Stealth Query

[Ripple]

We talked about letting the hull values go above six. This way you could leave traits as is and still reduce the effect of certain weapons. Failed stealth rolls become a bonus to the hull (we talked a +2). Since a six on weapons always hits we thought this kept the relative values of ships even on all but the highest hull ships.

The way you stated, alll go to hull six no traits, favored the ships that have very high AD vs good traits. We wanted to try to aviod upseting the balance between ships while balancing the mechanic more to our liking. Our proposal is not entirely successful but gets a bit closer.

The hull 3 Vaarl only goes to hull 5 this way, which makes it closer to other ships in its class. Hull 5 goes to hull 7 making AP kind of worthless but we found this a closer compromise.

Oddly we originally had this as our fix to Vorlons/Shadows before the tourney pack came out and pumped the hits so high. We thought it worked wonderfully having the Vorlon heavy cruiser at hull 7 but otherwise SFoS stats.

Ripple

 

[Wulf Corbett]

We talked about letting the hull values go above six. This way you could leave traits as is and still reduce the effect of certain weapons. Failed stealth rolls become a bonus to the hull (we talked a +2). Since a six on weapons always hits we thought this kept the relative values of ships even on all but the highest hull ships.

uhh... so Armour Piercing helps overcome Stealth, but Weak weapons are even worse? Stealth makes weapons less powerful? That makes about as much sense as D&D Armour Class, where heavier armour makes you harder to hit, but has no effect at all on the damage you take if you're hit...

Wulf

 

[Voronesh]

Which makes as much sense as

Antifighter weapons being unable to intercept a lone Zephyr flight, before it damages the ship.

Or ships being unable to turn in space, when they just hold station.

RIGHT.............ACTA is so realistic, lets complain about that mechanic, by people trying to make their game better.........

 

[Ripple]

Ah Wulf I have missed you so...

Lets see, how about we start with the stupidity of assuming all weapons hit. That is what we do in this game isn't it? That is why we go to armor piercing to hit better? Even the show had a large number of weapons only partially hitting, ie a few pulses from a weapon or only part of a beams firing pass. So yes we do use an armor class system, just like D&D.

If AP/SAP affected the damage chart we might have a disagreement but what effects that is Precise...a weapon which is supposedly more accurate does not help you hit, but does help you do more damage? We were talking about stuff that did not make sense right?

And weak makes a weapon even worse...um...no...you do remember how the mechanics work right. A six always hits on a to hit roll, so for weak weapons all hulls five and over are exactly the same. Six, seven, twelve....no stronger no weaker.

If you needed a fluff answer to what we were attempting to represent how about this. Stealth makes you harder to pinpoint. Weapons being fired are fired over an area (see the Centauri Secundus shot at bab 5) what the stealth does is make that area larger as you are firing at a less disticnt target (or less precisely located target perhaps). So less of you beam is on target/fewer pulses of your weapon hit. What does this mean it means that less of the total energy of you attack cuts into the hull/fewer pulses hit to pierce through the hull. Net result is mechanics wise is if your weapon is really good at cutting hull you need fewer pulses to hit/less beam time on target to get a damaging result. Thus stealth makes you harder to target but severly damaging weapons still do damage despite this. IE SAP/AP weapons are better against a stealth hull because if you hit though you hit less precisely you are still hit for some damage. In this way stealth modifies how good you hull is at protecting.

As a game design effect we were going away from a binary system and into a scaled system. On/off is a poor system of design. Want evidence of that, look to the die in your hand. Why do we use a D6 instead of a Coin. Both are adequate for determining a chance, one just has much more granularity. Stealth often feels bad game wise because it works or it does not, and if it does not the fact that you can do nothing is frustrating. If you could do something, however limited you would feel better about the situation.

When someone proposes a possible solution to something within the game that is not fun in their opinion, perhaps ask why they think that solution improves things.

Ripple

 

[Chernobyl]

under that proposed change to "finding stealth" it would be better to assume that the traits of AP and SAP can't apply unless stealth is defeated.

Chern

 

[Ripple]

Since there was some confusion about what we had proposed...

Stealth as it stands right now rarely in our experience produces a statistically average result. There simply are not enough die rolls to average out. And we have tried both targeting a single ship and spreading fire.

