Need help with some homebrew-rule balancing...

[Brightshadow]

Ahoy all!

I'll try to condense this down to as little space as needed...

I'm currently writing a homebrew campaign world/ruleset, using many of the spycraft rules I liked (action dice, vitality/wound points, critical hits on skills, etc) in a fantasy style campaign.

One of the important factors of this world is that life is made not only of organic material, but metal too. Not in the style of cyborg arms like in sci-fi thrillers, more of 'living metal', with blood vessels, organs, and such. It works just like normal flesh, except it's tougher.

All living creatures will have their bodies split up in a flesh/metal ratio (or bionic/organic, or whatever). A person could be 100% flesh, 100% metal, or any mix in between, with 50% either way being the most common.

Now, I've already decided that I don't want a 100% bionic character to be 'great' while an organic one is 'poor', like a high or low strength stat. I want them to be different, but balanced.

I've settled on dividing the ratios into 10% sections, with scaling modifiers along the way.

For example, someone with a 50% ratio either way has no bonuses or penalties whatsoever. The higher your organic ratio is, the more easily magic comes to you. The bionic side is balanced with another factor similar to magic.



Phew! If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! Now to the problem:

I want some way to 'differ' the two sides in a way that matters to non-spellcasters. I have one system currently, but I'm kind of iffy on how it would actually work.

It's currently set that, since metals (even 'organic' metals) are tougher, a person with their ratio biased towards metal will have a limited damage reduction -on wound points only-. This means that 80% of the time, the two sides will take equal damage. Should any attack get through the vitality (or get a critical hit), it won't do as much damage to the bionic people.
In a like sense, organic people heal faster. A 50% person would heal their level in vitality per hour of rest, and one wound point per day. As a person has a greater and greater percentage of organic, they heal a higher multiple of their level per hour, and more wound points.

To keep everything 'balanced' (gosh, the harder I try to balance things, the more I fear the word), I scale it in the other direction too. I don't want a 100% organic to be superior to a 50%, just different. Just as organics heal fast, bionics tend to heal much slower than average. Just as bionics take less wp damage per hit than average, organics will take more.

Here are the problems with all of this:

A) Organics look like they'll have a tough time surviving. A 100% bionic person, although rare, will have a DR of 5/- to any critical hits.
This means that a 100% organic would take an extra 5 points per hit, and that seems -very- dangerous to me. Even though armour is providing DR instead of an AC bonus, it still seems a heavy price.

B) Organics do heal faster. In a 15 minute rest, a 10th level 50% heals 10 points, a 10th level 100% organic heals 40, and a 100% bionic heals 2.5. This sounds big, but considering how many times this will matter, it doesn't seem as big. How many times has 15 minutes made a difference? Usually, there's either no wait between fights, or there's so much 'down time' that it makes no difference.

C) All monsters and enemies will be made this way, too. Since one side takes less damage, and the other side heals faster, the rules -could- be balanced for PC's. But any enemies they meet (excluding long-running villains) will be superior if bionic. PC's rarely hurt a monster and let it escape to heal, which is the main bonus the organics get.


Thanks for reading this far!

My questions are: Is there any way I could better balance this? Something small I could change, or simply do away with this altogether? Is there anything better I could replace it with? Or are my fears unfounded, and I should just keep it?

Thanks ahead of time for responses!

 

[Bendris Noulg]

There's a new half-golem template up at Wizards; A Web-Enhancement for MMII.

I think you might be interested in it.

 

[Romotre]

Just curious, but what (in-game) make magic come easier to bionics?

Also, I'm assuming the spilt isn't a simple genetic thing. Otherwise, I'd go 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, 6.25% et cetera.

But since I have no working knowledge of the VP/WP system, can't comment on balance. Hope someone else does, cause it looks like you have put a lot of thought into it.

 

[Plane Sailing]

My recommendations?

Match vitality to the organic proportion, rather than healing rate.

Thus organics have survivability due to vitality, bionics have it due to DR.

e.g. 100% organic d12 HD, 80% d10, 60% d8, 40% d6, 20% d4 0% none.


You might want to adjust these according to your own tastes, perhaps letting entirely metal creatures get d4 HD and scale upwards from there.

This would have the benefit that they are both tough to take down but for different reasons. Organics have lots of vitality (and this is regained quickly too), but are subject to critical hits. Metallics have DR so they shrug off lots of small hits, but their wounds take longer to heal and they are less vulnerable to critical hits. I'd be inclined to give bonus wound points for bionic components - say +1 per 10%. Thus a 50% creature would have D6 hd, and Con+5 Wounds with DR2 (say), while a 100% metallic would have d4 HD, Con+10 wounds with DR5 and a 100% organic have d12 HD with Con wounds.

