Pardon any typoes or errors in this post--I have not proofread it, completely, and wrote it all in spurts in my philosophy class.
All calculations assume maximum ranks for their level. Fighters are assumed to have a better-than-average (+4) STR at 1st level and achieve a STR stat-up at least occasionally as they gain experience.
I'm going to stop multiplying the rank and only multiply the monk's STR score when kicking, which should help with the scaling issue. Therefore, the new formula is:
(Rank+STR)+1d6 punching damage.
Rank+STR*2+1d6 kicking damage at -3.
The average mage is assumed to have a MAG of 4 or 5 and an INT and WIS of 3 or 4. This means that the average mage has a 1st level MP pool of around 80-90 MP. For calculation purposes, it will be assumed that a mage starts with 85 MP and gains approximately 7 MP each level ((5+4)/2 + 2.5). This is a slight abstraction, because the INT score may increase, but the overall difference in gains will be minimal (1-2 MP per level).
None of these calculations make allowances for techs. This is intentional, because all types of characters can take advantage of techs to gain extra attacks or other bonuses. The fighter archetype used in this example is assumed to use the same, typical weapon throughout the examples. This is not a complete set of examples, because a character could use a more powerful weapon or a light weapon, which would change his number of attacks, but the general idea is that a fighter with a longsword is a good estimate for the "average" damage done by a character who focuses on having a relatively high STR score.
All average damage/round calculations assume that all attacks hit and ignore the possibility of critical hits, because critical hits are equally likely with all archetypes, ignoring the [s]Precise Striking skill.
Level 1:
Ranks capped at 4.
Swordsman (using 10/14/17 longsword):
Light: 10 + 4 + 1d6 = 17.5 avg. damage.
Medium: 14 + 8 + 2d4 = 27 avg. damage, -3 to hit.
Heavy: 17 + 12 + 2d6 = 36 avg. damage, -6 to hit.
Monk:
Punch (Light): 4 + 4 + 1d6 = 11.5 avg. damage.
Kick (Medium): 4 + 4*2 + 1d6 = 15.5 avg. damage, -3 to hit.
Mage:
Rank 1 spell (8+rank*2+1d6): 8 + 8 + 1d6 = 19.5 avg. damage for 4 MP (<5% of total MP).
Rank 4 spell (14+rank*4+2d6): 14 + 16 + 2d6 = 37 average damage for 12 MP (~14% of total MP).
Level 3:
Ranks capped at 8. Physical fighters have improved STR to +5. At this point, a monk has gained an extra attack. Mage has 99 MP.
Swordsman:
Light: 10 + 5 + 1d6 = 18.5 avg.
Medium: 14 + 10 + 2d4 = 29 avg. at -3 to hit.
Heavy: 17 + 15 + 2d6 = 39 avg. at -6 to hit.
Monk:
Punch: 8 + 5 + 1d6 = 16.5 avg, 33/round.
Kick: 8 + 10 + 2d6 = 25 avg., 50/round, at -3 to hit.
Mage:
Rank 4 spell (14+rank*4+2d6): 14 + 32 + 2d6 = 51 avg damage for 12 MP (~12% of total MP).
Level 5:
Ranks capped at 12. Swordsman has gained an extra attack. Mage has 113 MP.
Swordsman:
Light: 10 + 5 + 1d6 = 18.5 avg., 37/round.
Medium: 14 + 10 + 2d4 = 29 avg., 58/round, at -3 to hit.
Heavy: 17 + 15 + 2d6 = 39 avg., 78/round, at -6 to hit.
Monk:
Punch: 12 + 5 + 1d6 = 20.5 avg., 41/round.
Kick: 12 + 10 + 2d6 = 29 avg., 58/round at -3 to hit.
Mage:
Rank 4 spell (14+rank*4+2d6): 14 + 48 + 2d6 = 69 avg. damage for 12 MP (~11% of total MP).
Rank 12 spell (20+rank*6+3d6): 20 + 72 + 3d6 = 102.5 avg. damage for 32 MP (~28% of total MP).
Level 10:
Ranks capped at 22. STR increased to +6. Monk has gained his third attack at rank 16. Mage has 148 MP.
There are no standardized direct damage spells listed in the spellbook past rank 12. If the progression were to continue, a rank 20 spell would hypothetically deal something like 36+rank*8+4d6 for about 52 MP.
Swordsman:
Light: 10 + 6 + 1d6 = 19.5 avg., 39/round.
Medium: 14 + 12 + 2d4 = 31 avg., 61/round, at -3 to hit.
Heavy: 17 + 18 + 2d6 = 42 avg., 84/round, at -6 to hit.
Monk:
Punch: 22 + 6 + 1d6 = 31.5 avg., 94.5/round.
Kick: 22 + 12 + 2d6 = 41 avg., 123/round at -3 to hit.
Mage:
Rank 12 spell (20+rank*6+3d6): 20 + 132 + 3d6 = 162.5 avg. damage for 32 MP (~22% of MP).
Rank 20 spell (36+rank*8+4d6): 36 + = 226 avg. damage for 52 MP (~35% of MP).
