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Post by CharlesX on Jul 22, 2022 14:36:05 GMT
I think this may or may not have been raised before, but in House Of Hell you are presented as some random guy, and yet you are able to take on undead creatures and even a terrifying, 15-foot tall Demon, so, did you happen to take night classes on self-service in your spare time? I know you can't be a martial artist, because you have a Skill penalty for fighting unarmed. Perhaps you come from a tough area, like London or America. I haven't read Blood Of The Zombies so can't speak for that.
Why do most FF creatures have a mook-like tendency to have lower or much lower Stamina than you? That either implies you are built like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, or they have muscle deficiency from being chaos servants. The latter might be why Demonic Servants collapse if you can hit them twice in a row.
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Post by johnbrawn1972 on Jul 22, 2022 14:46:58 GMT
I think this may or may not have been raised before, but in House Of Hell you later presented as some random guy, and yet you are able to take on undead creatures and even a terrifying, 15-foot tall Demon, so, did you happen to take night classes on self-service in your spare time? I know you can't be a martial artist, because you have a Skill penalty for fighting unarmed. Perhaps you come from a tough area, like London or America. I haven't read Blood Of The Zombies so can't speak for that. Why do most FF creatures have a mook-like tendency to have lower or much lower Stamina than you? That either implies you are built like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, or they have muscle deficiency from being chaos servants. The latter might be why Demonic Servants collapse if you can hit them twice in a row. Maybe people can draw on their recessive capacities though I think you would need therapy after what you have witnessed. The strange otherworldly creatures who are aware of the mathematics of attrition possibly realised we need help. Sometimes these otherworldly creatures seem to fail in their benevolent function and deliver attrition systems that can only leave us humiliated. |
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Post by tyrion on Jul 22, 2022 22:20:38 GMT
Because if you had a stamina of 7 your adventure wouldn't last very long.
Also remember that a group rpg has a pool of hit points, and many skills to draw on, whereas a single character has to rely solely on themselves.
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Post by Gabe Fandango on Jul 23, 2022 2:29:11 GMT
Most FF PCs are battel-hardened adventurers who'd already spent years training and battling monsters, and are potentially much tougher than Dwayne Johnson, so it's not an issue. House of Hell is one of the unique cases. But remember this random guy can't actually take on the 15-foot Demon in most cases unless he finds the special magic weapon that the Demon is uniquely weak against. The Demon's SKILL 14 sufficiently ensures that he can't just be ganked by any normal guy. As for the less than impressive STAMINA, it may reflect the fact that he's actually not at full strength when he leaves his home and steps into the mundane world.
I'm actually more bothered by the fact that a child in Crimson Tide is potentially as tough(or weak) as a flesh grub. Children are weaker, but still shouldn't be as fragile as something you can squish with a single heel.
