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HeatDeath · 03-02-2023, 05:53 PM

One of the key differences between 4e and 6e, that I may not have taken fully into account in the Killer Kart design process, is damage and defense.

In 4e, if you miss, you miss cleanly, and do zero damage.. If you hit, you'll do (on average) the expected value of the nD6 your weapon rolls. So you can determine really easily how many landed salvos you can expect your armor to be able to take from a weapon with a given number of dice.

In 6e, your attack roll will give you the expected value of stars over it's dice, but those stars are then subtracted from by the defense roll which is (mostly) proportional to the target's speed, with modification due to range rerolls. So really, you're gonna land at least some damage more often, but when you land damage it'll be less than the expected value of your weapon's dice. Whether that balances out or not depends on how recklessly your target tends to drive.

A fuller analysis of equivalent effective armor levels between 4e and 6e would need to take into account the expected value of the defense dice from a target driving at an "average" speed (i.e. 3), vs. what the target speed modifiers (if you use those in your 4e game) do to the probability of a hit landing at all in 4e.

[I have a C# library I've developed than can do some pretty fancy dice calculations, including expected values and expected values of rerolls on CW6e dice, and one of the features I've added to it since I wrote the Killer Kart article was a way of chaining to-hit rolls and damage rolls to find the expected number of landed damage points per a to-hit-roll-plus-damage-roll 4e-style attack. That would be a more apples-to-apples comparison to a full CW6e attack-roll-minus-defense-roll attack for calculating how long a given amount of armor could be expected to last against a given weapon in each game.]

03-02-2023, 05:53 PM	#30
HeatDeath Join Date: May 2012	Re: Old CW vs New CW One of the key differences between 4e and 6e, that I may not have taken fully into account in the Killer Kart design process, is damage and defense. In 4e, if you miss, you miss cleanly, and do zero damage.. If you hit, you'll do (on average) the expected value of the nD6 your weapon rolls. So you can determine really easily how many landed salvos you can expect your armor to be able to take from a weapon with a given number of dice. In 6e, your attack roll will give you the expected value of stars over it's dice, but those stars are then subtracted from by the defense roll which is (mostly) proportional to the target's speed, with modification due to range rerolls. So really, you're gonna land at least some damage more often, but when you land damage it'll be less than the expected value of your weapon's dice. Whether that balances out or not depends on how recklessly your target tends to drive. A fuller analysis of equivalent effective armor levels between 4e and 6e would need to take into account the expected value of the defense dice from a target driving at an "average" speed (i.e. 3), vs. what the target speed modifiers (if you use those in your 4e game) do to the probability of a hit landing at all in 4e. [I have a C# library I've developed than can do some pretty fancy dice calculations, including expected values and expected values of rerolls on CW6e dice, and one of the features I've added to it since I wrote the Killer Kart article was a way of chaining to-hit rolls and damage rolls to find the expected number of landed damage points per a to-hit-roll-plus-damage-roll 4e-style attack. That would be a more apples-to-apples comparison to a full CW6e attack-roll-minus-defense-roll attack for calculating how long a given amount of armor could be expected to last against a given weapon in each game.]