Here's a quick summary of how combat is apparently going to work here, for people who are a little confused. I'm going to walk through a single attack, from a mortal sniper against Taylor. Someone might want to check my math through this.
TL,DR: If we can't work out a way to use our Parry DV against ranged lethal attacks, it's best to minimize our Mobility Penalty to avoid the risk of losing our DV entirely. If we can Parry, then we can effectively disregard our Mobility Penalty and maximize our Armor, because Mobility Penalty does not affect Parrying, only Dodging.
When I say 'mortal', I refer to a plain vanilla mortal. Parahumans won't fall under this limit, and it's possible equipment bonuses can also crack the limit.
The best mortal marksman in the world will have an attack pool of (5 [dexterity] + 5 [firearms] + 3 [specialty] + Accuracy), where Accuracy refers to their weapon. A basic sniper rifle has an Accuracy of +2; Tinkertech or exceptional equipment would be higher. Let's say this best mortal marksman has a weapon with the Exceptional dots put into Accuracy and Damage. That brings the Accuracy to +3, and their pool to (5 + 5 + 3 + 3) = 16 dice.
There are various penalties and bonuses which might apply here. Internal penalties remove dice from the pool, whereas external penalties remove successes. Generally, for us, 2 dice = 1 success. For others, 3 dice = 1 success. This is an average only.
The most relevant penalty here will be the range penalty. Each firearm has a range associated with it; a basic sniper rifle has a range of 400 yards. If you try to shoot at a target within range, you take no penalty. Shooting at a target less than twice that distance (800 yards in this case) imposes a -1 external penalty. Triple the distance (1200 yards) imposes a -2 external penalty. You cannot shoot at anyone further away without magic.
Let's say they're close enough to not suffer a range penalty (which means they'll be in range of our bugs, but hey).
With 16 dice, they'll average 5 or 6 successes. This is an average, from the best mortal marksman in the world, disregarding stunts (because I have no idea if they can stunt). Let's say they spend a few seconds beforehand aiming: this provides 3 bonus dice, bumping them up to 6 or 7 successes on average. They also spend a point of willpower, giving them an automatic success, bringing them to 7 or 8 successes on the attack roll.
OK. We currently have 4 Dex, 3 Essence, 0 Dodge. Ignoring wound penalties, our current basic Dodge DV is (4 + 3 + 0)/2 = 4. We can stunt this for +2 under most circumstances (which boosts the DV directly, not the pool used to calculate it, resulting in DDV of 6). Similarly (if we get a firearm we can parry with/stunt it properly), our Parry is based on (Dexterity + Firearms + Defense), which is probably (4 + 3 + 0)/2 = 4, stuntable up to 6. We can also, if necessary, burn Willpower or a Virtue Channel to increase our defense values.
Mobility penalties reduce from the Dodge value (not pool) but not the Parry value, and also reduce various other things (such as movement rate). For reference, Dashing is (Dexterity + 6 - wounds - mobility) = 10, while Move is (Dexterity - wounds - mobility) = 4, with dash being a minimum 2 yards per tick (second) and Movement being a minimum one yard per tick.
Various other things apply penalties or bonuses to your defense values including defensive cover or taking an action such as aiming or attacking. It gets complicated. Most significantly, if we don't see the attack coming we cannot apply our DVs against it at all.
We subtract our DV from the attack successes. If he has more than 0 success remaining, the attack hits, and the remaining successes (called threshold successes) contribute to the damage.
The base damage for a sniper rifle is 9L, but this is an Exceptional one so it does 10L. We add however much they got past our DV to this to get the raw damage.
We then subtract our Armour and Soak from it. We have 3 basic lethal soak. Our armour value … I worked out a neat little table below, take a look at it. Using the minimum Armour value of 9, we subtract 12 dice from the raw damage. Armor-piercing rounds subtract 4 from our Armor, assuming they work like anti-soak ones do.
So here's a neat little table.
Values assuming:
* We have the no-penalty slot for Advanced Materials at all times
* The Exceptional bonuses are first placed in Mobility Penalty (to reduce it to 0), then moved over to Armor
* After that, we pick up increasing penalties from Advanced Materials to buff our armour
* We aren't stunting here.