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Post by nathanh on Jul 23, 2022 9:13:51 GMT
I think having a very high stamina relative to most enemies but having similar skill levels is pretty consistent. After all, YOU ARE THE HERO, and if we think about most heroes in fiction, they tend to take a few hits from mooks and a fair few hits when they have to face off against elite baddies, but they tend to be much more resilient and hard to actually finish off.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 23, 2022 9:32:26 GMT
Most FF PCs are battel-hardened adventurers who'd already spent years training and battling monsters, and are potentially much tougher than Dwayne Johnson, so it's not an issue. House of Hell is one of the unique cases. But remember this random guy can't actually take on the 15-foot Demon in most cases unless he finds the special magic weapon that the Demon is uniquely weak against. The Demon's SKILL 14 sufficiently ensures that he can't just be ganked by any normal guy. As for the less than impressive STAMINA, it may reflect the fact that he's actually not at full strength when he leaves his home and steps into the mundane world. I'm actually more bothered by the fact that a child in Crimson Tide is potentially as tough(or weak) as a flesh grub. Children are weaker, but still shouldn't be as fragile as something you can squish with a single heel. It reminds me a bit about those 80lb+ Knight's swords I'd see in museums which I'd struggle to lift, let alone fight with against a competitive opponent. As you say certain FFs such as Crimson Tide and Black Vein Prophecy (in which you are a peasant, albeit a working-class one) have you starting with lower initial scores, I guess in an FF such as Night Dragon you play a real veteran adventurer. Of course its only a game, and bosses often have competitive, high or even outrageous Stamina. I always think there's something to be said for a tense, long fight against an opponent with maybe average Skill but high Stamina, such as the Kraken in Demons Of The Deep or some of the enemies in the game-like Knights Of Doom and Legend Of Zagor. |
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Post by slloyd14 on Jul 23, 2022 18:31:44 GMT
I think having a very high stamina relative to most enemies but having similar skill levels is pretty consistent. After all, YOU ARE THE HERO, and if we think about most heroes in fiction, they tend to take a few hits from mooks and a fair few hits when they have to face off against elite baddies, but they tend to be much more resilient and hard to actually finish off. You do, which bothers me a bit, because even the weakest starting adventurer has a higher stamina than most giants or ogres or trolls or other creatures known for their massive strength and size. WOFM also has a dragon with a lower stamina than an adventurer - what is up with that? I can see that in game terms, the adventurer is fighting several battles and the monsters are only there for one battle. Is there a way of giving the adventurer typical adventurer stats (like skill ,8 stamina 8) and just have them use tactics to overcome opponents. They can have more choice in battle. Of course that means less simple combat. Or have gamebooks with less combat, but people might not like that. |
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Post by hallucination on Jul 23, 2022 19:06:55 GMT
I haven't read Blood Of The Zombies so can't speak for that. Ugh. No skill stats, and you've a whopping 2D6+20 Stamina against the 1 Stamina point per zombie. Still, you're a goner. Re House of Hell and other FFs - maybe skill increase isn't linear. That might make some more sense out of certain relative skill discrepancies...? A skill 14 mega-demon truly would outmatch... though, haven't thought this through in terms of other monsters in FF... The stamina thing has bothered me too. Well i guess the other option is either more provisions or potions dotted around the place, and we can imagine these turning up in unlikely spots (a deli or apothecary in Deathtrap Dungeon?), or some extra mechanism for recovering stamina, and it all might get a bit demanding and take away from gameplay. (that said, various titles have novel mechanisms that are ok: regaining stamina when flying from each planet if your medical officer is still around, etc) |
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Post by hallucination on Jul 23, 2022 19:10:53 GMT
Somehow the freeway fighter hero is 2D6+24, what??
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 23, 2022 19:20:05 GMT
Somehow the freeway fighter hero is 2D6+24, what?? As I mentioned before I personally don't have an issue with that, to me that's just 'bang for your buck'. It's harder to rationalise in gameplay terms because it seems there isn't really a good reason for it, but it slightly fits in with the novel feel of that particular FF. It might be slightly irritating you have only the one combat in the true path solution, however. |
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Post by thealmightymudworm on Jul 24, 2022 1:49:24 GMT
Somehow the freeway fighter hero is 2D6+24, what?? I'm of the opinion that that's a misprint but other people think otherwise. |
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Post by terrysalt on Jul 24, 2022 8:33:30 GMT
Somehow the freeway fighter hero is 2D6+24, what?? I'm of the opinion that that's a misprint but other people think otherwise. I'm almost certain the extra stamina is deliberate to balance the increased damage from gun fights. |
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Post by sleepyscholar on Jul 25, 2022 4:38:34 GMT
Personally, I feel this whole issue is the same as the old Dungeons & Dragons hit points farrago. In other words, you have a stat which a reasonable player/reader will understand as one thing, but which is actually being pressed into service as several other things. When Gygax was put on the spot about the absurdities of hit points, he claimed that they covered things like dodging, parrying, divine intervention etc. Later theoreticians got all meta and viewed hit points in terms of the narrative importance of the character.
