Hi !

Been a bit, but it doesn't mean I haven't been working on this.
In fact, I've been working away at V0.3 a fair bit, and I got to run SOAR again as a one shot and a combat playtest, which got me more data which lead to me being able to change even more things.

One of those is how common Armor is and how it works, which is going to lead me to talk about Armor and Defense in SOAR in today's devlog.

So, lets quickly summarize how SOAR works with regards to both of those:

Defense is the score you need to meet or beat to hit someone, you roll a d10 and you compared it to the defense score, which hovers at around 4 to 5 on average, with 3 being especially easy to hit and 6 being quite hard to hit.
Armor is flat reduction of damage, which, crucially, cannot reduce damage past 1, so if you take 2 damage and you have 3 armor, you still take 1 damage.

With this out of the way, lets talk about design quirks this gives us.

For Defense, I actually made it this way because a d10 neatly fits into percentage, this means when you get a +1 to hit someone, you know it makes you 10% more likely to hit them, when you have someone that has 6 defense, you know that's a 40% chance to hit them if done with a flat roll.
This has been an important point for my design process, because it allows me to have a relatively tight view on what the math is to hit a given person, and it fits into an easily understandable view on things in a given moment, which is important as it allows players to take informed decisions.
However, in recent play, it's been mentioned one of the option to be more likely to hit, Focus, has been a bit of a hard sell, as it used to be done BEFORE the roll was done, and did consume a limited resource, I think this was a fair criticism, and I have made it so it can be spent after a roll to actually make it a success by spending enough to meet the right number. I am unsure if this will stick around but the next version of the game should have this added rule, which hopefully helps make this option more enticing.

Armor is that way specifically because I think its important for every hit to account for some damage long term, this makes it so armor isn't a way to fully negate damage but to ablate it.
This leads to an odd quirk, where technically your armor is worth "1 more" than what the number is, meaning there is functionally no difference for someone taking 3 damage and someone taking 4 damage when the person in question has 3 armor, the difference is only felt when the damage is 2 higher or more.
This has lead to some odd feelings, as armor 2 ended up feeling very powerful, as the average damage is around 3, but it also meant the player who took a character with 3 armor didn't feel that much more able to tank hits.
On the other hand, it made npcs with 2 armor feel super hard to damage past chip damage, which is partly the intent as SOAR has a lot of added ticks of damage by throwing people into objects and whatnot, but it didn't carry all that well for players in terms of immediate feelings, and this is really what matters in the end.
You can try and make something you think is "balanced" all you want, if players think it isn't that fun to play around with, they won't.
So as a response to this, I lowered Armor for a few npcs to 1 at most, which SHOULD help players feel like armor is ablating hits some, but not turning their normal hit into a weak one, depending on feedback, changes might have to be made when it comes to health pools for some npcs as a response to this, but we will see.
Stone style also gets a nice little option to make their armor reduce damage to 0 if they take stress, to make them feel a lot more like a tank, hopefully this works.

That's really all there is for today, I hope to have the next version out this February if all goes well, I already got one piece of art for the new update (you can actually see it on the page, I changed how it looked btw).

I'll see you all hopefully soon, when I release this new version !