These data suggest the following:
At level 1, things are essentially completely fair. The monk does a fair bit less damage early on, barring techs or Two-Fisted (but a swordsman can technically use two weapons, if he wants, too). The mage deals the most damage, but will quickly run out of MP spamming his rank 4 spell.
At level 3, the monk's extra attack pushes his damage past the swordsman's. While he does have to make two successful hits to do so, his damage output (for a -3 penalty) is 20 points higher than a swordsman's. The swordsman does have one advantage--his attacks, individually, can hit harder than the monk's, allowing him to break damage reduction more easily. Oddly enough, at this point, the mage has almost an identical damage output with the mage.
At level 5, the swordsman gets his extra attack--and his performance is almost identical to the monk's! The mage's advantage is that he only needs to land one attack roll to deal almost the same amount of damage (slightly more), but he is still expending over 10% of his MP to do so. If the mage really wants to deal damage, he can utilize what functionally amounts to about 1/3 of his MP to vastly outdamage the physical fighters, but the swordsman's damage (with a heavy attack) does not lag that far behind, comparatively speaking. If a medium attack is the typical/average attack style, his damage/round is about half the mage's, but the mage only gets three "attacks" in a given day/time period if he casts NO other spells. This, in my opinion, works out to be fair, in practice.
At level 10, the monk has achieved his third attack. At this point, the monk is extremely superior compared to the fighter. His base damage, attacking with no penalties, is about 133% of the fighter's, and his average damage per round is triple that of the swordsman's! If he needs to pack more punch to break damage reduction, his kick attack deals as much damage as the swordsman's heavy attack without the same penalties. As would be expected, the mage deals the most damage, but proportionally speaking, not much more--the mage is still dealing about twice as much as the swordsman per round, but the monk's damage output compared to the mage's (especially since the monk has no need to expend MP and can still use techs to increase damage further) is remarkable.
The solution here, as I see it, is not to eliminate the monk and the mage's ability to scale up damage purely by gaining levels. Nor is it, in entirety, to provide the swordsman with better equipment--indeed, in order to be on par with the monk in terms of per-hit damage, he would have to have a weapon dealing around 20/30/50 base damage, which is pretty absurd (for comparison's sake, Order's Edge, a weapon forged by Shamaya, goddess of order, did 22/33/44 base damage, which sure seemed like a lot at the time). Instead, it might be best to introduce some sort of skill-based improvement to damage for weapon-wielding fighters. This might be something as simple as adding the skill rank to each "step" of a weapon's base damage, which essentially means that the monk and the swordsman have the same damage formula--a standardization that might be good. Changing medium attack damage to base damage + rank + STR*2 + 2d6 would standardize it further--and heavy attacks can be changed to base damage + rank + STR*3 + 3d6. I would also like to reduce the penalty for a heavy attack to -5 to encourage fighters to use them more often--it's a very slight benefit, but it helps. In addition, medium attacks (as well as kicks) could also be reduced to -2. Strictly speaking, heavy attacks could be reduced to -4--with the present rules, from a hitting perspective, it simply isn't efficient to use heavy attacks. However, I really don't think reducing heavy attacks to -4 is a good idea, because I've always seen heavy attacks as "opportunistic" attacks, intended to be used against defenseless or hampered targets (foes in critical condition or denied parry rolls, for example).
The other issue that needs to be addressed is whether or not the character can "trade" an extra attack for an extra parry roll instead. This does, on thinking about it, seem reasonable.
There is one problem with this solution--a character using a dagger will get the same number of attacks as an unarmed fighter, with the current setup, and get the damage bonus--while dagger fighters do not necessarily (or typically) have a high strength, a pure dagger fighter will always outdamage a monk, barring techs. This, on one hand, is realistic, so I'm not inclined to think of it as a dreadfully serious problem, but it should be noted that the system would give characters no advantage to NOT use a weapon except stylistic purposes. I mostly don't consider this a problem because Philsys is all about style anyway, it doesn't put a fist-fighter that far behind a knife-fighter anyway, and, generally speaking, it doesn't actually matter.
To recap, the new damage formula could be:
<ul>
<li>Light: Weapon base damage (if applicable) + skill rank + STR + 1d6
<li>Medium: Base damage + skill rank + STR*2 + 2d6 at a -2 penalty
<li>Heavy: Base damage + skill rank + STR*3 + 3d6 at a -5 penalty</ul>
This gives everyone a chance to improve, regardless of being granted magic gear--though I'm still not ruling out the suggestion that there ought to be more magic weapons for PCs. It also effectively improves
everyone's damage, possibly excepting current fist-fighters, who are somewhat overpowered anyway.
