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1991-06-12
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Path: pitt!cadre!pt.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!hubcap!mrspock
From: mrspock@hubcap.UUCP (Steve Benz)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp
Subject: Re: Improved Clerical healing system - Equations
Message-ID: <1650@hubcap.UUCP>
Date: 17 May 88 21:05:07 GMT
References: <1646@hubcap.UUCP>
Organization: Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Lines: 163
Okay, in the complaints section we covered the notion that Cure spells
should not be based on dice, rather they should be based on more important
things:
Level of the cleric
Wisdom
His past track record at serving his God
The importance of the current mission to his God
What the Cleric's diety thinks about what the Cleric
is doing right now (as the spell is cast.)
The alignment of the patient relative to the alignment of the healer
The mystery question is, how do you quantify the above?
I'll discuss them one at a time:
Level of the Cleric(LV)
-----------------------
All you have to do here is slap a percent sign after your level--
that is, for a third level cleric, LV=3%. (Right, it's that easy.)
Wisdom(WIS)
-----------
Convert this to a percentage and you're ready to go--
(15 wisdom means WIS=15%)
Past track record (TR)
----------------------
Past track record is a number from (roughly) -5% to +5%. Many clerics
are simply average, they get a 0. If the cleric accidentally blows
up a temple of his alignment, you'd better call the figure closer to -2
or so. If the deed was intentional but under mitigating circumstances,
then the number should be -5 or so. Anything worse and the Cleric should
get a blue boulder from heaven on his/her head. On the other hand, if
the Cleric has been a good boy/girl in the past, give 'em a +2 or a +3.
If the Cleric is headed for sainthood, maybe give 'em +5, but probably not.
Anybody that true to their God/Alignment should be knifed in the back by
somebody from the opposite alignment. :-)
Importance of mission (IM)
--------------------------
Importance of mission is a number from -3% to +3%.
IM is supposed to reflect whether the cleric is currently doing something
really important for his deity or alignment, or doing something totally
against what his deity would want, or just doing the usual stuff that the
deity doesn't care much about one way or the other.
I've never played in or DM'ed a mission where this number deserved to be
non-zero. Maybe you folks have, so I stuck it in there.
Recent actions (RA)
-------------------
Pick a number that centers around 0 (probably between -2% and 2%.)
This number describes what the Cleric's God thinks about what
the Cleric has been doing around casting time.
This isn't designed to be a punishment or a benefit,
it won't impact actual results that much. It's more of a feedback
mechanism from you to the player on how you think he's measuring up,
and to give some indication of what his TR will be doing in the future.
Alignment Affinity (AA)
-----------------------
When figuring this, remember that a Cure gives two forms of healing
at once, spiritual healing, and physical healing. Physical healing
works regardless of alignment, but spiritual healing relies entirely
on it. So, you have to decide, here and now, what the ratio of spiritual
points to physical points is in your campaign. For generality,
I'm going to call it SP:PP. Good numbers here are 1:1, and 2:1.
(My favorite and Bart's favorite, respectively)
The second thing you have to consider is how do you quantify
the alignment difference. You can do this any way you want,
so long as the result is a percentage, with 100% being complete
agreement (ex. CG - CG), and 0% being complete disagreement
(ex. CE - LG).
Most folks will figure it like I do, but feel free to use your own
system. I compute it like this:
+----+----+----+ Start at your alignment, find the minimum number of
| LG | NG | CG | hops it'll take you to get to the Cleric's alignment
+----+----+----+ without going diagonal. Subtract that number from
| LN | N | CN | four, and multiply by 25%.
+----+----+----+
| LE | NE | CE |
+----+----+----+
Some folks might like to figure that any vertical hop (good <--> evil)
counts double. In that event, subtract from 6 and multiply by 16.6%.
I'd add that you can't hop _through_ true neutral.
This has the effect of making LN and CN just as opposed as LG vs CE.
Compute this figure any way you want (So long as it comes to
a percentage) and call it AA (Alignment Affinity).
Summing it all up
-----------------
You might have noticed these two things:
- RA is the only one of these that needs to be computed at run-time.
- All else but AA are constant for the Cleric.
I'd like to introduce a new term, current favor:
CF = LV + WIS + TR + IM
CF is computed for each cleric in the party, AA is computed for each
party member relative to each cleric.
Alright, so you've got CF and AA calculated, now we're ready to
do some serious calculating. The number of HP restored by a
cure spell is:
/SP*AA+PP\
(CF+RA) * | -------- | * HP(patient)
\ PP+SP /
Now I know what you're thinking, you think this is too friggin'
much trouble to calculate every time a heal is cast. Well, I'd
like to introduce a new variable, VARIANCE, it's here to help:
/SP*AA+PP\
VARIANCE = HP * | -------- |
\ PP+SP /
Compute VARIANCE for each party member relative to each Cleric
(as in AA).
That means the value of a heal is down to:
(CF+RA) * VARIANCE
Which can be beaten into:
CF*VARIANCE + RA*VARIANCE
You can compute CF*VARIANCE for each cleric/party member combination
ahead of time. Call this value BASE
** For you computer-literate folks, BASE and VARIANCE are two-dimensional
arrays, indexed by party member and cleric.
So our equation now looks like:
BASE + RA*VARIANCE
Since most of the time, the Cleric is doing "pretty much the right
thing", RA will most of the time be 0, so there's no math involved
*at all* at casting time. Since RA is a fairly discrete value (that
is it only has a few possible values, 0, 1, and 2) that multiplication
is much easier than it looks in the equation. So you shouldn't
need a calculator at casting time.
One minor problem: First level Clerics aren't
worth piss. We came up with a couple of "mercy-point" systems for
that situation, the one we liked best was this. When computing
the VARIANCE, instead of using HP(patient),
use HP(patient) + (the # of sides on their hit dice).
This has little effect for high level clerics and patients, but
helps out the low level types quite a bit.
Now, on to discussing spells...