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.