Our basic values are:
Now lets add in some other bonuses:
* We always apply a 2-die stunt
* We have the thing to double our ground speed
* We have the +2 armor from the spidersilk, and we're facing a bullet for another +2
The reason for that sudden drop at the -3 to -4 M.Pen.? Without at least 1 Dodge DV, we cannot start to dodge and so cannot stunt it up. The same problem occurs if we have sufficient wounds in addition to our Mobility Penalty that our basic Dodge DV drops to 0; the lower our Dodge DV the sooner that happens.
Let's assume we're playing the -0 Mobility Penalty build in the table above (with the spidersilk). This guy hits us with 8 attack successes, blowing past our DV with a threshold of 2 because we didn't burn willpower for some reason. He then adds 10L from the sniper rifle for a total of 12L, and subtracts 4 from our Armour because he's using armor-piercing bullets. We apply our resulting 9 armour to his 12, he hits us with 3 die. If we add a dot of mobility penalty, our Dodge drops by one and our Armour increases by one ... to the same result: 3 die. This progression continues until we hit -4 Mobility Penalty, at which point we can't dodge at all, meaning no stunts so we take an extra 2 die for 5 die.
So Armor is equivalent to Dodge DV so long as our base Dodge DV remains above 1 (so we can still apply stunts). Potential wound penalties or other penalties mean we probably want to stay as far above that as possible ... meaning minimizing our Mobility Penalty. The exception is against surprise attacks or situations where we can't dodge (enclosed area, etc) and can't parry.
Speaking of parry, Mobility Penalty doesn't apply to Parry DV, so if we had a reliable way to parry (preferably with a firearm so we get the skill bonus) we could maximize our Parry DV and our Armor and get the best of both worlds. We need equipment or a stunt to parry a lethal or ranged attack (such as a bullet) and can't normally parry with a firearm at all. If we had a way to parry with a firearm and maximized our Armor, we'd have a PDV of 6 and an Armor of 17.
TL,DR: If we can't work out a way to use our Parry DV against ranged lethal attacks, it's best to minimize our Mobility Penalty to avoid the risk of losing our DV entirely. If we can Parry, then we can effectively disregard our Mobility Penalty and maximize our Armor, because Mobility Penalty does not affect Parrying, only Dodging.
When I say 'mortal', I refer to a plain vanilla mortal. Parahumans won't fall under this limit, and it's possible equipment bonuses can also crack the limit.
The best mortal marksman in the world will have an attack pool of (5 [dexterity] + 5 [firearms] + 3 [specialty] + Accuracy), where Accuracy refers to their weapon. A basic sniper rifle has an Accuracy of +2; Tinkertech or exceptional equipment would be higher. Let's say this best mortal marksman has a weapon with the Exceptional dots put into Accuracy and Damage. That brings the Accuracy to +3, and their pool to (5 + 5 + 3 + 3) = 16 dice.
There are various penalties and bonuses which might apply here. Internal penalties remove dice from the pool, whereas external penalties remove successes. Generally, for us, 2 dice = 1 success. For others, 3 dice = 1 success. This is an average only.
The most relevant penalty here will be the range penalty. Each firearm has a range associated with it; a basic sniper rifle has a range of 400 yards. If you try to shoot at a target within range, you take no penalty. Shooting at a target less than twice that distance (800 yards in this case) imposes a -1 external penalty. Triple the distance (1200 yards) imposes a -2 external penalty. You cannot shoot at anyone further away without magic.
Let's say they're close enough to not suffer a range penalty (which means they'll be in range of our bugs, but hey).
With 16 dice, they'll average 5 or 6 successes. This is an average, from the best mortal marksman in the world, disregarding stunts (because I have no idea if they can stunt). Let's say they spend a few seconds beforehand aiming: this provides 3 bonus dice, bumping them up to 6 or 7 successes on average. They also spend a point of willpower, giving them an automatic success, bringing them to 7 or 8 successes on the attack roll.
