). And then the number in front of the damage level was how powerful the attack was. So a 10L hit was really hard to resist, but the ultimate damage if it penetrated was fairly light, and a 3D attack did serious damage if it got through, but was easy to stop. There were a number of fiddly bits as far resisting damage, staging damage up and down, etc.
Ah, so it looks like I was misunderstanding that part. The 1=1, 2=3... part wasn't a lookup-table for converting damage rolls, but rather a specific rating per weapon? So, if it overcame the soak, that was that, and it did a set amount of damage?
Per weapon, spell, etc. The thing is you first rolled to see if you could hit, then the Strength was reduced by armor (if relevant), then you rolled dice to soak the hit (stage down the damage). So if you rolled enough soak dice, the 4D hit could be reduced to S, M, L, or nothing.

Compare/contrast this to Fortitude in Vampire: the Masquerade.
Ancient History wrote: But the main idea was: it's not like D&D where you have fistfuls of fucking hit points. You can't grind in SR the same way you do in D&D; your characters just can't keep taking hits. Likewise, damage is scaled more to the weapon than the individual: how hard you can swing the sword is largely irrelevant if the pencil-neck geek in front of you has a shotgun. (There are some special cases to this - a magically-augmented troll with a bow for example - but most people don't care.)
So, in a system where 1 damage = 1 box, how many hits do people typically take before going down?
Shadowrun had a double-track system where you had 10 boxes of stun and 10 boxes of physical damage to go through - run out of stun and you fell unconscious, run out of physical and you died.

I did a vaguely similar system for Space Madness! (which cribbed a fair bit of SR4), although I tossed in wounds (basically, damage that required special healing) to make things a little more complicated.
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Post by Stahlseele »

The LMSD Model also meant that if you did not have enough Body dice to roll, you took damage.
For example, even if the damage was only 2D Damage, you would have to roll 2 eight times to not take any damage.
Now if you only had 6 body dice to roll with against that, then no matter what you did, you would take L damage, because you could not roll more than six twos at a time, meaning you could only stage the incomind deadly damage down to light. Granted, that is still taking 1 box instead of 10 . .
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Post by RobbyPants »

Ancient History wrote: Compare/contrast this to Fortitude in Vampire: the Masquerade.
I haven't read or played that. From what I understand, it uses d10s, and 1s and 10s trigger things (extra dice/rerolls?).

Ancient History wrote: Shadowrun had a double-track system where you had 10 boxes of stun and 10 boxes of physical damage to go through - run out of stun and you fell unconscious, run out of physical and you died.

I did a vaguely similar system for Space Madness! (which cribbed a fair bit of SR4), although I tossed in wounds (basically, damage that required special healing) to make things a little more complicated.
I'd noticed that looking at some quickstart SR5 rules.

I was toying with a cinematic system that would track actual wounds separately and the hit boxes would represent stamina (which would return quickly). That's not super important for this part of it, thought.

Stahlseele wrote:The LMSD Model also meant that if you did not have enough Body dice to roll, you took damage.
For example, even if the damage was only 2D Damage, you would have to roll 2 eight times to not take any damage.
Now if you only had 6 body dice to roll with against that, then no matter what you did, you would take L damage, because you could not roll more than six twos at a time, meaning you could only stage the incomind deadly damage down to light. Granted, that is still taking 1 box instead of 10 . .
Oh wow. That's way more complicated than I'd gleaned. I didn't realize there were multiple soaks to reduce it steps. That seems way more complicated than what I'd want to do.
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Post by Ancient History »

It's one soak roll, but you had multiple stages of damage.

So for example, you're facing 2D damage and you have Body 10. If you roll 2 hits, you stage the damage down to S. If you roll 4 hits, stage it down to M. 6 hits, L. 8+ hits and you take no damage at all.

By the same token, if someone rolls high on the attack roll they can stage the damage up - so again, it's the linear increase/response that Frank was talking about.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Ancient History wrote:It's one soak roll, but you had multiple stages of damage.

