Mechanics for scale: ie mouse, man, dragon

[John Blaz]

Hey all, working on a sword & sorcery type game right now, and I had a thought. Do my mechanics work with the different scales of creatures? Right now, the system is 3d6 + skill + attribute over a Target Number to succeed. Now let's say the standard TN is 15. If a human had to push a door open, he'd need a 15. If a mouse with 1 point of strength tried, he would still be able to push the door open a good percentange of the time. Makes no sense right? How about this: humans are size 1. A creature twice as large is size 2x. A creature half the size of a man is 1/2x  Now would it make sense if all of this creatures Strength rolls were rolled and then halved? Would this cause any problems? Or if a troll (2x size) doubled his Strength rolls, but everybody's Strength score is based on the average for their race being a 5 for example? Thoughts?

[chance.thirteen]

The reality 9sorta)  is that a 2 ton critter that could swing a weapon effectively would kill anything human scales. Likewise children sized things could stab with spikes and slash with razors but couldn't muster the force to do much else. Our visions of heroic combat where sizes are vastly different aren't going to happen. So you have to imagine they will, and make the mechanics you choose allow that.

At least for small things we do have the jaws that are built to go through wood and such, so rat bites and so on are very able to penetrate human skin and have a strong chance of doing shallow damage over and over.

My experience in Rolemaster was the added weight bonus was powerful, and there wasn't enough of a pushback from defenses to make it avoidable. EG if they had said creatures using their thrown weight bonus sufered X2 from your defensive allocations, that might have worked. You know, that old you really have to fully dive away from the giant attack to survive feel.

Runequest made giants unsurvivable. We had transferred from C&S to RQ, and found to maintain the previous conflicts we had to wear armor that was invulnerable to almost everything else.

[John Blaz]

I was actually having the same thought a short while ago, but here's a quick example I thought of. Strength scores are relative. A rat and a human both have STR 5, they are both average for their kind. Let's say a rat is Size 1 and a human is Size 5. If the rat is fighting another rat, they roll their standard STR damage or whatever. If a rat bites a human, he only deals 1/4 the damage, because they are 4 sizes apart. If the human stomps the rat, he deals 4x the damage he would to another human. Really what I'd like is a way for size to factor into combat and certain skills like climbing without ading tons of damage or Hit Points to larger creatures. That always felt like a cop-out to me, but at the same time, maybe it IS the most eficient way to model scale differences?

[lumpley]

Why are you trying to model scale in these terms? In sword & sorcery fiction, when (for instance) Conan gets chased up the mountain by the giant lizard in "Red Nails" or when Drezaem fights the dragon in Night's Master, there's no sense that the monster is x-times stronger than the hero or has x-times as many hit points.

Off the top of my head, I'd recommend that you try giving non-human-scale creatures different stats, different abilities, and different mechanics altogether, instead of trying to make your human-appropriate stats scale up and down. Like, it makes sense for humans to do damage per their STR (sort of), but it doesn't make any sense at all for rats or dragons to. Maybe rats should do damage per how many of them are biting you, for instance. Maybe for dragons, a direct hit just plain kills you - its damage is functionally absolute - but you can reduce what you suffer by managing to get out of the way of full impact.

-Vincent

[lumpley]

Oh, I meant to add - for hit points, maybe again rats have hit points as a group, so each 1 damage you do kills 3 rats, for instance. Maybe again dragons are unhurtable, except that their weak spots have hit points. You can't thrust a spear through the dragon in "Red Nails," but if you're strong enough you can thrust a spear throught its jaw. You can't grapple the dragon in Night's Master and hope to hurt it, but you can grapple its horns and if you're strong enough you can pull them out of their sockets.

-Vincent

[Callan S.]

What's the fun thing about play from moment to moment, for this particular thing? Is the fun thing that in play it, from moment to moment, is scaling beutifully for all sizes of creature? I'm genuinely asking - I could imagine that as a pleasurable thing.

[John Blaz]

Lumpley: I hadn't considered that sort of thing, but I'm definitely using it now! I think stuff like maiming the enemies will work great since I'm running a heavily Cthulhu-mythos-ed sword & sorcery game, with lots of abominable spawns of Shub Niggurath and whatnot.