What we tend to see is a string of three battles. In battle one the acting player tends to make 80% of his stealth rolls. Not a satisfing game for his opponent. In battle two the acting player misses 80% of his stealth rolls. Not satisfiing for the acting player. In battle three we see about halfish made and both players feel they had an even chance. This was under tournament list rules Minbari, pre-Arm post SFoS. It was also the case using stealth carrying scouts such as the Corvan, Vaarl, Narn scout and Rbax's Brakiri scout at skirmish level. (though stealth 3+ has proved useless vs the Drakh)

By altering the rule of a failed stealth roll to simply adding two to the hull, we suggested that we could even out that result somewhat more. Our goal was to get Stealth to be more in line with other secndary defenses, ie interceptors, geg, adaptive, dodge. Under SFoS Minbari ships are not significantly smaller than a number of other ships found at the same pls, but their secondary defense and weapon suites were better. The hull in many cases was not as good.

This put the effect of stealth closer to interceptors and dodge. The higher hull would cause a number of hits to simply miss, but still leave the ship vulnerable to a few lucky dice (ie no matter how high you hull sixes always hit). This put the Minbari on in the same boar as every other ship in the game but the Vorlons/Shadows. A few lucky dice can have a dramatic effect but the percentage chance is fairly small.

This let stealth ships be engage without the same level of randomness. You did not have a situation of having a ship clear to shoot one turn just failing to reach a threshold and never being able to fire at the ship again due to a few bad rolls the rest of the game. It lowered frustration.

This has not been adapted by our group as a standard house rule, or used in tournaments. It was one thing we tossed about after our initial inversion of stealth (+1 to roll under ten, flat beyond) was thought to be too harsh to the stealth ships. The inversion remains our current campaign answer to stealth as that is what we started with. But we may adopt a different standard for our next campaign.

I would think threads such as this would be a resource for new rules ideas for mongoose itself and groups wishing to continue a game that maybe doesn't quite fit their needs as is.

Ripple

 

[Voronesh]

That makes about as much sense as D&D Armour Class, where heavier armour makes you harder to hit, but has no effect at all on the damage you take if you're hit...Wulf

Rereading that and ripples post, i just realized ACTA has the same damage system.

Cause for some funny reason better hull makes you harder to hit. Unless you count that all weapons always hit, which is simply "boo! hiss!" Cause in most battle scenes that it quite clearly not the case ^^.

 

[Wulf Corbett]

That makes about as much sense as D&D Armour Class, where heavier armour makes you harder to hit, but has no effect at all on the damage you take if you're hit...

Rereading that and ripples post, i just realized ACTA has the same damage system.

Not exactly, in ACtA, the number of dice (the damage potential) is reduced by how many exceed Hull, so the damage is reduced by Hull/armour, whereas in D20 armour has no effect on damage whatsoever, only on the chance to hit. ACtA is more like the new World of Darkness system in that respect.

Wulf

 

[Voronesh]

Well a fighter that throws 5 attacks in D&D will be doing less damage as well, if the enemy has better armor......only those that exceed defense will do any damage.

Same accounts for ACTA....only wargames prefer to throw more dice in general.

 

[Ripple]

Voronesh has it right. Each attack die represents one attack against a ship. This attack is defended against by the Hull score. Should you exceed the Hull score you roll on the damage table to see how much you did. This is recorded as damage/crew.

D&D you make an attack with one die (you may make several in a turn, ie you throw a 3 attack die strike) against the AC (Hull) of your target. Should you exceed the AC you roll a damage die (roll on the damage table) to see the amount of damage you do. This is recorded as hit points (damage/crew points).

Systems are only really different in that most weapons have the same damage die, ie the damage table, instead of lots of different dice. Even here we have a similarity in that we in effect have two kinds of weapons, precise and non-precise.

Ripple

 

[Goldritter]

Don´t see the attack roll in D&D as a roll to see if you hit the target.
Insteat see it as a roll if you effectiv hit the target.
So if your roll is over the AC without armor but under the AC with armor you can descripe like "you hit your target, but the blade bounce of of the steel breast plate".

The same for ACtA. You don´t roll if you realy hit it. You roll if you hit it effectiv.

 

[Voronesh]

Goldritter.

Yes thats also a correct represantion.

Ripple and me were only going on about this, as Wulf mocked ripples attempt at imrpoving the stealth mechanic by citing the totally unrealistic D&D ruleset......

 

[Burger]

Hey,
ACTA uses the dame damage system as Monopoly! You roll dice, and that determines where you land. OK so the damage is determined by how many houses are there rather than dice, but this is just a small difference. You can even have multiple attacks, if you roll a double. Get a double 3 times and you've taken a critical.

Its a dice game, people. The system is going to be comparable to every single other dice game, in some way.

 

[Voronesh]

Correct.

Which just proves Wulfs mocking/argument as having not strong basis.

Move along people nothing to see.