08-22-2019, 02:55 PM | #1 |
World's Worst Detective
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Columbus, Ohio
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Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
Hey, all!
Background I've loved Knowing Your Own Strength since the moment it was born. Logarithmic ST tickles my fancy. I haven't actually used it as a GM or as a player—it's been a little fantasy of mine, though. So, I'm finally planning on using it, and I noticed an odd problem. Damage is also done logarithmically and HP is still quadratic, which seemed fine, but I realized that wounding modifiers don't make much sense to me. Multiplicative modifiers for damage, wounding, injury, etc. seem weird and would log[arithm]ically (get it?) use addition because multiplying damage doesn't scale right even with quadratic HP. Of course, that doesn't make sense for damage—unless I'm using some kind of logarithmic HP/injury/wounding system. I think the other solution would be to make damage quadratic again, right? (I'm not actively looking for feedback on this part, but I'm still happy to have someone nitpick or prove me wrong... politely). Issue But there is a logarithmic solution: Conditional Injury. So, I'm wondering how to resolve logarithmic damage with logarithmic injury. Now, I'm hoping that it's as easy as saying "take the logarithmic values for ST, use them for HP, and plug those into the Robustness Threshold Table", so RT 6 would be for logarithmic HP 16–18. I guess, technically, you wouldn't even need to do that since HP doesn't matter outside of determining RT, but logarithmic HP would make RT cheaper and tighten the bands on the breakpoints (though, I'm not sure if that's a benefit or not). Now, that seems too easy, so I'm waiting for someone to bust in and say "wrong! You're going to have to re-tool the whole system!" Before you say that, my guess is that I might have to use logarithmic values for the Penetrating Damage column of the Wound Potential Table because, since logarithmic HP and logarithmic damage are smaller, logarithmic Penetrating Damage should be smaller too, right? But, if that's the case, then it gets weird. Logarithmic Wound Potential Table Code:
PD WP 1 -2 0 1 2–6 2 7–8 3 9–12 4 13–16 5 17–18 6 19–21 7 Anthony's Logarithmic Damage looks like it could help, but it's a bit harder for me to piece together and resolve with Conditional Injury. So, how can I make this work better? Examples
Spoiler:
Note about DR
Spoiler:
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Raekai's links: My blog about conlanging, GURPS, and other stuff! — Using Knowing Your Own Strength with Conditional Injury Simulating multiple attacks Wildcard Power Pool: a flexible magic/powers system Magic to RPM complete conversion v2 (incomplete) Perussinexian Magic 2 (outdated) Last edited by Raekai; 08-29-2019 at 08:41 AM. |
08-22-2019, 02:55 PM | #2 |
World's Worst Detective
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Columbus, Ohio
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
Ultimately, what I want is a system to use Knowing Your Own Strength (KYOS) from Pyramid #3/83: Alternate GURPS IV and Conditional Injury (CI) from Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V. Ideally, it would be realistic, easy-to-use, and work directly with KYOS and CI as opposed to creating a parallel system. There has been a lot of great work so far, and I'm extremely grateful to each of the contributors.
THE +30 = ×10 SYSTEM This is what Anthony’s Know Your Own Damage is based on, and Anthony has listed the advantages of this system here. It is complete, but it doesn’t satisfy the idea of directly working with KYOS and CI because there isn’t enough information on how the systems interact. THE +24 = ×10 SYSTEM This assumes that BL in KYOS is converted to be +10 = ×12. It'd be a bit of extra work. Plus, dataweaver mentioned that it “gives you easy squares and cubes”. Anthony argues that it gives “nasty numbers”, and dataweaver argues that it's “less of a concern [...] since we're actually more interested in ranges of values than exact values”. Earlier in the thread, dataweaver detailed these values here. THE +20 = ×10 SYSTEM The +20 = ×10 system feels the best to me. It seems like it would take the least effort to get working directly with KYOS, especially because BL in KYOS is based off of +10 = ×10. KYOS also converts BS ST into KYOS strength this way since KYOS ST is based on 20 times the log of BS ST. dataweaver details a conversion from BS HP/damage to the +20 = ×10 system here. RyanW's System is described by RyanW as being based on +20 = ×10 here. RyanW's System
In order to keep the regular ST [10/level], I suggest multiplying everything before Severity by 3 and then dividing it by 3 for Severity, which also helps with the resolution.
