Quote:
Originally Posted by frogspawner
Oops, I missed the "per point of damage" before.  OK, so it's not super-powerful like I thought but instead it's insipid. And, without a roll involved, where's the excitement? It's just a bit too calculated, not Heroic. And all the other ways to spend PP makes it too complicated.
Where would this lead? One side spending points to re-roll better hits and increase damage, the other side spending points to downgrade those hits and then (maybe) negate some damage too. So, everyone's out of PP by the second round - and then the real fight can start!?  |
In practice it can work that way, but honestly, that's okay; it still reduces swings of bad luck, which is pretty much the point.
One of the least attractive features of BRP (at least with full blown RQ) for many people is how remarkably easy it is to just get a bad roll (and not even necessarily yours) and get taken out in a relatively trivial fight where you fundamentally did nothing wrong; it tends to be a deal-breaker for using the system for certain groups even with campaigns it'd otherwise be attractive for. This is a straightforward effect of two features of the system: 1. Attack and Defense are relatively linear (so that even relatively high levels of defensive skill--90% parries for example--still fail fairly frequently in an absolute sense), and 2. The system can be rather unforgiving of damage (if you don't have a lot of magical protection--or your opponents have similar levels of magical augmentation--even regular hits can end up being pretty lethal depending on where they hit, let alone things like impales or crits).
You can't completely buffer bad luck, nor, in the end, do you usually want to except in very stylized games, but there's matters of degree here.