Which means the doc can just use the highest roll. Seems to work. But would Doc Plus gain +3 in both cases or only using doctor to get it, like Ackbar is currently limited to all wounds healed or being doctor plus. And would Ackbar then be effectively unchanged?
Doc+ would make sense if it remains strictly just a better Doctor roll. I always found Akbar to be a weird and under-used skill, maybe Akbar would be better off if it was like Doc+ but worked on models that aren't UNC instead?
It's the targets PH that was supposed to be used not the PH of the paramedic, so a Daiyokai + a Keisotsu paramedic would be cheaper than a Daiyokai + a Tokusetsu Doctor while at the same time be better at healing the Daiyokai. But making paramedic a lower level of doctor so the Doctor and choose to use that instead as others suggest would solve that problem.
Sorry, I thought my shorthand was clear. PH14 on the target and Paramedic is more expensive than a WIP13 Dr. So I still don't see why a Keisot Paramedic healing a Daiyokai on 14s and a Tokusetsu Doctor healing it in 13s is a problem? It's not like the only thing to heal are Daiyokai.
N4 suggestion: Separate the psychological and physiological aspects of Valor into 2 separate skills, valor and dogged. Valor level 1: May choose to pass or fail guts rolls Valor level 2: Ignores opposing suppression and full auto mods Dogged level 1: Current dogged Dogged level 2: Current NWI
That is, certainly, a very novel and interesting take on it. Depends on how common that Valour L2 becomes, of course (preferably somewhere between current Veteran and current Martial Arts L1+)
This makes sense. Counterpoint: The fact that some medical skills are user WIP rolls and some are target PH rolls has always struck me as weird. The Regeneration skill being a user PH roll makes sense. But automated equipment, whether it's an automedikit or a medikit/medjector being used at range, seems like it ought to be a flat roll instead of a WIP or PH roll. If you're being injected with a swarm of medical nanobots, why isn't it just a Normal roll against 10 (medikit) or 13 (medjector, automedikit)? It seems like it'd simplify the costing as well; right now a trooper with a high PH is going to get more mileage out of another unit's equipment than other troopers might, but it doesn't really get reflected in the cost of the kit. If the kit just had a flat level of effectiveness regardless of the target, it would seem like the value of the kit would be more uniform and therefore easier to reflect in the kit's cost?
Has anyone already floated the idea of replacing ammo types with their effects? If we can streamline hyperdynamics and kinematica with dodge+X and dodge+X", why not the ammo? E.g. normal = ARM, breaker = 2xBTS/2. This would reduce the cognitive overload even more :)
I made myself a quick-reference sheet that lists weapon damage that way. For example, a Combi has a damage code of 13 [ARM], a Contender is 13 [ARM]x2, and a Breaker Combi is 13 [BTS/2]. I had to bracket the applicable defense and its modifiers from the number of rolls to make it more clear what math applies where. They already do. That ship has sailed, caught on fire, exploded, sank, and is currently a cozy artificial reef. :)
I like the clarification using brackets – on a sheet this can even be made to look a bit nicer. I also made myself a sheet, and will probably use your notation, depending on where N4 goes (they note down the saving roll attribute in the C1 quick start rules, so they may go where I'd like them to). But my hope is that some sort of shorthand ends up on the army list – I prefer my fluff to be in the fluff books, not having to translate it when I need to roll. I have to agree with you – from experience, new players have as much problems decoding DA and breaker etc. I now keep telling them DA means double ARM. That helps. Using [BTS]x2 or [ARM/2] is easier for new players since it I need to teach them fewer concepts. The issue there is the loss of fluff – "boom – explosive ammo" is certainly cooler sounding to new players than [ARM]x3.
I feel like this is where it's OK for the printed game profiles to note things a bit differently than the full profile entries. Other game systems do this just fine; you have a description that lists the full build for a troop or weapon, and then the version that you use at the table condenses all of it into a compact format. I think that more fluff should be in Army Builder's user interface—including pics of the units, not just their icons—but the printed profiles it spits out ought to be in a compact notation that separates "name of equipment" (TO Camo) from "effect of equipment" (Mimetism -6, Hidden Deployment, Camouflage -6 State), and the game effects really ought to be divided up logically. Here's an example, dividing the trooper's special abilities based on when you can use them:
The idea that one can enjoy the fluff while building lists and also reducing cognitive load while playing – dividing it up that way is a great idea. I really like your example … incidentally I wonder whether dodge and engage will be streamlined into a single skill, but that's perhaps another discussion (it looks like it could be, based on the dodge description in the C1 quick start rules and that there's only dodge+2" anymore).
I think that's kind of the point. As in the real world, better physical condition allows you to survive battlefield casualty treatment. This seems especially the case if it's an automated system with no regard to user skill. On another note it has the mechanical effect of rewarding the points cost going into higher PH scores. Paramedic provides a specialist option on cheap units that also has a last ditch chance of saving a fellow unit. Personally I'm pretty happy with the Paramedic/Doctor system as it is. The skills fill two distinctly different roles on different platforms. The suggestion that the Doctor skill doesn't kill on a failed roll might be enough to differentiate it more.
