Re: Mastery Questions!

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 12:25:07 +0100 (BST)

NFranz197_at_...:
> Suppose you have these three characters:
>
> Joe1 Close Combat 17 (17 AP)
> Joe2 Close Combat 2w (22 AP)
> Joe3 Close Combat 17w2 (57 AP)
>
> If Joe1 squares off against Joe3 without any further modifiers, he is most
> likely to roll a Success vs. Joe3's Critical Success.
>
> However, if Joe2 squares off against Joe3, he has a target number of only
> 2, and will most likely keep rolling Failures vs. Criticals. He has only a
> 10% chance of a Success, even though he has one level of Mastery already.
> This means that a character with NO masteries has a better chance against a
> guy with 2 Masteries than somebody with 1 Mastery has against the same
> opponent.

Oops. Yup, you're right. On the plus side, it's a fairly marginal circumstance, though. And Joe1 and Joe2 are very likely both creamed anyway, it's just a matter of degree. ;-)

Here's the longer, messier version. This is fixable if you use a slightly more complex version of the 'cancelling' rule. In a nutshell, instead of cancelling scores aWb and cWd down to aW(b-e) and cW(d-e), where e is the minunum of c and d (the present, fast and furious rule), then cancel down to (say) 10 on the one hand, and

        max (a+20*b, c+20*d) - 10

on the other. Which you then have the added pleasure of converting back to TN + Masteries, mind...

OK, so in practice it's not quite that hard: intuitively, just pick some handy number (10 would be my suggestion, though an earlier version of the rules (Convulsion playtest, or thereabouts) suggested 2, IIRC), and reduce one to that, and the other by a similar amount. Trouble is, as soon as your campaign hits the masteries, you'll have to do this for _every_ contest. (In fact, potentially more than once per contest, if mid-contest modifiers come into play, as they often will, clearly.) That would be fairly clunky, I'd suggest. OTOH, I'd recommend doing something like this on an ad hoc basis if troublesome cases do come up, and they bug you enormously. ("OK, adjust both your ability scores down by 5 -- everyone happy now?")

Fixing it by super-crits, hyper-crits, etc, would also work, but that's getting into 'crocodiles ate all the sharks' territory, IMO...

Cheers,
Alex.

Powered by hypermail