Quote from: Marchand on March 28, 2021, 07:54:02 AM
Interesting, I didn;t even realise it had its own setting.

4 on a better on d20 to hit?

Armor increases that number, parry and dodge rolls block the attack if higher (if I remember correctly)

Quote from: Marchand on March 28, 2021, 07:54:02 AM
Interesting, I didn;t even realise it had its own setting.

4 on a better on d20 to hit?

Actually it's 5 or better to hit a non-defending target; the confusion is that it's written that a 4 or less is an automatic miss. The latest rulesets also made ranged attacks require an 8 or better to hit (and with relatively low bonuses and penalties for things like target speed and evasive action). Called shots require a 12 or better and often have penalties for very small targets.

Really old settings like Mechanoids and Heroes Unlimited 1e also had particle beams that scored glancing blows with an 11+ and a direct hit only with an 15+ (they also ignored robot/natural AR, which was important in the Mechanoids and Heroes Unlimited).

Now, just because you hit those numbers doesn't mean you actually do damage. First there's Armor Rating (AR). If the attack roll with bonuses is higher than 4 (or 8 or 12), but lower than the AR then either the armor takes damage or, in the case of robots and creatures with robotic/natural AR it takes no damage at all.

Note that in the very first Palladium book, the Mechanoids, all AR was "natural/robotic" even human body armor and could be as high as an 18 (with only a +3-6 to hit)... which is where those particle beams I mentioned previously were actually BETTER at hitting in most cases.

Back in 1e Palladium Fantasy bonuses were generally low (a +6 would be a REALLY good bonus and your average starting PC is probably only +2-3 to hit) so full plate having an AR 18 and chain having 14-15 actually offered significant protection to the wearer. Later editions made it easier to accrue bonuses such that a +6 was generally the low end and so the value of non-robot/nation AR degraded significantly, particularly light armors with AR 10-14.

Armor had a Structural Damage Capacity (SDC) which determined how much damage it could take before being wrecked. Getting your armor repaired/replaced was also a significant gold sink.

The need to reflect heavily armored vehicles and mecha led to Robotech introducing the concept of MDC (mega-damage capacity). Each point of MDC was 100 SDC and any attack that did less than 100 SDC with a single round.

Ex. a .50 cal machine gun firing a full burst for 6D6x20 SDC could easily deal several hundred SDC damage in aggregate, but each round only did 6D6 SDC and so would do nothing to an MDC structure. By contrast, a LAW rocket does 1D6x100 SDC, less on average than that full burst from the .50 cal, but because it's all in one shot it could actually do 1D6 damage to an MDC structure.

Early Robotech had MDC reserved only for full-sized war machines like tanks, gunships and mecha. Humans and non-military vehicles still ran around with SDC. MDC values were also fairly low; a tank had about 50 MDC (a normal truck had about 400 SDC) while a heavily armored mecha was 250-300 MDC. Similarly for damage; a short burst from a 55mm autocratic cannon did 3D6 MD (a short burst from a .50 cal would do 6D6x3 SDC) while a fighter launched tactical nuclear warhead was in the 4D6x10 MD range.

As the timeline progressed though and the later anime series merged into Robotech focused more on characters in just body armor with hand energy guns who could harm them, the later books upgraded the personal scale armor and weapons to be low MDC as well (50 for the body armor with energy rifles doing 2D6 or so MD) with a corresponding increase in the values for armored mecha as well (this where having damage multipliers 1D6x10 and the like started becoming prevalent).

So AR and just raw SDC/MDC is the first side of where those low "to hit" thresholds are slightly misleading. The other half is active defense; parrying and dodging. These are basically just rolls like to attack and if they equal or beat the attacker's total, they parry or dodge the attack and usually take no damage.

Active defense usually require spending your own actions, with the latest iterations of the rules clarifying that these actions are subtracted from your total actions per round, but do NOT replace your next action in round robin turn sequence (which is a REALLY important balance tweak that fixes a lot of combat issues).

However, in 1e Palladium Fantasy one of the HUGE advantages of the fighting classes was that, unlike non-fighters, their parries did NOT require an action (called an "automatic" parry in the system) and with both weapons and shields providing bonuses to parry and most attacks being melee (and so able to be parried without special abilities) this was a HUGE defensive advantage for them.

Later interations such as Heroes Unlimited, Robotech and every subsequent game added an automatic parry to every form of hand-to-hand combat training and while such training was not universal for NPCs, pretty much every PC class got at least "Hand to Hand: Basic" as part of their skill package.

This wasn't as big a deal though since more modern settings tended to use more modern weapons and parrying a bullet just wasn't possible outside of certain options (typically large shields or super reflexes) and also typically damaged whatever you were parrying with, so dodging was the default defense.

Which inevitably led to the addition, with the super-agility of the Robotech Cyclone power armor to the "automatic dodge" which was like the automatic parry, but worked against everything. While at first it was limited to certain extremely small and agile options, power creep led to it showing up more and more.

Also of note is that the addition of various physical skills lead to dodge bonuses far outstripping ranged attack rolls (still back in the +3-6 range mostly while dodge bonuses could reach nearly double digits for characters with only average reflexes and I remember several with +12-14 or more).

And so began a decade plus of rule tweaks trying to fix the problem that resulted from opening the door to massive dodge bonuses and automatic dodges (people who say Palladium hasn't really updated it's rules haven't actually been paying attention).

