Question for the lucky handful with the book

[SDLeary]

Originally Posted by Rurik

In the Interest of being Fair and Balanced(tm) I am going to agree with Nightshade on this one.

Though this is automagic (forcing something with a skill of 95% to re-roll is not) it becomes severely limited in use.

Take a Dragon for example, even with 18PP you can only reduce damage by 6, which is pretty much going to be useless. And when fighting dragons is when you want a mechanic like this to work.

It is going to be limited in the above situation. But then, someone foolishly went after a Dragon without proper prep (proper armor, magical protection, etc). If the character did go in prepared, and had a bad string of luck, then perhaps one of the first two options would be better. Re-roll of his last defensive maneuver, or not using his defense and using his Luck roll instead. Both listed as 5 point options.

As for the damage soak, you want this to work or be an option whenever your character will die, or when they will fall unconscious and bleed to death, or be captured with no way out. Don't limit the utility to the extreme.

I like this variability. Another suggestion to the GM is to allow the player to spend a total number of PP equal to the entire damage range of the weapon to inflict maximum damage. A very good option in a heroic game where the setting precludes everyone having magic.

None of these options are set in stone. The first three are "...ways power points can affect game play other than a power source", and other examples are also given. This is a fairly open system to the GM.

SDLeary

[SDLeary]

Originally Posted by Rurik

Can one buy down a greater success at a greater cost?

"...and can shift the result by as many categories as you have power points to spend."

No... fairly open.

Again, I think the intention of this is for heroic games where not everyone has access to magic. Better in many regards than the Ki powers from LoN for that kind of setting.

SDLeary

[frogspawner]

Originally Posted by Sunwolfe

An expenditure of three power points per point of damage allows a character to, ''…ignore [said] damage…from a single attack…''

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!?

[SDLeary]

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!?

If the GM allows it. They can allow all, some, or none of this; or use this as a framework to roll their own options. Its all optional. What is listed are simply suggestions.

SDLeary

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by SDLeary

I don't know.. if you are playing with Hit Locations, this can be the difference between holding onto your weapon or not. Or, if over double has been reached in a location, the difference between going unconscious or not (trunk locations). Not to mention that it could prevent bleeding.

SDLeary

I've just seen too many cases where the sudden death results (usually impales) were enough over that most people just wouldn't have had enough personal magic points to make any difference here. It might matter in marginal cases, but we're talking about a maximum of somewhere between 4-6 points here, after all, and that's assuming the person has not needed to dip into his personal magic points for anything else beforehand.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Argh. Someone emailed me a list of the uses and I can't find it!

I recall that there were a few other uses, such as altering the success level of an attack. I think there was a option to turn a success into a failure, and that it was usually cheaper than buying off damage point by point. I think it was 7 PP.

That would certainly help at least; its probably not going to help if the giant critted you, but at least it'd address the more common sudden-death cases.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by SDLeary

It is going to be limited in the above situation. But then, someone foolishly went after a Dragon without proper prep (proper armor, magical protection, etc). If the character did go in prepared, and had

Even with all that, there's simply cases where the dice hate you, or when the dragon or his allies dispels your magic. Because RQ/BRP involves a big, essentially linear die roll, there's a little too much opportunity for bad luck to pretty much come out of nowhere just because of the swings in potential result; consider just the fact that with 96+ being an automatic failure on defenses, and 01s always being crits, that one in about 2000 rolls is going to crit you no matter what your skill or your opponents. That's obviously a very extreme case, but its also a best-case scenario for a defender, and over the course of a campaign where any significant combat occurs, I'd put bets the net set of attacks and defenses approaches that number.

That said, with the category reduction, that probably is the better choice in all but the marginal cases anyway (or in cases where categories are irrelevant like some attack magic).

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Rurik

In the Interest of being Fair and Balanced(tm) I am going to agree with Nightshade on this one.

Though this is automagic (forcing something with a skill of 95% to re-roll is not) it becomes severely limited in use.

Take a Dragon for example, even with 18PP you can only reduce damage by 6, which is pretty much going to be useless. And when fighting dragons is when you want a mechanic like this to work.

Or with massive crits, yes.

[Atgxtg]

Originally Posted by Nightshade

That would certainly help at least; its probably not going to help if the giant critted you, but at least it'd address the more common sudden-death cases.

Au contraire. Assuming that a critical parry still blocks everything then upping your own success level would do the job. Once. If you got a lot of POW maybe twice.

[Nightshade]

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.