Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Let's face it, in TL 7+ games, ST is close to being a dump state because there is little reason to go above ST 12.

You mean you wouldn't want to spend forty points on ST for your engineer to be a Vulcan?

Compare 40 points for +4 ST to four levels of a 10/level Talent or ten levels of a skill. Or almost anything else.

Even if we look at the best-case scenarios for ST (carrying supplies and damage in melee combat), it feels like those goals would be much better served by buying skill that improves the utility of the supplies you can carry.

I would rather have +5 to my ranged combat skill and +5 to my melee combat skill than be able to carry marginally more weapons and hit marginally harder in melee combat.

The price for Lifting ST seems okay (this one is pretty useful in certain types of settings; it's only really useless when you have robots who can carry things for you, which is something you should have in most sci-fi settings). The price for HP seems reasonable (I mean, you won't survive hits from weapons, so this is pretty useless too, but it's fairly cheap; I would price it at 1/level, but whatever).

It's the 5/level for Striking ST that seems ridiculous. Being able to hit for slightly more damage in melee is worth very, very little in a science-fiction setting.

Ultimately, I think all of the things ST gives you are nearly worthless in most science-fiction settings. These are mostly flavor abilities. If they were each 1/level (making ST a total of 3/level), it would possibly still be overpriced, but it wouldn't feel bad to waste points on it for characterization.

ST is clearly significantly less useful in sci-fi games than in low-tech games. If it's priced correctly in low-tech games, then that must mean it's overpriced in sci-fi games.

And the effect of an overpriced trait is that it discourages players from building characters with those traits when they would otherwise do so.

I don't think it's desirable to discourage players from building strong characters in science-fiction games. I personally love the idea of playing robot characters. But they run into a confluence of overpriced traits (ST and DR are rip-offs at high TLs), so I never get to do so. The game discourages me from playing a concept I want to play. And if I bite the bullet and do so anyway, I feel ripped off. It feels bad to waste points and then have a much less useful character than the other players. You end up trading character agency for mechanically useless characterization. All of which seems undesirable from a game design viewpoint.

[tbone]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

It's the 5/level for Striking ST that seems ridiculous. Being able to hit for slightly more damage in melee is worth very, very little in a science-fiction setting.

Well, there is a bit more to Striking ST in high-tech: ability to use heavier guns, and ability hurl those disintegrator grenades further.

But still. Yeah, it'll usually be a better buy in a low-tech setting.

[Kromm]

To a great extent it comes down to gaming style!

I ran a modern-day secret-agents campaign for years. The characters often had access to technology near the cutting edge, but nothing I'd call science fiction. There was a marked tendency to raise ST with earned points – even the "face" character and medic did so – for three reasons:

1. On commando raids, stealthy insertions/extractions, surveillance missions, and so on, a lot of specialized gear was needed to succeed – not just weapons and body armor, but also load-bearing gear and packs filled with comms equipment, explosives, medical kits, optics, portable computers, tools, etc. If the team had to operate far from civilization, down a sewer, stowed away on a ship, or whatever for several days, consumables (ammo, bandages, batteries, food, medication) were a big deal. In many cases, people thought it wise to have backup items, and also to be prepared for "what it?" situations ("Well, we're not supposed to be seen, but if we find a high-value target, we need explosives to demolish it."). All that stuff caused serious encumbrance that penalized Move and – often more important – Climbing and Stealth, and ST was the antidote

2. In violent situations other than pitched open-field battles, all combat was close-quarters combat. This was especially true in built-up areas (particularly indoors), dense vegetation, and aboard vehicles. Encounters at arm's reach – a door opened, someone rounded a corner, a foe lunged from behind a tree, etc. – were common. It was essential to be capable at grappling, because it was fatal to be grabbed from behind, hand over your mouth, and knifed in a dark corner, or to have your gun snatched and turned on you. In fact, this is why the "face" raised her ST: She was repeatedly abducted by force and was unable to break free or prevent her takers from just carrying her away.

3. In battles of few against many, there are three force multipliers of primary importance: The first is superior training; the second is stealth, covered already in my remarks on being strong enough to carry gear; the third is a much larger proportion of "support weapons." The agents discovered that they could defeat many times their number in poorly trained foes armed with cheap assault rifles if they were carrying machine guns, sniper rifles, RPGs, repeating grenade launchers, mortars, and packs full of hand grenades and directional mines. These things are heavy (addressed in my first point) and in the case of rifles and MGs often require high ST to wield. And when you're few, everybody shoots, so nobody was off the hook (in fact, the "face" became the best mortar gunner because it let her contribute from complete concealment).

This was all necessitated by a particular style of game, where autonomous, stealthy operations in dangerous environments were called for on the regular. There, ST wasn't anything like a "dump stat," and ST 11 was considered the bare minimum, with most people ending up at ST 12-15. It was definitely worth the investment.

This wouldn't necessarily change with higher TL in this general kind of game. With greater TL come greater technological challenges that require even more bits of specialized gear to overcome . . . and things like doors that need breaching and armor that needs piercing get tougher, necessitating heavier weapons. Individual items may be lighter if you're willing to accept what was formerly "heavy" performance at a lower TL, but meeting the "heavy" challenges of the current TL calls for a loadout that remains heavy. And changing TL does nothing to prevent close-quarters battle; in fact, the real-world tendency has been "the higher the TL, the greater percentage of infantry actions are CQB" (and also "the higher the TL, the more stuff an infantryman lugs into battle").