The first tweak was minor; bonuses to automatic dodge were made separate from the ordinary dodge bonuses the physical skills could provide, but when that proved insufficient we entered what I call the "overcorrection phase."

During that phase Kevin decided that because lasers and rail guns and the like moved so insanely fast that they were virtually impossible to dodge. All dodge bonuses (including from your attributes) except those specifically stated to work against ranged weapons were removed AND a huge -10 penalty to dodge modern weapons.

It "solved" the problem, but made many games practically unplayable as the only defense against ranged attacks became massive amounts of MDC and due to the normal expense associated with armor repairs the game skewed heavily towards options that allowed regaining MDC without said expense (supernatural creatures with bio-regeneration, nanotechnology, force fields, etc.).

So, from there we slowly got the counter-correction; first the base to-hit number was raised to 8, then the dodge penalties were reduced (by Heroes Unlimited 2e they were -4) and penalties to attack based on cover, target speed and evasive action were added.

The definitive fix didn't arrive until Rifts Ultimate Edition where the proficiency bonuses for ranged attacks were adjusted, attribute bonuses again applied (but almost nothing else did) and the penalties to dodge now only applied at close range (within 50 ft).

The final fix came in the 2e Robotech games with the previously mentioned change to where dodging actions were taken from; and in so doing largely removed a lot of the need for automatic dodges in the first place.

See, previously dodging didn't just burn one of your actions per round, it burned your NEXT action... so if someone shoots at you and you choose to dodge, you can't shoot back because you're dodging and then the guy who shot at you gets their next action to attack, which you have to spend an action to dodge.

The only ways to break the cycle were to A) hope you win initiative on a subsequent round so you can do the same thing in reverse, B) have more actions than them, wait out the attacks and then use your extra actions to return fire (with them unable to dodge because they have no actions left), C) not dodge so you can use the action to attack back, or D) Automatic Dodge so you both avoid damage AND can return fire.

With the change though, dodging doesn't surrender your next action, just one from the end of the round, so you can dodge, shoot back and cause your opponent to spend an action from the end of their round to dodge it. Combat gets less lopsided in the initiative winner's favor with all the bonus actions that robot combat typically provided turning as much into effectively X automatic dodges per turn instead of always being attacks by the initiative winner that keep the defender dodging or undodgeable attacks at the end of the round by the guys with way more attacks than everyone else.

So that's a not-so-brief explanation of Palladium's combat system through the years. In terms of playability, I feel that Palladium Fantasy 1e and post-Rifts Ultimate Edition (Robotech 2e in particular) games are by far the best implementations while Palladium Fantasy 2e, Heroes Unlimited 2e and others of that period are among the worst.

Quote from: Marchand on March 28, 2021, 07:54:02 AM
Interesting, I didn;t even realise it had its own setting.

4 on a better on d20 to hit?

That above 4 is correct but will almost never come into play. The reason is if you have any form of Hand-to-Hand training you can attempt to parry a melee attack for free, so in effect it's really an opposed roll to hit.

If you do hit and the attack was equal or less then the AR of their armor you do damage to that. If above you do damage to them. If they are a species with a natural AR (demons, dragons, etc) and you roll below it you do no damage.

Yep.
Roll d20 + mods to hit.
4 or better is a hit.
Anything at or under armour threshold gets soaked by the armours HP/SDC.
Anything over goes to the target itself.
Target can try to dodge or parry.
With parry you roll a d20 + mods and try to beat the attackers roll.
Or you can opt to dodge, which is also a d20 roll vs the attack. But moves you away from the attacker and you can not attack next round since you put everything into fancy footwork as it were.
Co-ordinated simultaneous attacks prevent dodging and parrying. Otherwise a defender can parry multiple attacks within their field of view.

A pretty solid system and very similar to my own.

Thanks all for the commentary. I'm really tempted to give 1e Fantasy a look. Only seems to be the 1e Revised edition on Drivethru but people seem to think that is OK.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 28, 2021, 01:26:44 PM
a short burst from a 55mm autocratic cannon did 3D6 MD

Final argument of kings?!

Quote from: Marchand on March 30, 2021, 07:23:06 AM
Thanks all for the commentary. I'm really tempted to give 1e Fantasy a look. Only seems to be the 1e Revised edition on Drivethru but people seem to think that is OK.

The only difference between 1e and 1e Revised is the cover art and removing one of the insanity tables. It's otherwise identical; even the percent chance of cannibalism.

Quote from: Marchand on March 30, 2021, 07:23:06 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 28, 2021, 01:26:44 PM
a short burst from a 55mm autocratic cannon did 3D6 MD

Final argument of kings?!

And proof that the great stealth jester, Spell Check, has struck again.

This is a % liar moment. Autocratic cannon should be a thing!

Its Rifts. It IS a thing somewhere, somehow. A cannon that fires little angry autocrats at targets. The pen truely is mightier than the sword. 

Quote from: Omega on March 31, 2021, 12:06:18 PM
Its Rifts. It IS a thing somewhere, somehow. A cannon that fires little angry autocrats at targets. The pen truely is mightier than the sword. 

Don't mean to derail this thread at all but, reading that all I could picture was a horde of Nancy Pelosi clones being fired out of a veritech's gunpod and splattering against some random battlepod. Thank you for a good laugh.