I think in FF, since many of the writers came from a role-playing background, they carried with them -- unconsciously or consciously -- the same sorts of ideas. STAMINA did not literally mean just how far a character could run. It meant metaphorically how far a character could run. But if this is not explained in the rules, you get entirely reasonable objections such as the above thread comments being raised. A kid no tougher than a flesh grub? Well, obviously absurd (though no more so than various other implications in the books), but it's there to indicate the sense of heightened danger of being a kid, rather than a 'battle-hardened adventurer'.
Other games have had different ways of trying to tackle this conundrum. Indiana Jones, as I pointed out in my review of the eponymous game in Imagine magazine (a slag off of a TSR game in a TSR magazine? No wonder they shut Imagine down!), could put a lit stick of dynamite in his gob in the certain knowledge that its explosion wouldn't kill him.
I don't really care for the meta 'let's view things in terms of the story arc' approach, and I note that most readers/players who express a view also seem to prefer to proceed on the assumption that hit points/stamina actually mean something in the game world. But it's by no means easy to come up with a system that does that, yet remains fun to play. FF, like D&D, adopted the 'hang the realistic detail, let's just make it quick and fun to play' approach. It can be nitpicked till the cows come home, but I think this misses the point.
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Post by thealmightymudworm on Jul 29, 2022 3:32:21 GMT
I'm of the opinion that that's a misprint but other people think otherwise. I'm almost certain the extra stamina is deliberate to balance the increased damage from gun fights. That's possible, it just doesn't seem very likely to me. Let's consider two possibilities:
Firstly:
Ian Livingstone comes up with a draft of Freeway Fighter and shows it to Puffin. Initially he thinks that ARMOUR is basically just STAMINA for cars, so it might at well be 2d6 + 12 like STAMINA. Later he thinks that there's no reason they should be the same, so he calls up a Puffin employee and says "Please change the bit in the ARMOUR section where it says 'roll 2 dice and add 12' to 'roll 2 dice and add 24'". The Puffin employee says "Sure!", but thinks "Great, I've got a million things to do with proper books and now I have to waste time on this Mad Max knock-off for which he hasn't even bothered to put the paragraphs in the right order". He starts to skim through the instructions, immediately spots 'roll 2 dice and add 12' and changes it accordingly, perhaps whilst muttering "It's not even called 'ARMOUR', you named it 'STAMINA' you dingbat." Later someone says of the ARMOUR section, "Oh, I thought this was supposed to be 'roll 2 dice and add 24'...?" and it gets changed too. This would explain why the only book in which STAMINA is calculated this way has another stat which is calculated in the same way, which otherwise seems like quite a coincidence.
Alternatively... Ian Livingstone is a man who sticks rigidly to the manner of calculating basic stats whilst flinging the adventurers rendered by these rolls into quests in which these are ever more inadequate to the task. Whilst Forest of Doom is generous enough in this regard, City of Thieves is not; Deathtrap Dungeon is really not; Island of the Lizard King is not; Caverns of the Snow Witch no no no no. This trend will not end with Freeway Fighter, oh no. Statistical brutalities yet to come include Trial of Champions, the notorious Crypt of the Sorcerer and the infamous Blood of the Zombies, in which a zero (sic) with normally calculated STAMINA (at least in the first edition) is presented with the task of tackling 50 billion iterations of the marauding undead with little more than a feather duster and a positive attitude.* It doesn't matter. All gamebook players are either cheats or masochists, right? Whilst 2d6 + 12 seemed sufficient to take on an army of the undead, for Freeway Fighter Ian was in a benevolent mood. You see every Tuesday, Ian undergoes a series of medical treatments to keep his stone heart living for another week. The ordeal leaves him both exhilarated and disorientated. It is whilst he is in this frame of mind that he edits the instructions for Freeway Fighter. He is also emitting an eerie, colourful glow (because that's how everyone dressed in the 1980s).
