Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Inanimate Disconnect (181 vs 201)

The following was mildly cathartic to type up, but not worth the storm it would generate on the Scion forums.

Engaging Vent/Nitpick Mode...

Inanimate Disconnect (181 vs 201)

Has anyone else noticed the extreme disconnect between the charts on page 181 and 201?

If Strength + Athletics = 11, according to page 181, you can "knock down a brick wall with repeated blows".

However, according to page 201, that brick wall has Bashing Soak of 14, health levels of 40. So to render the wall "damaged" to the extent that it "no longer keeps things out" you need a raw damage pool of at least 15 dice.

Assuming my Dex + Brawl match my Str + Ath, so I'm getting about 6 threshold successes on each attack and I make only "heavy unarmed" attacks I can hit that 15 damage pool minimum every time, but I'd have to hit the darned wall 20 times to get through. A hero level scion with Epic Strength 3 and a sledgehammer (Quauhololli stats, +7B) would still take 5 or 6 attacks to bash a hole he could squeeze through. 20 heavy attacks would be about 1.6 minutes (100 ticks), but page 181 says you can do it in a minute without the hammer.

To further complicate things, IMHO, Holy Rampage and Divine Rampage are virtually useless as written. Hardness is rarely the big problem. I houseruled them to reduce soak as well as hardness, but the PCs are still generally better off using the chart on page 181 than making an attack using Holy Rampage.

Ending Vent/Nitpick Mode

Thankfully, my campaign is now at Demigod level, where Epic Strength 5 solves this issue pretty quickly. (Epic 5 provides +11 successes beyond the die roll)

3 comments:

digital_sextant said...

I love the thought that this would start a storm of controversy. It seems such a reasonable criticism, yet I know there would be ragers, people affronted to their very core by this observation.

SiderisAnon said...

Oh, you just don't understand how the structure of a brick wall works. You see, bricks are formed .... and mortar does ... blah blah blah.

There. Now you get a little bit of flame war of your very own. Or something.

Sorry, feeling snarky today.

My actual thought on reading the post was that I thought hardness and soak were the same thing on objects. :) I guess I'd better read that section again.

Personally, I just love the fact that by the table, my little 125 lb. character can hook a rope to her car and run down the street at full speed while pulling it. It gets great gas millage that way!

rbbergstrom said...

Your revolver and my crayola box both have 6 cylindrical objects in them, but who's gonna win the fight? :)

Soak and Hardness are like that. :) Kinda. Sorta. If you stretch.

As a default, all inanimate objects have a Hardness Value equal to their Soak. They do different things, however. Soak absorbs damage that has been rolled, whereas Hardness prevents damage from being rolled in the first place.

Any damage pool small enough to be stopped by default Hardness is less than 25% likely to penetrate Soak, anyway. Therefore, reducing Hardness of an object is rather pointless - even cutting it to zero still leaves you with a very small chance of damaging the object.

Hardness is derived from soak, but nothing in the books says clearly that altering one or the other via a power affects both.

I intuited that they should, and so houseruled all things (that alter either) in my campaign to alter both.

And those are the points which would get argued on the forum for about 4 or 5 pages (40 to 100 posts) if I'd stuck this little observation up there.