Rules you ignore/alter.

[kirbwarrior]

One rule I somehow never noticed until about a month ago is that daily HP recovery requires rest and food. That's not unrealistic (I think?), but I was thinking that Rapid Healing can become slightly better by doing as it does normally (+5 HT to recover), but on days you don't rest you can still recover HP at a -10 (total -5) to represent the slight healing ability some people seem to have that I would attribute to Rapid Healing. The effect is so small that I don't think it would really be even a point, and I could even see using it universally; HT10 person would never succeed, but HT15 can rarely heal without rest.

Oh, and Very Rapid Healing is entirely changed, it now just doubles any and all healing (although it probably makes most sense to restrict it to HP) while still giving the effects of RH. In a mundane setting it's unchanged and in settings where daily healing is the least useful form of healing it stays useful.

[Otaku]

Hmm... kirbwarrior's -10 penalty to heal when a character can't rest and get decent meals sounds pretty reasonable. Anyone have any more on such a thing? Like how to break up the penalty to represent the different but mundane ways a person may not properly rest or get "decent" meals?

If you're not shooting for gritty realism, and other campaign elements aren't making natural recovery unimportant, a little more granularity seems like it could really add to a game. Like the token example of marching to or from the Dark Lord's Lair (TM), either unable to pause for rests but still getting decent rations, or being able to stop and rest but supplies are minimal, even with supplemental foraging? Would it be better to have smaller penalties that perfectly add up to -10, or two smaller penalties that do not equal -10, because no rest and no meals exacerbate each other?

[Plane]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

One rule I somehow never noticed until about a month ago is that daily HP recovery requires rest and food. That's not unrealistic (I think?), but I was thinking that Rapid Healing can become slightly better by doing as it does normally (+5 HT to recover), but on days you don't rest you can still recover HP at a -10 (total -5) to represent the slight healing ability some people seem to have

Originally Posted by Otaku

Hmm... kirbwarrior's -10 penalty to heal when a character can't rest and get decent meals sounds pretty reasonable. Anyone have any more on such a thing? Like how to break up the penalty to represent the different but mundane ways a person may not properly rest or get "decent" meals?

I definitely like the idea of the baseline HT rolls (whether normal, rapid, or even SLOW healing) to be at a "fully fed" state which is gradually penalized in -1 increments as one suffers progressive malnutrition, up until the point it's below 3 at which point you don't roll at all.

"GM may give a penalty if conditions are bad, or a bonus if conditions are very good" on B424 pretty much hints at that anyway, since it would be "bad" if food was "less than decent" and "good" if food was "more than decent". To me "day of rest" means it would also be linked to FP somehow. Last Gasp begins to address that: every 20% of missing FP is -1 to HT rolls, so fatigued guys heal inefficiently.

For rest to matter more on a micro scale I favor the idea of "HP ticks" each consuming 1 AP (Action Points) and requiring a certain level of 'ticks' to build up before you get your HP roll. To represent "you must rest to heal" is the idea that you'd be more often taking Recovery Events (like Do Nothing) to pay for the ongoing healing ticks, and you would not be accruing ticks during times when you're spending all that AP on combat or running around.

You could have it so the AP cost of a tick is ONLY payable if you're at full AP and do a Recovery Event (AP overflow) so that you don't have guys hovering around 50% AP and still healing. I like the same idea to somehow represent FP recovery too.

Instead of a "tick" that might just be regaining fractional HP too (in which case, with multiple opportunities per day, not one) and FP too:just at an inferior ratio you get from burning FP for quick AP access so you don't have people casually swapping between the pools. Like instead of 1 FP burning to give 50% AP, you need 500% AP (50 for HT 10) overflow to rebuild 0.1 FP, which is 100x as efficient in the opposite direction. 500 AP might be regained in 1000 seconds, which is 16 minutes, pretty close to the standard 10 minute intervals.

Overflow might quickly dissipate in the case of AP usage though, like maybe using AP doesn't just use up your normal pool, but also destroys AP squared from the accumulated overflow pool?

The ratio also has to get worse as fatigue worsens due to Cole establishing progressively slower rates of FP recover from deep (sub-zeor) fatigue) or moderate (0-50% left) ones. If there was some way to progressively worsen it rather than having 3 distinct tiers that'd be awesome, but need a lot of experimentation for balance until something feels right. This part's too complicated for me.

Slow Healing 3 is an HT roll every 8 days. Whatever ongoing AP costs you would want to

Another thing is... since there's actually some delay in digestion, in some cases maybe what you heal today should be based on what you ate YESTERDAY?

Another consideration is that the body can metabolize stored fat for backup energy in calorie scarcity, and break down muscle/protein in less important muscle groups to free up amino acids for use in the immune system or healing muscle injuries...

So perhaps a situation might exist where you can sacrifice Arm ST or Lifting ST or Striking ST (various muscle fibers) to heal a loss of HP? Maybe not considered a permanent loss, but treat them like crippled powers that take weaks of healing (with good meals) to get back. But in some cases, the recovery of systemic HP for survival is more important than having one of those ST subtraits.

