[Solar System] Let me see if I got equipment ratings right...
Klaus_Welten:
So, let's say I have Melee 2 and a sword with +1 for fighting men. I roll the dice to attack a fellow soldier, but I'm unlucky and get +, -, -. That would be a -1, so my final result would be 1. But since I have the forementioned sword, I can substitute my die roll for the rating's value, wichi is +1, so my final result is 3.
Did I get this right?
Eero Tuovinen:
I fear that this depends on whether you're going by the traditional equipment rating rules or the ones in my new TSoY book.
According to the old rules, an applicable equipment rating is added to a non-zero Ability check result. Thus a Marginal (1) result would be bumbed up to Good (2) by a +1 tool. These rules can be abused so much that I personally don't much like to use them: there is a very narrow range of utility in between making equipment useless (by having each rating cost one Advance and being strict about applying them) or overpowered (using the SS style cheaper equipment ratings liberally). There is a range in there where these rules work, but as these rules break the balance mechanics of the game, there's no telling when you get either too powerful or too weak.
The new rules I figured out through this year are different: your own Ability check is used to find out whether your equipment gets damaged, but the equipment rating itself is used to adjudicate the actual Ability check. So if you got a Marginal (1) result under those rules, a +1 equipment would do nothing for you.
Which rules you'd go with would depend on what you were actually doing, overall. Those have somewhat different feel, and they interact differently with other crunch you might be using. The rule you suggest (equipment replaces the dice roll) is something I've considered, but I didn't use it in TSoY due to how important bonus and penalty dice are for the TSoY crunch landscape. That (or something like it) could be used in some other crunch environment, though.
Klaus_Welten:
Hi Eero,
don't you think that the Near rules make rated equipment a bit too weak? On the average, rolling three dice gives you a result of 0, meaning that you go with unmodified skill; if your skill is 2 or 1, a +1 rating is totally useless in most of the cases. That only becomes worse when bonus dice are taken into account, beacuse they raise your chances to roll more than 0; it's a paradox, but a GRANDMASTER swordman would actually waste a Secret if he went for a rated sword, as even a +3 rating would do nothing for him most of the time. I don't know, it feels... weird.
Eero Tuovinen:
Equipment is much more manageable in the new rules, that's true. A grandmaster swordsman (or any grandmaster, really) won't benefit much from a piece of equipment, but that's fine with me for four reasons:
The equipment will still provide insurance against bad rolls. Those do happen now and then. So while the master won't be dependent on his equipment, he does keep it around.TSoY has a very rich crunch environment, which includes many, many ways of dumping a boatload of penalty dice on an opponent. Even a master or grandmaster will benefit from having a piece of equipment he can shunt forward when his own check result falls dramatically at something like that.Equipment ratings have become considerably cheap in TSoY to own. Just like SS, you get ratings equal to the quality level of the equipment; unlike SS this is an inherent and mandatory property of mechanically significant equipment, which means that all of your equipment will have ratings whether you want them or not. In a sense they are thus free as long as you want to have a piece of equipment at all; you might not need the ratings, but if you want to get the benefits of imbued Secrets, you're going to be carrying the equipment ratings as well.The most important point: a grandmaster wouldn't use his equipment ratings as mere replacements for his own check, he'd get some of the equipment mastery Secrets that allow him to do stronger things with the ratings. His equipment or personal skill (an imbued or known Secret) could allow him to turn the equipment ratings into extra Harm, reduced Harm, bonus or penalty dice, discounts on Secret activation or any number of other things. The default thing is pretty lame if you're skilled enough, but at that point nothing prevents you from getting equipment that uses the ratings differently.The new equipment system is probably the part I'm most proud of in the WoN book, and the part I worked on the hardest. It's very powerful now in terms of setting contact, balance and punch that characters can get out of it. It also makes alternative solutions and expanding the system trivial; I went to great pains to rework what equipment does while preserving the concept of equipment rating unchanged exactly because I wanted to make it easy for anybody to use the old system or their own hack for what equipment ratings do.
Klaus_Welten:
Mmm, I didn't consider all those elements... Perhaps I judged too quickly. I'll give it all a second good read. ^_^
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