The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:And that is why Shadowrun and even World of Fucking Darkness abandoned it for (relatively) fixed target numbers. And the few legacy mechanics wherein the target numbers can (at least effectively) still change, are the worst parts of those games.

Being as I am fairly uninitiated to SR or oWoD, might I ask: what was the specific context of the variable TNs in those games? Both 1) the actual mechanic, and 2) the narrative in-game causal relationship?

I'm not saying that it would necessarily make a huge difference; but relevant context always helps with understanding things.

Thanks.

Shadowrun had 3 editions with variable target numbers. White Wolf put out something like twenty games with variable target numbers that played together to a greater or lesser extent. What made TNs go up or down has varied all over the place. Sometimes target number bonuses were limited to supernatural or cybernetic sources, other times target number improvements were handed out willy-nilly with skill spacialization and shit.

And you know what? No matter what they tried, it never fucking worked very well. And I will tell you why: because you already have levers to make things easier or more difficult. You can increase or decrease dicepools to make things easier or more difficult. And you can also increase or decrease hit thresholds to make things harder or more possible.

You don't need weird extra modifiers that change the value of the other modifiers you have. Yes, you can change target numbers or explosion numbers, and World of Darkness has done both. But all that does is change the value of the dicepool bonuses and penalties you're handing out elsewhere in the setting.

For example: in nWoD, different weapons have different explosion thresholds. Specifically, bigger rifles explode on smaller numbers. Now you have a couple of actions available as a trained sniper. You can Aim, and this gives you extra dice. These extra dice are worth more when you have a bigger gun and worth less when you have a smaller gun. That's kind of weird. You also have a "kill shot", where you spend a willpower point and turn a certain number of your dice into automatic successes. But since you aren't actually rolling those dice, you don't get explosions, meaning that performing a kill shot with a bigger gun is a smaller bonus and performing it with a smaller gun is a bigger bonus. That's probably even weirder.

And the thing is: changing TNs and Explosion Numbers is always going to give you crap like that, because randomly changing the value of other bonuses and penalties in the system is 100% of what TN shifts and Explosion Number Changes does. Have you ever in your life wondered why D&D has no "+1 to all bonuses you get from other sources" bonuses? Of course you haven't, because that's fucking retarded. And yet, that's exactly what every TN shift is in a dicepool game.

-Username17

For example: in nWoD, different weapons have different explosion thresholds. Specifically, bigger rifles explode on smaller numbers. Now you have a couple of actions available as a trained sniper. You can Aim, and this gives you extra dice. These extra dice are worth more when you have a bigger gun and worth less when you have a smaller gun. That's kind of weird. You also have a "kill shot", where you spend a willpower point and turn a certain number of your dice into automatic successes. But since you aren't actually rolling those dice, you don't get explosions, meaning that performing a kill shot with a bigger gun is a smaller bonus and performing it with a smaller gun is a bigger bonus. That's probably even weirder.

holy shit... what if... smaller weapons in general exploded easier; and aiming and kill shots functioned the way that they still do?

I'm trying to figure out how to make Combat in my Heavy Metal AWoD kludge more "interesting", as some people have mentioned it's very straightforward.

So, like, a dagger could up and murder a clown; but you need to aim it up ahead of time (risky, but viable; like setting up a sneak/death attack in D&D?); but an axe or cleaver that you outright just power-drive into a target is going to probably just murder them from mass trauma & leverage.

Making technique weapons and physique weapons fight differently and along the lines of how they're used in real life feels like a good direction. I still want concealed/unarmed to fill out the martial art triad.

Judging__Eagle wrote:So, like, a dagger could up and murder a clown; but you need to aim it up ahead of time (risky, but viable; like setting up a sneak/death attack in D&D?); but an axe or cleaver that you outright just power-drive into a target is going to probably just murder them from mass trauma & leverage.

Making technique weapons and physique weapons fight differently and along the lines of how they're used in real life feels like a good direction.

