Combat Ratings

[Blinkey]

Hello,
Is HL currently calculating Combat Ratings (SWDE pg 123-124) for players and creatures and I am not finding where it is?

If not is there a way to add this function to hero lab?

Thanks,
blinkey

[CapedCrusader]

No, it doesn't. The reason why is that the calculation depends on knowing what the "typical" attack damage is for a given character. That's fairly hard for the program to determine.

Firstly, the choice of which attack is typical is subjective. For some characters it would be fairly obvious, and for others not so much. Some quite unconventional things could end up being considered typical attacks.

The second reason is that some of the damage values are not strictly numbers, they're text. The best example is ranged weapons, but there are others that would be difficult for a program to determine a correct numeric answer for maximum damage. Some values include actual text information that would have to be filtered out.

Also, the text in the first paragraph and the second bullet point shows how subjective the decisions about which abilities get counted and which don't is also subjective. Counting Combat Edges is easy, but "special abilities" is more open ended. If it's just combat-related special abilities, that also a subjective judgement since special abilities don't have "Type" categories. It makes it a lot harder to count them.

That being said, it's possible to add the values and interfaces needed to make this calculation easier. The easiest way might be to have a place where the user could enter a numeric value for the maximum amount of damage the character can do with their typical attack. Perhaps two new derived traits, one for the character's maximum typical damage (MTD), and one for Combat Rating (CR), with MTD manually entered and CR being figured?

[zarlor]

It's not a bad idea to try and work something out for it, especially with some of the functionality that has been mentioned to be added along this very front for all game systems in Hero Lab in the latest news post about the addition of the Encounter Builder. So presumably it would need to be worked out for SW and I'd guess working with the official Combat Ratings would need to be an integral part of that.

[zarlor]

Now that I think about it this might be a good topic to bring over to the Pinnacle forum just because there are lots of very experienced GMs over there who might provide some really good insight on possible ways to handle Combat Ratings.

[zarlor]

I decided to do a little bit of digging over on the Pinnacle forums and i think there are two threads of primary interest here. One uses the base formula in SWD to determine the CR of core monsters: http://www.peginc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39510

The other is by Zadmar who has a Combat Simulator set up. You can read the thread at http://www.peginc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39183 and the simulator can be found at http://www.godwars2.org/SavageWorlds/combat.html.

The results from the latter don't differ too significantly from the former. So arguably even using just the base formula would be "good enough", so to speak. After all even the rules state that CR is just a baseline to get a feel for relative abilities so getting too lost into the weeds may just not be something to worry too much about. Rather just getting something in place could, itself, be helpful.

So base creatures and NPCs could presumably just be given a straight CR value. For NPCs/Creatures created on the fly, though, we'd have to allow for an entry for an estimated Max Dmg value. Combat Edges are already available to count since Edges are already classified by type and Toughness is already computed on the character as well. Wild Card status is also tracked already and allies are tracked if you have them all in the same portfolio, like if you do an encounter.

The difficulty comes in with Racial Abilities/Properties which currently do not have any annotation to denote if they would be counted as equivalent to a Combat Edge or not. That's really all that I see that would really need to be handled outside of the Max Damage thing, though. I don't see why we couldn't have a checkbox available in those to denote if it is a Combat ability or not. Sure it's subjective, but that's not a big deal. It's only one or two points here or there from totals and it's really just for some kind of relative and general baseline anyway. So with the idea that the Encounter Builder is coming out I suppose it should be something that should be added in anyway.

[Blinkey]

To use the standard SWD rules do we need to add values to npc / monsters?

[zarlor]

Well, the base rules has a formula for calculating CR based on half of the max damage possible with a "typical attack". Potentially the program could calculate that on its own, but which attack is "typical" in that case? Presumably you'd need someplace on the npc/monster to either note which it is or to just manually add that value. So I think you'd need something on the npc/creature to note that part.

The next part would be that each Combat Edge (already noted by type) and Special Ability (not currently noted) would need to be determined. So we'd need that for Abilities but Edges are already covered. So you wouldn't need to have anything on the npc/creature for that part at all, since it would just be a modifier to the above to get to the final CR for a given npc/creature.

So yes, I think you do need to have something on the npc/monster to either denote the "typical attack" for the program to use in the calculation or just a value for it the be put in manually.