dataweaver's +20 = ×10 System
Anthony's +20 = ×10 System
A MESSY SOLUTION Everything is calculated per BS except for ST, which is the default assumption of KYOS. However, for this, damage is reverted to how it was before for calculating reasonable WP.
And it is messy. It requires buying extra HP, and damage will always be looked up from a table because the progression is awkward. Plus, this relies on the large HP and damage bands in CI. Though, I don’t like the damage progression in BS. So, I use tbone’s New Damage for ST. If you don’t mind everything being a bit deadlier, use it as is with “medium” damage and “large” damage on the New Damage Table (or you can use it in conjunction with tbone’s Toughness). Otherwise, per tbone’s suggestion, you can use “small” damage and “medium” damage on the Expanded New Damage Table (and it’s suggested to give big weapons a damage boost). Personally, I think there’s a nice middle ground in using the New Damage Table and shifting the table to ST 7 is ST 10, so ST 10 is 1d-2/1d damage. That leaves me with the following:
Current Thoughts It really is a toss-up between a few options right now.
Last edited by Raekai; 08-29-2019 at 07:03 PM. |
08-22-2019, 03:25 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
I was never able to get my logarithmic injury system simple enough to be useful, without losing a lot of detail. I also don't have conditional injury.
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08-22-2019, 11:44 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
Conditional Injury has a section in it about how to apply DR.
To me, the one thing that needs to be done to get Conditional Injury and Know Your Own Strength to match up is to replace the damage roll. When I join the two, I convert damage ratings based on the maximum damage they can inflict, then I apply a penalty to that if your margin of success on the attack vs. defense roll was low: -3 for a margin of 1, -2 for a margin of 2, -1 for a margin of 3, and no penalty for a margin of 4 or more. So a 2d6 attack is rated as 12 damage, which becomes a Wound Potential of 4; then a marginal hit can reduce that as low as 1. (I did an analysis of how the spreads of various numbers of damage dice get mapped to Wound Potential. What I found was that the resulting spread of Wound Potential is nearly always a five-point spread, with a strong bias toward the upper end; and the more damage dice, the less likely the lower end is. In practice, at least half of the results show up in the upper two levels; and most of what's left show up in the next two levels below that. So a “damage roll” that generates a Wound Potential directly really ought to follow a similar pattern.) |
08-23-2019, 12:23 AM | #5 |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
I've been fiddling with a version where you start at +0 damage and RT 4, and each +1 ST is worth +1/3 to each (round to nearest). Instead of rolling damage and converting to wound potential, you just use the damage as wound potential directly. Roll a d6 and give -1 on a 1-2, +1 on a 5-6. Swing is worth +1 damage.
That's the bulk of it, but there's more detail (including how armor works) in this thread.
