Standard/house-rules resistances

From: Posselt, Theo (US - Foster City) <"Posselt,>
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 14:07:54 -0400

Folks,

So, after running several demo sessions with HeroWars, I consistently find the feeling of the game a bit flat. On the one hand, the social interactions modelling in the game are wonderful. On the other hand, the combat and especially the magic doesn't work too well.

Maybe it's my weakness as a GM, maybe it's my love for rules mechanics. In any case, I realized recently that one thing that would help would be to have a more developed set of baseline resistances, especially for magic. The two pages in the base rules don't really seem sufficient.

My basic idea is that I would have a set of baseline resistances, and then a set of standard modifiers. I conceive of these standard modifiers as being something like standard limitations in (forgive me) GURPS or champions.

Before everyone reacts in utter horror, let me give you an example. One annoying (to me) aspect of the magic in HeroWars is the fact that you have so many gods with similar affinities and similar feats. Let's take our friend Vanganth and Vinga. Vanganth has the affinity Movement, with the feat Leap with Wind; Vinga has Movement, with Leap over Water. So my idea is that you'd have the base resistance for all 'leaping' feats:

Leap 10' = 16
Leap 20' = 1w
Leap 40' = 6w

Each 2x = +5

(for horizontal leaps)

And then you'd have modifiers, depending on the restrictions on the feat: Very common = -0
Common = -2
Unusual = -5
Almost never = -10

So, in this case 'wind' is a common restriction (-2), 'over water' is an unusual restriction (-5). So, for Vanganth to leap 40' would be a 4w resistance, only doable in wind, whereas for Vinga to leap the same distance over water would be a 1w resistance.

Obviously this approach isn't for everyone - it would add some more bookkeeping to the game. Still, I would love to try to develop this idea a bit more with people that think it's useful. So, some questions:

• Do any of the GM's out there have standard resistances they use? If so, send them my way.
• How should resistances scale? There used to be a lot of discussion about whether skills are linear or geometric. Ie, is 1w2 twice as difficult as 1w, or many times more? I assumed a doubling of difficulty for every 5 increase in resistance, let me know what you think.
• I don't want to start a debate, but - aside from the obvious downside of being more rules-heavy, does anyone see any other issues with this approach?

Theo

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