Request for Comment: Subdual damage comparison

[Morgenstern]

Hm, at threat level 20 NPC vitality can range between 100 and 500.  But if you took out the "x 5" it'd be 20 and 100.  More reasonable?

Only if your special characters hunt in packs as large or even larger than the PCs... which basically means they're standard characters .

That large multiplier give them a "clock" that makes fights hopfully last more than 2 rounds. Bring it down and pretty much any two combatants will grind a single special foe to nothing in the blink of an eye.

[Antilles]

Subdual's just as valid a tactic as lethal in my book for two reasons. 1) You need threats for lethal to really shine, which unless you dedicate a good part of your build on increasing your threat range isn't really something you can rely on, thus becoming 'occasional nice bonus' rather than a dedicated combat tactic, and 2) Fatigued is an excellent combat debuff, plus it actually changes the feel of the combat when you've inflicted a couple grades of fatigued, as opposed to having taken off half the target's vitality.

[Agent 333]

Frankly I'm in the camp that Vitality being so high for Special NPCs just makes it "Race to Crit Mountain". I've run combats where the entire party was wailing on an NPC for three rounds, brought him down to about 50 Vitality left, then the Mage crit with a Scorching Ray and dropped him dead in one round. Not exactly the most exciting way to end a fight, IMO...

[Morgenstern]

Subdual's just as valid a tactic as lethal in my book for two reasons. 1) You need threats for lethal to really shine, which unless you dedicate a good part of your build on increasing your threat range isn't really something you can rely on, thus becoming 'occasional nice bonus' rather than a dedicated combat tactic, and 2) Fatigued is an excellent combat debuff, plus it actually changes the feel of the combat when you've inflicted a couple grades of fatigued, as opposed to having taken off half the target's vitality.

Simply buying a weapon with a 19-20 threat range is one of the best tactics there is against special opponents and requires virtually no effort. you don't have to do anything beyond that to have a reasonable expectation of dropping a big bad in 7 hits.

There may be a greater variety of ways to pump up a subdual strategy, but its basically starts 3-4 hits in the hole vs. lethal and all your early investment of character options is just working back toward parity, not actually putting you ahead.

Subdual is designed to be appealing. It doesn't suck, but I just don't see the fears of uberness playing out when you crunch actual dice rolling rather than summ averages. Most of those curves have loooong rat tails, and thus do not add together anything like linearly.

Take a simple scenario. You target has a combined 35 wounds and vitality. You are inflicing 1d6 per hit. You cannot hope to kill him in the first 5 hits. 6 is is your very first chance to drop him. conversely, you cannot be certain to drop him with anything less than 35 attacks (!!). Does that mean the typical number of hit required to drop him is 20ish ((6+35)/2)? Nope. The average damage of 10d6 is 35. Does that mean the typical number of hits to kill him is 10? nope, it does not.

[Morgenstern]

Frankly I'm in the camp that Vitality being so high for Special NPCs just makes it "Race to Crit Mountain". I've run combats where the entire party was wailing on an NPC for three rounds, brought him down to about 50 Vitality left, then the Mage crit with a Scorching Ray and dropped him dead in one round. Not exactly the most exciting way to end a fight, IMO...

I guess I'd ask were the players having fun? Because ussually there's a pretty big fondness for 'the power of big rolls' at most tables I've dealth with.

Vitality is a clock. It always runs out. But its a clock for the longest amount of time the fight should run, and all partymemebers can cumulatively advance that clock. it's the teamwork option. Its also why vitality damage not only is, but should be inferior to subdual/stress. If those tactics were any worse than vitality (the deliberately slowest way of getting the job done) they'd be completely superfluous.

Crits are the glory option. No previous roll affects your current attempt IF the bigbad is still alive at all. It's just you and your dice against the foe in-the-moment. Your mage got an awsome roll that finished the fight before the clock ran out. Hopeful that can be presented as the very essence of cool .

[Doublebond]

Hm, at threat level 20 NPC vitality can range between 100 and 500.  But if you took out the "x 5" it'd be 20 and 100.  More reasonable?

That large multiplier give them a "clock" that makes fights hopfully last more than 2 rounds. Bring it down and pretty much any two combatants will grind a single special foe to nothing in the blink of an eye.

That reminds me of the houserule I saw on this forum a while back that replaced the "x 5" multiplier with the number of PCs.

Thoughts on that?

[Morgenstern]

I guess what I'm saying is the table for crits I posted is the upper bound - its the fastest a fight should go. Average damage versus vitality is the lower bound - its the slowest the fight should go. In some respects its miraculous that subdual/stress performance curves actually do fall between those two limits most of the time . If you're going to tinker with it, tinker only while knowing whats really going on.

[meadicus]

In the game I recently ran, the players rarely bothered confirming crits for two reasons. Firstly, an NPC becomes fatigued at zero vitality, not having taken wounds, so there's no benefit. And they weren't that designed for damage dealing, other than the archer. The Lander had a short, and did the dice plus a few points of damage, maybe averaging nearly 10, so hit crits wouldn't kill unless he spent another action dice, and there was limited to 1. So a crit didn't kill, it just cost and AD and didn't get the NPC any closer to dropping unless someone else was lucky enough to roll a crit. So almost all fights ended in a long (very long) decline of NPC vitality.

[Morgenstern]

That reminds me of the houserule I saw on this forum a while back that replaced the "x 5" multiplier with the number of PCs.

Thoughts on that?

My thoughts are that's bloody brilliant, and takes care of the accidental silliness of personal lieutenants and animal companions getting an absurd number of vitality points.

