Complex and unnecessary

[Sean Waters]

I tell you what really hacks me off...

 

(Don't you love it whena post starts like that)

 

...this whole thing about 2xmass=+1 Body. Grr. So the planet Earth has 86 Body, or thereabouts.

 

Well, actually it doesn't hack me off that much but what it does is creates serious conflict with the rest of the system, which works on a largely arithmetic progression (yes, we might possible have chatted about this before). If +1 Body represents an object twice as massive, then +1 Body damage should represent twice as much destructive potential. That would mean that a hit on the planet that did 86 Body in one go could crack the mantle, but 86 hits that do 1 Body each should have no real effect at all.

 

Reflecting that in the system would require major changes unless...

 

What if we assumed that a 2 Body hit was more effective than 2x1 Body hits, or a 9 body hit was much more destructive than 3x3 body hits?

 

So, something with 1 Body can take 1 x1Body hit. Something with 2 Body can take 2 x 1Body hits, something with 3 body can take 4x 1Body hits.

 

Binary increase, basically. That would mean that something with 10 Body could take 512 x 1Body hits, or 32x 5Body hits and so on?

 

That would mean that a small increase in Body damage would have much more damage potential. Going back to the example of planet Earth, if you wanted to destroy the planet with 1 Body hits (after defences obviously) then you would need 2^86 hits, or 7.7E+25 - a big number.

 

OK, that involves more book keeping and certain other changes when it comes to stuff like focii and vehicles, but it isn't that difficult a concept and would make the rules more coherent.

 

Nascent idea still, but any initial thoughts?

[ghost-angel]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

 

Our physics teacher at school used to threaten us with 'The Death of a Thousand Rusty Pen Nibs' (this was back when we had pen nibs*), and I oftent hink that the basic using of aliveness/coherence in hero is a bit of a blunt tool: if 1 pen nib isn't going to do any Body, then 1000 aren't either (certainly not one at a time) and if 1 pen nib does any Body, then 1000 would be overkill.

 

Personally I would like to see more exponential elements in Hero as, IMO, it makes superheroes more super, which I think is a good thing.

 

I started thinking about this when I was going through some Star Hero stuff and realised that some of the starships were actually harder to destroy than planets were and that Hero vehicle rules tended to make a mockery of damage when it was in fact easier to sink a battleship than blow up a main battle tank.

 

The answer is not just jigging with DEF and Body values - because that then leads to jigging with damage and almost everything else and we wind up rapidly playing make believe.

 

Something like this allows a massive but relatively low DEF object to actually take damage but not be destroyed ridiculously quickly: take the climax of Star Wars 4: the Death Star, in Hero terms, probably has a lot of Body (but not THAT much) and relatively low DEF (because bits of it ont eh surface got blown up reasonably easily). Never mind sending a torperdo down a cooling vent, a dozen ships, a couple of phases and some autofire lasers and it would be slag.

 

 

*and, of course back when we had teachers who could threaten children with such things and not be subject to dismissal and public villification.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

 

Same.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Actually ... I have a spreadsheet that tracks damage for the Terran Empire writeups ... they aren't harder to destroy than planets. In fact they aren't as tough as it appears at first glance, they are tough per Genre Simulation, but not impossible to kill.

 

Several of the writeups in SH are similar to the TE builds.

 

Also - keep in mind that with Very Large Objects it's generally not a good idea to treat the whole thing as the same "scale" as Comparatively Small Objects.

 

A space fighter being a CSO should not be able to do significant damage to an object a magnitude of order larger on the Size Scale - i.e. a VLO.

 

What we really need are to come up with some useufl Size/Damage Comparison Models to use. I think Thia Hamaldes has done some thoughts along these lines.

[archermoo]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I'm still trying to come up with were people ever got the idea that doubling something's mass meant that it had +1 BODY.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I'm still trying to come up with were people ever got the idea that doubling something's mass meant that it had +1 BODY.

 

Growth power, shooting through walls rules, and there is a specific example in Star Hero (actually a sort of side bar) that confirms the rule and calculates the Body stat of planet Earth.

 

**Checks reference** page 447 of 5ER (second column 2/3 way down) specifically states that 2x mass = +1 Body.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Actually ... I have a spreadsheet that tracks damage for the Terran Empire writeups ... they aren't harder to destroy than planets. In fact they aren't as tough as it appears at first glance, they are tough per Genre Simulation, but not impossible to kill.

