FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1203813633[/unixtime]]That's because d'Artagnan lives in a world where things work the way K is describing where all characters are kind of close to one another on the attack/defense matrix and circumstance modifiers aren't super important as a +1 or +2 one way or another is often lost in the mists of the fickleness of luck. Aragorn lives in a world where he has big defense bonuses and he has already pushed his weaker enemies near the edge of the Random Number Generator. When he gets a +1 or +2 he pushes people along the edge cases where those bonuses make a big difference.
That is mechanically how that works.
As I carefully spelled out in the same post you quoted, that is indeed one way mechanically that it can work, but there are many other mechanical ways that effect can be achieved, and that one in particular isn't even the original distinction you cited (unless I have utterly misunderstood your explanation of battle reserves and how every hit is threatening for Aragorn and not for d'Artagnan).
In fact, if you want players to fight tactically against actual level-appropriate threats, making those little modifiers important only in the edge case of extreme level difference is probably a phenomenally bad design move...so I'm unsure on what basis you're recommending that, if you are.
Just to be clear the Defenses system requires that a single orc attack does a good chunk of damage to Aragorn, right? I'm talking about 25-30% of his max hp.
If it didn't he'd effectively be on a reserve system since he could survive a lot of successful hits and withdraw when his hp got low enough that the next hit might drop him.
Yeah when I think about it, I just don't see a difference between battle reserve and defenses in the case of cinematic characters. I see the mechanical difference, but to say that one guy in a book/movie is on BR and the other is on defenses just doesn't work.
The basic premises is that BR gets worn down and eventually you get hurt. Defenses basically let you get hit at any time if you get unlucky.
Really then, by that definition, if a guy gets killed by a random first shot attack, you can call that the defenses system, otherwise it could be either.
Since by "never got hit" you could either mean his AC is so high that people just never rolled high enough, or you could mean that he was depleting hp or FATE points or whatever to negate the hits that should have struck him. And we have no idea which one of those it is. Did Boromir die because the orc archer rolled a lucky hit? Or did he die because the other orcs tired him out enough to drop his battle reserve? Fuck if I know.
I'm going to argue that it's actually pretty pointless to discuss what kind of system movie characters are playing under, because we all know it's just magical tea party.
Now, saying "I want to emulate X" is all very well and good, but you'll rarely be able to get X precisely, and this has drifted from that to an in-depth analysis.
At least it's not as bad as the "So, watching Ghost Dog*, what Tribe/Auspice/Whatever other bullshit do you think he is? He's clearly a _____."
And that bit is why I hate WoD players. One day someone will convince me they're not all like that. But so far, the statistics are working against them.
*He's not a ghost or a dog. And he's certainly not a werewolf.
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Draco_Argentum at [unixtime wrote:1203826139[/unixtime]]Just to be clear the Defenses system requires that a single orc attack does a good chunk of damage to Aragorn, right? I'm talking about 25-30% of his max hp.
If it didn't he'd effectively be on a reserve system since he could survive a lot of successful hits and withdraw when his hp got low enough that the next hit might drop him.
The character on the Defense System may be so far up the RNG that he can only suffer a small amount of damage. The point is that it is actual damage that stays around after the encounter.
Battle Reserves vs. Defenses is mostly a question of damage persistence more than a question of determinism. While in general you would cinematically expect a battle reserve system to be more deterministic, the important part of the equation is that a character who loses battle reserve during a combat has not lost anything and next "encounter" is coming in fresh. While a character in the defense system who suffers damage is likely looking at having some or all of it sitting on him next fight.
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To put things in TNE terms: in a defense based system a mook has a real (if hopefully small) chance of causing you a wound, and in a battle reserve system that mook can only cause you to lose hit points. Indeed, in a battle reserve system you probably can't take a wound until you run out of hit points and there is no Wound Threshold.
I've actually run a couple WoD games, both Requiem and Ascension, and I despise discussions where you attempt to represent any kind of non-RPG media into RPG stats. Actual in-depth stuff like you described, Koumei, as opposed to the current one where there's a discussion for what kind of 'experience' you want to represent (though the more nitty-gritty examples started irking me).
Now for the discussion of defense-vs-reserve. Aren't both versions capable of allowing recovery of hit points/wounds between encounters, if you so choose? And is it not possible in either system, if allowed into it, for your defenses to be off a mook's RNG and thus be immune to anything he's capable of dishing out?
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virgileso at [unixtime wrote:1203924421[/unixtime]] Now for the discussion of defense-vs-reserve. Aren't both versions capable of allowing recovery of hit points/wounds between encounters, if you so choose?
Yes, but the reserve system requires it, and becomes a little silly when you have wounds recover between encounters too. The only way for that to even make sense is wound penalties.
And is it not possible in either system, if allowed into it, for your defenses to be off a mook's RNG and thus be immune to anything he's capable of dishing out?
The equivalent of shoving a mook off the Reserve 'RNG' is having arbitrarily many HPs. In other words, not really. That's pretty much the point of the reserve system.
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NoDot at [unixtime wrote:1203975813[/unixtime]]Quick question: can you mix-and-match between Battle Reserve and Defense Systems or are they too inherently non-jiving?
Sure D&D does it. HP is a battle reserve and AC is a defense.
Except that the people with high HP also tend to have high AC (in theory), and that HP is not per encounter (unless you win and have a method of recovering it quickly enough).
NoDot at [unixtime wrote:1203984199[/unixtime]]Except that the people with high HP also tend to have high AC (in theory), and that HP is not per encounter (unless you win and have a method of recovering it quickly enough).
You don't have to win, you just need to disengage. We're talking full system use here too, so while lots of groups likely do not have arbitrary between combat hp regen the system most certainly does.
In the Battle Reserve set-up, any enemy given sufficient time will eventually become a serious threat.
In the Defenses model, any enemy given a sufficiently good circumstance bonus will temporarily become a serious threat.
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That right there is the core of the argument as to whether you want to primarily focus on Battle Reserve or Defenses as an ass-kicking model for higher level characters.
Can (or should) we combine them in some fashion? Epic Defense-Focused Characters have the Reserve of a low level Reserve-Focused Character and Epic Reserve-Focused Characters have the Defense of a low level Defense-Focused Character. In both cases, anyone but a very weak mook should be able to ignore the other part.
That's kind of done already with 3E, except that attacks follow a similar routine, so the use of an attack designed to fight Epic Defense will slaughter the Epic Reserve character; anti-defense attacks being SoD/SaW, anti-reserve attacks being high density (armies, 3E's telekinesis, non-crappy twf-flurry specialists, etc).
Of course, if the choice of tactics is one-sided (choice of defense/reserve is made on the attacker's or defender's side), I'm not sure what happens.
Now personally, for the games I'd like to see, battle reserve.
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