01-05-2018, 01:55 PM | #91 |
President and EIC
Join Date: Jul 2004
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
I wonder if perhaps the "roll more dice for more difficulty" mechanic should be done away with entirely, in favor of stat penalties.
When you roll 4 dice the result is very often going to be within a few points of 14. When you roll 5d, the significant majority of results will be from 16 to 19. The bell curve gets way steeper and most uncertainty is lost. Larger numbers of dice are more predictable yet. Stat penalties, on the other hand, keep the familiar 3d bell curve the same and move its center point. Much less predictable. |
01-05-2018, 02:00 PM | #92 | |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Yukon, OK
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
Quote:
On the other hand throwing more dice just 'feels' more impressive.
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01-05-2018, 02:26 PM | #93 | |
Join Date: Jan 2018
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
Quote:
As an aside, people seem to be willing to accept a d20 roll as an acceptable distribution. I always loved the bell curve of 3d6 and miss it when playing other games. |
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01-05-2018, 02:28 PM | #94 | |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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01-05-2018, 02:40 PM | #95 | |
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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01-05-2018, 08:41 PM | #96 |
Join Date: Jan 2018
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
As you are looking to possibilities
TFT is a simple but elegant system - I still use mechanics and ideas from Space Gamer 23 and 24 for example - for Ship board combat, Vikings and other periods of history for skirmishing. At one time I also adapted another hex based popular system into more of a melee based game Would strongly encourage you to give some thought to the historical aspects of melee - While Saga and some of the recent Osprey rule sets cover unit actions - Or even consider the boarding actions during Pirate encounters and the like. I believe there is a niche for individual and small unit actions at the Skirmish level. |
01-05-2018, 09:24 PM | #97 | |
Join Date: May 2013
Location: Tyler, Texas
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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My sci-fi rules were designed explicitly to avoid the problem of equating penetration and damage (which leads to poorly armored characters typically being killed outright when hit by a modern weapon). Basically, high tech weapons do a certain number of dice damage. High tech armor reduces each die by the armor’s rating. But it acts normally against Melee weapons. For instance, a heavy pistol does 2D damage. Heavy ballistic cloth armor stops 3 points of damage. It will reduce each die by 3 (but only to zero). Against melee weapons, it stops 3 points of armor. Primitive thrown/missile weapons doing 1 die or less damage are treated like melee weapons. Missile/Thrown weapons are treated like guns, with bonuses treated as a separate die. So the cloth armor would affect a longbow doing 1d+2 by stopping the +2 entirely and reducing the die by three. The armor would affect an Arquebuss (3D+3 damage) by stopping the +3 entirely and reducing each die by three points. If you don’t like subtracting from each die, an easy way to handle hi-tech armor is to treat a 6 as no damage for 1 point hi tech armor, 5-6 for 2 point high tech armor, 4-6 for 3 point high tech armor, etc. This system also allowed melee weapons to be reasonably effective against high tech armor...if you got close enough. I’m not sure that this system is wildly realistic, but it was a reasonable approximation for 1982. And it played very fast, once you got used to it. Last edited by tbeard1999; 01-05-2018 at 10:08 PM. |
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01-05-2018, 09:27 PM | #98 | |
Join Date: May 2015
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
I appreciate and agree with much of what you've written, but:
Quote:
That sounds like a change to a non-problem that creates some new questions, reduces the grain of the system, and actually seems more complicated to me than the existing modifiers. For example, what about auto success/failure, double and triple damage, or the chance to drop or break a weapon? Particularly for 2-die rolls, which would become common (attacking rear and downed foes) - triple on 2 and double on 3 would make those more juicy, but are we going to do 10 auto-miss, 11 drop, 12 break too? Is this "simplicity" worth it to either lose or increase those possibilities? The new players you hope to help will now more frequently need to know the six crit result ranges for each of at least 2d, 3d, and 4d rolls. That seems to me certainly harder to memorize than the existing DRMs, the most common of which are listed in Melee and don't seem that numerous to me. |
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01-05-2018, 09:39 PM | #99 | |
Join Date: May 2013
Location: Tyler, Texas
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
Quote:
So a high DX figure could reduce his DX and make himself much harder to hit, while retaining enough DX to have a decent chance of hitting. The Blitz mechanic worked the same way except a figure could add to his adjDX, giving the same bonus to any melee attackers. The maximum was 4 I think. This allowed a low DX figure to increase his chance of hitting at the cost of being easier to hit. Evading/Blitzing figures all attack in the same order they would have before the DX modifier was applied. |
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01-05-2018, 09:49 PM | #100 | |
Join Date: May 2013
Location: Tyler, Texas
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
Quote:
Last edited by tbeard1999; 01-05-2018 at 10:09 PM. |
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Tags |
in the labyrinth, melee, roleplaying, the fantasy trip, wizard |
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