[New release] EABA v2 augmented pdf

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by BTRC

Don't know how well it would do THS. EABA v1 had a nanotech post-Ruin supplement called Age of Ruin, but I have not converted that over to the EABA v2 powers system. I am in the early stages of a different nanotech-postsingularity supplement called Grep, which is thus far working out under v2 rules.

Oh, I meant I wondered how it handles various racial templates, body-hopping, blurred lines between self and equipment - that sort of stuff.

[BTRC]

since it seems to make higher difficulties not reachable with even significant roll levels

That's not a bug, it's a feature... Seriously, the difficulty scale in EABA is designed around what can be done. The idea is that no matter how good your vision is, you cannot read a newspaper from across the street or shoot a rifle one-handed from the hip and do a head shot at 200 meters. Setting a maximum acheivable difficulty sets the limit of human performance.

Given that, there are things you can do to decrease the difficulty. Like GURPS, EABA ranged weapons have an Accuracy. If you aim as an action, you decrease the difficulty for range by Accuracy. So, if you aim and have a sufficiently accurate weapon, you can hit things that would be impossible to deliberately target with a non-aimed shot. So, an Accuracy of 4 could knock an unacheivable difficulty of 21 down to a 17, which is not all that hard to reach if you are rolling say 7d+2 and keeping the best three.

And since there are genres where people can do "impossible" things, there is a character trait you can buy called "Larger than Life", and each level you buy in that lets you keep an extra die ("best 4", "best 5", etc.). This lets you have a world where two people can have identical skill levels or attribute rolls, but one person has that special something that lets them do things not possible for mere mortals.

If you have a die roll that is d+0 or d+1, you can always drop a die and get a +2. So, a better roll is never inferior to a lesser one in terms of the number you can reach. Because EABA uses cumulative action penalties (-1d per extra action), higher numbers of dice give you a "best three" to keep longer than a lower roll would. For instance, if I have a 4d+0 roll and you have a 3d+2 roll, on your second action you are rolling 2d+2, but I am still rolling 3d+0. The person with that extra die in their roll, even if only because of a +1, is going to get one more roll that has a "best three" than the other person.

It's a fairly common question for new players and just came up on the BTRC forum as well. I believe this link is a file that shows the percentage curves of each roll vs. each difficulty using the mechanic.

[BTRC]

Oh, I meant I wondered how it handles various racial templates, body-hopping, blurred lines between self and equipment

racial templates: no problem, that's in the core rules
body-hopping: that would have to be a gameworld specific rule or mechanic in EABA, as it has nothing to cover that in the core rules
man-machine: I have not worked anything like that out, but at first glance I think you could expand/extrapolate on existing rules to cover it

[vicky_molokh]

Okay, I've finally decided to take a look at the whole thing and not just the lite, so added your EABA2 and Stuff! to my library. Will examine it in more detail later.

As for the variable turn length, I'm kinda scared off by the idea of turns lengthening as the action goes on, but I like that it essentially lets the GM pick a preferred turn length and run with it.