Tried to start working on comparing CoX powers to have a starting point for determining how to make a PnP system that balances time, hp, mp, and whatnot...  Figured I'd use Brawl as the basic starting point.  But I found that powers are confusing as all heck.  Brawl is a different power depending on your powerset.  As are the prestige staff powers.  And the regular level 1 powers.  Here's what I found so far:

https://spreadsheets.google.co...amp;authkey=CJfunaAM

  Right, so.  We like the min/max caps that ironically help sideline min/maxing.  Let's hear it for having provided help that wasn't just elaborate nitpicking.

  Snag with trying to direct compare to CoX besides the fact it's a class style game, is it's also a combat style game first and foremost.  Though the primary/secondary angle does have some potential.  As does the HP/MP(endurance) equivalent/time resource thing even if I cant really place a way to apply them.

  I completely sympathize with the 'how to translate mindset to mechanics' thing Phillip goes through.

  Seems at the moment primary sticking point as ever is actual chargen itself, as a play mechanics it seems we can just pick up a bare bones one and just go with it.

And Tim suggested a different pool of points for combat attributes/skills and out of combat skill.  This idea would kinda force a minimum aptitude in combat and out-of-combat skill.  The trick is in defining combat and non-combat.  Because a sharp eye is useful in and out of combat.  As is first aid, strength, speed, etc, etc.

One thought I had was making player pay twice for the same skill if they want it in and out of combat.  Say you get 100 combat points and 100 non combat points at level 10.  If you want a character that's super strong in combat (Hulk), but wimpy out of combat (Bruce Banner), you can do that by not buying out of combat strength.  But somebody like Wolverine has super senses and regen in and out of combat and must pay for that stuff on both sides.

Problem with that is the min/maxers will instantly go for the Hulk build so they can have Bruce Banner's brains out of combat... 'cause who needs advanced calculus in combat?

Soo... I'm thinking of having all skills be just skills, but players must select one of those skills as their primary combat skill.  For example.  Player wants a dancer who's very good at dancing.  They're also kinda good at poetry, botany, teaching, and so on.  They must select a skill among their list of skills as their combat skill that meets the minimum for that level.  In this example, the only skills that meet the minimum is dancing and poetry.  The player chooses poetry.  So in combat, they use rhyme to annoy and confuse enemies, causing psychic damage.

Silly, perhaps, but it makes the point that you don't have to be fast/strong/DEX/dodge/initiative/perception monkeys to survive in a fight.  Be creative.  Sword mages and wizards dodge with their INT.  Sorcerers smile their enemies to death.  It's been done in other systems.

I can't help but think about how Byron will have people roll piloting every time just to start a ship. Or get it off the ground. Or land. You know... BASIC stuff any pilot who so much as has the skill would be able to pull off 999 times out of a thousand. NOPE! Try 5 out of 6 chance! 1 out of 6, you have the chance of ruining the controls, the ship, or even semi-crashing into the ground. Silly. So here's the point I'm getting at:

When Byron has us roll piloting just to start a ship, it makes me want to do one of two things: 1) Never pilot so it isn't my problem. 2) Raise piloting skill so dang high I might only fail 1 out of 24 times instead. So to prevent THIS, I propose the following: Have "inherent" abilities. The rules will cover "Everyone can do this, this and this" (namely the GOD stats such as dodge, etc). Anything BEYOND said base skill will be impressive feats such as your mentioned running up walls and backflipping while shooting at two guys. Want to dodge bullets while tightrope walking? Fine. Up your dodge. Want to dodge a punch? Don't worry about it... everyone can do that.

