Ping damage

Iceshard

Iceshard

New Member
Hey all


So, I know I will be tackling a thrice dead-thrice reincarnated-thrice dead again horse but I've been thinking on something: If ping damage was not absolute but instead depended on the difference between the attacker's and de defender's Essence? For exemple, a solar with Essence 3 would get 2 dice of minimum damage against a mortal, but when faced with the a Essence 3 dragon-blooded monk, no minimum damage.


I do not expect to fix lethality or some grandiose task like that but I've been lurking around here and the white wolf forums for a while and this was always one of the points that bugged me and, after presenting the rules to some potential players, that was the one game mechanic that they found boring as hell.


So, any thoughts?
 
Anyone with a higher essence than yourself and with the ability to reduce your damage to 0 -> ping damage will more immune to your attacks - I think that will become a problem very quickly.
 
When the group I am in played our first game of Exalted, we had not read the combat rules completely as we were all experienced in the typical White Wolf combat system. Playing the Eclipse Caste in the game, I had not taken any combat Charms or powerful weapons, so I was completely ineffective in physical combat. Between our first and second game I read through the combat rules (mostly because I wanted to learn Social Combat) and figured out how Hardness and Soak worked I realized that I would never be able to do any damage to anything ever, until I read about the Ping damage. It is the only way I can do any damage in combat.


I understand the concern about the concept once you have high Essence characters in a game, but I think the rule is a good one to keep (though it may cause the death of my character).


Also, in as was mentioned by skafte, what is going to happen when our group of 3 Essence Solars go up against another Exalt with 5 or 6 Essence with good armor? Most of us would never be able to damage the higher Essence Exalt because all of our Ping damage would go away. Not to mention, that only one character has a weapon with a minimum damage rating. But I guess that would also be compared to the Essence and negated too in the proposed system.


I feel that it is always best to make sure the players don't feel they are getting nowhere with physical combat unless you are attempting to move the game away from being a strict combat game. In which case, you can just create an artifact for the NPC who needs the extra protection and follows the rules you suggested.


The first rule of any White Wolf game is “Have Fun.†The second rule in the Exalted Core Book is “If you don’t like it, change it.†Just remember that Rule 2 is there to make sure Rule 1 is followed, not to have you change every mechanic of the game. If you and your players are having fun, then you are doing it right.
 
Thank you for the advice, both of you.


I've created some characters for testing the system and to understand chargen process and I always placed points in combat abilities, charms and armor, thanks to D&D background, so I've never imagined the situation you described, ghoti115. Even in Vampire I've always thought about combat and how to survive it, if necessary. But that's me.


With ping damage, it always came to my mind a character that started with a reaver daiklave than, as essence grew, threw that always and started using a thootpick of doom and many flurries. My ideia was to keep extras and minor characters easy to kill but to keep thootpick fighting from happening against more relevant enemies.


But again, thanks, I've more to discuss with the group before we start playing.
 
Iceshard said:
My ideia was to keep extras and minor characters easy to kill but to keep thootpick fighting from happening against more relevant enemies.
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Extras and minor characters should be easy to kill, there are simple rules for this on page 156 of the Exalted 2nd Edition Core book. Hopefully your players will recognize a big enemy and ready their best weapons when the time comes. If not, the key to keeping toothpick fighting out of larger foes is to make sure that the proverbial toothpick is damaged beyond repair when it is used the first time against some heavy duty armor. This is assuming that the toothpick is a small non-artifact weapon with a high rate. Or in the case of an actual toothpick, just give the big enemy the equivilent of Defection of the Wooden Doom.
 
I've mused with the problem myself for quite a long time, the only good idea that came up was to use hardness as a post soak reducing effect and changing its values for 1 (light) - 2 (medium) - 3 (heavy) - 4 (super heavy), but only for artefact armors.


This way people with a sufficient protection are no longer victims of lucky / coordinated mortals with deadly weapons, and the lethality is more or less balanced.


Essence 8 barehanded angry siddies can no longer kill you (the guy with the toughest armor known to man) with two punches, now they need at least five ! :roll:
 
cyl said:
Essence 8 barehanded angry siddies can no longer kill you (the guy with the toughest armor known to man) with two punches, now they need at least five ! :roll:
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Of course, an Essence 8 Sidereal has probably mastered at least one SMA, so he can just kill you with his mind, but hey.
 
Let's say you duel the old ways, with the dueling collars, relying only on raw skill and attribute... he'd just cut through your plates of magical armor with his bare hands anyway.
 
