TNE: Combat Advantage Number

[virgil]

I think that's more of a flaw in the description, rather than the numbers. I don't want there to be any chance for a balanced attack to one-shot my uninjured opposite, and I want two-shots to be rare; which the current numbers certainly maintain.

Reexamining the wiki on thresholds, I'm wondering if perhaps we should have damage (defensive CAN penalty) be one option, and have other attacks inflict non-CAN penalties; since that's what seems to actually be described in the wiki, and I'd rather have that than everything be damage with flavour-text descriptions.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I think that's more of a flaw in the description, rather than the numbers. I don't want there to be any chance for a balanced attack to one-shot my uninjured opposite, and I want two-shots to be rare; which the current numbers certainly maintain.

Reexamining the wiki on thresholds, I'm wondering if perhaps we should have damage (defensive CAN penalty) be one option, and have other attacks inflict non-CAN penalties; since that's what seems to actually be described in the wiki, and I'd rather have that than everything be damage with flavour-text descriptions.

Imagine two woodcutters having a territorial dispute. They're attacking each other with axes, and have a 50% hit rate. They're strong, so each one adds 2 to her damage roll.

A woodcutter has a 0.50*0.95 = 0.46 probability of staggering (tier 1 damage) the other, a 0.50*0.63 = 0.32 probability of bruising (tier 2 damage), a 0.50*0.16 = 0.08 probability of wounding (tier 3 damage), and a 0.50*0.006 = 0.003 probability of killing (tier 4 damage) the other.

That means that there's still an instagib chance, however small (although the damaged party will only be dying, not dead).

Once a woodcutter is bruised, the probability of wounding increases to 0.50*0.38 = 0.19, and the probability of killing increases to 0.50*0.05 = 0.025.

Once a woodcutter is wounded, the probability of killing increases to 0.50*0.09 = 0.05. And this number never goes up unless the attacking woodcutter gets all tactical.


IMO, the effect of each tier is too small. That could be changed by moving thresholds or changing the magnitude of damage effects. You could even change the scale, although that could really fuck up balance.

[virgil]

That's different from the expectation I was working under, which was the CAN penalty stacking for the same Tier effect; where three staggers is equal to a single wounding (except a staggering is easier to heal from).

[Draco_Argentum]

We really need to pick one of those. Either the same effect stacks or it doesn't. I don't think we'll get much further without making a choice.

Stacking promotes ability spam. Non-stacking makes teamwork a little tougher, especially when the team becomes more homogeneous.

Does anyone have any other points to make?

[virgil]

This is my own opinion, and not what's been decided by the community.

I don't see how it creates something logical where hitting someone with a sword doesn't stack. That means fighting someone that starts with a +4 defensive CAN is impossible to take down with any number of standard attacks, no matter how wounded they are (unless they're dead). If you allow different Tiers to stack, then you need a +7 initial defensive CAN advantage to be immune.

It also creates a weird scene, because if you roll well and inflict a Tier 2 on an otherwise healthy foe, that means further rolls that inflict Tier 1, 3, or 4 are the only ones that matter. You have gaps in your damage die roll, which is a very non-intuitive effect.

Although, looking at the wiki again, a Tier 2 hit automatically includes a Tier 1 along with it. Assuming no healing nor prior effects, the penalty to CAN works in this order: -1, -3, -6, -10 (& incapacitated). This does prevent the gap effect, but hitting progressively harder is actually more difficult. Once you inflict a Tier 2 effect (along with Tier 1), you need to roll a 13+ to actually do anything to him, followed by 14+ to down him once he's got the Tier 3 and down on him.

[Manxome]

If same-tier effects do not stack, then the maximum number of successful attacks you can make against someone before they drop is the number of tiers. If we have 4 tiers, then if you want someone to survive more than 4 attacks, you must do it by causing most attacks to have no effect at all, because you cannot construct any series of 4 non-null hits that fails to drop him.

And that sucks, because when a combat is balanced on the principle that only 1 in N attacks will actually accomplish anything (and N is "large"), you're just as likely to get the lucky roll on the first attack as the Nth attack, which means the battle has pretty good odds of being either much shorter or much longer than the average. And who really wants to play a game where most die rolls result in "no effect?"


