Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: When do heroes become too powerful?

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: When do heroes become too powerful?

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I’ve been doing some work on a system for scaling AFF scenarios against the experience of the party and have come to some fairly startling conclusions. The reason for the thread necromancy here is that when I went searching the old posts some of it’s been said before.

Hullalla wrote:
you typically become almost a juggernaut when you have 3 SKILL points (including relevant special skill) above your enemies. Clearly, your absolute points are not so important, as long as the enemies somehow stay within that range.

This is spot on, what matters is your attack strength (SKILL plus weapon special skill plus modifiers) relative to your opponents. Outnumbering is part of that because it adds a modifier to AS. Other things such as damage, armour and STAMINA make some difference but are more likely to affect how long the fight takes than change the end result.

These are the odds of winning each round at various AS differences, you can see how one sided it gets once the difference is 3 or more. Of course this is ignoring special abilities but it’s a good guideline.

AS Diff____-5______-4_______-3_______-2_______-1_______0________1________2________3________4________5___
Win %____5.40%___9.72%___15.89%___23.91%___33.56%___44.36%___55.63%___66.43%___76.08%___84.10%___90.27%

Slloyd14 wrote:
It takes 180xp to take a 2 point skill to a 6 point skill (about 4 adventure's worth), so if this is a weapon skill, an adventurer can have an effective combat skill of 13 in relatively short time (skill 7 + weaponskill 6).

So a typical starting warrior character has an AS of 9 and after only 4 adventures will have an AS of 13 with their usual weapon.

Seeing as its relative AS that matters I’ve been looking through Out of the Pit and Beyond the Pit. The average SKILL of the creatures in both is a bit above 8. There are only 19 creatures in OotP and 14 in BtP with a SKILL of 13 or more, out of over 500. What’s more none of those 13+ SKILL creatures have a number appearing (NA) of more than 1, meaning they’ll never get an outnumbering bonus and may get one against them, although many do have multiple attacks to at least avoid that. Looking at SKILL 12 and 11 creatures, OotP has 27 and BtP 18, with three quarters having NA 1. There’s a gradual increase in creatures with a NA of more than 1 as SKILL goes down, but you have to get to 8 before more than half do.

My guess is that because the creatures came mainly from FF gamebooks their SKILL scores and numbers appearing are set to challenge a lone hero with a SKILL of up to 12 or maybe a little more counting items. Obviously an entire group of adventurers with AS 13 (some less than that but with magic) are a lot more powerful.

I don’t believe you can rebalance this from the monster side. The 16-18 SKILL creatures are things like Dragons and greater Demons that should rightly be at the top of the tree and met rarely. More 13-15 SKILL creatures would be helpful but again you don’t want to overuse them. Beyond the Pit says you can change listed SKILL by up to 2 either way, but you can’t have all the creatures being champions of their type just because the party have become powerful.

On the character side some ideas have already been brought up, like starting the adventurers with less points to spend. That’s a great option for adding variety to your campaign but as far as rebalancing the game goes it only delays the problem a little. Another suggestion is limiting Special Skill advances to half SKILL or MAGIC as appropriate. This definitely works but I don’t think it goes far enough and seems a bit of an artificial restriction on player choice.

If we need at least some encounters against creatures with AS within two or three points of the parties, and the bulk of creatures are in the 7-10 SKILL range, it means the longer the adventurer’s AS stays below 13 or so the better. This is after outnumbering and other modifiers so creatures that appear alone count lower unless they have a lot of attacks.

The problem is caused by the weapon Special Skills being worth up to 6 points and also relatively cheap. Against a 12 point scale for SKILL +6 is too much. The idea of weapon special skills allowing players to choose which weapons their characters are particularly practised with is great but I think you can get that without adding such a big bonus to the AS.

My suggestion is if a character is using any weapon they don’t have the Special Skill for it’s at -2. Having the weapon skill at 1 avoids this penalty but does not add to AS. They get a +1 to AS per every 2 ranks in the Special Skill, so at 2 it’s +1, 4 is +2 and 6 +3.

This limits starting characters to an AS of 8 (SKILL 7 + WSS 1). But more important is that then maxing out the special skill for their weapon of choice only takes them to AS 10, still well within the sweet spot for AFF creatures. From there increases to AS mean expensive SKILL advances. For comparison getting to AS 13 takes a minimum of 15 adventures at 50xp each compared to 4 before. If they accumulate the enormous amount needed to go all the way to SKILL 12 they have an AS of 15, high but more manageable than the 18 it was before. It’s also more in line with the limits of the heroes from the FF gamebooks.

My other suggestion is to take the numbers appearing in the creature books with a grain of salt. I’m wondering how often it’s based on the number that appeared in the FF gamebook it was from and that on the need to not overwhelm the lone hero. Director judgement needs to be applied but in a lot of cases the number can be increased. Also powerful enemies might be encountered with a bodyguard of another type of creature, there’s no reason not to mix and match if it seems like they could work together.

Statistics: Posted by SkinnyOrc — Thu Jun 02, 2016 12:14 pm

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June 2, 2016 at 06:23AM