Replacing melee damage d6es with Skill dice

[stubby]

-Does this apply to a squads skill being boosted to 1D8 by an officer?

Yes, which I'm excited about. It makes the Officers a lot more relevant.

-Do MOMs stay D6's?

I hadn't intended to change MOMs, but I'll give it some thought. A lot of MOMs don't have a Skill rating attached (like a rolling boulder for example), so there'd have to be some kind of balance between a unit's MOM and an inanimate object's.

-What do the probabilities look like in a charge attack?

I haven't done the math yet, but in a charge attack the damage will be sufficient almost every time, so the success or failure of the skill roll will be the determining factor almost entirely.

Also I didn't know two hand weapons had such a high weapon kill rate. I'm kind of surprised but I guess it still has it's disadvantages such as not being able to charge with them.

I was surprised also, but regular minifigs are what they're designed for. If these charts were measuring kill rates against Shielded enemies or vehicles, I think we'd see that other weapon types are more effective.

The real tradeoff is that if you have two hand weapons, you can't carry a pistol or a shield, for whatever that's worth.

Could we some more of these probability charts as I'm loving the insight they give on the actual game mechanics. Maybe we could see how the kill rate would change against an enemy trying to block with a shield or something.

Me too, but setting up the calculations takes a while. For this simple stuff I'm doing it in excel spreadsheets, but for anything more complicated it'll probably faster just to hack together some ugly brute force nested loops and have them crawl through all possible dice roll combinations.

Just for trivia's sake, what I've been doing up until now is just generating hash tables like http://www.roll3d6.com/archives/dice-odds.asp (but with more digits of precision) and running comparisons across them - 2d6 rolls X number this percent of the time, 2d10 beats X number this other percent of the time, multiply percentages, sum across the composite percentage results for all possible Xes.

[Zupponn]

Building a program in Python might be the best way to get your results. After you have the program done you can always modify it to test other stuff as well.

The one thing I am wondering though is how can a sword randomly picked up by a hero or a minifig do different amounts of damage when swung? The skill check determines if the minifig has the ability to use it correctly, but a good swing made by one minifig vs another should do similar damage, right?

On a similar note, do minifigs get any bonuses for far overshooting a skill roll? I've always played it as sort of a yes or no check to see if damage should be rolled, but if a minifig crits his skill roll and gets like a 6 and then a 3 for a check of 3, should he be awarded an extra damage die or something?

[Tzan]

The one thing I am wondering though is how can a sword randomly picked up by a hero or a minifig do different amounts of damage when swung? The skill check determines if the minifig has the ability to use it correctly, but a good swing made by one minifig vs another should do similar damage, right?

It mostly depends on the designer, who can justify just about anything.

6 - A hero has higher skill at attacking so has a better chance to hit
7 - A hero has more combat experience and knows all the vulnerable places to hit, so his hits do more damage, using the same tool.

There are games that don't do this.
But those games have a wide variety of more powerful weapons and upgrades, like Diablo, that achieve the same result.
More experience equals better loot and more damage.

Some rpgs build more damage into your character level.
So hero equals more level equals more damage.

[*CRAZYHORSE*]

The one thing I am wondering though is how can a sword randomly picked up by a hero or a minifig do different amounts of damage when swung? The skill check determines if the minifig has the ability to use it correctly, but a good swing made by one minifig vs another should do similar damage, right?

Obviously the Hero will hit a lot harder as they are naturally stronger than normal minifigs. It also makes sense that they hit in the right places like necks and stomachs because they are more skilled.
And all of that doesn't even really matter as Hero's are the lead in their own action movie and as we all know heroes in action movies have a ridiculous easy time killing extra's compared to normal people.

[Gungnir]

What about melee weapons on constructions?

[*CRAZYHORSE*]

My guess is that they would stay the same way as they are now although I am not sure about larger creatures with minds of their own.

[Quantumsurfer]

SN dice might throw a kink in the works, at first blush.

How so?

Well, it may not be in a bad way. I suppose I was just thinking that the way they worked might be a bit different in reference to the follow up idea of making Attk/Dmg into one roll.

That's just knee jerk, though. Let me think this through.

Two uses for SN Dice are Damage and Skill Boosts. Both would apply now to the same roll. With half the basic melee weapon options insta-killing on hits, emphasis is no longer placed on die size so much as die effect. So while there's no real reason to add a Damage d6 to such rolls, d4s are still useful because they might spread to other healthy units later, d8s and d10s are still useful because they cause the melee attack to become an AoE, and d12s are still useful for mitigating that survival math from armored units and whatnot.

