Silent Wayfarer wrote:I wonder if the simplest way to handle that isn't damage scaling. Like say, vehicle damage is basically x10 infantry damage, so if you fired a handgun at a car and did like, 6 health boxes (S wound), it would be about 0.6 of a health box on the vehicle scale (less than an L wound).
This is the Rifts solution. SDC is your normal "hit points", and MDC = 100 SDC. SDC damage is ineffective against MDC level vehicles/people/monsters, because throwing rocks at a tank will never ever do anything.
Rifts subsequently goes batshit crazy though, and the SDC/MDC thing is part of that.
As for equipment limits, I'm... okay with them in a very, very limited concept. Basically, if I was going to use the concept of limits, I'd implement them when you're using the item in a way that is not intended. So a holdout pistol past say 5 meters is really fucking inaccurate, so I'd impose a limit when you use the holdout pistol at long or extreme ranges instead of dice pool penalties. Using a sniper rifle in melee combat would have limits, whereas long and extreme range brackets don't. I'm conceptually okay with this because I've never met someone who could snipe with a saturday night special at someone blocks away. It just doesn't happen reliably due to ballistics.
If, and that's a big if, I extended limits to equipment, I'd only implement limits depending on the situation for the equipment. So for example, an intrusion kit would get you past doors. A standard intrusion kit would get you past one type of door: maglock, combination, electronic passkey, biometrics, etc etc... If you use your kit for doors not intended, you get a success limit. The higher the rating of the kit, the more types of doors you get to open without a limit.
I'd still be wary to extend limits to equipment because fuck that's a lot of work to come up with all that granularity. Even then I'm not sure if dice pool modifiers wouldn't just be a better solution.
Also Frank, I'd be interested how difficult the scaling 1st ed damage system would be to graft into 4th edition. I really loved the LMSD damage codes, and miss the variable soak numbers of 3rd edition (though not the variable target numbers themselves). I liked the idea that some guns hit hard but were easier to soak and others were tough to soak but did little base damage.
I was thinking maybe your damage code, LMSD, and then the number after it is how many successes it takes to stage down the damage on your soak. So a gun that does 3M damage bases medium damage and it takes 3 hits on a soak to stage the damage down (that'd probably be an extreme soak code. Most guns would probably soak based off of 1 or 2). Perhaps the code would also relate to staging damage. So 3M takes 3 net hits to stage to S, 6 to D, and 9 to up the 3 to a 4 on the soak.
But I"m interested in your solution on it Frank. I generally like 4th ed but I really miss the combat damage system from earlier editions.