Ian
"Oh my goodness, my poor readers are at risk of harsh treatment by these rules!" gasps the moustachioed one, completely mashed off his tits, "They have to dodge bullets in this adventure. I must make sure their stats are up to that, justified by some reason I'll think of later." Sadly he sobers up just before adding any explanation, which after all could be as simple as "In this adventure you wear ultra-lightweight, compact body armour because it's the future." (which would neatly lead on to a more typically Livingstonian "The treacherous biker girl strips you to your underpants, leaving you without the protection of your body armour, halve your STAMINA hahahaha") or "You are so jacked up with futuristic steroids that most weapons glance off your thick, dense, rubbery muscles like poorly fitted dentures off a Granny Smith apple."
As it is, things are left somewhat ambiguous.
________________________________________ *Obviously I'm exaggerating slightly about Blood of the Zombies, but it's perhaps a measure of the craziness of it all that whilst there are plenty of people on the internet who claim that the Earth is flat, that Covid is a hoax and that Donald Trump was sent by God to sweep away a vast paedophile network, no one has yet claimed to have beaten BotZ by the rules. |
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 29, 2022 8:24:54 GMT
I'm almost certain the extra stamina is deliberate to balance the increased damage from gun fights. That's possible, it just doesn't seem very likely to me. Let's consider two possibilities:
Firstly:
Ian Livingstone comes up with a draft of Freeway Fighter and shows it to Puffin. Initially he thinks that ARMOUR is basically just STAMINA for cars, so it might at well be 2d6 + 12 like STAMINA. Later he thinks that there's no reason they should be the same, so he calls up a Puffin employee and says "Please change the bit in the ARMOUR section where it says 'roll 2 dice and add 12' to 'roll 2 dice and add 24'". The Puffin employee says "Sure!", but thinks "Great, I've got a million things to do with proper books and now I have to waste time on this Mad Max knock-off for which he hasn't even bothered to put the paragraphs in the right order". He starts to skim through the instructions, immediately spots 'roll 2 dice and add 12' and changes it accordingly, perhaps whilst muttering "It's not even called 'ARMOUR', you named it 'STAMINA' you dingbat." Later someone says of the ARMOUR section, "Oh, I thought this was supposed to be 'roll 2 dice and add 24'...?" and it gets changed too. This would explain why the only book in which STAMINA is calculated this way has another stat which is calculated in the same way, which otherwise seems like quite a coincidence.
Alternatively... Ian Livingstone is a man who sticks rigidly to the manner of calculating basic stats whilst flinging the adventurers rendered by these rolls into quests in which these are ever more inadequate to the task. Whilst Forest of Doom is generous enough in this regard, City of Thieves is not; Deathtrap Dungeon is really not; Island of the Lizard King is not; Caverns of the Snow Witch no no no no. This trend will not end with Freeway Fighter, oh no. Statistical brutalities yet to come include Trial of Champions, the notorious Crypt of the Sorcerer and the infamous Blood of the Zombies, in which a zero (sic) with normally calculated STAMINA (at least in the first edition) is presented with the task of tackling 50 billion iterations of the marauding undead with little more than a feather duster and a positive attitude.* It doesn't matter. All gamebook players are either cheats or masochists, right? Whilst 2d6 + 12 seemed sufficient to take on an army of the undead, for Freeway Fighter Ian was in a benevolent mood. You see every Tuesday, Ian undergoes a series of medical treatments to keep his stone heart living for another week. The ordeal leaves him both exhilarated and disorientated. It is whilst he is in this frame of mind that he edits the instructions for Freeway Fighter. He is also emitting an eerie, colourful glow (because that's how everyone dressed in the 1980s).
