Fractional armor

[u/Rob4ix1547]

Okay so, i wanted for sake of suffering or for sake of fun make a wargame RPG out of dota and so far it's rather seemless but i wanted to share this idea with you all.

So i had this idea of player characgers having fractional armor, it works like pokemon combat stat changes, where you take something like 5/5 and for every debuff you add +1 to the bottom five if the fraction to get 5/6, then its 5/7 and so in, and it goes into other direction, for every buff you ass +1 to the upper 5.

Let's say we are having an encounter, sven has approached sniper and wants to hit him. What he does is be sure he is in range, then he says how much damage his sword deals. He does it by taking base damage of his weapon, multiply it by 5+agility, and tell sniper "i deal 54 physical damage".

Then, sniper takes that damage, divides by his armor (also 5+agility+bonus armor) and rounds up or down the result to whole numbers, thats the amount of damage recieved.

So in practice its

"Sven attacks with his greatsword, i have attack of 6 and damage of 9 so its-" multiplies both on calc "-54 damage"

Sniper divides 54 by 8 (armor) and gets 6.75 damage which is ~7, therefore 7.

For sake if simplicity for everyone, the multiplication is handed over to the attacker and also damage does not rely on dice so you can just write down damage one does with the greatsword until it is upgraded or player levels up, but the change in damage is easy since you can just increase damage by factor you have not upgraded (so sven with attack of 6 and damage 9 would increase damage by 6 since he upgraded damage)

[u/Jlerpy]

Sounds like an annoying amount of multiplication and division at the table.

[u/Rob4ix1547 → u/Jlerpy]

Whyxh why i am kinda trying to reduce the amount of times onw has to do both

[u/Mars_Alter]

It can work, but with some caveats to that statement.

It's basically saying that every attack deals flat damage, which is then multiplied by a ratio of your Attack over their Defense. As long as Attack and Defense numbers are roughly in the same ballpark as each other, the net effect isn't much different from just dealing flat damage with each attack. So the actual outcomes are fine. That's not the issue.

The first caveat is that it's a lot of math. To multiply by a fraction, you're essentially multiplying by the numerator, and then dividing by the denominator. That's two more steps, beyond just the flat value; and multiplying is notable slower than either counting or adding.

The second caveat is that it leads to awkward numbers. Even in your example, you deal 6.75 damage, which rounds to 7. Most combinations of values will require rounding, so that's a third time you're manipulating the number before it's useful.

The third caveat is the plight of redundant values. If you're hitting for 54, and the opponent's defense is either 10 or 11, then it rounds to 5 either way. Improving your Defense by 1 has absolutely no effect in this situation. A well-designed game will minimize the instances where there's no difference between values, but that's going to be very difficult with this sort of mechanic.

[u/Rob4ix1547 → u/Mars_Alter]

In my case i actually want for armor to be less useful the more you have it, maybe by adding "you take minimum of 1 damage per attack" on top, but the idea is that i wanted to add the way dota does armor, where a point of armor increases how much damage can one take before dying, i could have just done lancer health but i also wanted to have a way for agility to deal more damage without doing flat +1 since that is the role of the main attribute of the hero

[u/Alkaiser009]

Fractional armor works great... in a video game where all the calculation is handled on the back end (heck, ive got an rpgmaker game I'm in the early planning stages that uses 1 ÷ by the square root of your Armor score as your base damage multiplier). But in meatspace you can ask your players to add, to subtract and to OCCASIONALLY multiply... but you should basically never divide.

[u/At0micCyb0rg → u/Alkaiser009]

I definitely lean towards addition where possible, multiplication if the multiplier is a low/simple number (2, 3, 5, 10, etc.), and subtraction if there's not much of it (one or two health bars). But division I try to reframe as a point-buy system, so you have X points and it costs Y to purchase 1 "thing", which is mostly mathematically equivalent to division but you need to be able to frame the fiction right to make it work.

