mage early game

[ekolis]

What if you changed the absorption to work sort of like Sil's armor - instead of 6 absorption meaning -6 damage to all attacks, it could instead mean -1d6 damage to all attacks, so even weak attacks have a chance to penetrate?

[LostTemplar]

IMHO current armor is somewhat a step back. Basically you have removed raw +damage bonuses from combat system but added raw -damage. Ovearall + or - raw damage effectiveness depends too strongly on blows.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by LostTemplar

IMHO current armor is somewhat a step back. Basically you have removed raw +damage bonuses from combat system but added raw -damage. Ovearall + or - raw damage effectiveness depends too strongly on blows.

But that's consistent with what we're trying to achieve, which is a distinction between fast characters who hit lightly many times, and strong characters who hit heavily but less often. The current absorption mechanic is exactly what we need for this, and avoids the need for the extra die rolls in Sil's system.

IMO finesse weapons should have lots of small dice: 2d3, 4d2, etc., while prowess weapons should have a small number of big dice. This means things like mauls and great hammers need to change quite a bit. IMO this would give finesse characters additional consistency and prowess chars a bit more unpredictability, to balance out the inherent advantages of prowess.

But this does mean that monster absorption values need to be carefully set to avoid too many of them being immune to unboosted physical attacks. I agree that the default value should be zero, and that 50' monsters should not really have absorption of more than 1.

[half]

Note that for two weapons with the same mean damage, the one with the higher variance is typically better in systems with damage reduction, since the damage reduction is subtracted off, with a minimum total of zero.

[ghengiz]

Originally Posted by half

Note that for two weapons with the same mean damage, the one with the higher variance is typically better in systems with damage reduction, since the damage reduction is subtracted off, with a minimum total of zero.

I don't get it...the minimum damage is
Max[
0,
(minimum damage of the weapon)-(damage reduction)
]
or is it?
so why should a larger variance give a minimum total of zero?

[half]

Sorry if I explained this poorly. Imagine fighting a creature with damage reduction 4. One character does 4d1 damage (average = 4) so always does zero damage overall. The other does 1d7 damage (average = 4) and does 0, 1, 2 or 3 damage. The extra variance helped.

[ghengiz]

Originally Posted by half

Sorry if I explained this poorly. Imagine fighting a creature with damage reduction 4. One character does 4d1 damage (average = 4) so always does zero damage overall. The other does 1d7 damage (average = 4) and does 0, 1, 2 or 3 damage. The extra variance helped.

I see your point, and it is a valid one...but I'm afraid that a bigger variance is needed, because the 'real' mean damage is the weighted mean, that is

(0*4 + 1*1 +2*1 + 3*1) / (4 + 1 + 1 + 1) = 6/7 <1.

Does Sil consider fractional damage too?

This is just the 'real' _mean_ damage, I agree that your point is valid.

edit:
note: the weights are those ones because with an 1d7 you have an uniform distribution, so, considering the damage reduction of 4, you can obtain 1,2,3 points of damage exactly once, with a dice output of 5,6,7 respectively. OTOH, you have zero damage in the rest of the cases, which are 7-3=4.

[Old Coach]

I am glad that we are trying to fix the problem of older versions where every class did better damage with a dagger than with a long sword at early levels. It was always frustrating that Nimthanc was better for a Warrior than a great axe until strength and dex were maxed out.
So, we are on the right track here. I am of the opinion that for most monsters, the large weapons should deal the most damage. Of course, there will be exceptions, but I think that for most monsters the quick attacks with a dagger should not be more effective than a warrior with a two handed great flail, for instance. Maybe just a little fine tuning is all that is needed.

[Scatha]

It seems that you'd like to have some monsters be tougher for heavy weapon users, and some tougher for light weapon users. At the moment, if I understand it correctly, you're aiming for a default where most enemies have no absorption and no special evasion, but some have one or the other (or both?).

I just wanted to point out that it's possible to achieve this with just the damage absorption. You balance the weapons so that the damage output will be around the same against foes with a default (non-zero) absorption. Then light weapon users with many attacks will do more damage than heavy weapon users against lighter-than-usually armoured enemies, but less damage against heavier-than-usually armoured enemies. There is a little asymmetry in the system: heavy weapons will be able to kill everything, just a bit more slowly for some enemies, whereas light weapons might have real difficulty against the most heavily armoured opponents. But I think that this asymmetry may actually be helpful in making them feel different, rather than just two equivalent but differently named approaches.

Aside: The Sil combat system is rather more complicated than would be needed to achieve this goal, but helps add other parts of tactical depth. We do have evasion as well as absorption as a major mechanic, with also hitting-by-a-lot getting criticals. We don't have any more attacks for light than heavy weapons (usually just one attack per round in all cases), so we use the criticals to differentiate between the weapons. As a result, we also need to have some monsters which are resistant to critical hits to be a challenge for the light weapon users. Being able to vary the number of attacks gives you a very useful extra parameter to vary for balancing purposes (although also gives message spam). Sil doesn't actually need the damage absorption to be variable rather than flat: sure we might need to rebalance a couple of things if we changed, but the basic gameplay is stable.

[Estie]

The main reason to have evasion and absorbtion is not so much to make the monsters feel different, but eventually to also apply it to the @, afaik.