I think my personal scripting was "All special NPCs get vitality equal to TL x rating. Villians multiply that by the number of special characters in the player's team."

Basically mellows out allies a lot. make non-final-boss enemey special characters a LOT easier to best, and folds the issues with PLs and ACs boosting party size directly into the final equation.

[Morgenstern]

In the game I recently ran, the players rarely bothered confirming crits for two reasons. Firstly, an NPC becomes fatigued at zero vitality, not having taken wounds, so there's no benefit. And they weren't that designed for damage dealing, other than the archer. The Lander had a short, and did the dice plus a few points of damage, maybe averaging nearly 10, so hit crits wouldn't kill unless he spent another action dice, and there was limited to 1. So a crit didn't kill, it just cost and AD and didn't get the NPC any closer to dropping unless someone else was lucky enough to roll a crit. So almost all fights ended in a long (very long) decline of NPC vitality.

And in that whole long decline they didn't get two threats? They were so tight on dice that spending 2 to summarily end a major fight wasn't an option? Honestly, that seems strange. Especially when as you say, the vitality grind was very long. At least the streak breaker worked .

In lower level play when action dice are tight, auto-crit options are few, and vitality totals for special adversaries are comparitively low, grinding it out with vitality damage is an ok option, but even then its still going by way of the longest road available.

[Antilles]

I know, but luck being the fickle bitch that she is, you cannot reasonably sit down and expect a threat every 7 swings. Raw numbers are nice to swing around, but means fuck-all on the table. You could have an entire session filled with combat and never see a single threat, or the party could kill everything in 1-2 rounds because they all rolled threats. Basically, unless you've built your character specifically for humongous threat ranges and barely even then you cannot rely on getting critical hits. You cannot make any sort of battle plans that involve someone critically hitting an enemy (besides a lvl 14 Soldier, of course), but you can with Subdual ("I'll hit him with subdual until he's got a couple grades of fatigued, then you do that thing that allows a fortitude save/opposed STR or DEX roll").

I guess what I'm saying is that while running the numbers is all very well and good, they don't necessarily map to how it would play out on the table. To use a quote I've heard spoken several times on this board, 'game design is part science, part art.' Crunching numbers is all well and good, but they don't show the whole picture IMO.

[Morgenstern]

I know, but luck being the fickle bitch that she is, you cannot reasonably sit down and expect a threat every 7 swings. Raw numbers are nice to swing around, but means fuck-all on the table.

Funny, because that's exactly why I find some of the subdual concerns overkill. Subdual is semi-reliable, but slower than lethal. Lethal is pursuing two tracks simultaneously, one that's even more reliable than subdual (if slower) and one that's erratic but extremely fast.

I guess what I'm saying is that while running the numbers is all very well and good, they don't necessarily map to how it would play out on the table.

Using averages to gauge whats going to happen is giving just as skewed expectations, if not moreso. As you say, at the table, things other than purely average performance happen, but tell a gamer he's got a 51% of succeeding and he'll give you an amazingly sour look if he doesn't pull it off on the first try . Because, you know, on average he should succeed every time you look at a single incident...

[Morgenstern]

I wonder if the issue isn't maximum time required. In Blankbeard's inital set up the knockout apporach never took longer that 20 hits.

We certainly saw a sharp trend for some people to gravitate towards reliability (take 10 mania) over peak performance. Maybe that's just the personality type that sees the appeal of always succeeding in no more than 20 tries (even if they never succeed in less than 10 tries) being a more desirable deal than always succeeding in 45 tries but potentially succeeding as early as the very first attempt?

Or maybe its the deathspiral that's so appealing? The incremental penalties make people feel like "they're making progress" at several checkpoints along the trail?

[Antilles]

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that by running these numbers the way it's being done, you're completely ignoring the fact that subdual inflicts fatigued, which to me is almost as big a draw as lethal's criticals do damage directly to wounds. It's a big part of why I find subdual just as good an alternative as lethal. Not as good as direct-to-wounds damage, but comes up more often. In a 1-vs-1 I'd favor lethal, hoping for that 1 critical hit, but in a party I'd favor subdual, as the debuff will make it easier to hit with a wide variety of effects, that will most likely end the fight sooner than raw damage would've.

It's basically a combination of all 3 of your examples that's why I like subdual just as much as lethal; sooner or later I will inflict fatigued on my enemy, whereas with lethal I can never be certain if I will crit or not, if you've lost half your vitality you're a little under halfway to death, whereas if you've gotten 2 grades of fatigued you're halfway to unconsciousness and you're suffering from a noticeable debuff, and that it's easier to feel like we're 'making progress' when we're having an actual mechanical impact on the enemy beyond 'you're 8 vitality closer to doing real damage to him'.

[Sletchman]

As a slight aside - what are people seeing at their actual tables?

My players are massive powergamers, and will take any exploit I allow (in any system).  They're also pretty smart, and good with numbers (plus I give them powergaming tips).  Now, with that said, at my table I saw no massive lean towards Subdual / Stress as "superior" damage type in my last FC game.  There was one player with Fencing Supremacy that used Stress all the time, entirely because it ignores DR and not because it was an enormously superior type (and he ran the numbers - he's got his Masters of Mathematics, with a Stats major).  We also had a player using a Greenstone weapon, but even that was only to take advantage of Harsh Beating from Highwayman.  In total: 2 out of 7 using non-lethal damage.

I'm not trying to say "you're all wrong, it doesn't shake out like that at the table", I'm honestly curious what sort of real life experience folks have had and what happens at other tables genuinely interests me - given the chance I'd game with any of the regulars.  Plus numbers can only tell one side of the story - so if you have a current game / your last game, what's the breakdown of player weapon use?