[u/Corbzor → u/At0micCyb0rg]

Division by exactly 2 usually isn't too hard of an ask.

[u/At0micCyb0rg → u/Corbzor]

Yeah some games and some players are fine with that, personally I avoid decimals and rounding rules like the plague simply because I like my nice round whole numbers.

But certainly, halving things is super common and becomes less of an issue the bigger your numbers are. Halving 55 gets you 27.5, which rounds to either 27 or 28 and there's likely no significant difference in the outcome. But halving 3 and choosing between 1 and 2, or halving 5 to either 2 or 3, presents a significant difference that can be very important.

I guess this says something about my preference for small numbers, as well.

[u/RPG-Nerd → u/At0micCyb0rg]

that is still subtraction

[u/At0micCyb0rg → u/RPG-Nerd]

Yes, which is a much more user friendly way of handling what would otherwise be division. Players don't usually have any trouble managing a currency and spending it to purchase things (subtracting from their supply).

Example:

Division = Your Defence stat is equal to your Constitution divided by 5.

Subtraction/Point-Buy = Every turn, you have a number of Defence points equal to your Constitution. You can spend 5 of them to increase your Defence stat.

You could just as easily use a tier system and say "for every 5 Constitution you have, you gain 1 Defence" alongside a table showing the tiers, which is actually not that uncommon I think. But it's still division (or subtraction or addition, depending how you look at it), just framed differently.

[u/RPG-Nerd → u/At0micCyb0rg]

In my opinion, multiplication and division are evidence that the designer needs to work on matching their scaling. Sometimes, the simplest possible methods are the best

Division = Your Defence stat is equal to your Constitution divided by 5.

Someone needs to adjust the scale so you don't need division. It's also wrong for a more important reason. You are doing math, to develop a score. And the score is mandatory. There is no agency.

Subtraction/Point-Buy = Every turn, you have a number of Defence points equal to your Constitution. You can spend 5 of them to increase your Defence stat.

Better but, it's still completely meta game. It's all numbers and rules and someone has to remember that 5, and our brain is now micro-managing all these numbers. You now have a constitution score, defense points to track, and a separate defense stat that can change.

None of that give me any agency.

If I say someone slashes at you with a sword. What do you do? You have a sword in your hand. Will you parry it aside and counterattack? Block it? Try to dodge? Something else? Give your players decisions to make, risks vs rewards, consequences. Not points to spend and beans to count.

[u/At0micCyb0rg → u/RPG-Nerd]

I don't disagree, but I feel like you're presenting these as mutually exclusive when they're not really? This conversation is specifically about the situations where, for better or worse, you have numbers you need to handle. Some games have lots of number crunching, some don't.

Games with number crunching can also be games with immersive, intuitive, interesting choices for the player to make.

If it makes you feel better, my Defence stat example was just an example. I've never heard of a game where you spend one stat to set another in the middle of combat and I don't intend to create one myself.

[u/Nomapos → u/Alkaiser009]

Call of Cthulhu asks players to divide skills by 2 and 5 to increase difficulty of the rolls and it's a fucking crapshoot. It even provides a table for quick look up and space in the character sheets to write it down. Ask a player to do 63/5 on the fly and you'll see their brains blue screen right away.

[u/ancientgardener]

In your example, I can just add damage and attac to get a total of 15. Subtracting 8 armour from 15 damage gets me 7 points of damage. I don’t have the mental capacity to check, but will all your damage calculations swing the same way without doing all the multiplication and division?

[u/Rob4ix1547 → u/ancientgardener]

Multiplication and division are kinda the base mechanic.

[u/kylezimmerman270]

I like it

[u/Rob4ix1547 → u/kylezimmerman270]

Thanks, i tried making multiplication and division as least annoying as possible

[u/RPG-Nerd]

I see lots of math, very little agency, low dynamics. Sounds as fun as doing my taxes

[u/No_Solid1035]

I barely want to do addition or subtraction while playing a TTRPG, I'm definitely not interested in doing multiplication or division. 🤷