And making it so that different effects on a single tier stack but the same effect does not...is really not going to give you something that feels like traditional combat. I'm not sure what I can say that I haven't: this fundamentally changes how tactics work, how team composition works, and how the game is balanced, and puts them on terms that are extremely unorthodox. It will reduce your ability to bootstrap your understanding using your experience with other games, it will cause all parts of creature design to become more strongly coupled and harder to analyze in isolation, and it will make it harder to add new stuff to the game without breaking it.

Basically, if you do this, you're not making something "kind of like D&D, but better"--you're making something that will require completely different conventions and analysis tools to understand and develop. I want to stress that this is a radical proposal. I cannot name any game I have ever played where damage does not stack with itself.

And I don't think I've actually heard anyone point out anything they like about this system, yet people keep suggesting it. I'm kind of mystified.


So I recommend that all damage effects stack, including with themselves.

[virgil]

I second the motion for all damage effects to stack. And I also wish I could've put it as eloquently as Manxome.

[NoDot]

Guys, Frank weighed in on this on the previous page.

Conditions that affect attack rolls should not stack, and conditions that affect damage rolls should. This is because going off the RNG on attacks is really boring, but going off the RNG on damage is how the battle actually ends.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

If staggering stacks with staggering, I have no complaint about low probability of lethality.

[virgil]

For ease of bringing in CAN info into the same thread for reference...

The 3d6 Damage test we were discussing earlier also inherently favors holding use limited abilities in reserve if those abilities have a damage test bonus, real or virtual. Especially if it's a virtual bonus.

For example: let's say that you had the spell Petrify. It does a normal Slow progression, but it has a +4 bonus to the damage test only for the purpose of seeing if you get a Tier 4 effect (which turns them to Stone, dropping them from combat). This is not really worth dropping at the beginning of combat with a major opponent because you'd still need a 16+ on 3d6 to Stone them and otherwise you just wasted a use limited death spell. On the flip side, if the target has already been beaten down, you can toss a Petrify to help end it all. Taking things from a 13+ to a 9+ is a big chunk of the bell curve.

Hence, we can have limited-use SoD effects. It's a SoD by virtue of the Tier 4 effect being lower on the chart. Keeping it limited-use means you only use it to end a fight, but the bell curve damage system makes it so that the target needs to be tenderized.

Because having an omega attack (ie. SoD) is part of the genre, but the vast majority of systems actually encourage them as openers rather than fight enders.

[Manxome]

I believe the tiers in the damage test are 4 points apart, so in that particular case, you could accomplish the same thing by just writing the tier 4 effect in as the tier 3 effect, which might be a slightly less complicated way of describing the spell.

But, yeah, this system makes it amazingly easy to construct abilities that you want to use only on targets that you expect to kill or only on targets that you don't expect to kill with the current attack--just make the low-tier effects unusually weak (or completely absent) and the high-tier effects unusually strong, or vice versa. You don't necessarily even need a usage limit on the omega strike if you want to make its effect progression something like (nothing)/(nothing)/(dead)/(vaporized)...though of course you may want to include limited-use abilities of some variety anyway.

[virgil]

Part of the problem with just trying to make a Tier 4 effect as a Tier 3 is that this makes healing the effect easier. That would be an odd effect, a Tier 1 death effect; where any pissant 'white mage' can heal it away and ressurect.

[Manxome]

Well, I was assuming that conditions are all drawn from some predefined list and that any given condition uses exactly the same rules no matter how it's applied, so an effect that's normally tier 4 doesn't become easier to heal just because it's applied at tier 3. I suppose that's potentially confusing to the player, though.

So, I'm sure one could invent some notation to say "treat this as a tier X effect, even though it's applied at tier Y," though at that point it might be easier to use CAN adjustment rules instead. The easiest way to handle this particular example might be if the tier 3 effect was written in as something like "upgrade to tier 4 effect."

[the_taken]

How about if conditions are independent of tier effects, be usualy occur at certain tiers depending on the severity?
Then under the conditions list, you see what removes the condition.

[CatharzGodfoot]

How does it look from the player's perspective?

• Do I have a few lines on my character sheet where I can pencil in the tier 3 and tier 4 afflictions my character has suffered?
• Will I want a set of colored d4s or numbered poker chips corresponding to specific types of inflictions?
• Will there be a master table of inflictions?
• Will every ability detail the inflictions it..inflicts?

That might have a lot of influence on what type of system makes the most sense.

