Dice Pools, Grades, and Difficulties

Morrus said:

I'm not entirely clear on what you mean. You're saying that in your game your monster DEFENSEs *and* your player DEFENSEs are too high? Or that their SOAK is? It's hard to comment without seeing the exact situation. What sort of SOAK scores are your players peddling?

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When I was talking about monsters trading dice, I was speaking specifically about their damage output. Using the Amazon from the bestiary as an example against a Player with the same pool limit of 6d6, the Amazon uses its Shortsword to attack the player's Melee Defence (which is 21 since they have it maxed out) so the Amazon has a less than 50% chance of hitting the player (with 5d6) and only if they trade no dice for damage. Assuming the Amazon hits with the Shortsword, they deal between 4-14 damage but the player has Scalemail so they have SOAK 6 which reduces the damage to between 0-8. Furthermore, since they are a player they have HEALTH based on END+WILL+LUCK so they have at least 9d6 HEALTH, meaning they could have 10 HEALTH (since that is the minimum) or they could have 54 HEALTH but for the sake of this example lets say they have the average static value of 32. In the best case scenario the Amazon has to hit the player over 4 times in order to kill it.

Note that this purely an example but hopeful it helps highlight the situation that I am getting at better. All of my players have between 5-10 SOAK from Armour so any creature that only uses basic attacks (1d6) has no chance of seriously hurting them unless their static damage bonus is 6 (i.e. 1d6+6) which is fairly unlikely.

On the other hand, what I was talking about regarding defences is pretty much dealt with by lowering the creature's defences below the pool limit. Using the example above, it sort of works at the pool limit too but the issue for the players is that without positional advantage they would have a much less than 50% chance of hitting the creature if they traded dice. Of course, they should be using positional advantage so assuming they trade dice from that then they should have a 50% chance of hitting then. That said, when this is pointed out to my players, most will still not trade dice since they feel they are better just ensuring they hit and dealing the damage since the monsters probably have less HEALTH then them. This is entirely their personal opinions on that though so the next combat will be a good test to see if I can convince them otherwise.

Morrus said:

So, I just whipped quickly through the Humans section of the online bestiary, and using MDPx4 as the upper limit, tweaked the DEFENSE values. Most of them didn't need tweaking as their DEFENSE scores were lower than that anyway, but there were a couple which go lowered a bit. Try them, and if that seems to work, I'll do the same with the other monsters.

If that's the case, the same restriction would have to apply to PCs and their DEFENSE scores.

[Edit - did it to all the monsters; only took a few minutes. Most didn't need changing. Now a character officially has a 50% chance of hitting an equivalent grade monster, assuming both are optimised to their mx dice pools for attack and defence.]

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Cool, I'll definitely try this out. I should probably mention that we have been restricting defence scores based on pool limit since AGI characters can easily achieve impossible to hit defences otherwise. Using this adjustment you just made should mitigate this though. If you see this before my other post then please take a look at it as I tried to explain what the issue with monsters and players have defences equal to or above pool limit is there. If I didn't explain well then I apologize.

Angusto said:

When I was talking about monsters trading dice, I was speaking specifically about their damage output. Using the Amazon from the bestiary as an example against a Player with the same pool limit of 6d6, the Amazon uses its Shortsword to attack the player's Melee Defence (which is 21 since they have it maxed out) so the Amazon has a less than 50% chance of hitting the player (with 5d6) and only if they trade no dice for damage.

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Let's see if this works:

The Amazon can feint, can get higher ground, can flank, all sorts of stuff. Say she shoots with her longbow at 6d6; she aims (+1d6), she's on higher ground (+1d6), and maybe they've gotten a crossfire (+1d6). She's got a dice pool of 9d6 to play with. On average that's a roll of 31.5 - an easy hit on your player. Spend two dice on extra damage, and roll 7d6 and she's still hitting over half the time and doing 3d6+5 damage (average 15.5). Knock off the scale mail SOAK, around 10 points per hit.

In the best case scenario the Amazon has to hit the player over 4 times in order to kill it.

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That's OK. Though using her bow and some tactics, that's more like 3 times; and if you have a couple focusing fire, you can take a PC down in a round.

On the other hand, what I was talking about regarding defences is pretty much dealt with by lowering the creature's defences below the pool limit. Using the example above, it sort of works at the pool limit too but the issue for the players is that without positional advantage they would have a much less than 50% chance of hitting the creature if they traded dice. Of course, they should be using positional advantage so assuming they trade dice from that then they should have a 50% chance of hitting then. That said, when this is pointed out to my players, most will still not trade dice since they feel they are better just ensuring they hit and dealing the damage since the monsters probably have less HEALTH then them. This is entirely their personal opinions on that though so the next combat will be a good test to see if I can convince them otherwise.

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Using the same Amazon, with defences of 24 and 23 respectively. Your PC has 6d6. Doing the same tactics as above, you can get that up to 8d6 or 9d6. Let's be conservative and say 8d6 (an aim/feint and a flank, say). That's an average roll of 28, which is an easy hit. Throw in a LUC die, spend 2d6 on something, you're now rolling 7d6 (average roll 24.5, so a 50% hit) with two dice to spend on damage or some other exploit.

What I think here is that if you're not using tactics, you're going to find combat tough; the game is *so* dependent on tactics and positioning, deliberately so. It may just be a case of having a group of Amazons pretty much wipe the floor with them by using good tactics to shock them into seeing how much of a difference it makes.

Morrus said:

What I think here is that if you're not using tactics, you're going to find combat tough; the game is *so* dependent on tactics and positioning, deliberately so. It may just be a case of having a group of Amazons pretty much wipe the floor with them by using good tactics to shock them into seeing how much of a difference it makes.

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After reading your post, I agree. I'll give this a go for the combat next week and see if that works to convince them.

[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION],
Running my short list of bad guys through with a cap of defense of MDP * 4 had essentially the same effect as the much longer process of calculating a high/medium/low process. So in the pursuit of making it simpler, I am ditching my idea of monster roles.

I will try out the defense capped monsters tomorrow and see how it goes!