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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brightshadow" data-source="post: 301903" data-attributes="member: 3584">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!</blockquote>

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