I would think that stuff like this would belong in the realm of "powers" or whatever. You know, have like a "slice-n-dice" power that lets you make precision kill shots with small bladed instruments; and maybe a "swing for the fences" power that lets you wind-up and knock their head off their shoulders. For this, each of those might involve taking extra time (and extra round or so) and perhaps taking some sort of penalty in exchange for that extra effect -- for "slice-n-dice", maybe you line up your shot, spend a survivor point, reduce your die pool by a # of dice, and if you score the requisite # of hits, then you just severed the brain stem ; and then for "swing for the fences", you wind up, take a penalty to your accuracy, spend a survivor point, and get a bonus to your damage that is proportional to the penalty you took on your accuracy.

I still want concealed/unarmed to fill out the martial art triad.

When you say "concealed/unarmed", do you mean instead of just "unarmed"?



@ Frank:
I'm willing to admit that I might possibly be being a bit myopic on this point; in that I'm more concerned with what such changes do on the margin of a specific instance. The way I'm seeing it, that's all really matters, so long as the function (the mechanism of change, if you will) is consistent throughout the system.

Now, there's something that you've mentioned a few times on that other thread about linking diceplosions with some sort of resource expenditure ... and I like that. So, let me ask you about this: what do you think of the idea of having to spend a survivor point* to allow your dice to explode on a given roll? For example, I roll my dice for a given action, see the result, and decide that I want to spend a survival point to reroll qualifying dice ("qualifying dice" would be defined as in the OP -- e.g., with a survivalism modifier of 2, 1s and 2s would be "qualifying dice").
When I pitched this idea to the guys in my group, we all agreed that having to spend the point before the roll would be bullshit, since that would involve expending the resource without knowing whether or not you were actually going to be able to gain any benefit. So, how does that strike you?

*survivor points: I haven't really described this bit, since it hasn't been relevant yet .. but now that we're talking about expending finite character resources, I think that it's now necessary to explain.
Survivor Points are basically like "hero points" or "action points" or whatever, wherein you "spend points -- do cool shit". Any sort of powers will require spending survivor points to use (briefly mentioned above with Judging__Eagle's examples); maybe you can take extra actions; and, prospectively, spend them to let your dice explode on a given roll; as well as whatever else we decide to attach to it.
We're still trying to dial-in the appropriate # of survivor points a character should get .... right now we're looking at 6+(2*survivalism score); but that may change based on how much we decide we want PCs to have to use them and just how many things that they're gonna have to use them on (as well as how often they're expected to refresh).

FrankTrollman wrote:For example: in nWoD, different weapons have different explosion thresholds. Specifically, bigger rifles explode on smaller numbers. Now you have a couple of actions available as a trained sniper. You can Aim, and this gives you extra dice. These extra dice are worth more when you have a bigger gun and worth less when you have a smaller gun. That's kind of weird. You also have a "kill shot", where you spend a willpower point and turn a certain number of your dice into automatic successes. But since you aren't actually rolling those dice, you don't get explosions, meaning that performing a kill shot with a bigger gun is a smaller bonus and performing it with a smaller gun is a bigger bonus. That's probably even weirder.

See, while I do recognize that this is a bit idiosyncratic; it's never really bothered me -- in the first example, I've just seen it as being an inherent part of the bonus; in the second example, I've always simply chalked it up to being a normalization function that goes with getting auto-successes (whether it was intended or not).
However, none of that is really the problem with, but simply a symptom of, nWoD's bullshit combat system -- that being that everything is resolved in just 1 roll ... just way too much was sacrificed for the simple sake of faster resolution. When you try to cram too much in to just one thing, you're necessarily gonna have idiosyncrasies like this pop up.

OB wrote:However, none of that is really the problem with, but simply a symptom of, nWoD's bullshit combat system -- that being that everything is resolved in just 1 roll ... just way too much was sacrificed for the simple sake of faster resolution. When you try to cram too much in to just one thing, you're necessarily gonna have idiosyncrasies like this pop up.

The thing you're missing is that these particular idiosyncrasies are not the stuff like "you can't distinguish a big attack from an accurate one" (which also exist in the game), but merely idiosyncrasies that flow directly from the fact that changing explosion qualification numbers is bullshit.

-Username17