Bad Defaults

Matt Miller 

When making Mayhem, we mentally defaulted to 20 as a top number, after so many years of DnD. Bonuses we re scaled accordingly. It's one of the things I regret the most. The end result was that all numbers were scaled by 5x, which did nothing but make the mental math harder.The higher numbers made margins larger, and since margins affect total damage, higher HP was required to compensate. So HP gets measured in dozens, not singles. It also made skill mismatches, for different levels of enemies, much much more deadly.

 Keith J Davies 

Heh, as it happen Echelon keeps hit point totals pretty low. The attached (mocked up, lots of text is _wrong_) character sheet shows a 28th-level character (D&D 20th-level equivalient in principle) with 35 hit points. One hit point per level, one more at the top of each tier (so one every four levels, by default). If this characer built up her Fortitude more she'd have more hit points, potentially a total of _49_.(For reference: dice pool mechanism, every die that rolls 5+ is a success, every 1 is a complication, you can spend a success to cancel a complication. She's 7th-tier and thus rolls 7 dice for everything, but you don't have to add them up... adding them up would suck,)