OK. We currently have 4 Dex, 3 Essence, 0 Dodge. Ignoring wound penalties, our current basic Dodge DV is (4 + 3 + 0)/2 = 4. We can stunt this for +2 under most circumstances (which boosts the DV directly, not the pool used to calculate it, resulting in DDV of 6). Similarly (if we get a firearm we can parry with/stunt it properly), our Parry is based on (Dexterity + Firearms + Defense), which is probably (4 + 3 + 0)/2 = 4, stuntable up to 6. We can also, if necessary, burn Willpower or a Virtue Channel to increase our defense values.
Mobility penalties reduce from the Dodge value (not pool) but not the Parry value, and also reduce various other things (such as movement rate). For reference, Dashing is (Dexterity + 6 - wounds - mobility) = 10, while Move is (Dexterity - wounds - mobility) = 4, with dash being a minimum 2 yards per tick (second) and Movement being a minimum one yard per tick.
Various other things apply penalties or bonuses to your defense values including defensive cover or taking an action such as aiming or attacking. It gets complicated. Most significantly, if we don't see the attack coming we cannot apply our DVs against it at all.
We subtract our DV from the attack successes. If he has more than 0 success remaining, the attack hits, and the remaining successes (called threshold successes) contribute to the damage.
The base damage for a sniper rifle is 9L, but this is an Exceptional one so it does 10L. We add however much they got past our DV to this to get the raw damage.
We then subtract our Armour and Soak from it. We have 3 basic lethal soak. Our armour value … I worked out a neat little table below, take a look at it. Using the minimum Armour value of 9, we subtract 12 dice from the raw damage. Armor-piercing rounds subtract 4 from our Armor, assuming they work like anti-soak ones do.
So here's a neat little table.
Values assuming:
* We have the no-penalty slot for Advanced Materials at all times
* The Exceptional bonuses are first placed in Mobility Penalty (to reduce it to 0), then moved over to Armor
* After that, we pick up increasing penalties from Advanced Materials to buff our armour
* We aren't stunting here.
Our basic values are:
Code:
M.Pen. Dodge DV Dash Movement Armor
-0 4 10 4 9
-1 3 9 3 10
-2 2 8 2 11
-3 1 7 1 12
-4 0 6 1 13* We always apply a 2-die stunt
* We have the thing to double our ground speed
* We have the +2 armor from the spidersilk, and we're facing a bullet for another +2
Code:
M. Pen Dodge DV Dash Movement Armor
-0 6 20 8 13
-1 5 18 6 14
-2 4 16 4 15
-3 3 14 2 16
-4 0 12 2 17Let's assume we're playing the -0 Mobility Penalty build in the table above (with the spidersilk). This guy hits us with 8 attack successes, blowing past our DV with a threshold of 2 because we didn't burn willpower for some reason. He then adds 10L from the sniper rifle for a total of 12L, and subtracts 4 from our Armour because he's using armor-piercing bullets. We apply our resulting 9 armour to his 12, he hits us with 3 die. If we add a dot of mobility penalty, our Dodge drops by one and our Armour increases by one ... to the same result: 3 die. This progression continues until we hit -4 Mobility Penalty, at which point we can't dodge at all, meaning no stunts so we take an extra 2 die for 5 die.
So Armor is equivalent to Dodge DV so long as our base Dodge DV remains above 1 (so we can still apply stunts). Potential wound penalties or other penalties mean we probably want to stay as far above that as possible ... meaning minimizing our Mobility Penalty. The exception is against surprise attacks or situations where we can't dodge (enclosed area, etc) and can't parry.
Speaking of parry, Mobility Penalty doesn't apply to Parry DV, so if we had a reliable way to parry (preferably with a firearm so we get the skill bonus) we could maximize our Parry DV and our Armor and get the best of both worlds. We need equipment or a stunt to parry a lethal or ranged attack (such as a bullet) and can't normally parry with a firearm at all. If we had a way to parry with a firearm and maximized our Armor, we'd have a PDV of 6 and an Armor of 17.