As for skill boosts, any SN Die is sufficient for turning any melee hit into an insta-kill. Even the average of a d4 bumps the UR roll of 2 up to a 4.5 (is that right?). I guess that'd be a 50/50 on d4s, then? With any other die having significantly greater chances of instakilling. It sort of skews the whole thing toward a Kill or Miss situation where the player is merely trying to not roll a one and get a crit fail.

I was going to say that it seemed like there was less and less incentive to bring ranged units to battle but I'm not so sure. Ranged weapons have a static UR3 across the board. CC weapons are more variable. Hand weapons might fall short because you have to build off of the lower UR 2 where 2H weapons might fall short because you have to roll higher in the first place (although most SN dice pretty much ensure this won't happen). Heavy and Ranged Weapons fall right at the sweet spot where you only need to make sure you don't roll a SN Fumble. So, actually, this system might bring SN Dice more into balance with the rest of the game.

As a small aside, it seems like there would be far less situations where a character/unit takes damage and survives. There might be something of the drama of the back and forth, the badass who takes his licks and keeps on ticking, that might be lost in the transition. Where the variability of failure becomes less significant, I wonder of actual play would feel one sided, like casually flipping a coin to determine results. Does this lessen tension and the natural drama of gameplay?

[stubby]

That's been my question as well, which is why I'm not as eager as I might otherwise be to jump straight to skill roll -> damage even though it would go a long way towards simplifying the combat process.

Speaking to the ranged weapon point though, the advantage of ranged weapons is that they're ranged.

[Tzan]

The only game I can think of that did hitroll+damage as one is BattleCars.

Different weapons rolled different sized dice.
If the weapon was a d8 that meant
- if distance to target is 4 spaces
- the roll is 6
- the damage is then 2

So the die size was also range.
You do more damage the closer something is.

The main difference to Brikwars is that BattleCars has armor chits on the car and components had hit points.
So it took some time to kill a car as bits of it became disabled over time, building suspense.

You only controlled one or two cars with hit points.
In a Brikwars army the individual soldiers are like your hit points all spread out.

[*CRAZYHORSE*]

I wouldn't like it if both rolls where combined into one.
I always enjoyed the tension of first seeing if something hits and then seeing if it does enough damage. It's exciting when you know you are half way to killing something.

[RedRover]

I wouldn't like it if both rolls where combined into one.
I always enjoyed the tension of first seeing if something hits and then seeing if it does enough damage. It's exciting when you know you are half way to killing something.

I agree. I feel like it's more realistic. If a minifig is taking a shot they first have to hit the target and then depending on where they hit is damage. Example: successful skill role but low damage role would mean they grazed their target.

Plus it leaves a wide variety of special abilities open that could just affect skill or just affect damage instead of doing both

[Gungnir]

I feel like combining them would be realistic. Where you hit is very dependent on skill.
I always equate missing a skill check with a melee attack as either missing, or the blow being deflected, while the damage is how deep the wound is. But combining the rolls makes a lot of sense to me. A high roll means that you not only hit the target, but hit it somewhere that's going to hurt.
Hell, I bet you could do the same thing with ranged weapons too. At least with solid projectile weapons.

[*CRAZYHORSE*]

Well my argument wasn't about realism at all as I think trying to be realistic with brikwars is a big mistake. It's about what's more fun to roll, and to me keeping that one extra step of first rolling for skill adds more excitement to the game.

[stubby]

Another time, one side's attack dog latched onto the ass of an enemy solder (I statted its bite attack to have an automatic grab in exchange for giving up the ability to parry), but again, didn't do enough damage to kill him. So this guy is twisting around, trying to kill this dog that's attacked itself to his buttocks (and a grab means insta-hits both ways) - great fun.

Genius. I may add this as an official rule for bite attacks.

We had something like this for whip and flail attacks in the past, but it was before we had actual Grab rules. I might combine them.

Would the CP costs of weapons stay the same in this tentative system?

Yes, because otherwise people will just buy weapons for their cheap units and then hand them to their expensive units.

[stubby]

Were there ever official stats for whips/flails? I'd like one that can scale up like other weapons, rather than just minifig whips.

Yep. They were Stun-damage weapons in BW2000 and BW2001: http://brikwars.com/rules/2000/2.htm#3-5

I'm not sure what the best way to handle whip damage in BW2010 would be, since they're non-lethal under any normal battle timeframe, but still extremely painful. I'd want to be able to use a whip to disarm opponents as well; I'm not sure what would be the best way to handle that.