06-20-2015, 02:03 PM
(06-20-2015, 05:41 AM)Kersus Wrote: Can it be both? Can I agree that I want one system to do all that but also want to occasionally dip into other systems?
"A +4 sword--a powerful magic weapon by D&D standards--is equivalent to a 10 precision extraordinary sword in LA that adds 3-5 preternatural harm."
Out of curiousity, why only 10? I would have figured at least 20.
You can play as many games as you like. You notice it more when you play an RPG that isn't among the top 5 brands that the "game of choice" from one person to the next keeps people from playing together. Wasn't the whole point of bringing rules into what is essentially a game of make-believe to bring everyone onto the same page?
It's tempting to convert the +4 sword to 20 precision in LA just on the bases that each pip on a d20 is worth 5%. Seems reasonable that 4 of them add up to 20 on a percentile system.
The reason a +4 sword only converts to a 10 precision bonus is because of the way Extraordinary items are treated in LA. That 10 precision doesn't just bump up your chance to hit by 10 points. It subtracts from the die roll, increasing by 10 points the odds of getting an '01'--maximum harm, bypassing armor. When you consider that in an armor absorption system such as LA, armor can reduce a percentage of "hits" to zero damage.
Keep in mind, in D&D, a "miss" can be interpreted as being a total whiff, or it could indicate that there was a hit, but the armor rendered it ineffective. (This is the answer to the common objection to D&D's system that wearing heavy, bulky armor should make you easier to hit, not harder.) Thus extraordinary precision bonus in LA is in a sense pulling double-duty. Especially if you're trying to emulate the spirit of D&D using LA rules.
You can also confirm this crudely by calculating "expected harm" per attack. This is imperfect because the two systems are different enough that the conversion has to be "calibrated" to a common case. The further you deviate from that case, the more the calculation will be off. A +4 weapon in D&D is actually a fairly meaty deviation. But comparing the two systems, the average expected harm per attack in LA is satisfactorily close to twice the expected damage per attack in D&D. (It should be roughly double because 2 health converts to 1 hit point.)
But this is the level of precision I seek to bridge the two systems. Yes, I want to preserve the mathematical probabilities and effects. But I also want to dig deeper than the superficial mathematics of it. I want to ask how something we could easily imagine--hitting someone, but the hit entirely absorbed by armor--is expressed in each of the two systems, and make sure that isn't left out of the equations.