RangerWickett
Legend
Except a big fireball wouldn't kill the whole squad. They'd see the ball coming, some folks would scatter out of the area, others would take cover, etc etc.So if we go back to our fireball example. The juicy x3 fireball does 84 damage. Sounds impressive, but in terms of context of what the damage means it actually hits about 8. To get such low kill numbers, the unit would have to be spread out in a single file line (no doubling up).
Your mechanic is not wrong by any means, as I said in the OP everyone has a line between simplicity and exactness. Your system is extremely easy to use and will work for many groups. I tried to add in a bit more complexity to gain more exactness. If I had 50 people in any kind of formation on the board, and a fireball only hit 8 of them when it was cast smack in the middle of them....that would be a very weak fireball. So my system tries to model that more accurately, but with a payment in complexity. Neither is wrong, its just do people think I accomplished my goal?
Again if we go back to the 50 people example. If I wanted to model a military platoon using standard dnd combat, I would need 50 minis on the board. And though dnd combat always assume an "attack" is not just a single stab, for mechanics purposes it is. You target 1 creature and deal X damage. In this scenario, a fighter could probably easily kill 1 person per hit....but he still only gets maybe 1-2 attacks, he's not killing 10 guys a round or anything.
If anything, treating a big crowd of people as static individuals who all die simultaneously is unrealistic. The game doesn't handle reactions that well.
All that said, I set up a squad of 10 police officers as a large unit with 50 hp, and a troop of 25 soldiers as a huge unit with 125 hp. A fireball is still plenty devastating. It just might not kill everyone, simply cause the unit cohesion to break and survivors to lose the will to keep fighting.