The Dresden Files > DFRPG

Game Balance and the Laws

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iago:

--- Quote from: TheMouse on February 09, 2010, 09:04:07 PM ---Setting up a sucker punch might be a maneuver with a free tag. In that case, it adds 2 to the above example. That's 5 beyond the base stress track. I don't know which stress reduction model DFRPG is using for Consequences, but using the normal 2/4/6 structure that seems common among FATE hacks, that means a serious Consequence and the track almost full. That's bad.

--- End quote ---

It's not *quite* as dire as that, in that you can combine consequences (so you could take a -2 and a -4 in order to get rid of 6 points of stress) and in that you only check off the box it lands on, not all of the boxes up to and including that one.  So, suppose a target with Mediocre Endurance, thus a stress track length of 2 -- Joe Shmoe. He gets hit by maximum bad dice luck: -4 on his defense, +4 on the attack, assuming equal attack and defense skills in action, margin of 8.  That's 8 stress before you add in a Weapon rating for, say, a knife. Let's call that Weapon:2.  10 stress.  He'll need to take a -2 and a -6 (total of -8) consequence set just to get that to land on the stress box in position #2.  Someone comes up and love-taps him for 6 stress on a subsequent attack, and he has to use his remaining -4 to get that to be a 2-stress hit -- but that lands on his already marked out stress box #2.  In that case, it "rolls up", but there's no stress box #3, so he's Taken Out anyway.  Taken Out means the attacker's player gets to define the nature of the defeat -- which could be death.

It's not easy to one-shot kill people in the system (though that's nominally possible), partly because the game is careful not to give players a feeling they could have their characters taken away from them through capriciousness.  BUT, it is easy to one-shot CRIPPLE people in the system, because consequences land fast and hard and the ones past -2 take a while to heal from.  And that's usually enough to make someone think about maybe getting the hell out of this fight.

Ancalagon:
the chance of someone rolling a - 4 (or a +4) is 1 in 81 (or 1.23%).  Unless I'm really off, the chance of rolling a 0, +1 or -1 on the 4 dice is 51/81 (or 62.9%), so such a dire result (8 apart on the stress track) is not too likely.

... in fact, with the frequency of average rolls, a 1 point difference between the attacker and the defender (the attacker has say, +3 attack vs a + 2 defense) would be quite significant.  Hmm... that can have consequences on how the game runs.

p.s.  I have a cold, so my curve calculations may be off.

iago:
You're right! A -4 vs +4 situation is much like the one cited above where a punch causes someone's vital bits to rupture and they die.  Rare, but possible.

Of course, when someone swinging the punch is 9 feet tall, warty, green, and has a curious allergy to iron, they don't NEED to get a margin of 8 in order to make you really, really hurt.

Bosh:
Dresden Files FATE is trying to do different things with its damage system than either D&D or Warhammer, the purposes of the damage systems are:

D&D: you're a big damn hero, (unless you're first level ;) ) big damn heroes do NOT get taken out by puny little untrained goblins no matter how lucky the goblins unless there's is a damn big swarm of goblins.

Warhammer: the world is a nasty dangerous place ANY attack has a chance of doing serious serious damage to your character.

FATE: skill generally matters more than random chance but what can trump skill is how dramatically appropriate something is. Let's say Bob the Bloody killed a women in a fit of rage and then felt remorse about it and tried to reform (Aspect: "Haunted by what he has done"). Meanwhile Sarah's mom got killed by Bob the Bloody swore revenge (Aspect: "You killed my mother. Prepare to die."). Let's say Sarah confronts Bob, gives a speech and then lunges at him with a pointy knife. She's driven by fury and he hesitates because of his feeling of guilt.

Bob is an experienced warrior and Sarah's just a teenager, in D&D Bob could just laugh Sarah off and in Warhammer Sarah attacking Bob and any other random teenager attacking Bob, but in Fate those two aspects get tagged, giving Sarah a +4 bonus, which is enough for Sarah to trump Bob's greater level of skill. It's that sort of thing that makes Fate tick, not trying to be realistic.

TheMouse:
Ah, I didn't realize that you were using roll up type stress. I had figured from comments made about the faster conflicts rules for SotC that y'all were using a stress as HP type model.

Although I suppose with a base track of two that it hardly matters.

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