Am I doing this right? Missile weapons and Toughness

[SNJ_Namek]

I just started learning tRoS, and had my friends make up some characters.

We made up a general test on Missile combat.
(A) sits on top of a Small House with a CrossBow, and (B) stands ready 230ft from the house, Knowing (A) is there. His destination, the entry to the house, where inside he is safe from Crossbow attack

(B)'s Move is 7 Giving him the ability to Sprint at roughly 25ft a Round.
(A) has to take two Rounds get a Bolt from his Quiver, meaning (B) moves 50ft closer to home.
(A) Then Knocks the bolt using no MP, for Four rounds.
During this time, (B) sprints one more turn 25ft. Here he finds himself caught in an Everyday Crowd.
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I didn't know what to do here, so I just Halved (B)'s Move, judging that Cautious movement is like Dodging people.
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(B) then can move 3ft per round, after  4 Rounds of 'dodge people' he makes his way to a clearing, and (A) has his sites set on him.

(A) has Wits of 3, and MP of 13
at this point (A) has watched him emerge from the crowds for 1 Round and gained 3 MP.
(B) Sprints again for 1 Round 25ft, (A) aims for this round for 3 more MP

At this point (B) is 118ft from the house moving constantly.
(A) decides to try his luck at a Chest shot with his 6MP-2 from the moving target =4 at ATN 5+4(from range)= 9, and incredibly gets 3 successes.

Adding 3+6(from Crossbow) = 9 damage
(Excited he hit, (A) rolls a D6 and rolls a 6, nailing the heart)
But...
(B) is wearing Full chain AV of 4, and has a TOughness of 6. which ends up Negating the Damage.


Just wondering if this was all done right?
And are there any other Modifiers that I should take into account....
I was wondering about Shock or Knockdown rolls for (B), he did just get drilled with a Bolt, even if it didn't do damage.

-Mike

[Caz]

Sounds pretty much right to me, though I have a couple of suggestions.
It seems the concensus is that a TO of more than 4 or 5 for a human is unrealistic.
   And I's only apply the moving target penalty if the target is moving left or right, or deliberately trying to be a hard target.  If he's coming directly towards or away from you, it makes it no more difficult than a static target.
   If the bolt didn't do damage, there should be no shock (unless it scared him) and definitely no knockdown.  Bullets don't even knock people down.

[Morfedel]

Having skimmed it quickly, it would appear correct. I haven't checked to make sure you had all the modifiers and such right, but I will assume so.

With that in mind, there have been the occasional accusations that TRoS can suffer from the Naked Dwarf Syndrome. Or, in other words, someone with a high toughness completely naked is tougher than someone wearing armor with a low toughness.

There might be a tiny bit of justification to this. If you had a strength of 4, a weapon that does Str + 1 damage, and got two successes, your attack would do 7 damage... bouncing off of someone with a toughness of 7.

Is this realistic? One could call it the weapon barely scraped along the skin, not really a solid blow. Some people think this is fine, others do not.

Various solutions have been bantered about by those who are not fond of this - such as toughness negating strength one for one, but any toughness over the attacker's strength is ignored.

That's up to you. But, and correct me if I'm wrong guys, that looks correct. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. He IS wearing chain mail, and with the AV + Toughness add, yeah, you will need to roll well. In this case, 5 successes.

Now you see why the archers like to wait for their pools to be totally filled. Against armored opponents, they will need every chance to succeed!

Of course, even against an ATN of 9, you will need 5 successes to damage that guy... and with 13 mp, whew, thats going to be a tough thing to pull out. Hope is Spiritual Attributes are firing!

[Overdrive]

I'm having some problems with missile weapons damage myself. The weapon damages don't decrease over range, though the number of successes does. I have a strong GURPS background, it that system it really does not matter if a shot was well-aimed or not. In TROS it seems that there exists no such thing as lucky shot, since the successes are pretty much the only way to determine damage.

Hmm- Let's see if (A) had been using longbow instead of crossbow. He shot from 118ft range, that's something like over 25 yards but less than 50? ATN is then 8, so he probably gets the same 3 successes, doing 11 damage. That minus AV 4 and TO 6 results in a measly level 1 wound. With a shortbow there is no chance.

Actually the first thing I did when I saw the ranged weapon rules was to try shooting a longbow at an unarmored character. TO 4 guys will *always* get level 5 wounds on a hit?! And hitting in TROS is simple, if the roll is not contested. On the other hand if the target is evading, hitting becomes a bitch -- then any other than longbow won't do much damage on a hit!

Summary: Longbow hits are always lucky. Shortbow actually always needs a lucky hit to damage.

While the MoS + ST - TO - AV formula rox with melee weapons, I think with missile weapons very much depends on luck, not as much on skill. If there will be any 'realistic' firearms rules, random hits must be about as lethal as aimed. Think of a HE shell exploding, the shrapnel flies everywhere. If you're hit, better pray nothing vital was hit. Nobody is aiming those pieces of metal..

[Brian Leybourne]

It certainly looks right to me.

As a couple of others have pointed out, the missile rules in TROS are not quite as elegant as the excellent melee rules, but you'll find that in play they do work pretty well. The only alteration I have made in my own games is to house rule that all melee rounds are fixed at 2 seconds, so that each exchange is 1 second. This allows missile-during-melee to be easier worked out.

For those who are bothered by the "longbows always do 5 wounds" thing, then simply drop the ATN by 1 and the damage by 2; that makes longbow damage more variable and less of a "miss or kill" proposition.

Brian.

[Overdrive]

I was thinking a longbow fix something like removing a bit damage, and automatically subtracting some armor. But no longbows have appeared in my game yet, so I have no idea if they're going to be a problem (most likely not).

I do like the missile combat resolution. We've had a couple of ambushes with crossbows, and they seem to work very well. OTOH, poorly-aimed shots tend to do little or no damage, if the opponent has armor.