[Broken Sky] How to balance Area of Effect damage

[Nalanthi]

The system I am working on is a fairly crunchy urban fantasy system.  Combat is supposed to feel fast but fairly realistic.  One place that we have decided to leave off the realism is in our AoE damage.  In real life, you don't really dodge large explosions.  We feel that this would be frustrating to the player. 

From a gameplay standpoint, which do you guys think would be more satisfying to the user of an AoE attack.

1.) Lower powered AoE attack that is harder to avoid completely (hits 75% to 85% of its on-level targets) , but in many cases would only cause opponents to expend Feat Points (think essence from Exalted for a parallel) to avoid damage.  Tank build characters would likely to be immune.

2.) Higher powered AoE attack that is easier to avoid completely (hits 50% of its on level targets) and causes them to heavily expend Feat Points and still possible take some damage.  High Speed characters would likely be immune.

Which do you think would be more frustrating to a party if the attack was used against the party?

Either balance option still makes AoE insanely effective against below level enemies, which is the actual point of AoE as the dogpile mechanics in our system makes a mix of on-level and below level enemies extremely dangerous.

--Nalanthi

[ADGBoss]

Well, I think you kind of answer your own question, don't you?

In real life, you don't really dodge large explosion

So either the game is going to be like real life or it isn't.

If it is -
Then you need to make the cost of an AoE expensive and not useful for every situation. Cost can be anything from your mentioned Feat Points to social and economic costs. These would certainly depend on WHAT the AoE is. (grenade vs. fireball for example).

If it isn't
-Then avoiding damage has to be a function of that special "It" about the characters as opposed to minions and mere mortals. I should not be class specific per se, but player character and big NPC specific. If the fireball is really designed to blow away those pesky sewer goblins (for the good guys) or those pesky SWAT guys (for the bad guys) then build the mechanic around that.

Two other notes
-You mention player frustration, but if the player is using such a powerful AoE attack on his or her enemies, then I do not see frustration there. Now when it is turned around on them then yes, you see the frustration. The point is that is not mechanically fixable. It is as much a part of the RPG experience as dice. Just because players are going to complain about damage, which we always do as players, if its a fair mechanic then I do not see frustration being too much of an issue you need to worry about.

-What is the purpose of an AoE attack? It seems designed as a counter to weed out the mooks but it also seems to unfairly target characters who are not either Tanks in one version or High Speed in another. How important are AoE attacks? If they are super important then I would suggest this might unfairly push players towards those classes that are immune to them.

In general the rules for any kind of weapon are always less confusing and more fair if they use 99% of the rules that other weapons use.

[Ron Edwards]

I'd like to focus on Sean's last question: what is the purpose of such an attack? I don't mean in the fictional characters' minds, but rather, what role in the fiction, from the perspective of people at the table.

For example, in the game Extreme Vengeance, explosions do the ordinary damage inflicted by dice, but they are very easy to avoid by using the characters' Slo-Mo option, meaning that the fiction goes into slow motion and we see the characters blown around by the explosion and making funny faces in slow motion, but landing unhurt. Totally unrealistic, but it suits the genre of the game perfectly. Or in Hong Kong Action Theater, a very similar game, the rule is simple: explosions simply do no damage to characters. Why not? Because they never do in the relevant movies on which the game is based.*

Your game is definitely being written with different priorities. So whatever it is that explosions (AoE) attacks do in your game, it should suit those priorities exactly.

The key is not to distract yourself with the abstract concept of realism. Think of an explosive attack in play: what do you really want to see happen to the characters in such a situation? What would be most consistent with the rest of the game and most fun in that context? Then have your rules do exactly that.

Best, Ron

* My favorite similar rule in that game is that shots fired at a pane of glass do no damage to anyone on the other side, but do remove the glass.

[Nalanthi]

So you have both asked what the point of AoE damage is.  As I see it one of you is asking what the point of AoE damage is in the system and the other is asking what the point is in the setting.  These are of course interlinked questions.  So I'll be honest, I'm the number crunchy balance guy on our design team, so I can probably speak better to system concerns.

