From:	David Buehrer <dbuehrer@****.ORG>
Subject:	Re: [SR3] Staging
Date:	Fri, 11 Jul 1997 09:04:39 -0600

Bruce H. Nagel wrote:
|
[snip]
|
| These examples don't really illustrate what I was thinking about,
so I'll try | to be more clear. It may be easy for me to aim a shot
at someone with a | firearm, but not easy to dodge it. Thus, it
might require more successes to | dodge the attack than to improve
the shot and increase the damage level. But | as you've been saying,
that could be done through higher T#'s rather than a | higher damage
staging # (SR2 vs. SR1, basically). In some cases, I see it as |
being so great a difference in difficulty that a lower staging for
attack would | make sense to me, as well as perhaps an easier target
number (since skills | limit the number of dice you can throw at a
test).

<Bill Nye> Consider the following. With Drain it's the caster vs the
magic and you can create valid reasons for variable staging (see my
other post). However, combat has several things going on. There's
the attack test, the dodge test, the damage resistance test. And
these can be modified by a multitude of variables: perception, BF,
AF, armor, wounds, etc. And the system is abstract in nature. It
doesn't reflect what happens in combat, it *represents* what happens
in combat. IMO, you would be making a reflective adjustment to a
representative system, and would throw things out of balance in the
proccess.

Anyway, I feel that I've said all I can say and I think I did a
pretty good job of expressing myself. (Not to mean that I won't
debate this anymore :) But at this point its heading toward a
philosophical debate and if it does I'll say what I said in a
previous post, you can do whatever you want to in your game :)

-David
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/1068/homepage.htm
--
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing
which ones to keep."