The goal I want to shoot for is a combat system that's FAST.  And by fast I mean a minion will take 1 round for the striker to defeat.  A leutennant might take 2 rounds.  And a boss 3-4 rounds.  Super powerful elite solo monster final fight of the story might take 6 rounds!  *Gasp!*

You have to figure at any given time there is going to be 4 to 6 players at ANY tabletop game. That said, as I was reading what Mittens last typed, I was remembering Warhammer and how the HP was like, just these 10 dots. So along the lines of what you're talking about:

Wimp: 1 HP
Minion: 4 HP
Lieutenant: 8 to 10 HP
Boss: 25 to 40 HP

These HP levels are substantially lower than in DnD, but the point is that HP is not a gauge of how hard you have to hit, but rather how many times they must BE hit. The players would take off 1 HP on a successful hit. That means any player can take out a wimp with 1 hit. Any GROUP can take out a Minion in one round. And the boss has 25 HP so that even a group of 6 hitting him every round will take 24 of his hit points off in 4 rounds. He'll still have 1 more HP and thus, 1 more turn to do something before taken out.

Now even as all this was occurring to me, so was the fact that SOMEONE will want to be the damage dealer. I'm thinking a DD could, depending on how broken we want this, either do 2 HP of damage in his turn, or has what amounts to a special ability that allows him to hurt higher level enemies (like bosses and lieutenants) more while he hurts lower levels just as much.

SIDE NOTE:
Don't forget, we will want people to feel special in their respective rolls. The downside of having 2 clerics isn't that it's redundant (nobody minds being healed more), it's that the ones playing those clerics may start getting competitive or just plain feel less special. I hate to say it, but one of the angles I'm coming from is psychology of the players. If your players aren't having fun, the game is a failure.

After quick brainstorm with Yayvid and Tim about these things, we fell in love with the Champions Online's system, where characters can change their roles on the fly.  Solo?  Click the "balanced" button.  In a team with no defender?  Click the defender button.  Team needs more damage dealers?  Click the DD button.  And so on.

But how do tank players feel like they're special when anyone can tank?  Champions already answers this.  You can optimize your build for tanking.  Sure someone optimized for DD can tank in a pinch, but not as well as the person focused on tanking.

So how does this translate into a game mechanic?  Suppose you start your turn with 10 dice.  You're a healer, but no one's hurt.  So you choose to spend all 10 dice on attack.  WHAM!  You hit.  Now the bad guys want to kill you.  So next round you spend all 10 on tanking!  WHAM!  You survive the attack!  But your allies are hurt too!  So next round you spend your dice on healing.  Well since you're doing what you're good at, you get BONUS dice for healing!

Ingenious.  Talked with the local game store owner about our ideas, and he said, "I know what you mean about initiative being a pain.  I developed a 2 player pirate game, but new players wanted to play so I adapted to system for multiplayer.  But keeping track of initiative was time consuming.  Then I came up with a system of dealing out cards for initiative.  Higher the card, higher the initiative.  Then it evolved to where face cards had extra effects.  Queen of diamonds was nature, so you'd have some natural event happen on your turn like clear waters.  Aces got to go again at the bottom of the round.  And so forth."

Playing cards!  Visible initiative markers that can be easily handled.  So if you want to trade up initiative every round to keep things interesting, it's not a huge chore it's very simple.

"Builds allow you to specialize your character by selecting different roles and by equipping different Upgrades, Block replacers, Slotted Passives, and Devices. For each character, you unlock 6 roles during the level progression. Regardless of the number of builds you use, you can still select from the same 14 powers. In other words, you will not be able to choose entirely new powers for another build."

What that all means escapes me, but there's an idea of how Champs deals with the different roles.  I don't recall if you can change roles mid combat, but in FFXI you had to go to a city and talk to an NPC to change jobs.  Technically this ability exists in our current D&D games, where you can go from rogue to bard and back after every fight if you wanted to...

Downside: complexity.  The champs system adds 2 layers of complexity.  Roles, and optimizing those roles.  In PnP terms, you'd have to make 5 character sheets per character, and update each of those 5 every time you level.  Unless there's some super simple way of applying roles without a lot of during-play math which slows down play.  Perhaps a level specific quick reference sheet for each aspect a role changes?  For example, a level 10 sentinel sheet might say "minus 3 HP dice, minus 3 damage dice, plus 4 healing dice."  and a level 20 sentinel cheat sheet might say "minus 6 HP dice...." and so forth.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:50, Wed 08 Dec 2010.