Cheers

 

[Brightshadow]

(note: This message might seem a bit rushed, but the computer crashed and wiped out the nearly-completed message)

Romotre: Currently, the system is set up so that the organics are more adept with magic, and the bionics more adept with energy weapons (guns, basically). The energy weapons use vitality points as ammunition, sort of like soul-powered weapons (akin to magic). My only problem with them is balancing pistol-sized weapons with shotgun and rifle sized weapons. My only fallback plan for this is to use the 'magic item' route (no real rules governing their use, hand them out carefully or risk campaign destruction).

Plane Sailing: Hey.... I like that!

My only problem with the actual mechanics is that since magic and guns are using vitality points, I can't risk tweaking them too much. A fully bionic guy would have almost no ammo, and a fully organic guy would have far too much (one of my pet peeves about D&D is the near-omnipotence of mages, which I have tried to tone down).

I really like the concept behind it, though, and coincidentally enough I altered my planned system just a few minutes before checking for posts.

What I've set up now is a system with DR and defence bonus. DR for wound points goes up with bionics, down with organics, and the reverse is true for defence.
So, a 50% subject would have no bonus or penalty. A 100% bionic would have a DR to wound points of 5, but a defence penalty of 5. A 100% organic subject would be much more able to avoid being hit, with a defence bonus of +5, but would suffer more from a hit, with a wp DR of -5.

(Note: I'm also considering changing damage reduction to simply bonus wound points. That extra 5 points of damage per hit really scares me when I think of the poor organics).


Now, that's choice number one.

My choice number two:
Use a system similar to that (thanks again, Plane Sailing! I really like that!), and increase the cost of magic spells (so wizards don't become gods), and simply use some other balancing factor for gun-use. That part shouldn't be -too- hard... just have to put some kind of limiting factor on ammo.

Only other issue?
I've already got hitdice for different classes... how would I modify this? Perhaps increase and decrease die-sizes? Taking my cues from Spycraft, the largest hitdie is for the fighters, which is D12. The smallest is for the mystics (mage-like class), which have d8s. It seems large for a less combat-oriented class, but when one considers how much of that will be used in spells, it sounds a little better.

So... any thoughts, anyone? Thanks again for the input, this is helping quite a bit!

 

[Brightshadow]

Sudden Thought:

Alright, I just realized one other factor that might matter greatly in this:
Armour is currently providing damage reduction.

So, that could matter quite a bit in balancing basic damage reduction. For example, DR of 5 for bionics and a DR of -5 for organics sound like extremes. But pile full plate on that, and we have a DR of 13 and a DR of 3.

Just something else to consider.

 

[Thorvald Kviksverd]

Since you're already using different HD for classes, here's a little tweak to Plane Sailing's idea...

(BTW, I really like his idea.)

Adjust Base HD or HPs according to composition (% organic) of body...

• 0%: -5 (-3)
• 10%: -4
• 20%: -3 (-2)
• 30%: -2
• 40%: -1 (-1)
• 50%: 0 (0)
• 60%: +1 (+1)
• 70%: +2
• 80%: +3 (+2)
• 90%: +4
• 100%: +5 (+3)

Note: The numbers in parentheses would be used with Plane Sailing's suggested 20% increments (with 50% added).

The HD/HP progression would look like the following...

1/3HP...1/2HP...1HP...d2...d3...d4...d6...d8...d10
...d12...d12+1...d12+2...d12+3...d12+4...d12+5

Note: 1/2HP gains 1HP every even numbered level, while 1/3HP gains 1HP every level evenly divisible by 3; or, as a simplification, you can simply rule that characters at this level do not increase HPs at all.

For example, a 20% organic who pursued a class with a base HD of d8, would instead have his base HD adjusted downwards 3 steps to a d3 (or 2 steps if using 20% increments to a d4)--while an 80% organic taking the same class would have a base HD of d12+2 (or d12+1).

 

[Brightshadow]

Thanks for the input!

I've taken a look, and done some tweaking. Mystic's hitdice are now set to d4's. Since they're always going to be 100% organic, this means that they'll end up with d12+1.

I'm liking this much better than any of the systems I've come up with myself... whether it works or not will have to wait for some playtesting, but at least it doesn't fall apart on paper anymore

 

[Thorvald Kviksverd]

Thanks for the input!

Glad to be of help--hope it works out