Wise Turtle Publishing

Since I've had some extra time to think about the rules, I've been contemplating simplifying Health and Endurance to use less math.

Essentially, change the 40 health and Endurance to 4 or 5. Perks and Flaws will now cost either 1 Endurance or 1/2 Endurance, with the total being rounded to the nearest half number.

Damage will be calculated in tens. That is, if your margin of success is 5, and your Damage Multiplier is 4 for a total of 20, you only do 2 damage. I haven't decided if damage should be rounded up (15 also does 2 damage) or excluded (15 does 1 damage, since the 10s digit is a 1.)

To reiterate, I'm not confirming this as an official change, I'm just pondering.

The less math we have to do in game is better. Multiplication is also far easier and faster than adding multiple numbers, in my experience.

If you can figure out how to have smaller numbers without adding another step to combat, awesome; otherwise my two yen is leave it be, or tweak it some other way. For instance, if you change health to smaller numbers, consider eliminating the damage multiplier. If your Margin of success is a 5, and your Damage Modifier is 4, you would do 9 damage. Something like that.

The main problem with this is it EXPONENTIALLY increases the effective of Damage Multiplier. Since an additional die to roll and an additional point to DM are supposed to be roughy equal, the idea that a single increase in Damage Multipler deals an entire point (would've been 10 in the old system) of damage is not too idea.

So if my margin of success is 4, but my DM is 2.....

If you want accuracy and damage to be of equal import, then I think this is a bad design choice. Rounding up makes the multiplier too important, but rounding down makes it nearly irrelevant.

The key is that more dice does not necessarily guarantee a hit, but more DM means better damage regardless, so I would personally want to tip the balance slightly towards accuracy, but only slightly.

Also, you're adding more math into the game, which is is generally a bad idea.

Yes, I already decided against it over on my repost of this topic on the RPG.net forums.

But thanks for the input.