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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Slloyd14 wrote:
you could limit all skills to a maximum of 3 points

This one had me thinking, there is a nice symmetry to how special skills in AFF work the same way with all types of tests. Reducing all skills to a maximum of 3 points would be a way to keep that and still stop character attack strengths from being too high. So I did some digging to see how it might work.

Here's some examples of unopposed tests at various SKILL, special skills and difficulty. The target number tops out at 11 of course because a double six always fails. First up with no difficulty modifier:

SKILL___SpSk____Mod____Target___Success
7_______+0_______0_______7______58.3%
7_______+3_______0______10______91.62%
7_______+6_______0______11______97.17%
9_______+0_______0_______9______83.29%
9_______+3_______0______11______97.17%
12______+0_______0______11______97.17%

With a -3 difficulty modifier:

SKILL___SpSk____Mod____Target___Success
7_______+0______-3_______4______16.65%
7_______+3______-3_______7______58.30%
7_______+6______-3______10______91.62%
9_______+0______-3_______6______41.64%
9_______+3______-3_______9______83.29%
9_______+6______-3______11______97.17%
12______+0______-3_______9______83.29%
12______+3______-3______11______97.17%

With a whopping -6 difficulty modifier:

SKILL___SpSk____Mod____Target___Success
7_______+0______-6_______1______2.77%
7_______+3______-6_______4______16.65%
7_______+6______-6_______7______58.30%
9_______+0______-6_______3______8.32%
9_______+3______-6_______6______41.64%
9_______+6______-6_______9______83.29%
12______+0______-6_______6______41.64%
12______+3______-6_______9______83.29%
12______+6______-6______11______97.17%

I got a couple of things from this. For unopposed tests it does look like the special skills need to be in the 1-6 point range to make enough of a difference relative to SKILL. Most AFF tests apart from combat are unopposed so it's maybe not surprising the skill system is designed for them.

The other is you don't need to be shy with penalties on unopposed tests. A -6 penalty is fine for anything truly difficult, they still have a good chance of success if it's something they're skilled at (high relevant special skill) or are very experienced (high SKILL).

The odds with opposed tests are the same as for combat rolls in the earlier post, because er... combat rolls are opposed tests So even if the opponent has a few points higher SKILL they don't have much chance if the character gets +6 from a special skill. But there's a few differences that in my opinion means they work.

The obvious one is there just aren't opportunities to use any particular non-weapon special skill as much as the one for a character's main weapon. That means there's a lot of them to spread experience around so it takes longer to get any to +6. Even if the player does decide to specialise in one it'll only be useful every now and again but when it is they'll be great at it.

The other is it's easy to adjust the difficulty of most non-combat opposed tests. If a character's sneaking past and has +6 from the skill you can give the guard +3 because the light's good, or they've really alert from being yelled at by their boss, or whatever. It's easy to adjust the challenge without increasing the creatures SKILL. With combat it's a lot harder to do that other than increasing number appearing or maybe setting up a situation where they might get surprise.

So the short version is it seems like the 1-6 special skill scale is needed to make them count enough in unopposed tests, and it's also fine for non-combat opposed tests.

Statistics: Posted by SkinnyOrc — Fri Jun 17, 2016 11:51 am

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June 17, 2016 at 06:11AM