From: wadsley@chipmunk.cita.utoronto.ca
Date: Sun 10 Oct 1993 - 02:12:12 EET
G. Fried there ( to Allan ):
In your discussion of spirits on the SP getting really huge, you touch upon
an issue that really bothers me and that I have raised in the past, to no
avail. You mention that a spirit with 1000 POW will have trouble finding
another spirit in the range 990-1010 to get a POW gain check from. Notice an
absolutely absurd implication of the current rules: an entity of POW 1000
will always (excluding statistical miracles) lose to a being of POW 1010 --
even though there is only a 1% difference between them!!! This makes NO
sense to me.
Any ideas for fixes that get at the proportional values of STATS?
I have a slighlty heretical fix which I used to combat Stat vs. Stat problems. I looked at SIZ and saw that it was logarithmic and decided that everything else should be that way too. If I recall correctly, mass DOUBLES every 8 SIZ: something like 8 SIZ=50 kg, 16 SIZ=100 kg, 24 SIZ=200 kg etc... If you take a log scale for all stats then 1010 POW would mean just over twice as much power as 1000 POW and thus the resistance table begins to make sense at any POW ( or for any other stat ). This also makes sense because 50 STR lifts 50 SIZ therefore STR must be logarithmic and the way other characteristics are combined with STR only makes good sense if they are logarithmic too.
Going down this road makes really huge stats look ridiculously gross - but they are so it really rubs it in. For example: if something has 100 SIZ then it is >1000x the mass of a human - which is pretty severe. ( There is some sort of leveling out with the SIZ vs. mass table at 100 SIZ, but it's a crock IMHO and is to be ignored. )
In my view also - very few things should have more than 20-30 dex. It's just unphysical. If the rules make big creatures really clumsy then the rules need fixing ( or ignoring - which is what I normally do ) - don't give them 100 dex to compensate! ( Yes - I do hate centaurs :-) ).
As a GM I simply refuse to include 1000 SIZ or whatever creatures in my campaign. They are completely ridiculous. A 200 SIZ creature can eat anything on the map so why bother... I scale all such creatures back to more sensible ( but still absolutely gross when you think about it ) levels - often just a division by 5.
James Wadsley.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:31:52 EEST