[virgil]

I had previously asked about how to keep that horde of peasants as a threat against players, while simultaneously keeping them as a non-threat to the dragons that the PCs fight. The idea proposed was that PC defense is based on AC/dodge, while monster defense is DR/soak based.

Can that be incorporated into the CAN system, such as having defensive CAN for player-types be partially ablative? For example, you suffer a -1 defensive CAN for each attack past the first in a round (down to a certain minimum), which resets the next round (encourages bottle-neck tactics against mook hordes). Or should I not bother with CAN and attempt something else?

[virgil]

Since the wiki is down, does anyone remember how AC/to-hit was decided in the CAN system? Because it feels like a positional advantage improved both.

[MfA]

How do you know what your CAN is? Spot vs. Bluff?

Is it really necessary to keep a separate condition track and hitpoints? Can't you just have the the percentage of max hitpoints an opponent has determine your CAN bonus against him?

[virgil]

When using the CAN system, how would you tweak the numbers where a mob of peasants/militia is a threat to the players, but not the giant monster plaguing the town that the PCs can take on?

[Username17]

When using the CAN system, how would you tweak the numbers where a mob of peasants/militia is a threat to the players, but not the giant monster plaguing the town that the PCs can take on?

There are a couple of ways to do that. The first and most obvious way is to give hordes some kind of stacking thing where they Voltron into bigger attacks when they can "overwhelm" an opponent. You set giant monsters to not be overwhelmable by human level crowds and you're golden. Kind of a kludge though.

You could also do the D&D system: where you simply give very large groups of peasants with pitchforks a somewhat favorable system of generating numbers to speed up processes but still have them basically making their normal attack. Then you set the giant monsters to be tough enough that they bounce that shit. So you throw down something like a "Take 18" where for every 50 or 100 guys you can assume someone rolled an 18 (substantially but not amazingly better than they actually expect, but then you aren't getting 17s or 16s). If the monsters are tough enough that it takes a 19 to scratch them, only PCs with bonuses can hurt them at all, and if the PCs are not tough enough to shrug off an 18, they'll get crushtacized rapidly by any sufficiently large group of peasants.

-Username17

[souran]

Frank:

I know you have said before that you don't particlarly care for the Dream Pod 9 Silhoutte system, but you realize that what you are propsing is an awful lot like their combat resolution mechanic.

[Username17]

Frank:

I know you have said before that you don't particlarly care for the Dream Pod 9 Silhoutte system, but you realize that what you are propsing is an awful lot like their combat resolution mechanic.

I can't get past the thing where their RNG doesn't work. I don't particularly care what happens if you delve deeply into their secrets.

-Username17

[virgil]

Another idea, in conjunction with the "Take 18" suggestion, is to give some monsters a converted form of DR/magic, by giving them an increased Defensive CAN against non-magical weapons. That way, they don't have to be quite as big in order to be an untouchable threat to the village.

I am curious as to what situations/effects would increase AC and defensive CAN, and what the difference would be.

[OgreBattle]

I was thinking of something similar, but in terms of Warhammer Fantasy.
So rolling to hit, then to wound.

Goons hitting you would lower your toughness but they can't actually inflict a wound, they can only soften you up.
A Worthy Foe though is going to be rolling to wound against your toughness.
This could be determined by a strength vs toughness comparison (or CAN)

For overwhelming numbers to be able to do something, if the goblins poke you enough times for your Toughness to hit Zero they get to roll to wound against you.

So if you're Toughness 3, 3 goblins manage to hit you, the 3rd hit has a chance of causing damage.
This means a lone goblin poker pretty much has no chance against you but two goblins can make a troll that much deadlier if you don't get rid of them.
Toughness would restore after you lose a wound, or perhaps every round... I haven't given it more thought than that.

For your sleeping ogre example, it would be about how many Wounds the ogre has and how many wounds you inflict on a single successful attack. The sleep condition could just make it so he's automatically going to suffer wounding damage. An awake ogre would have a high toughness of course so it would still take some effort to kill.

For the sleeping dragon, its wounds total is simply too high for you to take out with one blow, but taking a wound off before the battle starts is great (or maybe it's so big, you only lowered its toughness but that's still good)

[virgil]

Another question is where equipment factors into this. If Defensive CAN is inherently level scaling and AC/Defenses are inherently static, where does armor fit into this?