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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 3555857" data-attributes="member: 9225">In the old system, you had the following options:1) Attack with your full pool.2) Defend with your full pool.3) Combine attacks and defenses, or just attacks at a penalty equal to the total number of actions for the first, -1 for each additional action.4) Defend only, at -1 per attack.You resolved attacks with opposed rolls. Extra attack successes added dice to a separate damage roll. You rolled soak against some results. The total number of steps was:1) Attack2) Defend3) Damage roll4) Soak rollThe new system gives characters a Defense score that subtracts from dice pools and a damage rating that adds to dice pools. Attackers roll the modified pool. This reduces the number of dice rolls to:1) Attack.There are no multiple actions without special abilities. Yeah, that saves a few steps<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />One thing to consider is that while single shots/blows are designed to be basically survivable, rolls of 10 explode (and so do 10s rolled on those rerolled dice) so that all attacks can inflict any amount of injury.So, let's discuss KOOL BARRET GUN LOLZ:A sniper with a Barret Light 50 attacking an unaware target (who isn't running or seeking cover) inflicts a horrendous amount of damage. If he's pretty skilled he has 8 dice. He gets a die for sighting, 3 dice for aiming and 3 dice for spending a Willpower. One dot in the Sniping Fighting Style and Composure 3 (the minimum) increases the Aim bonus to 4. The Barret itself inflicts 5 damage (8 again). 8+4+3+1+5=21 dice, and you roll all successes again.So our skilled military sniper attacks inflicts an average of 9 lethal damage. This instantly incapacitates and eventually kills everybody but the toughest person in the world (with Stamina 5) and badly injures a vampire.Alternately, you could inflict lethal damage to a vampire with a headshot. Taking the penalty into account, average damage (7) knocks an average vampire Stamina 2) into torpor instantly.If you want to compare the baddest dudes, we can compare the best sniper and toughest guys. The best sniper in the world has 5 Composure (his max Aim becomes +6) and a base pool of 10 -- 11 with a specialty. 11+6+3+1+5=25 dice. Oh yeah -- maxed out sniper means that his rife bonus dice automatically succeed. He inflicts 15 points of lethal damage.The toughest mortal in the world (with 10 HL) is instantly incapacitated and dies in 2 minutes without medical intervention (average people are merely instantly killed). The toughest Blood Potency 5 vampire around, with Stamina 5 and Resilience 5 (active) has 15 HL and is as badly wounded as Average Vampire. Funny how that works out, eh?Oh, at 6 points of armor piercing, the gun effectively makes body armor a waste of time.Basically, this situation exists because of playtesting and the desire for a balance between danger and playability. There was a point in playtest where damage was brutal and too awful, and a stage where it was trivial. My group suggested that what we found the most fun was where one hit *might* kill you, but you could bet on surviving a handful of attacks in a single scene. This means that instant death doesn't happen too often, but there are dangerous outliers in any roll. This requires some adjustment in thinking when you're used to D&D, where damage propagates more predictably and even critical hits have maximums.Now in typical combat with small arms (2 dice) and average-skilled people (4 dice) running around (-2 dice), you're looking at typical dice pools of 4 and 1-2 points of damage a shot. An average guy goes down in 4 shots or so and bleeds to death in 7 minutes. He can go down much faster or much more slowly. A vampire takes twice as much time to fall into torpor. Again, the idea is that realistic results are possible, but that the largest block of results will tend to allow a few turns of action.</blockquote>

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