Tim and I had a long conversation... well mostly a monologue from Tim... but the jist of it was about a game called Gamma that has super simple character generation.  You pick a race such as "half roach" and that's it!  You get a list of powers, now let's play!

"But what if I want to play something off the wall that isn't on the race list?  Like a could with tree limbs?  A lot of people say that the more character customization you allow, the more complicated character creation and game system becomes.  Take D&D for instance.  I used to think that 'only' 4 encounters and dailies wasn't enough.  But that was when only PHB 1 was out.  Now I know better.  That's a LOT of customization.  And it spans a library of books."

Me: "City of Heroes: 'Race?  What race?  Your appearance has no effect whatsoever on your power.  Big guy?  Could be a glass cannon.  Or a healer.  Little girl?  Could be a rock solid tanker or a raging brute.  So far, no one seems to have a problem suspending disbelief with that part of CoX.  You don't have to have big muscles to punch hard."

Other things we covered were: deadline for fully functional game: November 2011.  Theme of game system by that time: RL heroes!  Firemen, Police, etc.

We also discussed open-ended powersets.  Suppose you have the power "teleportation."  In D&D 3.5 it would give a description like "you open a portal 3' wide that leads to an exit of your choosing" then let the player decide how to use the power.

Tim: "I was playing Emmy as a rogue in 3.5.  I told the GM 'I'm gunna slice his achilles tendon to knock him down.  The DM said 'sure go for it.  It won't be easy, but give it a try.'  I made the DC and the guy went down and was unable to stand for the rest of the encounter...  In 4e, that's a DAILY, and it's a save ends."

Me: "Joe would flip out if we allow open-ended powers like that.  'If players can do that, then monsters can!'  So I've been thinking of having a 4e limited powerset for monsters, and 3.5 style open-ended powers for players.  Nothing says the monsters HAVE to be allowed exactly everything the players."

Tim: "Which follows your 'players have top billing' concept.  I like."

Today we visited the game store and asked the owner to demo D&D Gamma World for us.  Inside the box is: a rule booklet.  A couple steno-pad page size character sheets.  A deck of cards.

Character generation is:  Roll dice to determine powerset, or choose from a list.  Put an 18 in your primary stat, 16 in your secondary stat, then roll 3d6 for each of your other stats.  Pick gear and get dealt a couple cards, and you're ready to play!

The system is a marriage of traditional PnP RPG and a trading card game.  You make your own deck of 12 or so cards with bonus item cards granted by the GM for successful play.  Expansion packs have 1 rare card, two uncommons, and several commons.  Presumably you can play without ever buying an expansion pack... but we all know better.

So the advantages of this system are: Simple character sheet / character creation.  Quick and easy to learn the rules.  Can create a random character without a computer.

Then I mentioned our musings about an RPG that doesn't need a GM.  He told us that describes Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game perfectly.  So he demo'd that game for us too.  FUN!  It's everything I as a DM wished D&D were.  There's one d-20 that everyone shares.  Each player is given a character card describing their class and such.  Then they get a couple power cards that match up with that class.  We were each also given a cheet-sheet card that explained how to play the game.  One card is all it took to know the rules of the game!  Well... mostly because we were familiar with D&D, but still...  Cheat card described a turn:

Turn part 1: Hero Phase.  Move and attack; or attack and move; or double move.

Part 2: Exploration phase.  If you're standing at the edge of your map tile, draw a tile from the tile pile and add it to the edge you're standing at.  Randomly generated maps!  Under certain circumstances you'll draw and play and encounter card.  Which is usually a trap of some kind that attacks everyone.  My rogue character had a bonus to disarming traps.

