Dark City take on MA

[JimmyPlenty]

Dark City had MA as DX/2 to an action. They did not have DX=MA, but I think that is how it would translate.

Do you think this would work? My only thought is it would really make players slow in heavy armor with low DX.

[larsdangly]

Originally Posted by JimmyPlenty

Dark City had MA as DX/2 to an action. They did not have DX=MA, but I think that is how it would translate.

Do you think this would work? My only thought is it would really make players slow in heavy armor with low DX.

I am not sure I understand your description; what does 'MA as DX/2 to an action' mean? Are you saying they have a figure's MA equal adjDX/2? Or something more complex related to actions?

[JimmyPlenty]

Dark City was using DX/2 for MA, but you could do an action after. An average guy of 10 could move 5 and attack, much like TFT, just without the option not to attack and go twice the distance.

I'm wondering the possibilities of merging the two. Part of me assumes they thought of this already and I wonder what they came up with and why it wasn't used.

[Skarg]

Reasons that immediately come to my mind not to do this include:

1. I like the choice of moving less distance and acting, versus moving more and not being able to act. Removing that seems weird / wrong to me, because it seems obvious to me that people can't run full speed and fight at the same time.

2. Figures that can move many hexes and attack start to break TFT's maneuver limits. The higher MA is allowed, the more the movement sequence can be abused by people taking advantage of the way their enemies can't respond to their movement. The most glaring may be that if you can move much more than 5 per turn and attack, then it becomes more and more easy to run all the way around enemy figures and attack them from the side and rear when moving second. Or even (when moving first or second), to jump people from behind into HTH, who thought they had moved carefully to face you, but you just have so much MA you can go all the way around them and jump them from behind.

3. The MA of opponents becomes much less predictable if it's based on their DX rather than being based mostly on their armor and limited to 10-12 unless they're an unarmored Elf with Running or something. If MA were based on DX, then it'd be really hard to anticipate how far your foes could move, further undermining how well TFT's movement system would work.

4. MA = DX seems just wrong to me, in the sense that not everyone who's agile or skilled is a fast runner, and vice versa. And also in the sense that I think the difference in movement ability would not be as variable as DX is.

5. When roleplaying, I prefer players not to know what the exact stats of their friends and foes are, but MA = DX would tend to reveal adjDX automatically. "Oh he moved 7, so he's at least DX 14!"

6. It gives an important additional ability to DX, which is already a vital stat in TFT.

7. MA in TFT is already low compared to real rates of movement at the time scale. Unless you allow moving and not acting to be faster that DX/2, then you're doubling that error.

8. All of the fixed-MA non-human creatures would lose their existing MA status versus humans, and you'd need to figure out what you want to do about that, if anything. For example, horses in TFT have high MA but not that high DX - what MA would they have? Should a high-DX human have higher MA than a horse? Etc.