Re: DS2 FMA Enhancement Invulnerability and Auto kills

Andrew wrote:

>When rolling a number of dice equal to the weapon class and of type
>according to weapon damage, and comparing the highest die with the
>opponent's highest dice of a number of D6s according to the target's
armour
>level; if the damage dice are bigger than D6, there is between 25% (D8)
to
>50% (D12) chance of kill, no matter what the defender rolls. Similarly
for
>HEL attacking ablative armour, the defender has a 33.3% chance to be
immune
>to the HEL, no matter what size it is.

This is one reason why I am advocating the added dice vs. static armor
number method as the standard. The big problem I see here is not one of
automatic kill or automatic defence, but a class 5 laser failing to do
any
damage to an abalative class 1 armor. The chit draw system was additive,
so
that the larger the weapon the more raw damage it did in an attack. It
is
true that this will generate automatic kills where the chit draw system
didn't (a class 5 weapon minimum is a 5, class 1 armor can only take a
three, while in chit draw it was concieveable to draw five zeros) but
these
should only be at the natural extremes of the scale (auto kill for a
large
weapon attacking a small vehicle, auto defend for a small weapon
attacking a
large vehicle), but if you use my proposed critical hit and the roll of
the
die is equal to the vehicle's armor level, you could end up with five
mobility hits and no other damage, rare but possible.

This will still leave some tanks invulnerable to critical hits from
certain
kinds of weapon fire: class 5 and up abalative armors vs. HEL and
RFAC/HVC
at long range, class 7 armors against HEL and  MDC at long range, ect.
but
this is only against that individual type of weapon or in most cases a
specific range on a single weapon. Remember that only tanks invulnerable
to
critical hits are invulnerable, 1/4th of all crits on the table are
"BOOM".
So even if a class 1 laser fires at a fully armored class 4 tank with
abalative, there is a 1 in 5 chance of hurting the tank and a 1 in 16
chance
that the tank will go up with a spectacular fireworks display, not bad
for a
class 1 peashooter.

As far as losing time to the adding of dice I'm really not that
concerned. I
haven't proposed any really massive changes to the fire and damage
procedures, which is very fast relative to every other game on the
market,
and it works extremely well.

I am not really concerned with the timing of the procedure as much as
the
hassle of drawing chits over rolling dice, not to mention that chits get
lost (I have a homemade "M" to replace one I couldn't retrieve after my
chits got spilled near a ventilation duct. I could see it, I could see
the
little blue "M" on it but I couldn't reach it.) and this changes the
effects
of the damage resolution (and/or creates accusations of cheating with
"Marked Chits" because the replacement dosen't feel the same as the
rest.)

Anyways I'm not trying to make this enhancement an accellerator, but a
FMA
dice damage resolution for Dirtside II

By the way: What does FMA stand for? I know I've seen it, or heard it
somewhere but I can't rember where so I can go back and look. With my
luck I
will read it five seconds after I post this message.

Jim Whitehead