I've actually wondered if we could represent digestion/healing as Internal Leech taking HP/FP from food as characters (ie blueberry muffin)

P96 Leech [25] is 1/5 cost as an internal advantage and Internal Leech [5] could be modified in ways to represent digestion. I think we'd need Aura +80% to make it automatic, without the -30% Melee Attack (already part of Leech) but perhaps with an "Always On" discount since you can't turn off digesting things in your stomach, and "Contact Agent" (B111) because you can't absorb nutrients from stuff with DR.

Auras are able to take B113 Onset variant "Exposure Time" so instead of 1 HP per second you could digest 1 per minute/hour/day as appropriate.

"Heals FP" could represent B427's "regain one extra FP if you eat a decent meal" option. The "GM may" allows reasonable flexibility that you don't have some mage eating six "decent meals" per hour to get back +6 FP, since there should be a limit to how often you can eat meals. It would also be reasonable to delay that FP bonus at least a few hours to allow digestion to take place, depending on glycemic index.

I'm wondering if in the case of exposure time you could opt for a fractional loss of FP (perhaps gained as AP) or fractional losses of HP, rather than "nothing happens until the minute is up". You would round down fractions, a drawback leading to slower overall gain, in exchange for more immediate effects.

Unfortunately 1/60 is like 1.6% so that'd be something like rounding down to 0.01 dmg per second/minute (0.6 dmg per minute/hour) which is two decimal places and less aesthetic crunch than keeping it to one decimal place.

[MIB.6361]

I think Parry Missile Weapons should be a technique instead of a separate skill. Hard, with no default, with some suitable penalty off of the base weapon skill.

If you want to use this ability with multiple weapons, you take the technique with each skill.


I did it this way in a martial arts heavy game years ago and it worked out well. I haven't tried it since.

IIRC, I based it off of the same defaults as Aggressive Parry.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by MIB.6361

I think Parry Missile Weapons should be a maneuver instead of a separate skill. Hard, with no default, with some suitable penalty off of the base weapon skill.

If you want to use this ability with multiple weapons, you take the maneuver with each skill.


I did it this way in a martial arts heavy game years ago and it worked out well. I haven't tried it since.

In your game, what penalty did you use?

[ericthered]

I like to ignore that enchanters need 15 in their skill. It's just a touch bizarre. Not that it ever comes up.

[aaron819]

Bullet prices in After the End. I just multiply the prices in High-Tech by 50. No reason a .22 round should cost as much as a .45.

Also ATE's TL price multipliers work a bit different for guns in my campaigns. I use the TL where a type of gun would be available, rather than the TL where a specific gun is available (though any gun designed for smokeless propellant is at least TL 6). So a Glock 19 gets the TL 6 multiplier instead of TL 7, since TL 6 is when semi-automatic pistols become available. I mainly do that because I don't think the difference between a TL 6 and 7 gun of the same type, damage, range, and caliber justifies the significant price difference.

[AlexanderHowl]

I just think that healing rate should be one-third the rest rate with normal levels of activity, nutrition, and rest. I also allow people to purchase one level of Reduced Consumption (Food, -50%) in realistic campaigns. I trained myself to subsist off two meals a day (and no snacking) twenty years ago and I have had no ill effects, so I do not see why others could not do the same if desired.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by MIB.6361

I think Parry Missile Weapons should be a maneuver instead of a separate skill. Hard, with no default, with some suitable penalty off of the base weapon skill.

If you want to use this ability with multiple weapons, you take the maneuver with each skill.

I did it this way in a martial arts heavy game years ago and it worked out well. I haven't tried it since.

If it has a penalty off the base weapon skill, that sounds like you're talking about a Technique, and techniques always "default" to the skill they're based on.

As for maneuver, do you mean something like you would take All-Out-Defense: Double and it counts as 2 defenses or something like that?

Originally Posted by ericthered

I like to ignore that enchanters need 15 in their skill. It's just a touch bizarre. Not that it ever comes up.

Not that bizarre since T109 talks about relaxing the 15 minimum for Ceremonial Magic:
*power 11-14 works in high mana
*power 3-10 requires very high mana

"Assistants working on such projects must know Enchant and any other spells involved at the item’s intended Power level or higher."

I think this option works better if using T58 continuous mana where high mana comes in +1 to skill increments (even though high/VH mana doesn't normally give skill boosts) so then all you'd need is for it to be in mana which has enough to bring it up to 15.

Thaumatology doesn't hint at this, but another idea, at least for "the item casts spells" type of enchantments, is to not require mana to bring it up to 15, just roll at sub-15 levels as if the item was an incompetent spellcaster, so you'd have a lot of failed or easy to resist spells.

Where "only work if mana brings it up to 15" is really needed is the non-casting forms of enchantment that just indefinitely power stuff (golem, wraith, lich) because with them you're not constantly rolling against Power.

[David Johnston2]

I dispense with Regrowth, deciding to make it an automatic feature of Regeneration unless you limit Regeneration.

I dispense with Unaging, simply making it an Immunity.

I base the difficulty of the Time Travel spell in Magic on how precisely you want to target your destination. Thus it's easy to visit the dinosaurs if you're into that but fantastically difficult to travel to last minute.