Part 3: Villain phase.  Here's the genius of the game.  Under certain circumstances you draw and play a monster card.  Which is a monster.  Place the monster fig on the map where it tells you.  The monster card tells the player the monster's tactics.  "If the wolf is adjacent to a hero, it bites them.  If it is within 1 tile, it uses pounces the nearest hero.  If two or more tiles away from a hero, it moves it's move speed to the nearest hero."  My rogue char had a stealth card for immediately discarding a monster card I spawn if I choose.

You get xp and treasure for defeating monsters.  Very very simple, and no GM needed!  We literally learned to play the game in like 5 minutes.  There's a time limit of sorts where a powerful monster spawns if you don't escape the dungeon in a certain number of turns.

Disadvantage of this game course is the lack of roleplay and story, but those are relatively easily added.  The basic mechanic is just that.  A mechanic for fun dungeon crawling.  It spread out the chore of being a DM among the players.  Very very awesome.  If a group of players wanted to, they could assign a storyteller that gave plot behind the goal of the board game.  Or the game designers could have expansion packs that are a self-contained adventure with map tiles, monsters, and story.

If you prefer a less fig-focused style of play like a lot of 3.5 players fuss over, you could play with just the cards and dice, but I like drawing and adding random dungeon tiles and moving figs on said tiles.  I will admit that the lack of figs and dice tends to force me to use my imagination and thus forces me into more of a roleplay mindset.  Playing D&D 4e, I'll move my fig across a board and say "Kitau moves 5 then charges 4 more squares using brawl encounter power in place of a basic melee..."  Playing any game without figs I'll say, "I rush toward the troopers and do a leaping screw attack body-slam!"

Ravenloft turns out to be not as simple as Tim and I had hoped.  Explore, map expands, encounter card drawn.  Card: "Now whenever you discard a treasure card, you take 1hp in damage."  Monster spawns and attacks.  Next round.  Attack monster, but it survives.  More map is revealed, another monster, another encounter card.  "Trap!  Whenever the villain phase comes up, attack every PC in this area with a trap attack."  Monster attacks.  Next round.  Kill monster!  Get treasure card!  "Discard this card when you make an attack.  You get a +1 attack bonus for every hero within 1 tile of you."  Next hero uses a power with a lasting effect.  Another has an interrupt power.  And so on.  Modifiers, effects, zones, temporary buffs and enfeebles, Monster HP to track, treasure cards, xp, conditions, etc., etc.  It piles up fast.

By the end we were all like "someone found the exit.  good enough.  don't care if technically we'd have to trudge through another round.  we win.  yay."  Tim had gotten bored.  Even with most of the team about to die.  Info overload from a seemingly simple game has me thinking of avoiding conditions, effects, modifiers, zones, interrupts, etc. like the plague.  D6 SW is reasonable enough to play when it's just blasters and grenades.  Add on a few dozen force powers and it begins to get overwhelming.

After pondering Ravenloft's complications came up with a rule to help keep things simple.

There can be no more than 1 buff and 1 de-buff on any individual at at a time.

Suppose for example, your character is given the effect "hasten" where they can move faster than normal.  Then you use your power "Bane strength" where you sacrifice a few HP to raise your STR mod for the rest of the encounter.  The player chooses which effect to keep, but cannot keep both.

Suppose the enemy throws a flash-bang grenade.  Very loud, very bright.  The attack hits!  The hero is now EITHER blinded OR disoriented.  Bad-guy's choice.  Not both.

Also, the flash-bang grenade cannot hurt good-guys if thrown by good-guys.  This is a very needful hand-wave employed by MMOs that's seriously lacking in PnPs.

The yet-to-be-named game system so far.

Your Charsheet will look thus:

DAMAGE: [value from 1 to 6]
DEFENSE: [value from 1 to 6]
HP: [value from ? to ?]

Skill List.


