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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LucasC" data-source="post: 6492104" data-attributes="member: 6762606">Just thinking out loud - I would not start with deciding how to calculate DEFENSE, but rather lay out some goals. For instance, how often should a starting schmuck succeed in shooting his opponent? Personally, I'd use a 5d6 pool to calculate this. A PC is always going to be superior to your "average" joe and it's PCs active in this game, not average Joes. If we assume you want a normal PC shooting at a normal villain to hit 50% of the time, that means the target DEFENSE should be around 17/18 right? They can push their chance to hit up by using tactics, or the enemy can push it down with defensives tactics. Then, you have to assume each time the PCs go up a level they'll layer on another 1d6. I think this can easily be accomplished from levels 6-10. So every level you need to push the assumed armor up 3.5. Then, if you want SOAK to be an alternative, it needs to reduce DEFENSE. So, lets consider HEALTH. Most guns seem to do 2d6 damage. If people have a 4 END and 4 WIL they'll end up with 16 hit points. That's basically 2 shots to kill the guy (actually it's a little over 2 but I suck at math). If we just go with 2 for now, and compare that with our attack chance, we see we'll need to shoot at this guy 4 times to kill him (50% hit, 2 shots to kill).So, toss in SOAK and now I want the same 4 shots to kill the guy, but each one needs to do less damage. So I need the guy to be killed in either 3 or 4 shots. I'll go with 3, so there's still a chance to miss. If you take away 3 DEFENSE, pushing it to 15, I think that pushes the hit chance to around 75%. Then, add 2 SOAK and it will take 3 solid hits to kill him. That means that adding 2 SOAK needs to reduce DEFENSE by about 3. At least at level 1. With all that in mind, I'd start setting target numbers, and then use them to figure out how to get people to them.</blockquote>

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