Callan: Not sure what you're asking, but I was trying to figure out different ways to handle creature scaling in my game to make sure it's mechanically sound.

Anybody else have any ideas for representing scale? Now that I think of it, I might just do what Lumpley suggested and make some creatures just have different weak points that the players/characters will need to discover.

Oh, and sorry if my earlier posts were a little incoherent, I was on my phone at work

[Callan S.]

I don't know how to phrase this? John, I'm taking it you play games for fun. Me asking what you find fun about this should make sense as a question?

Is it being mechanically sound fun for you somehow? Or are you trying to avoid being unsound because that wouldn't be fun?

Obviously we don't do things, like mechanical soundness, for it's own sake. It has to connect to fun as some point (preferably ASAP, I think). Since your fun is the important thing in terms of this, I'm asking about it.

[John Blaz]

Callan: I see what you're saying now, and honestly, I don't know. I design  much more than I actually play games. I should probably consider the fun factor before trying to cram some potentially un-fun realism into a game.

[lumpley]

John, cool!

I have a little rpg theory to lay on you. Check this out.

There are two ways to approach rpg design. First is: design rules that fit together in the abstract, modeling the game's imaginary world as it exists, static, in the designer's head. Second is: design rules that work as procedures for the players & GM* to follow, which help the group create the kind of fiction, live and at the table, that you're after.

There's lots of overlap between the two approaches. For instance, the first approach hopes that the right imaginary-world-model will create fun and good procedures automatically. (As you'd expect, this doesn't reliably work, but sometimes it works kind of okay.) Try the second approach, similarly, and early on you'll find that fun and good procedures absolutely do demand a certain amount of imaginary-world-model - you won't get far if you think only of the players.

I can give you examples and stuff if you're interested in this kind of thing. Let me know!

-Vincent

* for games that have GMs.

[Catelf]

Hm.
There is, of course, also the idea to make small creatures extremely weak, and Great creatures massively strong and tough.
But then, i don't know if it would suit the Game.

[David Artman]

I'd listen to Vincent (lumpley). He's... kind of clever.

I'm just posting, then, to offer a more simulation-oriented than story-oriented approach. I am working from an absolute scale approach (i.e. the mouse, man, and dragon are all on the same stat scale, as in Hero or D&D... or my own GLASS).

Why not have certain action require "Minimums" to even be possible to try? A mouse can't open a human door with its 1 Strength because to even TRY requires (say) a 5 Strength Conversely, some actions would have the opposite value, Maximums: the value after which the success or result determination isn't even a challenge or worthy of a roll. That door has an Maximum of, say, 15, so a 16-Strength entity doesn't even have to roll--the door is like a Japanese paper screen to it.

So that would mean, for your examples:
Damage a Human with Strength: min4, max15 - Nothing with less than 4 Strength can roll, anything with more than 15 Strength automatically does full damage.
Damage a Mouse: min0, max5 - Even a small child can crush it at will (assuming a small child's maximum damage output is greater than a mouse's health, which is SHOULD be!).
Damage a Dragon: min20, max40 - Obviously, the scale of stats must be worked out--linear, exponential, log--but that 20 value is what I'd think a Conan would be at, and the 40 is more like what a Titan would be at--something that can pop a dragon square in the mouth and the lizard can only squeal.

[Note that I am not addressing To Hit stuff, but the same lower/upper bounds could apply.]

Hope this helps;
David

[chance.thirteen]

One thing to note from the simulation perspective - an elephant  may have the strength of twenty men in pushing, but only five in lifting with it's trunk, but be incapable of kicking (I do not know if that is true, it's an example). The proportional thing only works for humans that are scaled up. Even a chimpanzee is stronger just because of how it is built. Likewise the rodents jaws are tremendously strong for their size. It's just not easy.

[Callan S.]

I would argue it's not imaginary world model, but how much players are pushed out of their comfort zones not by the GM forcing them out, but because it seems plausible to their own minds/something they think they genuinely have to be faced. But I don't want to complicate things.