Playtest Feedback 4/9 (combat)

[LucasC]

So as it turns out we inadvertently tested both an older and newer combat system. For our ship battle we were using the last DEFENSE calculation (AGI*2)+10 and for our personal combat we used the new system (AGI+1)*1.75. For this post let’s talk about them as the HIGH DEFENSE ((AGI*2)+10) and LOW DEFENSE ((AGI+1)*1.75) options.

The first question we think you should be considering is, “What do you want out of combat?” What we mean by this is, do you want a system that encourages movement and special maneuvers to successfully score a hit on a person or do you want a system that encourages someone to utilize sound tactics to avoid getting shot at.

Consider this encounter:


The Red Circle is the PC ship. It has five smaller vessels firing at it with various modifiers on the attack rolls. The pilots of those ships had what seem to be ‘normal’ dice pools (6 dice).

Using the HIGH DEFENSE option the PC ship has a DEFENSE of 21.

• The typical roll for one of those pilots will be 6 x 3.5 = 21 (hit)
  • But the PC pilot chose to do Evasive Maneuvers every round of combat lowering the attack roll of every pilot by 2 dice
• The new typical roll is 4 x 3.5 = 14 (far short of a hit, requires exploders) (miss)
  • Those firing through asteroids roll only 2 dice for an average of 7 (miss)
  • Those firing from behind roll 5 dice for an average of 17 (miss)
• The little attacking vessels had a DEFENSE of 19 and the PCs, without any ranks in GUNNERY and after taking a -2 dice penalty from Evasive Maneuvers, rolled 1 or 2 dice for attacks (miss)

What is described there is pretty much exactly what happened every round of this combat. The PC ship was shot at by numerous durog vessels. The attack rolls came up misses almost every time. When they did hit, it was because of the exploding die. The PCs hit even less often because their rolls were even worse.

HIGH DEFENSE incented behavior?
Use swarm tactics and positioning to gain benefits on attack rolls to successfully hit the target.
​

Now, consider the same fight using the LOW DEFENSE method.

Using the LOW DEFENSE option the PC ship has a DEFENSE of 12.

• The typical roll for one of those pilots will be 6 x 3.5 = 21 (hit)
  • But the PC pilot chose to do Evasive Maneuvers every round of combat lowering the attack roll of every pilot by 2 dice
• The new typical roll is 4 x 3.5 = 14 (hit)
  • Those firing through asteroids roll only 2 dice for an average of 7 (miss)
  • Those firing from behind roll 5 dice for an average of 17 (hit)
• The little attacking vessels now have DEFENSE of 9 and the PCs, without any ranks in GUNNERY and after taking a -2 dice penalty from Evasive Maneuvers, rolled 1 or 2 dice for attacks (miss)

This theoretical fight plays out much differently. First, the durog pilots are hitting with almost every attack. The only way to avoid getting shot is to seek out cover anduse evasive maneuvers.

The PCs are still missing regularly but they are far more apt to score the occasional hit when they need to get up to 9 on two dice rolled vs 19 on two dice rolled. The former of course is possible, the latter requires exploding dice. Furthermore, if the PCs can find cover and not use evasive maneuvers they can risk taking a few attacks that might miss (avg roll is 14 v 12 so coming up below that's not a horrible gamble).

LOW DEFENSE incented behavior?
Use battlefield clutter and combat tactics (covering fire) to gain cover for yourself so you don’t get shot.​

To further illustrate the activity incented by the LOW DEFENSE behavior let’s look at our second encounter of the night.


In this fight the PCs approached from the jungle. If you see the green scribbled line towards the bottom of that picture, that line represents where they can be and still have cover. This picture was taken in the middle of combat.

Notice that every PC is somewhere with cover. Even those that have advanced have done so cautiously. One moved behind the tree trunk of the tree they cut down to break through the electrical fence (the black box on the board) and the second is hiding behind the satellite dish.

There was only one round when a PC broke cover.


He followed that purple line, running for the house that is very hard to see in this picture. No one provided that PC with covering fire and the durog on the roof of the building using Overwatch shot and killed him (well, knocked him unconscious).

If the others had given him covering fire, the attack would have missed. They did provide covering fire from that point forward.

So combat seems to come down to this:

• If you want people to be unafraid of getting hit and stand around in the open shooting at others but really need to use positional effects such as pin-down and crossfire use HIGH DEFENSE.
• If you want people to be afraid of getting hit and consider their environment, work together as a unit and help cover each other use LOW DEFENSE.

OK, with all of that said some more things to consider –

• Under LOW DEFENSE rules we feel like cover should give you better protection. Defense numbers are so low that even with the 2 dice knocked off for cover they were often being hit. A 3-dice cover penalty might be just enough to properly incent finding cover.
• A side effect of HIGH DEFENSE is that you cannot use combat tricks much because you really need all your dice for successful attack rolls.

SOAK
Once you have the above figured out, you probably need to spend some time on SOAK. It is very easy for new characters to get 10 SOAK. And for those few poor schlubs that don’t start with it, getting up to 10 is not going to be difficult as the armor is not expensive and can probably be scavenged from downed opponents anyhow. My guess is that within a 3-4 sessions a GM is likely going to be shooting at a team with a minimum of 10 SOAK. It’ll go up and get worse from there.

A typical gun seems to do between 2 and 4 dice of damage. That translates to between 7 and 14 damage. Most of the guns we’ve seen in play are at the 2 dice range. These don’t typically do any damage. The larger guns might get a point or two through per hit.

That means that most combats consist of a lot of shooting, some hits, and very little damage. Until one of two things happen:

1. Damage dice explode
2. Attacks are made with a damage type that ignores the SOAK

 

[Morrus]

That is a wonderful analysis, and matches my thoughts exactly.

