I had 1@6 boxing, fighting an expert knife fighter. Obviously I lost. I'm not complaining about it at all, as I totally understand Kyler's motives. However, I was just watching Knight Rider, and Michael gets into a fight with an expert knife fighter and beats him. He beats the guy with basically a lucky punch. This got me thinking. Even a 1@1 fighter has the chance to throw that lucky punch that knocks out his opponent. Lucky shots can change the course of a fight significantly, as I can testify from personal experience.
I was wondering, is there a mechanic in the game for this? Perhaps a GE roll after every successful attack to see how effective it was. A really good GE roll means that your 1 intensity of damage broke your opponent's nose, and he is surrendering. Where in the book is this covered, so that I might look it up?
Ooo! A question I actually know the answer to!
There's this big huge list of hit locations in the section under Combat. It's on page 69 in the Big Black Book.
Not that hit location has any impact on damage done. The table's only there for when it matters.
There's no separate mechanic for lucky shots. They're built in to the damage system. If your attack is annoying with a fifty-one percent chance of success, you only do damage on a roll of exactly fifty-one. If you make that one-in-a-hundred roll, you've gotten in a unlikely hit and actually done an intensity of damage with your (usually pitiful) punch - a lucky shot.
So, while we have a thread named "Fighting," I have a question of my own.
So anyone who's been trained how to fight barehanded has some kind of B7@1 Style, right? And anyone who hasn't can still try to throw a punch, "unskilled," without having to make a skill learning roll on the spot. Question: what happens in worlds with 5@ bod biases? Can the indigs still beat each other up while remaining perpetually unskilled, or do they need to pick up a tool before they can hurt each other?
Scott, while I admit I know very little of such game mechanics, one thing that humans have always been good at is hurting each other. Whoever said that violence doesn't solve problems was a fool. If you're in my way, and I punch you in the face and knock you down, you're no longer in my way, so my problem has been solved. Once humans realized how quickly and easily violence could solve problems, they started inventing better ways to do it.
So in short, I'd say that humans could hurt each other even in a 1@1 bod bias. It's just the way we are programmed.
Except that in a 5@ Bod world, we would be programmed differently. It hasn't occurred to people to use their own bodies that way, or it might be that they are built differently - fragile finger joints, or some such thing. It might be that the gross muscle control necessary to swing a club is possible, but the fine control exhibited by martial-artists is not. Psychologically - on the Psi bias - there might still be a violent instinct, but how it manifests - what I knock you down with - might be shifted from Bod to Tech simply because I don't have the capacity to aim, which requires that I use something big like a tire-iron to attack an area in order to hit you.
This might have odd side effects. If you say that the lower bod bias blocks examples of intense muscle control, you'll have almost no surgeons and almost no fine musicians in such a world either - but you could still, theoretically, have athletes of certain types. I imagine hockey and rugby analogs would be popular.
I'm probably working through this thread backwards.
Since delicacy is a 0@ skill, musicians (dependent also on their magic skills in music) and surgeons (dependent on their technological skills in medicine and tool use) are not likely to be biased out by a low bod bias. The difference between martial arts and these tasks can probably be identified not as fine muscie control but as the combination of fine muscle control and power, a more complex body problem.