If we accept that as true, it applies only if you take a paramedic. If you leave a paramedic out, the PH score of every unit in your list is worth that little bit less, but it's not reflected in their point costs. That means that the value of your troops' PH depends on whether you include a paramedic, but neither their point cost nor the paramedic's actually changes, which seems like a bug, not a feature. Honestly, I suspect that PH point costing completely disregards the paramedic skill and corresponding equipment, and vice versa. I assume that units with STR pay the same per point of PH as other units, which would bear that out—a list of all STR units that includes a dakini paramedic doesn't pay less for PH or that paramedic, despite the fact that no unit in the list can benefit from that skill or its equipment. That seems to me like an argument in favor of keeping all of the value of the paramedic in the profile of the paramedic and its point cost, and decoupling those things from the stats (or lack thereof) on other units as fully as possible. To some degree this kind of thing is one place list-building synergies in a game can come from, but given that the whole point of a point system is about balancing forces on the table...if you have the option to avoid this sort of mutual-unit dependence when evaluating point costs it's going to result in a better point system, in that the value of a unit will be more consistent across different list builds. You can't account for everything in the points—a TAG that gets alpha-strike'd off the table before it gets to shoot anything had an effective value way less than its point cost—but this is an area where the point system can account for things. I'd just rather see synergies come from clever tactical combinations than from some gotcha in the point system where you maximize your marginal list value by including a paramedic.
Umm, yes? That's the point of synergies in list building: it breaks the points system in interesting ways. The fact that the value of a unit changes with context is a feature, not a bug. MSV2 + Smoke is the clearest example. To an extent you already see this in TAK, where most things worth healing have high PH and no Cubes. And it's already the case a Hellcat Paramedic is as good as a Tomcat Dr for healing McMurder. What I don't see is why pricing PH on the assumption that there aren't Paramedics on the board and pricing Paramedics on the assumption that they're used intelligently is a problem? (So ~ double the cost of an FO for a Paramedic.) Would it entirely supplant Drs? No. The vast majority of PH is lower than the average Dr WIP. Does it open up interesting list building and gameplay options? I think it does. Certain factions and lists would be able to rely on Paramedics more than Drs. It's actually a solid HI buff. ZY Paramedics, for instance, become a great tool and the ORC and Fusi Paramedic a great partnership. I do think including Paramedic as part of the Dr skill, as suggested, would probably be better but I don't think it'd be necessary.
This also opens up different fluff things having the same in-game effects in the context of skills. This is already done with weapons. To use a current example: Pretas do not have actual weapons (which are described thusly: "and the Pretas, thanks to the presence of the male-symbiont, can expulse wide sprays of small calcareous excrescences at great speed with the efficacy of a shrapnel weapon."), but in game play terms, it just has a Chain Rifle.
Er...no? The point system isn't the game, and vice versa. The point purpose of synergies in list building is to be able to pull off interesting tactics on the table; this is true for every wargame that I can think of, and the point system ideally is not relevant to that part of gameplay. If you have different kinds of pieces, and you can choose some but not all of them, then choosing pieces that complement one another with the intent of using their abilities in a combined way is the literal meaning of "synergistic list-building." From a design standpoint, the whole reason to have a point system in a wargame is as a balancing tool with a goal of ensuring fair matches to the best of the designers' ability. Some games omit the point system entirely, using other methods of balancing forces, and they're still full-featured games without it. The point system's purpose isn't to be another place to min-max; that just happens organically because people gonna be people. Yes, it's part of the game's design, but! So is the decision to use movement in inches rather than a movement grid, and the purpose of those isn't to give people a way to game the distance traveled around corners or diagonally; the purpose is to have a system for players to use when determining maximum movement distance. The fact that you can min-max, slice the pie, etc. is an artifact of the game's level of granularity and the decisions of how rules are structured, but not necessarily indicative of the goals of those rules. The whole "stick an enemy unit on a wall" thing and the fact that it was FAQ'd out is a great example of this principle. Anyway, I digress. My intent wasn't that the point system should only be balanced around a unit's stand-alone abilities instead of how it might perform in a combined-arms manner, my intent was to highlight that decoupling the PH of a target from the point cost of a piece of equipment is one way to make the point cost for that equipment more consistent and therefore more fair across a variety of lists. If we want to get into the fluff, comparing the actual PH values of units gives some oddball results, not least because PH is as much about ferocity and agility as it is about health. I'm most familiar with Yu Jing so I'll go that way. Kuang Shi are LI with PH 12. Bao, Celestial Guards, Pheasants, and most other YJ LI have PH 10. Heavy Infantry on the other hand have PH scores that are mostly 12-14, but those vary widely and sometimes they're kind of odd (Hulang are PH 12?), and they seem to reflect the augmentation of wearing a heavy power suit—which should be related to the Engineer skill—rather than the musculature of the meat person inside the suit. So Kuang Shi are just innately in better shape and respond better to field treatment than literally every member of the ISS who isn't equipped with medium or heavy powered armor? Seems suspicious. And wearing powered armor makes you more likely to survive a medical dart? Also weird. I could see making medikits a "damage" roll, BTS vs. DAM 10, which at least maps to an in-game system for tracking how good your gear is at keeping you alive.
This is a really interesting way of describing a very complicated bit of thought about balance fulcrums and levers. I like it a lot.