Thus far, there is no point buy.  Now to explain what that all means.
Attack attribute.  A value of 6 means you must roll a 6 (or better) on your d6's to "wound" (i.e. deal 1 HP damage) to a standard target from standard range with a standard attack.  The meaning of "standard" has yet to be determined.  If the value here is 3, you must roll 3 or better to wound.  A value of 1 means you must roll 1 or better.

Defense attribute.  The value the bad-guys must roll to wound you under "standard" conditions.

HP = number of wounds before you're KO.

Minion NPCs have very few HP.  Leutennants much more.  And bosses about as much as a PC.  Solo bosses have as much HP as X number PCs combined.
Number of dice given to perform actions yet to be determined.

Skills are skills and powers and feats etc all combined.

Looking at that charsheet I spoke briefly with Tim and we agree on this point:

ALL attributes, damage, defense, hp; are determined by your CLASS.  Players CANNOT point-buy them.  The only things they can point-buy are powers, skills, feats, etc. under the skill list.

Examples:
TANK CLASS would have High HP, High Defense, Lowish Damage, and Lowish skill points to spend.

HEALER CLASS would have low stats but lots of skill points to spend.

BLASTER CLASS would be ye olde glass cannon with high damage, low hp and defense.  probably moderate skill points.

And so on.

By working up this example I came to realize that damage rolls are out.  Damage is static.

Two PCs walk into the arena, and 3 monsters approach!

"We're monsters.  Let's fight."

Monster stats:
DMG: 1
DEF: 2
HP: 2
1 Dice

Hero stats:
DMG: 2
DEF: 3
HP: 10
2 Dice

Round 1!
Monster 1 and 3 target hero 1.  Monster 2 vs hero 2.
Hero 1 targets monster 1 and 2.  Hero 2 targets Monster 2
Monsters: 1, 4, 1
Hero 1: 4, 1
Hero 2: 3, 5

This means that Monster 1 and 3 fail mc fail.  Would have failed vs even the frailest of PCs.  However, since Monster 2 rolled better than the PC defenses, he hits his target and deals 1 wound!

Hero 1 hits Monster 1, deals 2 damage, killing it.

Hero 2 hits both his targets, killing them both.

After much brain-wracking, I've come to the conclusion that some form of turn-taking is needed after all.  While dice rolling, math, mechanics, and such could be done simultaneously, 5 players worth of narrative can't happen all at once.  But dice and initiative can be evil partners.  I've seen it happen.  Table full of 3D initiative characters.  One player, rolling the same dice as all the others, never gets to go first.  Almost always goes last.  And thus their combat focused character gets the table scraps of combat because minions die so fast.

So to make initiative a stat?  Yeah.  I think it should be reflected by game mechanic if one character is quick and eager to fight compared to another who's reluctant or physically slow.  Allow dice to be part of it?  Sure.  But not always always always the dice must always rule.  Here's an example of what I'm thinking.

Player 1: init mod = +4
Player 2: init mod = +3
.
.
.
Player 5: init mod = +0
Monster: init mod = +2

All three roll a d-6.  All three get a result of 3.  This means that player 1 goes first.  The second to go isn't necessarily the one with the next highest total.  No.  It would be to player 1's left (clockwise) in keeping with most any other table top game ever.  This order continues until encounter is over.  Then when encounter 2 comes along, everyone rolls just like before, except for player 1!  Player 1 has already had a turn at being 1st.  It's now someone else's turn.  In this way, eventually, everyone will get a chance at going 1st.  And tracking initiative every combat round isn't an exercise in "who's turn is it anyway?"

Of course, this mechanic is geared mainly toward live RP, but that's what I'm aiming at for this game system.  To make my life easier when I GM the next anime convention.

Next thought.  Tracking damage.  I envisioned a table top full of empty glasses.  Each glass represents a character or a monster.  Whenever a PC injures a monster, for every HP of damage they deal, they put 1 walnut into that monster's glass.  When the glass is full, the monster is defeated.  Healing powers of course takes walnuts out of your glass.  Scale can be adjusted, and specific method as well.  But I'm heavily leaning toward a visual representation of damage rather than numbers on a page.  Hope this will help healers know who to heal.  Defenders to know who to defend.  Players to know which monster looks most injured.  Etc.