Of course, if Scott has a question, it's not going to be easy to answer; but let me take a stab at it. If we're looking at an "unskilled punch", we're looking at BRA+(2xbias)+MSV-TV, no SAL. We know in the example that bias is not higher than 5@, so that's 10; we'll assume that these are still human norms so the BRA is not going exceed 2@10, so that's 30. In the average case, MSV runs one intensity higher than TV; but because TV is dependent on Density it is a lot less flexible than MSV (which is also less flexible than RSV because it is dependent on three attributes instead of two). We can imagine an ordinary (terribly weak) human having a TV of 1@1, and an incredibly remarkable human having an MSV of 2@10, so the extreme case here is 30+10+30-11=59% chance to hit. The MSV makes this a damaging attack, though, so we've got real danger here. That, though, is the unlikely case--the extremely unlikely case. If we assume that our combatants have 1@ MSVs, we know already from the other numbers that they can't have a chance of success above 49% (because 1@10 is as high as the MSV can be and 1@1 is as low as the TV can be, the other numbers the same), and their attacks are always annoying. In such a fight the combatants can cause each other pain and discomfort, possibly leaving residual soreness, but cannot actually injure each other. Thus yes, they can pummel each other ineffectively until they are too tired and sore to continue, but they cannot do each other any real harm in the process. It is only those few whose strength, intuition, and hand/eye collectively average 2@1 or better who pose any threat in society. Only 2% of the population has a 2@1 attribute in any one of those areas, and it is not unreasonable to assume that this applies across the population rather evenly. (It might be argued that more people with high strength also have high hand/eye, but it might equally be argued that fewer people with high strength have high intuition, so it's probably a wash.) Two percent of two percent of two percent is 0.0008%, eight per million, one in one hundred twenty five thousand people. Might be a bit higher than that, since someone with a 2@10 attribute is included in that top 2% and does not need to be near as high in the other two attributes, but the limited number of people to whom that would apply makes the difference negligible. The vast majority of the population not only would not be able to hurt anyone, they probably would never have met anyone who could.
The mechanic for "lucky shots" is rolling the dice. Really, it is. You had a 1@6 Boxing SAL with an RF1 and a 1@something (it's now 1@10) MSV, figure with your 1@9 Bod BRA and 7@ bias that's 69 minus defensive values, which we'll guess are a 1@7 TV and with a strongly aggressive weapon-oriented style maybe -5SM, 47% chance to land a damaging hit once per minute. We're thinking he's got a 3@ SAL in an RF2 style with a 2@ MSV and 7@ bias, 12 attacks per minute, let's call it 3@1+2@1+1@10+14=86 minus your defensive values which include your -15 defensive sit-mod for the boxing (and you also have a -15 defensive damage mod which is going to make a difference in a moment) and your 1@6 TV brings him down to 55%. If you roll 48, you do 3 intensities of damage. His best roll is 55, the knife is damaging+3DC+1 makes it fatal+1; you take -15 off that making it fatal-14. The -14 means that his roll of 55 is effectively 41 for damage purposes, and any roll of 14 or less does no damage (even though it hits you).
Bear with me on this: by the law of averages, your average damage per swing (taking into account your misses) is 0.84 intensities of damage; your average damage per hit (only those rolls that connect) is 1.75 intensities. Although he land a blow that does 21 intensities of damage (if he rolls a 55), his average damage per hit (including all those hits that don't do any damage) is 7.64+, and per swing he is averaging 4.22.
The thing to notice here is that you will hurt him with 48 out of every hundred attacks you make; he will hurt you with only 41 of every hundred attacks he makes. He kills you because his attacks are more deadly and he has a lot more of them in a minute. But if he has a really bad run of dice luck, I can see him landing only a couple of weak blows; and if you manage to roll between 41 and 48 five times, you've brought a person of average (1@5) damage value to nothing. If he doesn't happen to have better than a 1@8 damage value, a sixth such blow will finish him.
Now, the odds are very much against you getting six highly successful attacks in six tries (8% chance on each attack), or even that you will get those six attacks before he lands three "average" blows, given his high number of attacks. But anyone who has had a run of bad dice luck knows that he has no guarantee that he's going to do this. If he rolls 14, he hit you but did no damage; if he rolls 16, he did one intensity, barely scratched you. If he rolls 56, he missed. Roughly three out of five of his attacks will fail to hurt you if he's doing "average". If he has a really bad run of dice luck, he could burn up all sixty attacks without managing to do the required 17 intensities of damage needed to disable you. Those sixty attacks give you enough time to make five attacks, maybe six if you get the initiative on the last round. The last one turns out to be your lucky attack, because against tremendous odds, he goes down.