The reason that I have been saying AoE as distinct from explosions is that the aoe rules should cover more than explosions.  The setting is a fairly gritty urban fantasy setting.  The sort of twist is that the reason that magic has appeared is that magic is quite possible tearing the earth apart.  Hence the name "Broken Sky."  In this sort of setting normal grenades are usually a fairly big deal to at least mid to low powerscale characters.  To look at the Dresdenverse as an example, while I am failye sure that Ebeneezer or The Gatekeeper could shrug off a grenade without problems, most of the other characters would get blown across the room and take minor to serious damage from a well executed grenade attack. Since like the Dresdenverse, this world is very heavily based on the "real" world, so it seems that explosions should at least be something you can't just shrug off.  The setting is also fundamentally about people who have lost part of their human soul in order to gain the ability to break the laws of reality using the magic unleashed by the Broken Sky.  The AoE they can generate will include almost any magical AoE attack that can be described, from ball lightning to gravity manipulation.

From a system standpoint, the ability to perform a magical AoE attack represents an expenditure of character points.  For a character in the energy aspect, they could have purchased immunity to a certain type of energy, the ability to shape tools out of energy, the ability to fire an energy based ranged attack at a single target, an energy sword, or an energy aura that harms people that attack them for the same cost.  This indicates that their AoE attack should be usable in most combat situations.  In order to make the tactical choice interesting, it should be better in some and worse at others.  The role it seems best suited to shining at is mook disposal, but I feel that itshould still be a creditable attack when thrown at a party of anti-pcs.

[Callan S.]

but I feel that itshould still be a creditable attack when thrown at a party of anti-pcs.

Well, if anti-PC's are built the same way as PC's, it wont be.

It kind of hinges on the human psychology that we like something to work when it goes against the enemy, but to not work well when it goes against us. Which, if you were just writing a story, you can write in this sort of lopsided, biased reality and the readers desire for it to work against the badguys will kind of cover up the inconsistancy. However, when you have stark mechanics - well, if anti-PC's are built the same way as PC's, it wont be credible, or the mechanics will starkly show the enemy anti-pc's aren't built the same way.

[Nalanthi]

but I feel that itshould still be a creditable attack when thrown at a party of anti-pcs.

Well, if anti-PC's are built the same way as PC's, it wont be.

Creditable does not mean that it would have to be as effective as the magic sword would be against the anti-npcs, just that the attack needs to be at the level where it kills the mooks, wounds the supporting characters and inconveniences the anti-pcs.  This likewise means that when it gets turned around and used against the party, it will do the same things.  The magic sword is much more threatening to pcs and anti-pcs but it can only kill one mook a round.

This does mean that some character builds will be less inconvenienced and some builds more inconvenienced (or even wounded) by the attack.  The mechanics can necessarily only check a few statistics, and if you are below level in those statistics (or of course roll poorly) it will affect you like a supporting character or even a mook.

[Matthew M.]

In Mutants and Masterminds (third edition) AoE attacks automatically hit but they cannot score critical hits and cannot be modified by other manuevers to increase the attack check. In D&D (3.5) you can roll to save to reduce the damage you take from AoE's by 1/2, and if you have a aquired a special ability (uncanny dodge I beleive it is called) you can then avoid full AoE's. I find both of these ways of limiting AoE's to be fairly pleasing, but if you are going for realistic combat I feel the Mutants and Masterminds system is better.

[Daniel36]

Perhaps you can have three different areas of effect within the spells / explosions? So the center is high powered and hard to dodge, the middle line is medium powered, medium to dodge, and the outer line is low and easy.

Or, to make things a little easier, choose any one PC (could be random), that one is, in essence, the center. This PC has a low percentage of dodge and gets the highest points of damage. Then whoever is closest gets slightly less damage and a slightly higher percentage of dodging, etcetera. Easy to calculate, fairly "realistic" and pretty tense. Also makes them think about their positioning. Perhaps the tank can have a skill where he can "take the blow" and as such be the center instead of a weaker character that is being targeted.

Hope this helps.

[Danny Bridges]

From a gameplay standpoint, which do you guys think would be more satisfying to the user of an AoE attack.

...

Which do you think would be more frustrating to a party if the attack was used against the party?

To answer your original questions, science suggests that option 1 (higher hit chance) will be more satisfying to the user, and the latter is what players would prefer to have used against them. Basically, we prefer certain gains to uncertain ones, and uncertain losses to certain ones.

However, we actually feel worse about experiencing a loss if thought we might get out of it than we do if we know it's sure to happen. As such, I'd say it's actually a toss-up between the two options with respect to what would be better to have used against players.

That leaves option 1 as definitely better to use yourself, and neither option as definitively better to have used against you, at least from a psychological perspective. Hope that helps.