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Correlating Player Satisfaction, Combat Speed, and HP / Damage Modeling
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6939422" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>What you are describing is a combination of two problems that are inherent to particular systems. There is no perfect system. If you maximize one thing, you are giving up on something else.</p><p></p><p>Savage Worlds has a particularly low granularity wound track. So naturally, there is very little obvious progression except through random chance. Wound tracks make for comparatively unpredictable pacing and challenge. Think of each 'wound' as being 1 hit point, and monsters typically having 4 hit points. Wounds have to be comparatively rare when you only have 1 hit point, and so being rare, they tend to come 'out of the blue'. And being a small number, groupings of hits and misses have a much larger impact on the pace and challenge. This is one of the reasons cRPGs have historically rarely adopted wound track mechanics and stuck with the familiar hit points.</p><p></p><p>But the other issue you are talking about sounds to me like you are dealing with the limits of the fortune mechanic. Any system starts breaking down when the numbers (targets, modifiers, etc) involved start getting close to the range allowed by the fortune mechanic. Your comparison to GURPS is apt, in that GURPS (without a lot of house ruling) typically starts breaking down when you reach a point where the only failures are critical failures, and the only successes are critical successes. When a target's active defenses get so high that it can reliably block everything that isn't a critical, combat gets boring and very swingy and arbitrary. Likewise, in D20, when the modifiers to the roll start getting close to 20, the game starts breaking down for a similar reason. In both cases, granularity is failing. The useful differentiations when the modifiers were a smaller portion of the total range of randomness start going away, and typically you start ending up with a lot of cases where characters have specialized to the point that what is trivially easy for one PC is impossible for the other ones. All games start breaking down at that point.</p><p></p><p>I would argue that in general, a low granularity wound track isn't any more realistic than hit points. You might be able to conceptualize what's going on from the language better, but in terms of realism you haven't gain much. Truly realistic systems have to track what sort of wounds were inflicted, and were, and what consequences that they have. You have to go from a wound track system to a condition/status inflicting system. And in doing so, you gain a good deal of realism, but you also gain all the problems that go with that - death spirals, sudden and random deaths, unheroic combats, fiddliness, and complexity of resolution. (Of course I say this, but to the extent that it even has a combat system, when I tried to make a really simple game system for my 4 year olds to play, I used a condition/status based system. Of course, it's pretty far from a realistic condition/status system.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6939422, member: 4937"] What you are describing is a combination of two problems that are inherent to particular systems. There is no perfect system. If you maximize one thing, you are giving up on something else. Savage Worlds has a particularly low granularity wound track. So naturally, there is very little obvious progression except through random chance. Wound tracks make for comparatively unpredictable pacing and challenge. Think of each 'wound' as being 1 hit point, and monsters typically having 4 hit points. Wounds have to be comparatively rare when you only have 1 hit point, and so being rare, they tend to come 'out of the blue'. And being a small number, groupings of hits and misses have a much larger impact on the pace and challenge. This is one of the reasons cRPGs have historically rarely adopted wound track mechanics and stuck with the familiar hit points. But the other issue you are talking about sounds to me like you are dealing with the limits of the fortune mechanic. Any system starts breaking down when the numbers (targets, modifiers, etc) involved start getting close to the range allowed by the fortune mechanic. Your comparison to GURPS is apt, in that GURPS (without a lot of house ruling) typically starts breaking down when you reach a point where the only failures are critical failures, and the only successes are critical successes. When a target's active defenses get so high that it can reliably block everything that isn't a critical, combat gets boring and very swingy and arbitrary. Likewise, in D20, when the modifiers to the roll start getting close to 20, the game starts breaking down for a similar reason. In both cases, granularity is failing. The useful differentiations when the modifiers were a smaller portion of the total range of randomness start going away, and typically you start ending up with a lot of cases where characters have specialized to the point that what is trivially easy for one PC is impossible for the other ones. All games start breaking down at that point. I would argue that in general, a low granularity wound track isn't any more realistic than hit points. You might be able to conceptualize what's going on from the language better, but in terms of realism you haven't gain much. Truly realistic systems have to track what sort of wounds were inflicted, and were, and what consequences that they have. You have to go from a wound track system to a condition/status inflicting system. And in doing so, you gain a good deal of realism, but you also gain all the problems that go with that - death spirals, sudden and random deaths, unheroic combats, fiddliness, and complexity of resolution. (Of course I say this, but to the extent that it even has a combat system, when I tried to make a really simple game system for my 4 year olds to play, I used a condition/status based system. Of course, it's pretty far from a realistic condition/status system.) [/QUOTE]
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