The "rank damage multipliers" for spells have traditionally been somewhat inconsistent. When Phil-dog created Hakaril's sheet for me back in the dark ages, his rank 1 spell had a rank*2 multiplier and his rank 4 spell had a rank*6 multiplier. In retrospect, this seems a little high, and the spellbook suggests rank*4 multipliers for rank 4 and rank*6 multipliers for rank 12 (level 5). At one point, I toyed with the idea of essentially having "another use for MAG." The numbers in the spellbook were potentially to be modified by the "mage cutoff"--at 4 MAG, a character has the aptitude to focus heavily on spells. A character with 6 MAG, in some situations, could have rank*6 spells at rank 4 and rank*8 spells at rank 12--and that's what Hakaril's sheet says.
The question then, is: Should spell damage multipliers be somehow related to MAG? On one hand, magic does not need to deal
more damage than these examples, so the answer is "probably not," or at least, not the way that is being presented. The idea of making the rank*8 multiplier spells rank 20 seems to make sense, because it follows a reasonable looking pattern (spell base damage improves at 4, 8, 12, 20, and perhaps 30?). It's hard to believe that mages would need to deal
more direct damage after rank*8, because at that point, damage is scaled up to be well beyond 160 from rank alone, but a rank*10 (or even rank*12) could be a possibility for the rank 30 "uber nukes."
Before anyone says anything, I realize that there is a rank 26 space spell with a rank*13 multiplier. Since no one has spells that powerful at this point, and this level of number-crunching had not been performed, some of the really high-level spells are not balanced simply because they were never placed on an accurate scale. Also, that spell costs 164 MP (dear sweet Lord) and would consume roughly 100% of a mage's MP, were he just barely high enough level to cast it (level 12, average max MP 162). Let's ignore, for the moment, the "high-level" spells that have never been playtested, much less subjected to intense mathematical scrutiny. Also, I don't really mind terribly that some of the more nebulous spell effects are less concretely defined in terms of requisite rank--in that sense, GM discretion is a perfectly fine mechanism as long as there are
some benchmarks. Think about how the different levels of power ("spheres") are defined in Mage: the Acension, if you know what I'm talking about. I am primarily concerned with precisely defining limitations for directly damaging spells.
Since we're changing the damage formulae in a way that essentially increases everyone's damage, we might get to go back and fix a bizarre oversight regarding AC and be able to set AC equal to damage reduction as originally intended. The equipment list needs reworked anyway, at this point, especially since we're eliminating the AT penalties on most armor and need to add attack options for weapons that previously lacked them (spears, with their thrusting only limitation, come to mind). It should also be noted that "high damage" is a
goal of Philsys. It is intentional and largely optimized for such--again, fights are intended to be survived by hitting first (and harder), avoiding getting hit, and potentially wearing enough armor to negate most damage. It is also intentional that critical hits are intended to settle fights almost immediately. In order to extend a battle with a major NPC more than a few rounds, GMs are encouraged to increase the NPC's defensive capabilities (damage reduction, both physical and magical, is appropriate, as is comparatively high PA and MBlock),
not give them (especially ordinary humanoids) astronomical amounts of HP, though there may be some creatures (powerful demons, dragons, whatever) that do have lots of HP instead. However, I never intended for monsters with HP in the thousands to be commonplace--not that I'm saying anyone is doing that, but I wanted to be clear about it.
I realize not everyone may have internalized/considered this, but I'm going to move on to my next point, so all facets of this post can be discussed simultaneously or whatever.
Standardized tech benchmarks for weapons. I have some baseline numbers that I want to throw around, and the way I want to classify what's fair for what weapon skill is going to be based on two things: the weapon type (light, standard, or heavy) and the skill rank required to utilize the ability. As such, there are a few things I want to suggest and or standardize.
These techs are going to assume DEX and AGI are remaining separate.
[Light Weapon Skill=2]Precise Striking (2 TP) - Uses DEX to determine weapon damage bonuses instead of STR and eliminates all penalties to hit other than those caused by magical debuffs for one round. Heavy attacks are impossible when using Precise Striking.
[Light Weapon Skill=4]Dextrous Striking (2 TP) - Adds DEX to AT a second time for one round.
[Light Weapon Skill=6]Rapid Striking (3 TP) - Allows one additional attack (of any type) this round.
[Standard Weapon Skill=2]Defender's Stance (1 TP) - Adds weapon skill rank to all PA rolls made this round. Even if no parry roll is allowed, half of the users's weapon skill rank is added to his PA for the remainder of the round. This tech cannot be combined with any other offensive tech, and the user forfeits any bonus attacks (but may use them, instead, as bonus parries).
[Standard Weapon Skill=6]Full Attack (4 TP) - Allows one additional attack (of any type) this round.
[Heavy Weapon Skill=4]Devastating Blow (2 TP) - As a heavy attack, but damage is multiplied by 1.5x. If the attack misses, the user loses his one of his parry rolls for the round.
[Heavy Weapon Skill=6]Follow-through (5 TP) - Allows one additional attack (of any type) this round.
Basically speaking, an extra attack from a tech costs 3, 4, or 5 TP depending on whether or not the weapon is light, standard, or heavy, and the prerequisite rank is 6--the other techs are included as some basic examples for benchmarking, but I wanted to lay those out, as simple as they are.
I'll eventually work on that [s] skill list, but I think I'm throwing out enough material for discussion at the present time. <p>
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