Base Scales
In a science-fiction game, there are lots of weapons and vehicles that are larger in scale than an individual person. In the Strikermechanica, we use a base scale mechanic to allow the physical attributes of vehicles, including their health points, energy points, resistances and damage from weapons, to scale with them.
If we don’t do this, then you’ll need to find something like 35 d6 dies in order to consider the damage from a plasma cannon.
When you deal damage from an automatic rifle from a 2d6 die roll, you might get the number 8. As all of this is on the personal scale, we call this base{0} damage. The reason that you don’t see the curly braces everywhere is that we don’t use any special notation when considering the base{0} scale, we just consider it the default. You will find that for strikers base{ii} is the default, so in places where we are mostly talking about strikers, we drop the curly braces for that base instead.
How Scaling Works
When we go to the scale of small vehicles, like powered armour, cars, trucks, ornithopters and similar, we move to the base{i} scale. We'll use this scale to demonstrate what happens to the various traits.
A nice example trait is health points, which for the base{i} scale, are given the {i} suffix. A car, for example, might have 18 base{i} health points. We express this as 18{i}(hp). Indicating that we are talking about base{i} health points, not base{0} health points.
When you see the damage from a flight shell from a railgun, being shown as 2d6{i}, we are saying that the result from the 2d6 roll will be that number of base{i} health points.
If you, as the character, happen to be hit with base{i} damage, then you must multiply the result by 10 to get the damage delivered to you.
So, the first rule of base scaling is that the physical characteristics are multiplied by 10 for each base increment. Not everything is multiplied by 10 but in general, the following table applies:
| Base | Mid Weight | Mid Size | Multiplication |
|---|---|---|---|
| {0} | 100 | 1 x 1 | 1 |
| {i} | 10T | 10 x 10 | 10 |
| {ii} | 500T | 50 x 50 | 100 |
| {iii} | 10kT | 300 x 300 | 1K |
| {iv} | 50kT | 1500 x 1500 | 10K |
| {v} | 1MT | 10K x 10K | 100K |
The multiplication applies to most physical characteristics
hp, ep, Resistance Multiplied x 10
Three very common physical characteristics that are considered this way are health points, energy points and resistance. All three of these go up by 10 when you go to the next higher base.
TC Is Not Multiplied
An important exception to this is the target challenge (TC), which does not scale at all. The reason for that is that this trait has base scaling built in to it. Notice how the size factor (SX) affects the TC of a creature. What this is telling us is that a creature that is roughly three times the size of another, suffers a -1 penalty to their TC. Therefore, a base {i} creature suffers a -3 penalty to their TC, compared with a base {0} creature.
What may be interesting to consider is that if you look at the largest size factor (SX) you might notice that it also has a -3 modifier on TC. In effect, a base scale change is equivalent to the smallest and largest size factors.
Neither Is Size (SX)
By the way, the higher base scales all have the same size categories and size factors as base {0}. Its just that a tiny (SX=2) base {i} creature is still roughly ten times the size of a tiny base {0} creature.
You can roughly translate sizes between bases as seen below.
| Base {0} Size | Letter | Number | (SX) | Base {i} Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diminuitive. | D | 1 | 3 | - |
| Tiny | T | 2 | 2 | - |
| Small | S | 3 | 1 | - |
| Medium | M | 4 | 0 | Diminuitive |
| Large | L | 5 | -1 | Tiny |
| Huge | H | 6 | -2 | Small |
| Gargantuan | G | 7 | -3 | Medium |
This means that a diminuitive base {i} creature is roughly equivalent to a medium base {0} creature. Note that there are many individual circumstances that break this rule-of-thumb.
Examples of Base Usage: Powered Armour
Powered armour is armour worn by soldiers, which is so heavy.
Base {i} & Resources
The health points listed on any powered armour are base {i} health points, so if a powered armour's listing shows 20(hp), then its read as 20{i}(hp) or 200{0}(hp).
The same applies to the energy points.
Base {i} & Resistance
The resistance traits listed for powered armour are base {i} resistances and apply to the armour and the wearer at the same time. If a powered armour's listing shows 3(rst,prc), then its read as 3{i}(rst,prc) or 30{0}(rst,prc).
Doing Damage to Powered Armour
Delivering damage to powered armour is mostly the same as with anything else, you subtract the pen of the weapon from the rst of the armour, and take that result away from the damage dealt.
hp (result) = hp - (rst-pen)
If the damage is from small arms fire, which is typically base {0} weaponry, then you need to divide that by 10 rounding down. Therefore:
12{0}(hp,prc) = 1{i}(hp,prc)
If a powered armour's listing shows 3(rst,prc), which is 3{i}(rst,prc), then 1{i}(hp,prc) will not have any effect.
If you managed to do 43{0}(hp,prc), which would equal 4{i}(hp,prc), then you would end up doing 1{i}(hp,prc).
Now that we can see that some damage has come through from this attack, we need to divide the samage between the armour and the wearer. Each suffer half the damage.
The armour is being used in mostly base{0} combat (using Cbt-Melee and Cbt-Ranged) then your GM will probably convert the armour's hp and rst to base{0}. In this case, it would be 5(hp,prc) dealt to both armour and wearer.