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08-23-2019, 03:02 PM | #6 | |
World's Worst Detective
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Columbus, Ohio
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
Quote:
Fixing Logarithmic Wounding Potential So, the above Logarithmic Wounding Potential Table is obviously a bit messed up. I had to start really thinking with logarithms. In standard Conditional Injury, every ×10 HP results in +6 RT (thanks to the Size and Speed/Range Table). So, it follows that, if ×10 is +10 in the scale used in Knowing Your Own Strength, then every +10 HP should be +6 RT. Either that, or it might have to be ×10^2 is +10 because standard HP is quadratic, which would make it every +20 HP is +6 RT. If RTa is ×10 HP is +6 RT, RTb is +10 HP is +6 RT, and RTc is +20 HP is +6 RT, then... Code:
HP RTa RTb RTc 1 -2 -2 -2 11 4 4 1 21 6 10 4 31 7 16 7 41 8 22 10 51 8 28 13 Code:
BL RTa RTb RTc 2.5 1 -2 -2 25 4 4 1 250 7 10 4 2500 10 16 7 25000 13 22 10 250000 16 28 13 It makes calculating RT from logarithmic ST much easier: RT = (ST × 0.3) + 0.7Yes, the parentheses don't need to be there, but it looks more organized to me. Leftover Weird Bits So, to have RT -2, you'd need to have HP -9. Yeah, negative 9. That's... very different from the original working of this system, and I don't know how something like this will affect small things hurting each other. I'm not sure what to do with weapons/damage or if I should just leave it. RyanW's thread has some interesting ideas. Really, there should be a way to overhaul weapons to better fit this scheme. If there's a correlation between weapon damage and a force multiplier that says, for example, +1 damage represents ×1.n power, I'm not familiar with it. If it exists, it would just be a matter of converting that multiplier in addition. As mentioned elsewhere, you could forgo even having swing damage and just make swung attacks have a +1 severity modifier. There was another weird bit that I thought of, but I can't recall it now...
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Raekai's links: My blog about conlanging, GURPS, and other stuff! — Using Knowing Your Own Strength with Conditional Injury Simulating multiple attacks Wildcard Power Pool: a flexible magic/powers system Magic to RPM complete conversion v2 (incomplete) Perussinexian Magic 2 (outdated) |
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08-24-2019, 12:36 PM | #7 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
The fundamental difficulty with logarithmic damage is that addition and subtraction (i.e. DR and barrier penetration) involves either advanced math or table lookup. If we ignore that problem, you can actually make KYoS work really easily with conditional injury.
First, decide on the scaling you want for damage. There are distinct benefits to either +20ST=x10 damage and +30ST=x10 damage. That just defines a scaling factor. I will say the math is less annoying at +30 = x10, so I'll continue from there. RT = ST/5 + 2 Thrust Damage: make a ST roll. If you succeed, the WP of your attack is equal to 1/5 your MoS. If you fail, it's -2, or nothing if you fail by more than 10. Note that this will give a range of values. For Swing damage, add +5 to ST. If you have a damage bonus, +1 per die is equal to +3 ST. For weapons with flat adds, that gets into the addition and subtraction situation. For weapons with flat damage, look up their average damage on the WP table, and give them an effective ST of WP*5+10 (for intermediate values, feel free to tweak up or down). If you aren't dealing with armor, you're done; just plug the WP and RP above into the rest of the rules. Now, for the addition and subtraction part. This, unfortunately, involves table lookup, but it's the same table as before. You need to start by converting WP to linear damage. To do this, first, when making the WP roll (above) keep track of any leftover (so if you succeed by 2, that's still WP 0, but you have 2 leftover). Your linear damage is equal to the minimum amount given for that WP, plus 10% per point of leftover (drop all fractions). Apply all flat adds and penalties, look up the result on the WP table, and that's your final WP. You may find it easier to change the WP table so the minimum damage matches the range/speed table -- i.e.
You might notice that RT has pretty low resolution on ST. If you're willing to have a larger table, you can adjust the table from +6 = x10 to +30 = x10. In that case, RT=ST+10, WP=MoS, fixed damage weapon effective ST = (average damage WP + 10), and severity is (WP-RT)/5 (apply all severity modifiers after division). |
08-24-2019, 05:48 PM | #8 | |||
World's Worst Detective
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Columbus, Ohio
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
Quote:
Quote:
I think I get it now. By Anthony's and RyanW's powers combined, I think I have a better grasp on this. After reading Anthony's comment (and thank you for taking the time to read up on the stuff), I thought, "Well, wouldn't it be ideal to scale it the same as lifting power?" (i.e., +10 is ×10). To be fair, I still haven't answered that question for myself. Is is ideal? Necessary? More or less realistic? I personally don't know enough to know. Should damage scale with lifting power? That's outside of my expertise. But, instead of just saying the same thing over and over, I tried to model that +10 = ×10. So, RT = ST / 3 + 3.33. It quickly dawned on me as to why "ST/3" seemed so familiar—it was RyanW's thread and above post. In that case, after changing the table to match the Size and Speed/Range Table with rounded values (per RyanW), it should be...
