I've had the first session of my Gamma World game for the kids at the library (I am using 4E for now, which might drive me insane given how overdesigned the mechanics are, being a modified version of 2E AD&D where they have set on ascending armor class but are still using the term To Hit AC instead of Attack Bonus, so I have to explain to the kids what THAC means when there's no THAC0...) and in digging through my various Gamma World iteration notes I came across this gem when I was analyzing 1E/2E and how I would modify the Attack Chart
I think this does a pretty good job of clarifying how the various Armor Classes would be defined as Defense Types, the weapons as Attack Types, and some clear definitions of how it works. I'm especially happy with some of the notes, like the width of personal force fields, that expands the implicit world building that these sorts of charts do. You walk a way with a good idea of the technology and its quirks.
I'm seriously tempted to institute this inside the otherwise GW 4E, or just convert to GW 2E entirely, just to be able to use this chart. Of course if I'm going to do that I might as well just build a new, better aligned to me system from scratch.
Why not just build an attack type / defense type table that just generates bonuses/penalties to a calculated AC /Attack bonus pair?
ReplyDeleteAs long as you have no =0 defenses like V&V has, any table like the above should be trivially convertable to an attack/penalty table, and such a table should be generally applicable across versions.
Heck, as long as the PCs aren't attacking one another, the players don't even have to do the calculations on such a table -- the GM can just apply them to NPC attacks (by subtraction) and defenses (by addition). Of course, players should be -aware- of the table's existence (and even its bonuses/penalties) so they know that tanglers are more effective against rigid armor and electricity against mesh and metal armor. But if you split out "how generally protective is this armor" from "and...what if you hit it with its weakness" it can involve a single comparison and addition rather than a calculation and then potentially adding multiple numbers.
(of course, if there are no other numbers to add in, just doing a lookup table is best).
There's "kinda" a 0 the way there is in V&V as rolls of 21+ are there for unarmed attacks against higher tech armor - without a STR bonus you can't hit those, even with a roll of 20. That's too good a simulationist mechanic for me to let go of it without more reason
Delete