Two other things are involved in the example you cited.
One is that Michael Knight has plot immunity. That's a technical term used in all story-structure media including role playing games. It means that because he is the hero, he cannot be killed and must in the end overcome all adversaries. You can create mechanics for this, if that's the kind of world you're running. We don't use plot immunity normally in Multiverser, because we're not worried about player characters getting killed. They do use it in action adventure television shows.
The other is that there are a lot of complicated things you can do with combat, and someone like Michael Knight is not an unskilled brawler--he's a skilled brawler. He has skill at things like "knockout blow", a B7@7 Special Damage in which he does ordinary damage plus opponent save v. stamina RS=S/D/N or unconscious RS minutes. That means if he uses this skill the guy has to roll a check against his stamina score or he blacks out. Yeah, you'd love to have that skill, and I'm not saying you can't, but I will warn you that if you're in a world where you can learn that skill your opponent probably already knows it. I would rather hope that no one knows how to do it than that I can find someone to teach me. Michael probably also has a steal initiative skill that enables him to get that blow in before the other guy can strike--useful, particularly if the other guy has the possibility of dealing a fatal blow on his first hit. These are all covered.
So there is luck, and there are ways to work around luck.
--M. J. Young
I've heard of Plot Immunity. It's called The John Wayne Law. The John Wayne Law states that the hero's gun will not run out of ammunition until the person he is shooting at is out of range, or until the hero is desperately outnumbered.
And regarding Michael Knight, what I've gleaned from watching most of the first two seasons is that he was Special Forces in Vietnam, then became a cop, then was recruited by the Foundation to drive K.I.T.T. and save people. So, I would give him 2@10 hand to hand easily. Probably higher.
Infinite ammo is slightly different.
Plot immunnity basically states that the hero won't be removed from action until he's beaten the bad guy, or until the series ends.
Well, that's just the first part of the John Wayne Law. The bad guys can fire thousands of rounds at the hero and never scratch him, but every shot the hero fires is a kill shot.
I know enough martial arts to get myself beaten senseless in a fight. However, under the John Wayne Law, I would be able to take on 50 clones of Bruce Lee and take them all down without breaking a sweat. The John Wayne Law was always kind of fascinating to me.
John Wayne was the first movie hero to employ this movie law. Notice his 6 shooter revolvers always hold about 5,000 bullets.
Two percent of two percent of two percent is 0.0008%, eight per million, one in one hundred twenty five thousand people. Might be a bit higher than that, since someone with a 2@10 attribute is included in that top 2% and does not need to be near as high in the other two attributes, but the limited number of people to whom that would apply makes the difference negligible. The vast majority of the population not only would not be able to hurt anyone, they probably would never have met anyone who could.
And imagine the power that would be held by the few people who could. Being able to give someone a black eye would be equivalent to owning a nuclear weapon. You could rule the world, or at least portions of it. (This assumes no psi, mag, or tech to negate this, so it would have to be a pretty low-level world all around.)
I can picture a world that seems like a peaceful paradise. Fights and murder are unheard of--not really even possible, except for a tiny fraction of the population. But if that tiny fraction could do whatever they wanted, people would live in fear of them, and it wouldn't be much of a paradise.
I can picture a world that seems like a peaceful paradise. Fights and murder are unheard of--not really even possible, except for a tiny fraction of the population. But if that tiny fraction could do whatever they wanted, people would live in fear of them, and it wouldn't be much of a paradise.
All hail the club. Great social equalizer.
Absolutely--and darn difficult to eliminate without a power block.
--M. J. Young
I can picture a world that seems like a peaceful paradise. Fights and murder are unheard of--not really even possible, except for a tiny fraction of the population. But if that tiny fraction could do whatever they wanted, people would live in fear of them, and it wouldn't be much of a paradise.
We have people like that here. They're called Multiverser Referees. (Meant as a joke)