Combat Advancement

Back to Combat again to answer the question of  what rate characters progress at. I've got just one more post after this about this combat system, then it's on to pastures new. So here's the answer:

Parry, attack and incapacitated values go up by 1 every level. (Kill doesn't).

But here's the rub - this is true for every class not just Fighters! What differentiates the class is how much better the Fighter starts off at melee and parry. If they start off +2 in melee and parry, then they are always +2 in melee and parry, so they are always 1.5 times as likely to hit, and 2/3 as likely to be hit.

In addition, a Fighter also has several attacks (melee / bow / throw / unarmed), whereas other characters would only have one or two of these.

So how does this rate of advancement work out in practice? (If you get bored, just skip to the conclusion section at the bottom).

What are the stats for an nth level fighter?
Assuming a Fighter has Plate & Shield & a sword, then a typical value for 1st level would be

Sword & Shield: P17, A4, K5. 
11/14/17/20 (23)
Full Armour: 9

So at nth level a Fighter's stats would be

Sword & Shield: P16+n, A3+n, K5. 
11/-/-/- (22+n)
Full Armour: 9

Note that this also applies to level 0.

(The other wound thresholds are just averages rounded up, so at 3rd level the middle one W3 is average of 11&25 = 18. Then W2 is average of 11&18 = 15. W4 is average of 18&25 = 22).

How good at fighting is this monster?
Everything has a Fight Rating, which is

Fight Rating = Parry + Attack + Kill + W3 (i.e. the middle value)

Anything with the same Fight Rating is roughly the same threat. That is, bonuses on parry, attack, kill or armour are roughly equivalent, but bonuses on incapacitation alone are only half as good.

Thus every level you get +2.5 fight rating, plus every so often you'll find some magic item or other to improve you, so we take that +3 fight rating for a monster makes it +1 level. Our 1st level fighter above had 43 fight points, and we'll take 42-44 as level 1:

Fight Points	Level	XP
24	-5	8
27	-4	12
30	-3	16
33	-2	24
36	-1	32
39	0	48
42	1	64
45	2	96
48	3	128
51	4	192
54	5	256
57	6	384
60	7	512
63	8	768
66	9	1024
69	10	1536

I'm not talking about XP today, but you can see the XP gained from killing a monster is doubling every other level.

So how good is that Fighter?
A fighter battles a never-ending supply of 1st level opponents - how many can he slay on average before he is slain himself?

We want to see the fighter improving markedly every level, but not too fast.

I wrote a short Java program to test this, and to calculate the same values for AD&D for comparison purposes.

Level	Explore	AD&D
0	0.4
1	0.7	0.9
2	1.3	2.1
3	2.1	3.9
4	3.4	6.3
5	5.3	9.2
6	8.4	12.7
7	12.6	16.7
8	18.4	21.4
9	25.5	26.9
10	37.3	32.9

(I took the AD&D fighter to be d10 hp/lvl, AC2 (plate & shield), d8 damage, "To hit" smoothed out to be 19-lvl.)

As you can see, it's a fairly similar rate between the two systems.

In Explore the rate of improvement is about double per level, slowing down to about half that rate as you get far far better than your opponent.

In contrast AD&D is slightly more linear, as per the oft quoted criticism "linear fighters, quadratic wizards" which causes an issue at high levels.


How long do fights last?
How many rounds does the average fight-to-the-death between two fighters of the same level take?

We want to see the length of the fight increase a bit at high levels, but not too much.

Here's the output from the program:

Level	Explore	AD&D
0	4.1
1	4.4	6.7
2	4.9	9.4
3	5.2	11.6
4	5.6	13.3
5	5.9	14.4
6	6.4	15.4
7	6.8	16.2
8	7.2	16.9
9	7.4	17.4
10	8.1	18.0

Note that in Explore the duration increases linearly to about double, whereas in AD&D it starts higher, there's an initial fast increase before levelling off, and it ends up very high.

We could make our fights last longer by adding +1/+2/+3/+4 onto the wound categories, but I prefer shorter combats.

How much better do you get for going up one level?
We'll measure this by asking how many opponents of one level lower can you kill on average before you are killed.

Level	Explore	AD&D
0	1.4
1	1.3
2	1.3	2.2
3	1.2	1.5
4	1.2	1.3
5	1.1	1.1
6	1.1	1.0
7	1.1	0.9
8	1.1	0.8
9	1.0	0.8
10	1.1	0.8

Thus in AD&D, there's a big jump between 1st and 2nd level, and then it rapidly tails off. In Explore the improvement tails off only slightly.

Conclusion

We have the following useful rule of thumb:

You can convert an adventure between D&D and Explore by keeping the level/HD of the PCs and monsters the same.

The rate of improvement is roughly the same in both systems, but Explore is more smooth (particularly in the jump between 1st and 2nd level).

At high levels in AD&D improvements slow down, but in Explore it stays the same, so it scales up to high levels.

Since the exponential growth in Explore is similar to FASERIP I am interested at some point in exploring the possibilities of this as the basis for a Superhero game, or perhaps whether you could have characters going to super high level and being able to wrestle down a Storm giant barehanded.

As a final note, you may have noted I tend to over analyse things. At least I sometime think I do. Perhaps I should analyse less? On the other hand possibly it's just a feeling I've got. I'm going to have to go away and think about this one...