 

Several of the writeups in SH are similar to the TE builds.

 

Also - keep in mind that with Very Large Objects it's generally not a good idea to treat the whole thing as the same "scale" as Comparatively Small Objects.

 

A space fighter being a CSO should not be able to do significant damage to an object a magnitude of order larger on the Size Scale - i.e. a VLO.

 

What we really need are to come up with some useufl Size/Damage Comparison Models to use. I think Thia Hamaldes has done some thoughts along these lines.

 

Well the Alien Wars write ups have 200m long battelships with 180+Body, which is more than Earth has, although the ships in Star Hero itself have mroe reasonable totals.

 

One option is to assume that 2x mass = +1 Body AND +1 DEF*, which then makes planets much tougher targets.

 

 

*or +1 DEF when the whole object is targeted**

 

 

 

** which has the intriguing possibility of attacking on different scales

[Doc Democracy]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Also - keep in mind that with Very Large Objects it's generally not a good idea to treat the whole thing as the same "scale" as Comparatively Small Objects.

 

A space fighter being a CSO should not be able to do significant damage to an object a magnitude of order larger on the Size Scale - i.e. a VLO.

 

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

 

It is like putting MegaScale on damage and defences which allows you to use reasonable numbers and numbers of dice without squeezing everything into a small scale.

 

So earth would have 86 MegaBODY - to do a MegaBODY with normal damage you would have to do 10, 100 or even 1000 BODY with an attack.

 

Much easier to attack MegaBODY entities with MegaDice attacks....

 

 

Doc

[archermoo]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Growth power, shooting through walls rules, and there is a specific example in Star Hero (actually a sort of side bar) that confirms the rule and calculates the Body stat of planet Earth.

 

**Checks reference** page 447 of 5ER (second column 2/3 way down) specifically states that 2x mass = +1 Body.

 

Thanks, though it seems that that ref is a general rule of thumb, and moreover only applies to objects. In fact it seems to me to be describing the rule of thumb that was used to generate the amount of Body given to different objects on the table. It also specifically notes that the Body total gained that way should be modified as appropriate.

 

I think some people get stuck thinking of the Hero rules as immutable laws of physics, rather than general rules to allow for the dramatic simulation of heroic fiction. Showing that a law of physics breaks down at extremes is a good way of showing that our understand of the law needs to be updated. Showing that a game rule breaks down at extremes is unnecessary: It's a given.

 

Though I'll also say that I agree with g-a and KS.

[OddHat]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

we wind up rapidly playing make believe

 

Um, yes. That's pretty much the hobby.

[Maur]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

 

Depends upon which incarnation of D6 you are referring to. In the original release I believe they used Damage Caps and To-Hit Caps and split everything up into named scales (character, speeder, walker, starfighter, capital). So, you looked up what your scale was as the attacker and the scale of the defender to find your damage cap (e.g. dice rolling above X are treated as rolling X) and looked up on another chart your To-Hit changes (e.g. dice rolling below Y are treated as rolling Y). So, character shooting at a starfighter had a much easier time hitting it, but far less likely to do damage.

In the 2nd Ed R&E version it was changed to bonus dice which were either applied to the attacker's damage or the defender's damage resistance.

In the current incarnation the scale of an object is an actual number (and the books have a chart of mass/time/volume/etc... to look up what that scale is). The scale difference is added to the to-hit roll, but subtracted from the damage roll.

Ex: a person shooting a handgun [scale 0] at a tank [scale 10] would add 10 to their to-hit roll for hitting (10 - 0), but subtract 10 (10 - 0) to the damage roll for doing damage)

Ex: that same tank shooting back at the person with the main gun would add -10 to his to-hit roll (0 - 10), but subtract -10 (or add 10) to the damage resistance roll (0 - 10).

[Doc Democracy]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Was first edition that I remember...

 

Doc

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Thanks, though it seems that that ref is a general rule of thumb, and moreover only applies to objects. In fact it seems to me to be describing the rule of thumb that was used to generate the amount of Body given to different objects on the table. It also specifically notes that the Body total gained that way should be modified as appropriate.

 

I think some people get stuck thinking of the Hero rules as immutable laws of physics, rather than general rules to allow for the dramatic simulation of heroic fiction. Showing that a law of physics breaks down at extremes is a good way of showing that our understand of the law needs to be updated. Showing that a game rule breaks down at extremes is unnecessary: It's a given.

