MA Questions

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

Why are MA penalties always presented as fixed values rather than deductions? There's clearly a humanoid bias there, but there are also creatures with higher and lower MA scores that could be impacted by encumbrance or armor penalties.

TFT's simplicity bias. It doesn't even get through the human encumbrance rules without suggesting many people will want to ignore them.

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

For example, what is a centaur character's adjusted MA when wearing leather barding? Half plate?

Well, we can almost get there, but not definitively.

Per ITL pg. 66 and 132, it is per weight encumbrance, with armor weight being 250% that of a human suit, so 40 pounds for leather, 112.5 pounds for half plate. A ST 14 centaur would have its full MA up to 56 pounds carried... at which point, ITL trips over its attempted simplicity by saying MA drops to 8...

So the GM has to decide if that means literally MA 8 (probably not), MA -2 (maybe) or 8 MA for a normal human, so proportionally that'd be 80% of the MA of a creature with some other MA (I think that makes the most sense - some may balk, but I see no good simpler alternative to getting appropriate numbers).

I would also quibble with the flat 250% weight for ALL 2-hex creatures. I think a centaur might want not just horse barding but most of a human suit of leather armor as well, which might or might not weigh more, but probably would reduce DX by the full amount, not the reduced barding amount mentioned on ITL 132.

So to answer, I get Centaur MA at a full 24 outdoors / 12 indoors in leather, but half-plate barding brings a ST 14 centaur to just over 8 x ST, which is human MA 4, so 40% would be MA 9.6 outdoors, or MA 4.8 indoors, and an extra -2 DX, and only able to carry another 27 or so more pounds of gear.

Originally Posted by JLV

Honestly, I personally have always felt that the MAs should be dependent on some combination of ST and DX to determine your actual MA. Perhaps something as simple as MA = (ST + DX)/2 (with suitable racial bonuses/penalties). This would, in turn, solve all of these conundrums that constantly come up, though it would mean that MA could literally vary from turn to turn based on encumbrances, damage, etc.

I suspect that the original decision to go with flat MAs with flat values for penalties was to make it "simpler," but in this case, I think making it just a bit more complex at the front end would have made the whole thing a LOT "simpler" in the end, since all these edge cases and special exceptions would have been eliminated from the beginning.

(That, of course, is just my personal feelings on the matter, and may not reflect anyone else's, YMMV, etc., etc., and so on.)

(Well it's also pretty much what GURPS does. I'd say it works out rather well there (for my own tastes), but the result there is more complicated, but logical and consistent.)