Trying to keep things as simple as I can for myself and generally liking FS3, I am wondering if a ‘scale toggle’ would be a thing that could work in FS3. To define what I mean, imagine a conflict between a person and an AI tank. The human would be on human scale (call it 0) and the tank on vehicle scale (call it 1).
The idea would be that the scale difference would put automatic penalties or bonuses in place depending if you are punching above or below your weight class. In this example, the human would face a penalty to do damage (call it -10) and the tank would gain a similar amount (+10) because of scale difference.
It seems something like this would allow FS3 to be used for things like humans against powerful supernatural beings (like a lot of urban fantasy novels), mecha and kaiju, etc.
Obviously the idea would have to be refined dramatically, but does it sound reasonable to explore to anybody else or is this just a really bad idea?
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I explored a concept similar to this with people vs vehicles in an earlier version of FS3. It really didn’t work out very well in practice. I also remember ages ago playing Robotech in Palladium’s system with megadamage vs. regular damage (to simulate people vs mechs) and that really didn’t work out very well either. So I’m not saying it absolutely can’t be done, but color me skeptical.
With FS3 in particular, part of the challenge is in the way the mechanics work. Lethality for instance is a percentage. You already get a 30% bonus for hitting a critical area (like the head/cockpit) and a 15-30% bonus for hitting a NPC. So that’s +60% right there on top of a random die roll. What would represent a human getting hit by a mecha bullet? +200%? That’s pretty much an automatic KO.
Armor is in a similar boat, where vast differences between penetration and protection come down to “your bullets bounce off the tank”.
All of that is pretty accurate when you’re dealing with humans versus tanks and stuff, but at that point you have to ask yourself… why bother? Just RP it and hope they can come up with some clever way to destroy the tank (sticky bombs!) and don’t try to make the system model what happens when you try to shoot a tank with an AR15.
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