What could change this is the presence of power armor that stands in for ST, or the use of drones instead of people for dangerous close-in raids. That would be a paradigm in which ST wouldn't be worth very much. But it would also be a situation where a lot of the value of individual accomplishments is lost (because with highly capable power armor and robot allies, everybody is about equally capable), along with much of the tension of first-person risk (because "just send in the drones"). So it would be a valid decision on the GM's part to not let things develop this way, and to keep a modern-day, Cold War, or even WWII "feel" to the action by not having the PCs be the sorts of people who have access to battlesuits and drones. Then ST would be just as important as ever.

Given that RPGs focus on action and adventure, risk-taking and heroics, I think it's fair to go with "even as melee weapons grow less important, adventurers carry more and heavier gear" and "grappling always matters," and keep the value of ST fixed. I think it would be fair to scale back its cost in settings where individuals are defined entirely by their brains, and have drones, power armor, robots, and even freakin' starships to decide violence, but I'm not sure those settings are actually as good a baseline assumption for ultra-tech gaming, even if they show up a lot in films and novels.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by tbone

there is a bit more to Striking ST in high-tech: ability to use heavier guns

Does anyone know first book to clarify when to use Lifting ST vs Striking ST in respect to recoil?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Plane

Does anyone know first book to clarify when to use Lifting ST vs Striking ST in respect to recoil?

Guns use Lifting ST. That's been an answered FAQ for a while (not sure if books duplicate that info though).

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Guns use Lifting ST.

That was the assumption I was making when I said that Striking ST is useless in high-TL settings.

Good luck trying to slice through a combat robot's DR with a superscience sword if you're unlucky enough to find yourself in melee with one.

Kirk and Spock might find themselves in frequent unarmed combat, but that took a lot of effort on the part of the writers to set up. As a GM, I don't have players as willing to cooperate with my plans. They try really hard to keep from getting dropped naked onto alien planets. Enough so that abilities that are only useful in those situations aren't very useful at all.

[newton]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Good luck trying to slice through a combat robot's DR with a superscience sword if you're unlucky enough to find yourself in melee with one.

Supercience blades get some hefty armor divisors combined with swing damage and the bonus damage it can probably cut through the armor like butter.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by newton

Supercience blades get some hefty armor divisors combined with swing damage and the bonus damage it can probably cut through the armor like butter.

A TL11 warbot has DR 100.

A hyperdense vibroblade has an armor divisor of (10) and gives 1d+3 damage with a cutting attack.

Someone with ST 14 has a swing damage of 2d.

They deal 3d+6 (10) with their fancy greatsword. So 6.5 gets through the robot's DR if you aren't using any sort of edge protection.

That doesn't seem so bad until you realize the robot has 40 HP, carries enough munitions to win a twentieth-century world war, and is stronger than an elephant. If it grabs you, you're not getting away. Oh yeah, and it also has advanced movement options.

Oh yeah, and the TL11 battlesuits have twice as much DR as the warbots.

I'd stick with ranged weapons.

(I won't mention that I think it's dumb they aren't able to harden any of the armor in Ultra-Tech. Seems like a technology they would have developed, but what do I know. Surely they know all this armor they're making is useless. *shrug*)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Kirk and Spock might find themselves in frequent unarmed combat, but that took a lot of effort on the part of the writers to set up. As a GM, I don't have players as willing to cooperate with my plans. They try really hard to keep from getting dropped naked onto alien planets. Enough so that abilities that are only useful in those situations aren't very useful at all.

Well, in that case, there isn't much function for their taking ST (unless, like Scott, they're going to get into bar fights with Klingons), and a rational player wouldn't take it. So there's not much reason to tweak point costs to push players into buying traits that really aren't very relevant to a campaign setting. If nearly all characters have ST 10, then ST 11 or +1 Lifting Strength will make you "the big guy."

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

a rational player wouldn't take it. So there's not much reason to tweak point costs to push players into buying traits that really aren't very relevant to a campaign setting. If nearly all characters have ST 10, then ST 11 or +1 Lifting Strength will make you "the big guy."

A rational player might spend a hundred points on useless ST if their goal is "play a character with a high ST." If they want to play a Vulcan, then they'll spend eighty points on ST ("Vulcans are three times stronger than humans and twice as fast." -- Benjamin Sisko), even if they know they're throwing their points away, because their goal is to play a Vulcan--not to optimize the mechanical benefit that they receive from their point expenditures.

Or they might not understand that the trait is overpriced. I've seen many players inadvertently waste their points in this way.

Regardless, the result is that players who understand the utility provided by ST will avoid playing strong characters. The trait prices discourage playing Vulcans.

I don't think it's desirable to have game rules that discourage playing Vulcans, or that punish players who lack the rules mastery to understand what traits are overpriced (or who purchase those traits anyway), so I find this to be a problem with the rules.

This is the same issue that we see with overcharging for other traits. Forty points for Regrowth or sixty points for Unaging has the same effect. It either discourages players from making characters with those traits, or punishes them for doing so. I find either undesirable.