RC wrote:How do you plan on handling non-muscle powered weapons, like firearms or crossbows? Is strength still going to determine damage, or are you going to use another stat?
Right now, the default SAME system world is set in early iron age. The only non-muscle powered weapons are things like Catapults, which are treated as attackers in their own rights (albeit attackers that have no Moxie or Elan).
A quick and dirty conversion is to have guns do a fixed damage but have a strength minimum, such that using the biggest hand cannon you can wield is equivalent to throwing around a top tier weapon with your normal added strength bonus. This would be appropriate for things like Crossbows and even early rifles.
Modern weapons exist in a separate setup entirely. One in which people expect to be able to destroy your whole house if they are willing to throw enough money at the problem. It's really inappropriate for FAEs to be meaningfully limited by your strength, so they aren't going to be. Instead, they are going to be limited just like they are in real life - by a vast network of well-armed legal authorities that take an extreme dislike to you using them. That is, in a modern setting you find yourself engaging in unarmed combat way more than you do in an ancient setting, because taking a weapon of any kind around is considered taboo. Thus, strength retains importance as a combat stat, depsite the fact that there is an entire set of combat devices that essentially bypass that entirely.
In fact, a modern setting doesn't even really need Elan-based attacks to be readily available. Strength and Elan can already be balanced by the fact that sometimes combat essentially entirely bypasses your strength (thus making the fact that you got anything at all for trading it in a good deal), and sometimes combat entirely is won or lost on the basis of your strength (making the fact that you bought it a good deal). Splitting combat into fisticuffs and handguns actually allows for a balanced (if weird) SAME setup even without psionics or sorcery available at all.
-Username17