Before the thread was banished to its cage and put in the Cone of Shame, JCurwen3 asked a pretty good set of questions that I thought I’d answer here.
Question: in your post RESCALING MELEE WEAPONS, you presented the house rule (which I use and enjoy) that rescaled ST-powered damage to be sensible vs firearm damage. Using this, sw and thr damage for a given ST would be lower overall.
Would you suggest that CP values (which run off the same ST-based damage table as in Basic) are cinematic or realistic as they are? Basically, if I use your house rule on rescaling melee weapon damage, should I also use a similarly revised table for finding the CP that would be inflicted for a given ST, or are you happy with the standard CP values as is, as far as realism goes?
Also, did you ever get a chance, in playtest, to see the interaction between the rules in Technical Grappling and The Last Gasp (both the adjustments to FP recovery and the addition of AP)?
Control Points and Basic Damage
The Rescaling Melee Weapons article on the realistic scale puts swing at ST/10, so ST 20 is 2d (and thrust is 1d). That puts ST 13 at about 1d+1 for swing.
The normal progression has ST 13 being 2d-1 and ST 20 being 3d+2. A bit less than double the swing value.
The thrust table is 1d and 2d-1 for ST 13 and ST 20, respectively.
The question is would 0.7d and 1d be appropriate to maintain the 1:1 correspondence between Control Points and injury.
Well, that would make things take a LOT longer in grappling, and TG already lengthens combats a bit by having much lower penalties than the “double CP” scale used for cinematic grappling.
Ultimately, without going too much into it, I think that having even lower CP awards might be realistic, but it will also likely be boring. I mean, a grappling match in my own Hwa Rang Do training is usually two minutes long, and that’s gone before you know it (championship matches are five minutes). I’ve heard that BJJ matches can go on longer than games of cricket (perhaps that’s being unfair). Seriously – grappling takes a long time. Too long, in most cases, to be gamed out without your other players pelting you with dice.
What I’d do is use ST/10 for Control Points on the new scale, but if you want to somehow turn CP into HP of injury, you’ll do it at a 2:1 exchange ratio. This includes setting the upper limit on injury when doing locks and whatnot. That should provide reasonable speed in actually achieving meaningful levels of control points for restraint and penalties, but not make grappling more effective than bashing someone with a sword for causing injury. Because that would be dumb.
Action Points and Technical Grappling
I write The Last Gasp quite a bit after I had already written most, if not all, of Technical Grappling. TLG was published in June of 2012, while the TG playtest and edits were complete in March of 2012. So when I wrote TLG I was definitely thinking that it would play well with the new grappling rules. Most everything in Technical Grappling is either an attack or a Contest treated as an attack – which means nonstop action will tire you out fast. You may wind up attacking to build up Control Points, and then Evaluate or Wait in order to hopefully pass the time and gain back some AP.
Still, we didn’t playtest it. The Last Gasp didn’t exist when I wrote Technical Grappling, and I wasn’t really free, I thought, to distribute the manuscript to let them interact together. NDA and all.
The thing I’d worry about, though, is that between keeping track of Action Points, Fatigue Points, and Control Points and Hit Points, that your players might revolt at that much resource management in one combat.
Before the thread was banished to its cage and put in the Cone of Shame, JCurwen3 asked a pretty good set of questions that I thought I’d answer here.