One of the issues we had earlier is that folks used what you called low defense tactics while using the high defense values. The result was that they couldn't hit anything and found the combat dull; even when shown ways to increase their attack dice by multiple dice, they didn't do it. It's definitely a question of matching play style to the scores used.

Notice that every PC is somewhere with cover. Even those that have advanced have done so cautiously. One moved behind the tree trunk of the tree they cut down to break through the electrical fence (the black box on the board) and the second is hiding behind the satellite dish.

This paragraph delights me. It illustrates the way I am trying to ensure that combat in this is a tactical skirmishy thing, and that's exactly the intended behaviour.

So- yes, you are right in everything you say. It really is a question of choosing one or the other.

I good question to ask might be this -- which did you enjoy more? The higher defense game or the lower? That would weigh heavily on how we proceed.

 

[LucasC]

Personally I very much prefer LOW DEFENSE and believe most of my players do as well.

One of them said, "It's a lot more fun to hit than miss all the time."

As I note above, there's still room to tweak some of the bonuses and negatives to get things just so but, while I thought I would dislike LOW DEFENSE that is not been the case in practice.

I'll see if I can get some of my players to come answer this too.

 

[Wrellin]

I am one of the players in that group. I am mixed on the defenses. With the low defenses you never need to use the combat tactics to hit your target. With the high ones you never need to use the combat tactics to avoid getting hit. Id rather both be needed or neither be needed.

Second I also feel that anything other than pulling a trigger and pointing the gun in the general direction of your target should be a combat trick. Over watch is like playing a game of wack a mole..as we know it gets harder the more targets pop up and as you are watching an area and have to quick react to it it should offer a negative that gets more pronounced after the first target.

Third I also think cover should offer negative modifiers to attacks as you are trying not to be shot more so than hit your attacker. I also felt that cover didn't do much as cover easily caused less than a 50% miss chance and was pretty close to only about 25%.

Just a few of my thoughts..

 

[Wrellin]

I also think you need to decide what you want PCs to be. Right now most of us in this group are to a lesser extent combat troopers of a sorts. If this is your design then about 80% of the careers will never be used. Or is your view that PCs should be just people who will find themselves in combat situations from time to time. I just don't think the combat math will balance for both. I pointed out to Lucas (our Gm) that I am purposely slightly gimped (on purpose) as I am one of the players trying out the Psy rules but could easily create a character that had an attack dice pool of 10-12 and do 5-7 d6 dmg with a soak 10+ and could hit anything on the board even when using cover while eating a sandwich and doing a Sudoku puzzle.

 

[Morrus]

I also think you need to decide what you want PCs to be. Right now most of us in this group are to a lesser extent combat troopers of a sorts. If this is your design then about 80% of the careers will never be used. Or is your view that PCs should be just people who will find themselves in combat situations from time to time.

Well, that's mainly adventure design rather than system design; I don't want to proscribe the types of adventures you have. Someone could easily design an investigative adventure, or a political one, or what-have-you, which would be great for other character types. I might try to write a few examples of these. Certainly in a combat-heavy adventure or campaign, players will no doubt gravitate towards combat-oriented careers. If you take a look at our ZEITGEIST adventure path for D&D and Pathfinder, you can see an example of a fairly political-investigative campaign.

 

[Velcerick]

I good question to ask might be this -- which did you enjoy more? The higher defense game or the lower? That would weigh heavily on how we proceed.

I preferred the lower defense game, but like Wrellin and Lucas both mentioned, it seemed too low. In the battle Lucas described the character who was killed by running out into the open had already been shot at and hit three times despite waiting in cover, giving the impression that cover was useless anyway. In general, we were getting hit with or without cover.

However, rather than boosting defenses in general, I think that situational modifiers should be increased to encourage their use. Maybe increase the cover/covering fire bonus to a -3. If it became too prohibitive, that would force positional tactics like crossfire (I think that's the only non-trick now).


In general, I still think the potential for vastly different to-hit dice has the potential to make combat feel broken. With enough to-hit dice the defenses will never be high enough (note Wrellin's scenario of purposely min/maxing). I don't think that the career changes made any significant impact on our group (the PC rolling 8 dice may have been reduced to 7).

 

[Morrus]

Out of curiosity how did he get 8 dice? That's the equivalent of an AGI of 15.

 

[LucasC]

Out of curiosity how did he get 8 dice? That's the equivalent of an AGI of 15.

I don't have all the character sheets here but I don't believe anyone has an 8-dice pool, which is not to say they couldn't. Looks like a 6-die pool is the highest of those in front of me. That's a character w/AGI 6 + 2 rank in marksman = 6d6 attacks.

Looking at last week's sheets I find an 8d6 pool but that was because of AGI + 4 ranks in Marksman. Those 4 ranks were knocked down to 2 ranks after the recent change.

Someone actively min/maxing could get higher.

Spartan.

• AGI 3 + marksman (racial)
• Navy brat +1 AGI + marksman
• police officer +1 AGI + marksman
• military academy marksman
• sniper +1 AGI + marksman
• assassin +1 AGI + marksman

That theoretical character would have AGI 7 (4 dice) and 6 ranks of marksman for a total pool of 10 dice. Now, that character is no good at anything but shooting, but he/she's gonna really make combat suck for someone.

Some limits on starting abilities and max ranks for new characters could sovle that.

I could envision something like capping ability scores at 5 (maybe 7 for your racial ability) and limiting max starting ranks in a skill to 2 or 3. That would compress the starting dice pools and stop the min-maxers from maxing out. Might need some tweaking, just tossing numbers out.

 

[LucasC]

Side note, here's the dice pools of the four sheets I have :

• 6d6 (AGI 6 + marksman 2) <-- there are two characters like this
• 5d6 (AGI 9)
• 4d6 (AGI 5 + marksman)