Ian
"Oh my goodness, my poor readers are at risk of harsh treatment by these rules!" gasps the moustachioed one, completely mashed off his tits, "They have to dodge bullets in this adventure. I must make sure their stats are up to that, justified by some reason I'll think of later." Sadly he sobers up just before adding any explanation, which after all could be as simple as "In this adventure you wear ultra-lightweight, compact body armour because it's the future." (which would neatly lead on to a more typically Livingstonian "The treacherous biker girl strips you to your underpants, leaving you without the protection of your body armour, halve your STAMINA hahahaha") or "You are so jacked up with futuristic steroids that most weapons glance off your thick, dense, rubbery muscles like poorly fitted dentures off a Granny Smith apple."
As it is, things are left somewhat ambiguous.
________________________________________ *Obviously I'm exaggerating slightly about Blood of the Zombies, but it's perhaps a measure of the craziness of it all that whilst there are plenty of people on the internet who claim that the Earth is flat, that Covid is a hoax and that Donald Trump was sent by God to sweep away a vast paedophile network, no one has yet claimed to have beaten BotZ by the rules. That's really well-written, but I still think you might be over-thinking it and Ian just felt like shuffling the rules at the time. I say Ian just 'doesn't get' difficulty curve, rather than he has a malicious tendency to write awful FF. As for comparing Freeway Fighter with Blood Of The Zombies, about 30 years time passed between when he wrote the two. For that matter, some time will have passed between Blood Of The Zombies and when Shadow Of The Giants comes out, as well. |
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Post by terrysalt on Jul 29, 2022 9:32:28 GMT
I'm almost certain the extra stamina is deliberate to balance the increased damage from gun fights. That's possible, it just doesn't seem very likely to me. Let's consider two possibilities:
Firstly:
Ian Livingstone comes up with a draft of Freeway Fighter and shows it to Puffin. Initially he thinks that ARMOUR is basically just STAMINA for cars, so it might at well be 2d6 + 12 like STAMINA. Later he thinks that there's no reason they should be the same, so he calls up a Puffin employee and says "Please change the bit in the ARMOUR section where it says 'roll 2 dice and add 12' to 'roll 2 dice and add 24'". The Puffin employee says "Sure!", but thinks "Great, I've got a million things to do with proper books and now I have to waste time on this Mad Max knock-off for which he hasn't even bothered to put the paragraphs in the right order". He starts to skim through the instructions, immediately spots 'roll 2 dice and add 12' and changes it accordingly, perhaps whilst muttering "It's not even called 'ARMOUR', you named it 'STAMINA' you dingbat." Later someone says of the ARMOUR section, "Oh, I thought this was supposed to be 'roll 2 dice and add 24'...?" and it gets changed too. This would explain why the only book in which STAMINA is calculated this way has another stat which is calculated in the same way, which otherwise seems like quite a coincidence.
Alternatively... Ian Livingstone is a man who sticks rigidly to the manner of calculating basic stats whilst flinging the adventurers rendered by these rolls into quests in which these are ever more inadequate to the task. Whilst Forest of Doom is generous enough in this regard, City of Thieves is not; Deathtrap Dungeon is really not; Island of the Lizard King is not; Caverns of the Snow Witch no no no no. This trend will not end with Freeway Fighter, oh no. Statistical brutalities yet to come include Trial of Champions, the notorious Crypt of the Sorcerer and the infamous Blood of the Zombies, in which a zero (sic) with normally calculated STAMINA (at least in the first edition) is presented with the task of tackling 50 billion iterations of the marauding undead with little more than a feather duster and a positive attitude.* It doesn't matter. All gamebook players are either cheats or masochists, right? Whilst 2d6 + 12 seemed sufficient to take on an army of the undead, for Freeway Fighter Ian was in a benevolent mood. You see every Tuesday, Ian undergoes a series of medical treatments to keep his stone heart living for another week. The ordeal leaves him both exhilarated and disorientated. It is whilst he is in this frame of mind that he edits the instructions for Freeway Fighter. He is also emitting an eerie, colourful glow (because that's how everyone dressed in the 1980s).