 

Though I'll also say that I agree with g-a and KS.

 

There is support for this being a general principle int he game as the growth power also operates on +1 Body for a mass doubling. Body is pretty mutable though: a normal human could have a 20 body which, by those lights, would be the same as a normal with 10 levels of growth who weighs in at 100 tons. I know I've been hitting the beer and doughnuts a little hard, but...

 

Also the principle is confirmed in Star Hero at page 197 (co authored by James Cambias and Steve Long) where the Earth, if treated as a homogenous sphere of rock (DEF 5, Body 19 per hex) has a Body of 86 and would be effectively destroyed by an attack that did 91 Body (to account for defences) or completely vapourised by an attack that did 177 Body.

 

I don't really have a problem with that as such - 86 Body is a LOT, but if we are assuming Earth has a DEF of 5, it is shockingly easy to destroy: a normal with an Uzi 9mm and 5 clips of ammunition could create an extinction level event*

 

OK, that is silly, and whilst testing at extremes often yields silliness (and is, as you say, unnecessary) it can also show up areas that might stand a little improvement.

 

Star Hero basically advocates an ad hoc approach to this sort of thing, which is fine - it isn't often that this is going to come up but the principle comes up at much smaller scales, and, perhaps, should inform the way we use Body. The system had a Body stat and a 1-20 range for normals long before we translated that into a mass relationship. Now that relationship seems quite embedded, we might need to stand back and take another look.

 

At the very least if a weapon was going to destroy the planet I'd want the whole planet in range of the weapon, and sufficient AoE to cover a large part of the Earth - but we do not use such distinctions on Gigantica the 150 metre tall woman: realistically (HA!) human scale weapons should have little effect on her no matter what the theoretical damage output - you'd need vehicle weapons at least to get a projectile deep enough to do any actual harm.

 

This is all a balance though between principle and playability. Playability has to win, obviously, but if we can incorporate more principle without detracting from the game, I think that is a good thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Of course, had it been Arnie with an Uzi and 5 clips, noone would even raise an eyebrow

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

 

It is like putting MegaScale on damage and defences which allows you to use reasonable numbers and numbers of dice without squeezing everything into a small scale.

 

So earth would have 86 MegaBODY - to do a MegaBODY with normal damage you would have to do 10, 100 or even 1000 BODY with an attack.

 

Much easier to attack MegaBODY entities with MegaDice attacks....

 

 

Doc

 

The Mega Attack idea is something Hero has done before IIRC in Robot Hero, or Mecha Hero or wahatever it was called. I don't have the book, but it rings a vague bell. The trouble with this approach is that it is a little ad hoc - how many different damage ranges do you create*?

 

Well, now we can formalise it: the idea I suggest incorporates a mega damage (or more like a mega defence) principle:

 

If you assume that Body works on an exponential scale then you have to use an attack that gets close to the Body of the object in damage or it has little effect. For example, using the complex and unnecessary idea presented, if you want to destroy an object, but cannot do all the Body in one hit it takes an increasing number of hits to bring the target down: if you are doing 6 Body less than the target's Body it takes 64 hits to remove all teh Body, not 2. The practical effect is megadamage - only really powerful weapons are effective at destroying really tough targets - whilst less powerful weapons might be able to do damge still, it will be cosmetic at worst or take years (sometimes literally) to do significant damage.

 

 

 

 

* Star Hero sort of addresses mega damage: what it does though is increase the damage large ships do to small ships - it doesn't work the other way round.

[casualplayer]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Didn't they do something of this in WEG D6 for Star Wars? I vaguely remember it.

 

It is like putting MegaScale on damage and defences which allows you to use reasonable numbers and numbers of dice without squeezing everything into a small scale.

 

So earth would have 86 MegaBODY - to do a MegaBODY with normal damage you would have to do 10, 100 or even 1000 BODY with an attack.

 

Much easier to attack MegaBODY entities with MegaDice attacks....

 

 

Doc

 

Sounding kinda Rifts-y there. Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

 

But to steal from another system's concept, I've always felt that damage should propagate similar to the feat Cleave. If the damage done exhausts the BODY of the target hex, the remaining damage carries on to any adjacent hexes, and so on and so on. That is, unless the affect area is constrained or predetermined by a power modifier.

