Crunch Friday - Talkin' 'bout my penetration
After giving him a few days off we have reclaimed Oliver from his family and re-installed him at his desk for this, our very first Crunch Friday post of 2017. It's a goodie... Combat Damage Philosophy. So pour yourself a little of your favourite tipple and settle down into one of those lovely leather arm chairs you have next to the fire and enjoy.
(Thanks to h347h in the Elite Dangerous Forums for capturing this image)
In the computer game a core facet of hull strength and damage in spaceship combat is the concept of damage resistance and penetration. Briefly the idea is that large ships resist damage from small weapons. If you want to hurt a big ship, bring big guns.
The concept helps to provide additional survivability to large ships when swamped by smaller vessels that they struggle to attack. In the first drafts of this game damage reduction and weapon penetration were right in there from the very earliest incarnations of the game. Then, during playtests, I took it out. What changed?
Damage reduction isn’t hard to calculate. If you have a damage reduction of 10, take 10 off the damage you have just taken unless the weapon used against you is the same size as your ship’s size class. Any decent roleplayer can do this kind of maths in their sleep.
I was encouraged in its use when I play tested a convoy attack, where a number of small ships attacked a Medium Sized Lakon 6 Transport. The damage resistance lengthened the transport’s life, medium weapons really shined in their use against the transport and everything was fluffy and nice.
It was at the dreaded Battle of the Big Guns that damage reduction really reared its ugly head. This was a playtest that stretched the maths to the extreme, using the largest and most expensive ships in the game, all equipped with Elite level pilots, in a huge bloodbath of dice rolling. What transpired was very telling – having one ship in a fleet with damage reduction is fun and dandy. Having six ships with damage reduction is a gigantic pain in the ass.
Remembering that my small turret did less damage to the Fer-De-Lance than my medium ones, trying to recall that the Python absorbs Medium and Small lasers, but not Large ones, unlike the nearby Anaconda which had Large weapon resistance … can you please tell me the damage separately because I have to figure out how much I’ve absorbed … what’s that? … you forgot to tell me the Plasma Accelerators you fired last round were Medium in size, not Huge, so I need to add 20 hull points, and then take off 50 for the current shot … arrrrggghhhh!
As an old-time D&Der I figured damage resistance was a breeze, but there was a thing I had overlooked. In D&D most of the things with Damage Resistance are monsters, not players (looks angrily at the 5th Edition Barbarian). If everyone had damage reduction the game would be a pain to play – and so it proved.
Because the game, by design, features players getting larger and larger ships it became apparent that Damage Reduction by size was going to have to be made history, because inevitably everyone would get it. And though I liked the concept of Damage Reduction – I really do like it – letting everyone have it is like dousing your brain in mud.
The core game now enhances big ship survivability with a suitably impressive hull boost. It’s less clever than Damage Reduction, but is easier to calculate at the table. So why have I told you this story about failures in game design? Perhaps to get across the idea that EDRPG went through many iterations before arriving in the form that it did, and to encourage you that it has been well play-tested with even dearly held rules discarded when they inhibited play.
