Removing Soak Dicepools

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 7:06 pm

I'm working on an RPG project that uses a stripped-down version of aWoD for basic mechanics and I was contemplating the idea of removing the Soak phase in order to speed up combat. Instead, Armor and Damage would be fairly static. When an attacker gets more hits than a defender, they add their Net Hits and the base Damage together, then subtract the defender's Armor.

I am fairly sure there are some downsides to cutting out soak rolls. The most obvious is that Edge is added to Soak pools to resist damage in aWoD, and this might alter the value of the Edge.

Any thoughts?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 7:09 pm

Someone could expend Edge to reduce the number of extra dice the attack roll gets, the obvious problem being that you have to declare a time limit for which someone can interrupt and also reserve a period of time for them to interrupt. Or if that's too much trouble, you could always just have an Edge expenditure to force a reroll with the attacker getting a bonus or penalty to the reroll as you see fit.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 7:55 pm

Yeah, but that's spending Edge. Doesn't it also passively add to defense? Resistance tests specify one stat, and then Edge gets added to that. Then you can actually spend Edge to improve things further.

I suppose I could add Edge to people's Defense dicepools. But I do feel concerned that I don't fully understand what the consequences of removing Soak phases from the game might be.

If it makes any difference, this is going to be at least partially a Winds of Fate system.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:07 pm

If you remove Soaking without both lowering weapon damage drastically and severely limiting and attacker's dicepool size and/or greatly increasing the amount of damage needed to inflict a wound, everyone will die, really fast. I'm not saying it cannot be done, just that the players may find it unfair that they are basically subjected to the Vampire: Death No Save Edition.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:57 pm

nWoD combat runs without a soak step. It works... not well.

-Frak

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 9:07 pm

Tell me how soak works in those games. I find it extremely baffling that the step can't be omitted and replaced with a semi-fixed number and/or a reduction of the size of the attack or damage numbers. I mean, shit, that's what Shadowrun does and it works pretty well.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 9:08 pm

So increased lethality or really weird damage/armor levels are almost certainly going to offset any advantages from streamlining combat.

Especially since Winds of Fate is going to make it difficult to rely on PCs having exceptional armor boosts through their powersets.

Any suggestions for making a dispute between the Blazing Swordsman + Rune Magus and an airship full of Imperial Musketeers fairly fast and easy to resolve without cutting out whole combat phases?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 9:28 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Tell me how soak works in those games. I find it extremely baffling that the step can't be omitted and replaced with a semi-fixed number and/or a reduction of the size of the attack or damage numbers. I mean, shit, that's what Shadowrun does and it works pretty well.

Shadowrun has a Soak Step. In fact, Shadowrun has a soak step and a Dodge step. That's 3 steps! (Attack, Defense, Soak). The minimum number of steps is 2: determine accuracy and determine damage. Either can be handled by an attacker roll (attack, damage), or a defender roll (dodge, soak), or both with an opposed roll.

In nWoD games, there is no soak or damage roll, you just have an attack roll that determines whether you hit (answer: you hit in almost all cases) and how many wound boxes you do. Tougher people simply have more wound boxes. But the range is seriously 6 to 10 boxes, so any attack that would one-shot a weakling is just going to take two shots to drop the "toughest" character. So everyone who cares about combat in the slightest tells toughness to suck nuts and just invests in going first and doing damage.

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 9:56 pm

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Any suggestions for making a dispute between the Blazing Swordsman + Rune Magus and an airship full of Imperial Musketeers fairly fast and easy to resolve without cutting out whole combat phases?

Dice pools make for slower rolling results. 1d20+bonus makes for faster rolling. That's about the most help you can get, bigger combats will always take more time.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:45 am

Any suggestions for making a dispute between the Blazing Swordsman + Rune Magus and an airship full of Imperial Musketeers fairly fast and easy to resolve without cutting out whole combat phases?

If you want to use dice pools and you want have mass combats that are over in a reasonable amount of time, you can have groups of enemies add dice together into a single dice pool. Don't add them linearly, because that would be crazy. But if you had a system where twice as many characters shooting was two or three more dice, you could keep things vaguely manageable with large numbers of mooks on the field.

-Username17

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 11:17 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Shadowrun has a Soak Step. In fact, Shadowrun has a soak step and a Dodge step. That's 3 steps! (Attack, Defense, Soak). The minimum number of steps is 2: determine accuracy and determine damage. Either can be handled by an attacker roll (attack, damage), or a defender roll (dodge, soak), or both with an opposed roll.

You can do it in one if you have damage and resistance as fixed numbers, with the attack v damage roll determining efficacy of the attack.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 8:11 pm

mean_liar wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Shadowrun has a Soak Step. In fact, Shadowrun has a soak step and a Dodge step. That's 3 steps! (Attack, Defense, Soak). The minimum number of steps is 2: determine accuracy and determine damage. Either can be handled by an attacker roll (attack, damage), or a defender roll (dodge, soak), or both with an opposed roll.
You can do it in one if you have damage and resistance as fixed numbers, with the attack v damage roll determining efficacy of the attack.

Err... that's still what happens in nWOD.

It's funky. It doesn't help that defense is generally tiny compared to attack pools (for example, you essentially get no defense against firearms unless you turn on celerity, which is the major big deal about celerity in nWOD: You get some defense that isn't even worth it).

I mean, oWOD was a mess: Roll to attack, roll to defend, roll for damage, and roll for soak. It took forever. So it needed streamlining, but making soak and defense both static suck. If you make them both small, they become pointless quickly. If you let them stay relevant, there are situations where you literally cannot harm the other person because they reduce your dice pool to almost nothing.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 12:42 am

That's still a question of scaling rate that's not an intrinsic, unsolvable problem.

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 1:01 am

You could improve defense in nWoD by allowing characters to add their stamina to defense to represent soaking. Mortals can only add stamina against bashing damage, vampires/werewolves can add stamina against lethal, and Resilience allows vampires to add stamina + resilience against aggravated, etc.

Or make the attack/defense roll a contested roll. With or without the above addition.