Oh I'm sure someone would have figured out a way to make a superior model :roll:
 
In one of the previous threads on this topic, the (Essence) - (Defenders Essence) calculation was mentioned, but instead of reducing the damage to 0 in the case of equal Essence traits, the minimum damage was set to 1 die for all lethal or agg damage attacks if this number came out 0 or negative. So any lethal attack that hits will deal at least 1 die of damage, and opponents with much less Essence than you will fall fast. All in all, the lethality for the Exalt in superheavy plate is non-existent against weak opponents, since only 1/3 of attacks will deal any damage. The same fellow going against a Deathlord when his Essence is 3 will get his ass appropriately handed to him. Seems like a simple and effective fix to me.
 
Hmm, you also forgot the O tag, which has some impressive values for some weapons.


Any essence 2 exalt can reach a ping of 5 !


So all in all you think your essence should protect you when magical armor fails ?!


What do you need magical armor then ?! :roll:


The problem is not the fix as much as its justification...


"I have essence 8 but I still bleed like a pig when you hit me with a sword, but strangely as soon as the soak from any form or armor I can have overcomes your sword, I'm invincible... you might hit me with a great klave, and there's a 0.6 chance it leaves nothing but a scratch."


Plus one could argue that Essence is already acting as a damage reducer with DDV.
 
I don't suggest that Essence have any influence whatsoever on the O tag. The tag represents a non-magical property of the weapon and I don't think randomly deciding that Essence influences everything is a good rule-making policy. That's why I didn't mention it. Also, the bare minimum of 1 die would apply to all lethal damage attacks (and agg, of course), so even the 8 Essence fellow would be taking 1 die per hit landed on him. If he were being bludgeoned with a grand goremaul, he'd be taking the 5 overwhelming just like everyone else.

Doesn't this just make sense?


Everyone understands that Exalted is not particularly realistic, but the concept that being beaten with weapons is not as effective a survival strategy as avoiding said beating should hold up at least into the middlemarches. :wink:


As for the argument that some character "concepts" are bent toward taking hits and shrugging them off, that's what resistance/stamina charms are for. Also, this argument has little merit, as how you absorb or avoid combat damage does not qualify as a character concept.
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cyl said:
"I have essence 8 but I still bleed like a pig when you hit me with a sword, but strangely as soon as the soak from any form or armor I can have overcomes your sword, I'm invincible... you might hit me with a great klave, and there's a 0.6 chance it leaves nothing but a scratch."
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Sounds entirely reasonable to me. After all, in the real world we have "I'm a human. If you hit me with a sword, I bleed like a stuck pig, but as soon as I have decent armor on I barely get bruised most of the time."
 
Okay so why not enjoy both ?


Hardness and essence reduction (provided the attacker is a magical being).


This way, this solar essence 2 with a hardness of 4, could actually stand more than 2 natural attacks from this archenemy essence 8.
 
Why should an Essence 2 character not be an easy 1-shot kill for an Essence 8 character?!


Disregarding the value of the actual Essence trait, the Essence 8 character is necessarily about 500 years older and proportionally more experienced than the newly Exalted Essence 2 character with a whopping dozen or so charms. If you are relying on ping damage to beat up children when you get to your 500th birthday and Essence 8, you're just plain doing it wrong.
 
Why should an Essence 2 character not be an easy 1-shot kill for an Essence 8 character?!
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Because -IMHO- that's not what the game is about... essence 2 solars have perfect defense for such reasons.
The problem is that the mechanics often do not follow the spirit.
 
When we look at ping damage, we should keep in mind when ping damage matters: Evenly matched opponents, at least one of which has a high soak. If the opponents are not relatively even in skill, one will add enough extra successes from his attack roll or from Charms to just blow through the weaker opponent's soak. It's what Hungry Tiger Technique is good for.


Essence 8 vs Essence 2 is not a good situation to look at ping rules. The Essence 2 guy is going to be perfect spamming as long as he can because any hit by Essence 8 guy is a one-shot kill, regardless of what the ping rules are. Essence 2 guy slightly cares, because ping is all he's likely to get in chipping away the health levels, but that's the extent of it.
 
I slightly disagree on this.


When E8C (essence 8 character) can simply ping spam punch E2C to the death in 2 blows without needing any charm (which is exactly what E2C would do with an lesser opponent), there IS a problem.


I mean there is naturally a huge gap between E2C and E8C, and it becomes worst when E8C starts using essence, yet, naturally (without charms I mean) E2C is not and should not be in the same position that a lesser opponent without magical equipment.


Ping is a good option for combat, because it allows the principle of "many lesser can defeat one greater" to be verifiable... but it has another pervert effect which is "greater OS lesser", whatever the nature.


Both E2C and E8C are and must be immensely superior to any extra, but E8C should not be naturally that much superior to E2C due to ping dmg rules.
 
To be clear, ping dmg matters whenever it applies in problematic proportions... like a total of 16 dice of post soak damage, wether they come from 8 blows from E2C or 2 blows from E8C.
 
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