So for example, you're facing 2D damage and you have Body 10. If you roll 2 hits, you stage the damage down to S. If you roll 4 hits, stage it down to M. 6 hits, L. 8+ hits and you take no damage at all.
Ah. So you're just subtracting multiples. That's less rolling, at least.

Ancient History wrote: By the same token, if someone rolls high on the attack roll they can stage the damage up - so again, it's the linear increase/response that Frank was talking about.
Net hits don't increase the severity (L -> M -> S -> D), right? It just results in a higher number of hits the target needs to soak?
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Post by Ancient History »

The details vary a bit between editions, and you've made me dig out the 3rd edition rulebook.
The character who rolls the most successes can use those successes to increase the damage his weapon does. the weapon's Damage level increases by one level for every two net successes. In the case of a tie, the weapon does its base damage. If the character is able to stage his damage up to Deadly, any extras successes can be used to increase the Power Rating of the attack by one for every two remaining successes achieved by the victor.
So net successes stage the Damage Rating up; and the soak dice stage the Damage Rating down.
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Post by Rasumichin »

RobbyPants wrote: Net hits don't increase the severity (L -> M -> S -> D), right? It just results in a higher number of hits the target needs to soak?
No, they do increase it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to one hit KO somebody in SR 1-3 with a pistol or a knife. And one-hit KOs where always supposed to be the norm in SR. You could always build bullet sponges, but these where universally things that took either dodge or soak dices or both far into the clearly superhuman range. If you're a normal gangbanger with a leather jacket, being shot at with a pistol is always pretty fucking dangerous and SR rules always wanted to reflect that.

Problem is that outside of kinda wonky optional rules and "orbital lasers fall, everyone dies" decisions on part of the MC, you still can't one hit kill somebody in SR1-3 with anything. At all.

That is because 10 boxes of damage is the absolute maximum damage you can ever do in a single hit with anything. After the ten boxes are full, you're not dead, you're in your physical damage overflow monitor, which has as many additional boxes as your body attribute and where you bleed out at a pace of 1 box per ten minutes. "Deadly" damage isn't immediately deadly, it's life-threatening and incapacitating.

This is why SR4 changed damage from LMSD to a number for base damage that is either increased by net hits or reduced by soak. So if you shoot somebody with a base damage 6 pistol and score 3 unsoaked net hits, you do 9 boxes of damage. Damage monitors also got changed from a flat 10 boxes to a variable number equal to your body attribute.
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Post by Stahlseele »

In SR1 to 3, Trolls were feared combat monsters for a reason.
It was easy enough to get Armor to 8 ballistic and Body to 16 dice.
A Shotgun deals 10S Damage base. You can get that to 13D with a Burst fire.
Or different Ammo in some cases would make it to 10D base Damage.
But a proper built Tank Troll would have the aforementioned 8 points of Armor.
Meaning you rolled either against 2 or against 5 to stage down Damage.
And if your opponent did not have ridiculous ammounts of skill or luck on his shot, you could reliably take a shotgun burst to the face and shrug it off.
Because hit locations were and are not really a thing that exists in Shadowrun.
And THEN you get to the silly big guns.
A Minigun right? It deals 7S BASE Damage. BUT! It fires a set ammount of bullets. Namely 15 per trrigger pull. And every 3 bullets increase the damage level while every bullet increases the power. So realistically speaking?
A Minigun deals 22D Damage.
BUT . . if you were wearing heavy military armor?
That is 7 points of HARDENED ARMOR (kinda like vehicle armor) and thus?
The 7S Base Damage fails to penetrate, you are absolutely immune to the 22D Damage you should have to soak.
A heavy Pistol on the other Hand?
Deals 9M Damage. 10M if you go for the Big One. 12S if you go for Burst Fire.
So yes, a heavy pistol with burst fire was the better gun for taking out targets with hardened armor. Despite it being basically a modern pistol with 10mm or so in comparision to a mingun . .
You now start to see where the damage system kinda breaks at not even that high end right?
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Post by Username17 »