Ian
"Oh my goodness, my poor readers are at risk of harsh treatment by these rules!" gasps the moustachioed one, completely mashed off his tits, "They have to dodge bullets in this adventure. I must make sure their stats are up to that, justified by some reason I'll think of later." Sadly he sobers up just before adding any explanation, which after all could be as simple as "In this adventure you wear ultra-lightweight, compact body armour because it's the future." (which would neatly lead on to a more typically Livingstonian "The treacherous biker girl strips you to your underpants, leaving you without the protection of your body armour, halve your STAMINA hahahaha") or "You are so jacked up with futuristic steroids that most weapons glance off your thick, dense, rubbery muscles like poorly fitted dentures off a Granny Smith apple."
As it is, things are left somewhat ambiguous.
________________________________________ *Obviously I'm exaggerating slightly about Blood of the Zombies, but it's perhaps a measure of the craziness of it all that whilst there are plenty of people on the internet who claim that the Earth is flat, that Covid is a hoax and that Donald Trump was sent by God to sweep away a vast paedophile network, no one has yet claimed to have beaten BotZ by the rules. Nice though your fan fic was, I doubt the thought process was any deeper than "Guns hurt more than swords so make them do more damage. Oh, and bump up the stamina to compensate." |
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Post by johnbrawn1972 on Jul 29, 2022 12:11:11 GMT
Maybe all that radiation has made people a lot stronger?
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Post by hallucination on Jul 29, 2022 21:06:26 GMT
And considering how terribly banged up you are even before beginning the adventure (if the graphic novel is to be taken as canon)
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Post by paperexplorer on Aug 1, 2022 3:11:36 GMT
I had always imagined an orc warrior would have no problem hacking up an apprentice chef, but according to Chasms of Malice, apparently not
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Post by CharlesX on Aug 1, 2022 5:26:15 GMT
I had always imagined an orc warrior would have no problem hacking up an apprentice chef, but according to Chasms of Malice, apparently not But remember, the apprentice chef is a direct royal descendant, the warrior is a filthy, lowly Orc. |
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Post by Gabe Fandango on Aug 1, 2022 9:06:16 GMT
I had always imagined an orc warrior would have no problem hacking up an apprentice chef, but according to Chasms of Malice, apparently not According to the Titan handbook, Orcs eat just about everything besides undead and their own kind. This means the chefs have to be specially trained against food that may fight back whilst in the middle of them preparing the meals. Orc Warriors are trained to fight soldiers on battlefield who are similarly trained to battle with routine, tedious and predictable formations and drills. Orc Chefs are trained to fight against just about everything conceivably edible, in all shapes and sizes. They are the true masters. |
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Post by thealmightymudworm on Aug 5, 2022 1:35:54 GMT
That's really well-written, but I still think you might be over-thinking it and Ian just felt like shuffling the rules at the time. I say Ian just 'doesn't get' difficulty curve, rather than he has a malicious tendency to write awful FF. As for comparing Freeway Fighter with Blood Of The Zombies, about 30 years time passed between when he wrote the two. For that matter, some time will have passed between Blood Of The Zombies and when Shadow Of The Giants comes out, as well. Nice though your fan fic was, I doubt the thought process was any deeper than "Guns hurt more than swords so make them do more damage. Oh, and bump up the stamina to compensate." Thanks for the compliments on the writing. I don't think overthinking or deep thinking comes into it though. My first thought on seeing STAMINA set at 2d6 + 24 was that it looked like an obvious misprint. Seeing the ARMOUR score is calculated in an identical way suggests the likely source of the error. If I'd never discussed it with anyone else that would have been the end of my thinking on the topic.