Or, after matching with minimum values (per Anthony), it should be...
The numbers are a bit trickier, but it slightly increases the resolution. I'm okay with the lumpy cost progression because it makes me think of Basic Speed, and I have no problem with that. You could buy/sell HP or Striking ST to move things up or down. Quote:
So, I think this means WP = MoS / 3, fixed damage weapon effective ST = average damage WP / 3 + 10, and severity is (WP - RT) / 3. Right? I'm still not sure about the rest.
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Raekai's links: My blog about conlanging, GURPS, and other stuff! — Using Knowing Your Own Strength with Conditional Injury Simulating multiple attacks Wildcard Power Pool: a flexible magic/powers system Magic to RPM complete conversion v2 (incomplete) Perussinexian Magic 2 (outdated) |
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08-24-2019, 06:54 PM | #9 | ||
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
Quote:
That's for fixed damage weapons, such as guns. Quote:
There are simpler ways of doing this, but they all involve table lookup, it's just a question of which table lookup you use. |
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08-24-2019, 09:29 PM | #10 | |
World's Worst Detective
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Columbus, Ohio
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Re: Conditional Injury with Knowing Your Own Strength
Ooh, that's an ugly number. It'd probably be easier to express that as "For every 3 points you succeed by, add +2 to your WP." That loses half of the resolution, though. "Multiply your MoS by 2. For every 3 points, add +1 to your WP" isn't too bad, and that's fairly easy to remember.
Okay, that makes much more sense. Thanks! That makes sense too now. Quote:
So, DR 7 is 2d, which is ST 16. Divide that by 2 for ST 8. Let's say the attack is 4d, which is ST 24. ST 24 - 8 is ST 16, which is 2d. And 4d - 2d = 2d. This works for 6d, which is ST 32. ST 32 - 8 is ST 24, which is 4d. And 6d - 2d is 4d. Going back down, let's say the attack is 2d, which is ST 16, of course. ST 16 - 8 = ST 8, which is 1d-4, which is neat because it still offers a small chance for damage to get through (though, that doesn't affect what we're doing here). So, DR 28 is 8d, which is ST 40. Divide that by 2 for 20. You can tell this is already broken. If the attack is 8d, which is ST 40, then it's 40 - 20, which is 20, which is then 3d. But 8d would obviously stop 8d. Then, I thought, what if 16 didn't turn into 8 from division? What if it's subtraction? So, DR 28 is 8d, which is ST 40. ST 40 - 8 is ST 32. Let's say the attack is 11d, which is ST 52. ST 52 - 32 is ST 20, which is 3d. And 11d - 8d is 3d. It would mean converting DR to dice to ST and making it ST - 8, but that's not a big deal for an overhaul. And I realized that you don't even have to do that. DR * 8/7 (~1.143) gives you the ST value. DR 70 (20d) × 8/7 is ST 80. Let's say the attack is 30d, which is ST 128. ST 128 - 80 is ST 48, which is 10d. 30d - 20d is 10d. DR 126 (36d) × 8/7 is ST 144. Let's say the attack is 36d, which is ST 152. ST 152 - 144 is 8, which is 1d-4. Did I stumble upon a solution for DR? Or am I kidding myself? If I did stumble upon a solution for DR, could this theoretically extend to all addition and subtraction? I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but...
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Raekai's links: My blog about conlanging, GURPS, and other stuff! — Using Knowing Your Own Strength with Conditional Injury Simulating multiple attacks Wildcard Power Pool: a flexible magic/powers system Magic to RPM complete conversion v2 (incomplete) Perussinexian Magic 2 (outdated) |
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Tags |
conditional injury, hit points, knowing your own strength, kyos, logarithm |
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