 

It's a symptom of the escalation of power that has creeped into the game. Characters are literally Tough as Dirt (because of Combat Luck or other defenses) so weapons get bigger to be able to hurt characters to instill drama so defenses notch up in a grail quest for invulnerability so weapons get turned up to 11....Then the poor GM one day realizes "Holy Smokes! Gunslinger's handcannon can knock down an apartment building" and he realizes just how many aspects of the game have been neglected in the care and feeding of PCs and he looks around at his mighty works and despairs. Stuff either isn't tough enough or damage has to be taken down a notch.

[Fitz]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I vaguely toyed for a while with the idea of scaling DEF, BODY and damage along the same sort of lines as the MegaScale advantage to cater to the enormous range of power levels that people play this game at. I let the idea lie and didn't develop it any further when I stopped running a Space Opera game, but I think it could work well enough within the current game parameters if the costings were properly worked out.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

................ Showing that a law of physics breaks down at extremes is a good way of showing that our understand of the law needs to be updated. Showing that a game rule breaks down at extremes is unnecessary: It's a given.

 

Though I'll also say that I agree with g-a and KS.

 

 

Another example from Star Hero (I'm really enjoying the book) to illustrate your point: the damage done by FTL missiles is calculated (on a move through basis) as 120,000,000d6*. Hoo boy, I'm gonna need more dice

 

This example is given in the book because it illustrates the point that you can take this stuff too far, but it all makes for a really enjoyable read. I'd strongly recommend Star hero to anyone who has not read it yet.

 

 

 

 

*yes, 120 million

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

I ignore all that and base the Body Stat off of how hard I want it to be to make the object "dead"

 

The problem with that approach is that you can do 40 Body a 12d6 KA or with 12x1d6 KAs (OK, after defences - we may need to make it 15d6 KA or 12x4d6 KA), which means that you either have to start defining large/tough objects as having Body in the 100s or 1000s (with consequent damage inflation), and start looking like Palladium, or acknowledge a degree of exponentiallity (new word?) and work a fix. The easiest answer is to relate not just Body but also DEF to mass - which makes massive objects much harder to do significant damage to, but that brings its own problems, not the least of which is damage inflation (again).

 

To take a low level example: last summer I had to chip this bit of concrete out using a hammer and masonry chisel. Took hours. Each blow was causing some damage but far less than 1 Body: a concrete wall in Hero requires only 5 hits that get damage through to take it down (i.e. it has 5 Body) and a DEF of 6. Assuming the chisel is (just) capable of doing 7 Body (or more likely 4 Body and is AP against masonry), such an endeavour is not going to take long. Using the 'Body is exponential' idea, it would take 16 x 1Body blows to do 1 Body to a 5 Body object, or 90 effective hits to chip through. Believe me that feels a bit more like it.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

The problem with that approach is that you can do 40 Body a 12d6 KA or with 12x1d6 KAs (OK, after defences - we may need to make it 15d6 KA or 12x4d6 KA), which means that you either have to start defining large/tough objects as having Body in the 100s or 1000s (with consequent damage inflation), and start looking like Palladium, or acknowledge a degree of exponentiallity (new word?) and work a fix. The easiest answer is to relate not just Body but also DEF to mass - which makes massive objects much harder to do significant damage to, but that brings its own problems, not the least of which is damage inflation (again).

 

To take a low level example: last summer I had to chip this bit of concrete out using a hammer and masonry chisel. Took hours. Each blow was causing some damage but far less than 1 Body: a concrete wall in Hero requires only 5 hits that get damage through to take it down (i.e. it has 5 Body) and a DEF of 6. Assuming the chisel is (just) capable of doing 7 Body (or more likely 4 Body and is AP against masonry), such an endeavour is not going to take long. Using the 'Body is exponential' idea, it would take 16 x 1Body blows to do 1 Body to a 5 Body object, or 90 effective hits to chip through. Believe me that feels a bit more like it.

 

When I build a Campaign I look at how things fit together. The System itself isn't going to be very good at telling you these things - it's too wide open for that.

 

If I want something that's very hard to kill, I start with what I want my average Person to look like, and what I want an average damage to look like to be a threat to said person. And I look at what I'd allow as a Maximum Damage in the Campaign - and make appropriately hard to kill objects have the level of Body and/or Defense to make that happen.

