Talk:Mano a Mano

Stun Counters R.I.P.

Rest

This action recovers all of your stun and gives you a +2 defense modifier until your next turn.

I like this idea* and want to test it ASAP. -BFGalbraith 2008.07.10

Should the defense modifier while resting be +3 or +4? Is using a turn to recover stun too risky or punishing if the defense bonus is only +2?

I think the +2 is actually on the high side (I would have first suggested no bonus or only a +1,) so +2 is what I think we should test. -BFGalbraith 2008.07.10

While you are incapacitated you recover half of your stun each turn.

When characters are incapacitated, there should be rules for how many rounds it takes for them to become incapacitated, and they should have an extra modifier against defense in addition to being on the ground.

I don't think we should have an extra penalty for being incapacitated, even if it would be realistic. Incapacitated can mean "dead" or "not getting up until the fight is over", but it can also mean that you just got knocked down by lots of stun, so you still have a chance to get up and continue the fight. The fighter's legs buckle, he looses his balance, he collapses, but then he gets back up and continues fighting. We are already giving him obstacles to overcome by having the fighter fall down and spend at least one turn recovering stun. If the fighter has any chance of recovery from that, I say we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his curl-up-in-a-corner defense is equivalent to normal ground penalties with no extra penalty, rather than punishing him for trying.

Half Power R.I.P.

• Instead of half power and full power attacks, have normal and double power attacks.
• Toughness becomes the amount of damage + stun you can take without being injured.
• The damage + stun required to incapacitate you is 2 × toughness.
• We can reduce average human power to 3 and toughness to 4 or 5 if necessary.
• You only have to list one power number for weapons.
• success-based damage might be simpler with this system

This is good. I approve of this system. -BFGalbraith, 2008.07.10

All attacks will be full power except for the following double power attacks:

• powerful strike
• powerful throw
• heave
• trip
• wrench
• choke
• disarm

This changes the balance between melee and missile weapon power: hand weapons and thrown weapons can do double damage but bows and guns cannot. Should we make power more expensive for hand weapons?

Will 2 × toughness replace healthy on the character sheet? Should we call it "stamina"? Is it so easy to calculate we don't need to put it on the character sheet?

Healthy, Injured, Incapacitated

Currently we have not defined "injured" to mean "damage + stun > healthy" because I argued that the distinction between "took damage" and "was injured" could be confusing. However I find myself wanting to use the term "injured" because of mini mam, and because it is convenient. In fact it would be convenient and narratively helpful to be able to contrast the three states of "healthy" (not necessarily unhurt) "injured" and "incapacitated". We do need to make sure that we only use the word "injured" in this specific sense, and what that sense is everywhere the word is used. (a simple text search for "injur" on the complete system page should make this easy.)

Having the three states of character health is fine with me. -BFGalbraith 2008.07.10

Success-Based Damage

• If the attack roll is 12 or less before adding modifiers, the attack has half power.
• If the attack roll is automatically successful, the attack gets an extra half power.

d20 roll	2d10 roll	3d6 roll	half power attack	full power attack
1-12	1-12	1-12	half power (still)	reduced to half power
13-19	13-18	13-15	half power (normal)	full power (normal)
20	19-20	16-18	half power + half power	full power + half power

I think this will work better than damage rolls because it gives us the variation we want with less math and fewer dice. Either of these two rules could be optional. The choice of the number 12 is fairly arbitrary but it seems balanced. It means about 20% of successful hits against an equally matched opponent will only do half damage, 60% of successful hits against a punching bag that can't avoid your attacks will do half damage, and all hits against an opponent who is really hard to hit will do at least normal damage.

I think we should have random damage, and I think that random damage should be an optional rule and not the default. I like the number ranges for this system, and this is most like the random damage systems used in the past with this system, so this is my favorite optional random damage system for MaM 2009 -BFGalbraith, 2008.07.10

Compact Characters

Some games will have some characters who only need a little bit of information instead of full character sheets:

• stock villains and monsters which only need combat stats and sometimes a few special qualities or abilities.
• battle-on-a-page where two facing pages of an RPG book contain everything a player or GM needs to play one side (the "NPC" side) of a battle.
• book-of-beasties which contains dozens of creatures which need to be playable. Most of these creatures won't have equipment.
• a "how to" format for beginning players, explaining how to do basic actions, what dice to roll, etc.
• "collectible characters" (action figures, miniatures, cards or comic books about characters) with a little stat section, possibly a "full" mano a mano character as well as "how to" stats or stats for a simpler game like minimam.

Padded Weapon Damage?

In the past we had rules where accumulating lots of stun would cause damage. I think padded weapons can sometimes cause damage, but not simply by accumulation. Instead, if a single attack causes too much stun (compared to the target's toughness or healthy perhaps) some of that stun is converted into damage. If we say "attacks that cause more stun than toughness" then only instant knockout attacks do lasting damage (Is this consistent with boxing reality?) If we say "attacks that cause more stun than healthy" then most full power attacks with blunt weapons will do a little lasting damage.

A simpler way of wording this might be to say:

• The victim of an attack can absorb some attack power as temporary stun, the rest becomes damage
• your healthy|toughness is the maximum amount of power you can convert to stun from a single attack
• all of the power of a padded weapon attack can be converted to stun, if you have enough healthy|toughness
• half of the power of a blunt (not padded or sharp) weapon can be converted to stun if you have enough healthy|toughness
• none of the power of a sharp weapon can be converted to stun

Editing Character Sheet

If you change the character sheet format when editing any of the following, you must update the others:

• Blank Character Sheet
• Example Template
• Example Character
• Clone character sheet in the Combat Example!

Be sure you know which character sheet you are updating:

• The template creation example includes both the blank character sheet and the example template.
• The character creation example includes both the example template and the example character sheet.