Re: Smashes (was: Another combat factor)

Carl Edman (cedman@cedman.remote.Princeton.EDU)
Tue, 20 Sep 94 23:24:08 -0400

Patrick McLaughlin <pmcl@cts.com> writes:
> Carl didn't suggest removing the attacker selection code. Swarms of
> beggars will still be dangerous to monsters. BUT, when a monster attacks
> back, it will slaughter large numbers before something stops it.

Exactly. Many beggars are still much more likely to be selected to attack.
To give dragons a chance at all, they need to be able to do a lot of damage
when they get to strike once ever few hundred blows.

> One might put a limit on this... say that the attack value is used as a
> measure of how many attacks a monster can make.

Yes, but the statistics take care of that already without any extra rules.

> Thus your Big, Nasty Dragon has a value of 500. I'd use that as a
> counter, and decrement it for each successful attack (not changing the
> actual attack value), so that at most a dragon could munch 500 peasants
> before it would lose its turn...

Even in the extreme case of N=1 (i.e. every hit by everybody is a smashing
hit), a dragon would only average 500 peasants in one rampage. For more
likely values of N, it will be 50 peasants (and remember that is the longest
average rampage you could possibly get) or maybe 10 or 20 soldiers.

> but that munching a party of 6 nobles would just about wear it out.

Even at N=5, dragon would only rampage less than two nobles on average.
Nobles are pretty strong against monsters and rampages don't change that
much. Against weak fighters nobles would become a lot stronger under the
smash system.

Carl Edman


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