Since the idea of it being deliberate was raised, it leads to weighing up which is more likely. While it's quite possible that it's deliberate and I wouldn't bet £1,000 against it, for me all the circumstantial evidence points the other way. On one side: it was hardly unheard of for there to be errors and misprints in the Puffin editions. Creature of Havoc springs to mind but there are plenty of errors listed on Titannica. On the other: if the STAMINA score is deliberate then... - you have a weird coincidence of this being the only book with STAMINA being calculated 2d6+24 matching another stat calculation (ARMOUR) which only appears in this book - you have a well-established stat changed without explanation/justification despite there being various natural justifications - the supposed motivation for this – to bolster the adventurer's stats to get them through a challenge – is very much out of character for Ian Livingstone in particular I think that's generally true, yes. Ian wants players to die a few times, but the main reason for stats deaths is that he thinks adding tough fights makes his books cool and it's not important to balance challenges against a player's stats because everyone cheats anyway. That's what comes over in his interviews. But for this argument there isn't a big difference. His complete lack of interest in giving adventurers the stats they need is exactly why I don't think it's likely he'd have changed STAMINA here. Sure, but BotZ isn't a one-off, it's simply the natural conclusion of IL's lack of interest in balancing his gamebooks for people. Freeway Fighter (1985) is in between Caverns (1984), (in which a slightly above average hero of Sk10 St18 L10 has a 1 in 1000 chance of winning if they make all the right decisions) and Trial (1986) in which a similar hero has a negligible chance: you need Sk11 St18 L11 for your 1 in 1000 chance now.
Freeway Fighter is actuallly freakishly generous by the standards of Livingstonian gamebooks around this time: with the lowest FIREPOWER, ARMOUR and STAMINA (26) a hero with Sk 10 L 10 enjoys a wildly luxurious 23.1% chance. It would still be easier going than Caverns or Trial even with STAMINA calculated in the normal way. It's exactly this sort of thought that I don't think IL would have without mind-altering drugs.
I'm not sure it really makes sense anyway. Guns cause more damage to you in a fight than hand-to-hand weapons but they also cause more damage to your enemies, so gunfights are not deadlier, merely faster. (Although it is true that Ian is capable of thoughts that don't quite make sense.) As it is, the change simply makes the hero taking part in hand-to-hand combat seem more like Rasputin or Blackbeard than usual.
Right, that's probably my last word on that topic which I don't think anyone else felt needed to be discussed further at all, but I just wanted what I was saying to be clear. It's taken rather longer than intended, partly because I've been slowed down over the past week by a bout of Covid.
No doubt there's an interview out there proving me wrong anyway...
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Post by Gabe Fandango on Aug 6, 2022 5:08:44 GMT
I'm not sure it really makes sense anyway. Guns cause more damage to you in a fight than hand-to-hand weapons but they also cause more damage to your enemies, so gunfights are not deadlier, merely faster. (Although it is true that Ian is capable of thoughts that don't quite make sense.)
As it is, the change simply makes the hero taking part in hand-to-hand combat seem more like Rasputin or Blackbeard than usual.
It may not make much of a difference for individual comabts, but damage stack up in multiple combat. A PC who gets hit once per combat in 5 combats loses 10 STAMINA. A PC in Freeway Fighter who gets hit once per combat out of 5 can lose up to 30. And medkits are not anymore effective than meals in restoring it, so I'd say it makes perfect sense to bump up STAMINA to compensate for it. |
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sylas
Baron
"Don't just adventure for treasure; treasure the adventure!"
Posts: 1,678 
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy, Way of the Tiger
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Post by sylas on Aug 6, 2022 10:20:00 GMT
Most people will have about 6 Stamina. Becoming an adventurer adds 1d6. Any additional Stamina is plot armour. All protagonists have it.
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Post by thealmightymudworm on Aug 10, 2022 1:17:35 GMT
I'm not sure it really makes sense anyway. Guns cause more damage to you in a fight than hand-to-hand weapons but they also cause more damage to your enemies, so gunfights are not deadlier, merely faster. (Although it is true that Ian is capable of thoughts that don't quite make sense.)
As it is, the change simply makes the hero taking part in hand-to-hand combat seem more like Rasputin or Blackbeard than usual.