Thinking about strikers vs. controllers...  D&D's approach just doesn't sit right with me.  Striker: Roll once, maaaybe twice to hit something and do 1dX+Y  damage plus 1d6 to one, maaaybe two monsters.  Most broken striker ever, avenger, get's two chances for each target of an attack.  Controller, roll for each monster targeted.  Which is often 3+.  Sometimes 9.  That's a lot of energy.  Think about the force needed to penetrate AC20.  Now think of the force needed to penetrate multiple targets simultaneously.  Damage total wise, controllers can out-shine strikers relatively easily, except for the rare solo boss fight.  Number of times the dice are rolled... they're the indisputable champions.  I like the idea of giving players 5 or so dice to use against 1 to 5 enemies of their choice (with certain limitations like "you can't stab that enemy from where you're standing without a reach weapon" or some such.)

I also like the idea of "auto-hit, roll for damage only," vs "roll for both to-hit and damage" or "roll to hit, flat damage."

I want to keep things simple.  So by "damage" I'm thinking of going for a "fighting spirit" concept.

  Initiative as a stat.  Could actually work out pretty well, with the usual big fat 'If' for scaling (callback to my 'hard caps all could reach if they wanted it bad enough from chargen' outlook).

  PC A) fst mc fast. they got +5 initiative whoo!
PC rest of them) they arent as fast but they are used to this/its expected Leroy Mc Mittens is first into the fray.
  Sudden NPC ninja) +6 initiative.  You've never seen a +6 in your life. but boss goes first nananana

  Record screech sound commences at enemy.  this is a lightweight 'what could happen' example.  but initiative as a hard stat instead of roll itself could work sanely.

  unless its tied into dex or something again then branching ancient many system snags you are aware of

---

also. walnuts in glass thing.
Sux. 'needing visual representation' for Play by post? screw you text based people I want a picture with a nebulous 'how many will fit?' concept.

  RL side, still kinda meh. to vague, and 'things in cups' is way too cluttery, even if you had things that took up less space without still taking 18 million more to fill a 'cup'

I like.  Re-reading over previous musings about "class is everything" I like the idea of initiative order being tied directly to your class.  Fighters should be the first one into the fray.  All too often I've seen a rogue or ranger get eviscerated because they ran into combat first.  That said, that's based on the idea of turn-based combat.  I want everyone rolling dice at the same time.  In a "real fight" everything's happening all at once.  The monsters don't stand around and wait their turn.  So initiative will determine which player narrates what they want to do first.

GM: "The monsters saw you coming.  No surprise round.  'Foolish heroes!' the boss says, 'You'll die here just like your friend did!'"
Player 1: "My character is going after the boss monster!  'This one's mine!' he says.  Charge forward and stab him in the gut!"
Player 2: "My character is smarter than to allow his allies to fall for that.  'It's a trap!' he says, 'Do NOT charge in there or you'll fall into a pit!'"
GM: "Changing your action for this round, Player 1?"
Player 1: "Are there any traps?"
GM: "None that your character sees."
Player 1: "Nah.  Player 2's character is just being paranoid.  And my character's insubordinate and brash.  He's still charging in head long."
GM: "So what's your character doing besides barking orders, Player 2?"
Player 2: "Well he was going to huck a grenade in there, but if Player 1 is charging in..."
GM: "Your character notices that Player 1's isn't following orders."
Player 2: "In that case never mind the grenade.  Uh... I guess I'll... take out my rope for when he falls into the pit."
Player 3: "I was gunna grenade them too.  Hmm...  I guess instead I'll go with smoke grenade."
(( Other players all declare actions.  Two target the same minion with sniper attacks. ))
GM: "OK, everyone, roll 'em!"
Results: Player 1 would have hit... had he not fallen into the pit trap.  Player 2 is ready with the rope to pull him out.  Player 3's smoke grenade blinds the enemy.  Players 4 and 5 both crit, killing the minion two times over.

