Doris Dealin' Damage
Jul. 8th, 2007 06:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
subplotkudzuYesterday's game went well, though not without a couple of mechanical hitches. I get the feeling that I'm missing something in the Buffy game system.
First, Doris was just able to unlimber scads of damage. For example, when fighting the episode's giant monster she made a 'through the heart' shot with an enchanted knife (which was exactly the right thing to do, as it severed the animated spirit from the mutated wolf). Drama point spent, as one would expect, and she scored 7 successes. This gave her a damage of STR x2 (14) plus success levels (21) times 4 = 84 points. In play I mistakenly also doubled the damage for the slash/stab type, forgetting that the 'through the heart' maneuver replaces that. By that point the beast was running on Drama anyway - it would stay up until Frost's drama point generated plot twist became relevant - but 84 is a heck of a lot of damage!
Something similar happened with her fight with a Veteran Vamp. 19 points times 5 for the stake to the heart is 95 damage, which would dust even a veteran vamp with no tenderizing battle at all. OK, there had been an earlier fight, but there need not have been, save for the Vamp's drama point. Of course, since he drama pointed to halve his accumulated damage he went from 130 taken to 65, which was less than his 69 Life Points... so the x5 multiplier on the heart shot went away as it didn't dust him.
That was the other problem: the math got pretty irritating, which I know wasn't what the designers wanted. Still, that particular scenario, were the damage that I had calculated and just halved needed to be reversed out to recalculate for 19 damage rather than 95, was a pain to do at the table. Regardless of the rulebook talking in attacks reducing your life points with unconsciousness and death happening in the negatives, when I run this again the character sheets will have their life points +10 marked on it to show where they have to worry about Survival Checks. Damage will accumulate, with problems when it reaches the Life Point total. This way we're only counting up, and Drama Points to cut damage in half will be easier to calculate.
We had problems with Doris' multiple attacks on one roll, but I think I figured out how to think through it. The idea in game is that you figure your first attack from one roll and then reduce each succeeding attack by 2 (Doris rolls an 18 on a punch, her other punches count at 16 and 14. A Vamp with a 15 Dodge will be hit by the first two but not the third). In theory this is fine. In practice Doris didn't just repeatedly punch people.
Against the veteran vamp her attack sequence was a kick to the head, then a sweep kick to take him down and then a heart shot with a stake. Tres Buffy. She has Dex 7, Kung Fu 4, Getting Medieval 3. She rolls an 8. What this sounded like in play was "OK, the kick to the head is at -1, so your calculated bonus is +10, for an 18. Then your sweep kick is at no modifier for a +11, which means we add the -1 back and then take off the 2 for the multiple attack for a 17, and your Stake base is +10, so it's one point worse for a 16, less 3 for the heart shot is a 13 minus another 2 for the third attack is 11." The back and forth of harder - easier - harder attack made the netcumudgen note "there's a lot of math in this game" which is, I'm sure, exactly what the designers didn't want.
Thinking it through, when Doris takes multiple actions in the future I'm going to have Ashacat just write down her die roll, die -2 and die -4. This would give numbers to add directly to the base attack numbers already on the sheet rather than following the books suggestion of figuring the highest number and counting down. That should speed things up. The numbers are the same, but the math is faster.
Something similar happened with her fight with a Veteran Vamp. 19 points times 5 for the stake to the heart is 95 damage, which would dust even a veteran vamp with no tenderizing battle at all. OK, there had been an earlier fight, but there need not have been, save for the Vamp's drama point. Of course, since he drama pointed to halve his accumulated damage he went from 130 taken to 65, which was less than his 69 Life Points... so the x5 multiplier on the heart shot went away as it didn't dust him.
That was the other problem: the math got pretty irritating, which I know wasn't what the designers wanted. Still, that particular scenario, were the damage that I had calculated and just halved needed to be reversed out to recalculate for 19 damage rather than 95, was a pain to do at the table. Regardless of the rulebook talking in attacks reducing your life points with unconsciousness and death happening in the negatives, when I run this again the character sheets will have their life points +10 marked on it to show where they have to worry about Survival Checks. Damage will accumulate, with problems when it reaches the Life Point total. This way we're only counting up, and Drama Points to cut damage in half will be easier to calculate.
We had problems with Doris' multiple attacks on one roll, but I think I figured out how to think through it. The idea in game is that you figure your first attack from one roll and then reduce each succeeding attack by 2 (Doris rolls an 18 on a punch, her other punches count at 16 and 14. A Vamp with a 15 Dodge will be hit by the first two but not the third). In theory this is fine. In practice Doris didn't just repeatedly punch people.
Against the veteran vamp her attack sequence was a kick to the head, then a sweep kick to take him down and then a heart shot with a stake. Tres Buffy. She has Dex 7, Kung Fu 4, Getting Medieval 3. She rolls an 8. What this sounded like in play was "OK, the kick to the head is at -1, so your calculated bonus is +10, for an 18. Then your sweep kick is at no modifier for a +11, which means we add the -1 back and then take off the 2 for the multiple attack for a 17, and your Stake base is +10, so it's one point worse for a 16, less 3 for the heart shot is a 13 minus another 2 for the third attack is 11." The back and forth of harder - easier - harder attack made the netcumudgen note "there's a lot of math in this game" which is, I'm sure, exactly what the designers didn't want.
Thinking it through, when Doris takes multiple actions in the future I'm going to have Ashacat just write down her die roll, die -2 and die -4. This would give numbers to add directly to the base attack numbers already on the sheet rather than following the books suggestion of figuring the highest number and counting down. That should speed things up. The numbers are the same, but the math is faster.
Still, socially the game was a great success, and for a system test it showed me what I needed to do differently to make this game work. I'd come back to it.
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Date: 2007-07-08 02:11 pm (UTC)Hmmm. I have 1/e, not 2/e, but it gives 6 success levels, not 7, for a roll of 21-23. Which would give a total of 20.
But, also, I don't believe that the "through the heart" multiplier is applied that way. You have a multiplier of x2 for slash/stab damage or bullet damage, applied after summing everything up; so if you weren't doing "through the heart," damage would be (14+6) x2 = 40. But you don't use the x2 multiplier with "through the heart" attacks. Rather, they have a base damage of STR x4. So STR x4 = 28; plus success levels = 34; times one = 34. At least, that's how I would play it.
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