The way that Shadowrun 3rd edition functionally works is this:
  • For every 2 net hits the attacker has in excess of the defender's soak, the defender suffers 1 wound level.
  • The first wound level does 1 hit point, the second 2, the third 3, and the fourth 4.
  • Everyone has 10 hit points, so it's not important whether attacks would do a fifth wound level or not.
This being the nineties, it's not presented in a clear manner like that, and is instead talked about in terms of starting in the middle and moving the dial up and down. Further, weapons vary on two axes of "doing more damage":
  • A weapon's "power" changes the target number of the defender's soak roll.
  • A weapon's "damage level" changes the number of free hits the weapon comes with on each hit that the defender would then have to soak.
Why bother having some weapons that were easier to soak but had to be soaked more times? Why bother having weapons that were harder to soak but didn't start with as many hits to soak? I don't have an answer to that. People thought it was a good idea at the time. It was not.

And believe it or not, that's a simplification. In 1st edition, weapons had a third value, which changed the number of hits a weapon needed to have in order to reach the next wound threshold. Which sounds like it would be bad, but that number was also automatically multiplied across the damage level to give you more free hits that your opponent had to soak. That number was really pointless and got dropped in 2nd edition.

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Post by Stahlseele »

And as you can see, burst fire and automatic fire and high velocity fire really rapidly shoot up both the damage and the power.
But if your starting power on single shot(even if the weapon did not HAVE single shot), was below or equal to that of hardened armor . . it just plinked off harmlessly.
See Military and Vehicle Armor.
But if you got your BASE POWER ABOVE said armor . . you basically did full damage to your target, because at that point soaking the damage would be mostly impossible, as long as you are not talking about certain critters, or simply did not happen, in the case of vehicles. Vehicles did not get a soaking roll. They got inherent damage resistance and hardened armor for that reason. But if you had something that cracked that? It cracked right open.
Of course . . there were ways around this as well . . AV Armor basically made hardened/vehicle armor more or less act like normal "soft" armor that was usually worn by everything else . .
And good old Dikote did kinda sorta the same for melee weapons.
Push a Trolls or even an Ork or Dorf STR up to 16, give him a Dikote Pole-Arm, and he will do 20D("AV") DMG and basically cut everything below a main battle tank open like a tin opener . .
Yes, SR3 was way more on the awesome stupid side of things than on the black trenchcoat side of gamestyle, if you let people actually make use of those rules.

Body and STR were way more usefull in SR3 than they are in SR4 and 5.
And stuff like dermal tech and bone works directly added dice to the body attribute, and did not just give bonus dice to damage resistance . . but that distinction is basically moot, because it only got used for brute force trauma like hits and shots impacting, but not for things like endurance or resistance to sickness, chemicals and biological warfare . . for that, only the natural attribute was used. Plus applicable other bonus dice of course . .
Last edited by Stahlseele on Sun Apr 07, 2019 9:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by merxa »

Was soak being a roll important for the mechanic opposed to just a flat number that gets subtracted afterwards?

If someone were to rewrite 3.5 damage rules for this ( ignoring how silly this would actually be) then every damage type need to have a corresponding soak resistance applied?

The save vs half dmg mechanic would also have to be rewritten right? And DR would be something like, ignore everything under 2dmg or along those lines.
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Post by RobbyPants »

merxa wrote:Was soak being a roll important for the mechanic opposed to just a flat number that gets subtracted afterwards?
Well, damage is static, too (apart from adding from a good attack roll), so you'd end up with non-random damage.

I mean, you could roll damage and have soak be static. The soak roll gives someone on each side of the attack something to roll.

merxa wrote: If someone were to rewrite 3.5 damage rules for this ( ignoring how silly this would actually be) then every damage type need to have a corresponding soak resistance applied?