On the topic of making live RP easier for the GM, such as visual representations of HP, remember that such devices do not HAVE to be employed for forum RP.

  More 'could work with extra effort in RL, fail for the play by post' with your intentions for 'everybody acts at once even if they act in a row'.  You seem to love the idea though, has it worked out for you in another game?

  But Play by Post wise The GM having to give results between every. single. PC post.
  Fast player posts. Wait for GM.  regular player gets around to posting.  wait for GM. 'Takes near a month between every post' player finally posts.... Wait for GM.  Not QUITE that far gone with 'everyone declares actions at once', but can get up there, or get even worse.  More time sink with the fact you can/will need to post twice or more for any given turn.  Post once for intentions (wait for everyone).  Anything changes things? Wait more as everyone who needs to change their actions makes a new post.  Wait for GM.  Things change even more?  Again, wait for everyone who needs to change their actions. repeat.

  And considering how we play, I have to admit some facepalm bias over 'RL playing will work out fine so who cares, big shrug and we'll just think up new rules for PbP'.  Though I still think the 'things in cups' method wouldn't work out so great in RL either.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:56, Fri 25 Feb 2011.

Idea for visual representation:

On your character sheet, you have 4 pictures. One shows a normal face. Two shows a beat up face. Three shows a VERY beat up face. Then four shows a dead face. Here are some pictures to show what I mean:

(insert graphic image here)

The GM will have a whole sheet of paper that shows nothing but faces in rows. He puts enemy names next to each row and when people ask "how beat up does (insert enemy here) look?", the GM can hold up the paper with his finger pointing at how beat up that specific enemy looks. A single piece of paper doesn't take up much room.

Or you could just have the GM describe to you how bad off the enemy is. Like Byron does without us even asking.

Again, the GM is what makes or breaks a game, more so than the players. If there is a bad player, it is the GM's responsibility to kick them out. If the GM is a douche, it is the players' responsibility to kick HIM out and find a new GM.
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:24, Sat 26 Feb 2011.

Thoughts on damage mitigation aka survivability.

D&D has several different defenses to represent a PC or monster being strong in 1 method of self-defense and weak in another.  High AC, low will for example.  Then, there's also Resistances to certain types of damage to further drive home this concept.  Then on top of that, there's high hp vs low, vulnerabilities, regeneration, defensive and healing powers, etc. etc. etc.  Layers upon layers of complexity to emulate "you're this tough vs this, and this weak vs. that."

Does it really add to the fun to have so many hard-coded conditional survivability rates?  Trump and similar game systems only have HP and 2 types of defense.  I'd point to warhammer being simple, but sadly, it's not.

Well my musings today included the fact that AC is similar to damage resist.  If AC 10 gives the player with a +0 attack score a 50/50 chance to-hit, it has almost the same effect as someone with AC 0 and resist half.  Or no resist and double HP.  Same survival time.

CoX has several methods for living longer, some more potent than others.  Is it right that fire shield tankers are made of paper compared to rock types?  Why not make the "flavor" of how you're a tank mean nothing like costumes mean nothing mechanically?

So here's the idea.  You have 3 in-combat survivability mechanics.  HP,  resistance, and healing.  If I roll a 6 vs an enemy with resist 1, they take 5 damage.  How this RPs out is "my tough guy's thick hide takes some of the brunt of the blow..."  or  "my guy with fast reflexes turns in such a way to keep the hit from hitting full force"  or  "the bullet is slowed slightly as it passes through my force field."  and so on.  The flavor can be anything you want it.  One mechanic to rule them all.  Also, this way to-hit and damage are dealt with in 1 roll, and there's no need for a bazillion layers of complexity.