The primary defense in Cyberrats is soak. If you have soak 2, you reduce all incoming damage by 2.
Someone hits you for 5, you take 3 damage. Easy.
We considered about introducing a new keyword called bastion. What follows is an explanation of why we didn’t.
Bastion? Not here!
Bastion would have been a threshold that an attack would have to exceed in order to do damage. If you have bastion 5, you ignore attacks that deal less than 5 damage.
You get attacked for 4, no damage. You get attacked for 7, you lose 7 HP. Not too complicated yet.
What about in practice?
Let’s look an an enemy, a big ol’ boss. We give him 20 health and bastion 5.
He gets hit for 8 damage, he has 12 left.
Get hit again for 8. Down to 4 health.
Hit for 4, ignore it.
Hit for 9, drops.
Okay…
Compare this to reusing soak: we give the guy 5 soak and 10 health.
He gets hit for 8, soaks 5 and loses 3 health. Down to 7 HP.
Gets hit for 8 again, down to 4 health.
Get his for 4, ignores it.
Gets hit for 9, drops.
That’s the same thing
Exactly. The numbers are smaller (10 health instead of 20), but we get the same effects. And we have an added benefit of not having two similar mechanics.
But bastion sounds neat
It’s true! I really like the threshold mechanic! And in a game where we didn’t have soak, I’d definitely consider using it. Instead of having to subtract every time you get hit, you can just compare to a threshold, which is faster!
It does present a problem where your numbers get really big without getting too powerful. If you have 20 hit points and 10 threshold, the only attacks that are going to hit you are going to hit you hard.
But these kinds of problems can be designed around.
For now? For Cyberrats?
I’ll stick to soak.