The save vs half dmg mechanic would also have to be rewritten right? And DR would be something like, ignore everything under 2dmg or along those lines.
You'd need to have some type of toughness/soak equivalent put into 3.5. DR does exist, but it's super rare. Given that damage and HP already scale assuming there is little or no DR, you have quite a bit to rewrite.
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Post by Ancient History »

If you were re-writing 3.5 damage rules with soak, you'd just use Damage Resistance. It would be a straight "subtract X from damage of this type and apply the rest."
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Post by Stahlseele »

But if you do that, then you also need to rewrite armor, because it does exactly that.
Y armor gets substracted from X damage to resist Z damage as your TN to roll on your Body Attribute.
Let us go back to old Faithful.
Somebody shoots you with a heavy pistol.
It does 9M damage. He gets 2 hits in. 9S.
But you are wearing your padded duster with plates in it for 5 Armor.
That means you do not roll against TN 9 but against TN4 to stage down.
You are a normal Human. A bit on the tougher Side. You have 4 Body.
You get to roll 4 dice to resist DMG. Well, plus Combat pool, but for easyness sake let us ignore combat pool on both attacker and defender.
Meaning you get to roll 4 dice. You would need 6 dice to be able to stage it down to no DMG taken at all.
But you only have 4 dice. And you roll 2 Hits for TN4. So the DMG lets lowered back to the original M DMG of the Heavy Pistol.
You take 3 boxes of physical DMG instead of the 6 boxes you would have taken had you rolled only 1 hit on your Soak Roll.
You can afford getting shot like that another 2 times.
Or you can afford one S DMG to get into you. You'd be at 9 out of 10 boxes on your condition monitor.
With your M DMG, you now also suffer a +2 to your TNs to roll.
ASIDE from Damage-Resistance/Soak-Tests.
So no, there is no real downward spiral in that at least.
But your counter attacks are gonna suffer a bit.
Turns out, having been shot impedes you from operating at normal levels.
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Post by Blade »

In my homemade system for Shadowrun, I've changed the damage system to work like this:

- Weapons have a power rating, in hand to hand combat the damage is increased by attacker's net hits*2. In ranged combat, the damage is increased by a random value (so that even a random punk with a handgun can be potentially very dangerous)

- Armor soaks damage, but has its rating reduced by one for each hit. To easily handle this, the armor damage boxes are drawn above the damage monitor, and with each hit the player crosses out one box

- Damage doesn't stack. The player doesn't cross the boxes of the damage track, he just adds a mark for each damage. This helps keep track of individual wounds (for fluff and for healing)

- Every third box of the damage track, characters get negative modifiers. The modifiers get worse with each row, so a 6 box wound is harsher than two 3 box wounds (and wounds with less than 3 boxes are purely cosmetic).

- Modifiers stack so while it's hard to get killed, you can quickly become completely useless if you take too many hits.

- You can ignore a wound by spending an Edge point or by converting it to an after-effect. You ignore the wound for the rest of the scene, but afterwards you get an after-effect that depends on the nature and the gravity of the wound.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

So would the fix for SR4e vehicles be to treat them like larger and larger trolls
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Stahlseele
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Post by Stahlseele »

*snerk* i have seen some trolls that were at 0.01Essence and should, by all rights, have been considered a vehicle rather than a living being still and so could have gotten away with having a number plate on them somewhere . .
I made one called "Van" because he survived a crash with a Van and the Van did not. Took the numberplate as his spoils of victory and wore it around his neck on a chain across his chest . .
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Post by Pixels »

FrankTrollman wrote:This means that if you give +1 damage and +1 soak to both sides the amount of damage inflicted will be the same.
That's actually not true. Part of the distribution gets cut off because damage taken cannot go below 0, creating a bias in the attacker's favor that increases the more dice are involved. E.g., the average net hits for 5 damage vs 5 soak is 0.58, and the average net hits for 10 damage vs 10 soak is 0.83.

The overall point is good though, that if you scale damage and soak linearly with power level, then you don't have to scale HP as well. You do have to be careful to ensure that players end up within a pretty tight range of soak, otherwise you end up in the territory where any enemy that can even scratch the high soak players will turn the low soak players into paste, and anything that's a reasonable level of threat to the low soak players cannot touch the high soak players at all.
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