It may not make much of a difference for individual comabts, but damage stack up in multiple combat. A PC who gets hit once per combat in 5 combats loses 10 STAMINA. A PC in Freeway Fighter who gets hit once per combat out of 5 can lose up to 30. And medkits are not anymore effective than meals in restoring it, so I'd say it makes perfect sense to bump up STAMINA to compensate for it. Sure if you take the same number of gunshot hits in place of sword hits over a series of combats, you'll take more damage. (Though you'd have to be spectacularly unlucky to lose 30 STAMINA over 5 hits, and generally FF authors haven't tried to save players who were simply very unlucky.) On average a gunshot wound causes 3.5 STAMINA points of damage compared to 2 for a sword hit. But what I'm saying is that you have to be luckier to get out of a sword fight with only one hit. Say you're a SKILL 7 STAMINA 20 hero battling a SKILL 7 STAMINA 10 enemy. The first four rounds edge in your favour: you win 3 and lose 1. If this is a gunfight you've lost a certain number of STAMINA points – let's say 4 – whilst if it's a swordfight, only 2. But if it's a gunfight your enemy is probably dead (3 x 3.5 = 10.5 STAMINA loss on average) whereas if it's a swordfight you still have at least two coin-flip rounds to go. You could easily lose another 2 or 4 STAMINA points before you get to move on. |
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Post by Gabe Fandango on Aug 10, 2022 2:30:57 GMT
It may not make much of a difference for individual comabts, but damage stack up in multiple combat. A PC who gets hit once per combat in 5 combats loses 10 STAMINA. A PC in Freeway Fighter who gets hit once per combat out of 5 can lose up to 30. And medkits are not anymore effective than meals in restoring it, so I'd say it makes perfect sense to bump up STAMINA to compensate for it. Sure if you take the same number of gunshot hits in place of sword hits over a series of combats, you'll take more damage. (Though you'd have to be spectacularly unlucky to lose 30 STAMINA over 5 hits, and generally FF authors haven't tried to save players who were simply very unlucky.) On average a gunshot wound causes 3.5 STAMINA points of damage compared to 2 for a sword hit. But what I'm saying is that you have to be luckier to get out of a sword fight with only one hit. Say you're a SKILL 7 STAMINA 20 hero battling a SKILL 7 STAMINA 10 enemy. The first four rounds edge in your favour: you win 3 and lose 1. If this is a gunfight you've lost a certain number of STAMINA points – let's say 4 – whilst if it's a swordfight, only 2. But if it's a gunfight your enemy is probably dead (3 x 3.5 = 10.5 STAMINA loss on average) whereas if it's a swordfight you still have at least two coin-flip rounds to go. You could easily lose another 2 or 4 STAMINA points before you get to move on. interesting that you're using a SKILL 7 hero as an example. A SKILL 12 hero would have served your point better, I think. When you have the lower SKILL in a combat, getting shot/stabbed 5 times in a row is more likely to happen than you scoring consecutive blows and getting a quick win. Gunfights make combats quicker, but for a low-SKILLed hero, he's far more likely to make it out of battles with higher STAMINA losses on average than the usual FF PC in a swordfight - or not make it out of a battle at all. A low SKILLed character is always more likely to lose the "coin-flip" and get hit a lot in battles. A higher base STAMINA gives the low-SKILLed PC of the gunfight a higher chance to make it out of the battle alive. A SKILL 12 hero is more likely to blaze through combats with quick kills and taking little to no damage - but then, lower STAMINA has seldom been an issue for SKILL 12 heroes in any book. The sword-carrying adventurer may take more damage on average here, but usually not enough to the extent that he needs to be saved by extra STAMINA. So the STAMINA buff serves as a sort of balancing measure for low-SKILLed heroes in Freeway Fighter, while not really being much of a factor for high-SKILLed heroes either way. Honestly, though, the better way to balance out the higher STAMINA loss would probably have been making the medkits more effective than Provisions. |
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