 

The System can't tell me that space ships are fragile, or nearly impossible to kill. The System really doesn't care. The Campaign is where that's decided, where you take and scale the appropriate System parts together to make happen what you envision.

 

So - what kind of Campaign are you running, and how hard is it to kill the Average Character with the Average Attack?

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

When I build a Campaign I look at how things fit together. The System itself isn't going to be very good at telling you these things - it's too wide open for that.

 

If I want something that's very hard to kill, I start with what I want my average Person to look like, and what I want an average damage to look like to be a threat to said person. And I look at what I'd allow as a Maximum Damage in the Campaign - and make appropriately hard to kill objects have the level of Body and/or Defense to make that happen.

 

The System can't tell me that space ships are fragile, or nearly impossible to kill. The System really doesn't care. The Campaign is where that's decided, where you take and scale the appropriate System parts together to make happen what you envision.

 

So - what kind of Campaign are you running, and how hard is it to kill the Average Character with the Average Attack?

 

My point is that it does not matter how you pitch it, in terms of Body or even DEF - what matters is how that damage can be accumulated. I see a massive difference between a single large attack and a dozen small attacks but, if they both exceed DEF, the system doesn't - all it 'cares' about is damage through defence and that can lead to a great deal of unrealistic results having to be handwaved on an arbitrary basis. That's what I'm talking about, not making rulings over what body levels should be.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

Using the mass/Body relationship, a human heart has a Body of 2 and a human brain has a Body of 4, so even a point of damage to a heart can disable it, or 2 to the brain. I may be getting a little carried away now.

[OddHat]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

My point is that it does not matter how you pitch it' date=' in terms of Body or even DEF - what matters is how that damage can be accumulated. I see a massive difference between a single large attack and a dozen small attacks but, if they both exceed DEF, the system doesn't - all it 'cares' about is damage through defence and that can lead to a great deal of unrealistic results having to be handwaved on an arbitrary basis. That's what I'm talking about, not making rulings over what body levels should be.[/quote']

 

So what's your solution?

[Sean Waters]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

So what's your solution?

 

...clearly in need of a better explanation. What I was trying to suggest in the OP is that the amount of Body that a thing has should define not just a raw total of Body it can take but also how tough it is.

 

Thus you cannot destroy a 10 Body thing with ten hits that do 1 Body each but you can destroy it with a single hit that does 10 Body. The idea is that it would take two 9 Body hits, or four 8 Body hits, eight 7 Body hits and so on.

 

There would be an automatic scaling of damage and toughness (as represented by Body) because unless an attack was doing Body damage near to the Body total of the attacked object it would have negligible effect.

 

I appreciate that this is a mathematical solution that would cause some to shy away and it certainly is not a core concept, but it seems a reasonable way to deal with what has been termed 'megadamage' attacks: in essence you would never be able to destroy a planet unless the damage you were doing had Body results within about 10 points of the Body of the planet (and even then it would take a considerable number of hits.

 

To simplify you could, in effect, ignore any result that did Body damage less than (target Body-10). That prevents an accumulation of pinpricks having the same effect as an orbital kinetic spear. That has to be a good thing.

[OddHat]

Re: Complex and unnecessary

 

There would be an automatic scaling of damage and toughness (as represented by Body) because unless an attack was doing Body damage near to the Body total of the attacked object it would have negligible effect.

 

Not sure about this. I can kick open a door without destroying it. Given time, I could even whittle my way through it with a pen knife. A needle would take more time, but so long as it didn't break, it would work eventually.

 

Could I destroy the Earth with a pen knife? Nope, even with unlimited time gravity would keep pulling it back together. This seems like a case where the Earth's defenses should be higher than the maximum damage that could be done with a pen knife. Or where the GM should say "no".

 

I appreciate that this is a mathematical solution that would cause some to shy away and it certainly is not a core concept, but it seems a reasonable way to deal with what has been termed 'megadamage' attacks: in essence you would never be able to destroy a planet unless the damage you were doing had Body results within about 10 points of the Body of the planet (and even then it would take a considerable number of hits.

 

Make things too math heavy and you end up with a table full of people number crunching rather than role playing. Fine for some groups, not for others. Personally, I'd rather avoid it.

 

To simplify you could, in effect, ignore any result that did Body damage less than (target Body-10). That prevents an accumulation of pinpricks having the same effect as an orbital kinetic spear. That has to be a good thing.

 

You can kill a person with a pin. It just takes a little time.