Re: (TFT) How would you modify HaOW? (Heroes and other worlds)

[raito@raito.com]

> Im in complete agreement with you here. However, Brandon says what
> controls
> access to weapons is Money.
> Your money as an adventurer starts at 3d6x10. Average is 110.   That means
> the average fighter can start with a shortsword 2d6-1, and then there is a
> rule on page 36 which states you get +1 dam per 2 str points over the
> weapon ST min, giving you 2d6+1.  Unless you start out with 180, which
> givfes you the broadsword and 2d6+3 for 150 bucks.

And here we get to the crux of non-scalability (I'm speaking generally, as
I haven't seen the rules in question)(it's entirely possible that if
there's a ST max of 12 for weapons, that cuts off the plusses). If you
allow any static plus to a weapon, you get a better guaranteed damage. It
certainly gets bad in TFT, where it becomes better to not use a weapon
other than a club at high enough ST.

One way I tried for a while to fix that was to always say that another +3
damage was another die. This meant that the guaranteed damage was the
number of dice (+/- up to 2 additional). I suppose that the point of the
gaussian curve generated by multiple D6 was deliberate in that there's
good odds on a particular range of damage, but not so much odds that
things can't go well or poorly. And D6 is easy. But it would probably have
been better (if there was an easy method) to just have a maximum damage
stated, and compute the appropriate gaussian distribution.

I've probably mentioned that at one point I experimented with a variable
number of dice for damage, using that +/- 3 points as a basis. If your
weapon did 2D6, you could take that, or 1D6+3 (giving a miniumum of 4
points), 6 points guaranteed, or 3D6-3, or 4D6-6. No, it didn't work,
mostly because it slowed things down. The math worked out well enough for
the purpose. I think I'd also hooked it into the mechanic I experimented
with for using ST to affect DX (spend a point, roll 1 less die on offense,
make the other guy roll 1 more on defense).

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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