DissectingDefenseValue/Discussion

These comments were made on past drafts of the DissectingDefenseValue page, and have been largely incorporated into the main text.

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the roll Charms play in DVs. I don't think the restriction on pg. 185 is a dice cap - I think it's just a limitation on DV bonuses. The reason why I suggest this is the way the 1st Ex interacts with DV. You do not add dice to the pool for calculating DV - you roll the dice, and the successes are capped by pg. 185. This suggests that attempting to shoehorn the DV cap into the general dice pool bonus cap is inaccurate, and will eventually lead to compromises in Charm assessment elsewhere. I think it's worth mentioning that all the variable bonuses to DV - Charms, stunts, Virtue channels, wounds, cover - are applied after DV is calculated from the base pool, either by separate rolling or direct modification. The result, I think, is that DV really is intended to be its own thing, and limitations on it should be considered their own thing as well.

Similarly, I wonder whether its true that DV penalties and external penalties are the same thing. External penalties are explicitly defined as things that eat successes off of rolls. In and of themselves, DVs are not rolled, so I'm not sure it's safe to call a DV penalty an external penalty; it might open up too many possbilities for conflicting mechanical referents. - Hapushet, who is willing to move this conversation to DissectingDefenseValue if its more appropriate there

I would say that page 185 is fairly clear when it describes how die adding charms interact with static values. "This bonus increases the Attribute + Ability Pool, not the final result of any calculations." So the 3rd Excellency, along with any other die adding charms should interact with static DVs in that fashion. The section goes on to note that the First Excellency is a bit of an exception, and as such I don't think it should be used as a benchmark for die adding charms. Similarly, the text on pg. 102 seems to indicate that virtues are added to the pool, not treated as stunts. -Ambisinister

Here's the issue though: DV Charms don't actually work like that. Other than the Excellencies, I cannot think of a single DV enhancement Charm that actually adds to the calculating pool. All of them add directly to the derived values. Trying to make them work that like involves either a) reading into them that +1 DV actually means +2 dice to the pool as Wordman is being forced to do over on his page, or b) cutting the functionality of every non-Excellency DV boosting Charm in half. Neither is a good idea. Moreover, the text on 147 argues a different path - the path that follows both intuition and logic: "When Essence Overwhelming aids DV, the player rolls the dice and adds successes to the DV like a stunt. Essence Triumphant adds its successes directly as points of DV. Essence Resurgent allows players to add half the Ability to the dice pool from which the DV was derived." Note that last bit - though it obviously suffers from a bit of editing confusion where the end result (half the Ability added to DV) is confused with the mechanics (the Ability is added to the pool), it's the only one of the three where adding to the pool is referenced. Otherwise, it says to add the successes directly to DV, which is what we all do anyway. Given that the system rules and the Charm rules were written by two different people, I think using the interpretation that maintains greater integrity with the system is the superior option. - Hapushet, who could swear that he's seen text saying to roll Virtues, but can't find it currently

Since DVs are calculated from a dice pool to begin with, and the text of the second excellency itself says "each two motes spent increases the effective (attribute + ability) rating by two," (also page 185), and the text of the first excellency itself says "each success increases the effective (attribute + ability) rating by two," (page 183) although the word "pool" isn't used I think it's safe to say that it's the base, pre-division calculation that is being affected. Just like Wordman has been saying. - IanPrice

The problem is that, contrary to what Hapushet said, all of the excellencies mention both adding to pools and adding to DV directly. Also, in saying "I cannot think of a single DV enhancement Charm that actually adds to the calculating pool", I think you are actually favoring the pool adder interpretation. That is, when a charm says "+1 to DV", this is to what page 185 refers when it says "for unrolled activities such as DV, Mental DV or feats of strength, Charms increase a character’s static rating by adding...". But, whatever. In revising the "success adders" section of my page, it seems to me that the rules are ambiguous enough that either interpretation can be defended. In choosing between them, I think it may come down to this: how do you want success adders for defense to work? And I think this might be Hapushet's point: if you treat a success adder as enhancing DV post-calculation, success adders for defense then work like success adders for offense. Is that desirable? If you get hit with a magic beam that reduces your defense pool to zero, do you want Second Excellency to be able to save you? If you hit someone with a magic beam that reduces their defense pool to zero, do you want Second Excellency to be able to save them? - Wordman

Personally, I don't want inapplicability to be part of the "penalty" discussion. It's specifically called out as "not a penalty, it just treats it as 0." But I do want there to be the possibility of charms that exceed the normal DV cap, just like success-adders on offense can exceed the dice cap's limits - IanPrice

That's not going to happen without explicit Charm text regardless. Whether it's a hard DV cap or an extension of the hard dice cap, the cap is there. The reasons RSB gave for it sounded... odd... to me, but it was intentional and is currently canon. - Hapushet

The difference between what I was arguing and the text for unrolled activities you quote above, Wordman, is that taking that line literally cuts the efficacy of almost every non-Excellency DV booster in half. On this very page, you mention that 5D Blocking Technique has to be reinterpreted to say, "Add your Essence to your defense pool" - taking the Charm text literally and using pg. 185, the actual benefit would be 1/4 your Essence (half Essence added to Ability + Attribute pool). I think we all agree that this is not how the Charm is supposed to work. Instead, taking the text for what it is, it adds the DV bonus directly to the calculated stat, not the pool before calculations. And every other DV-boosting Charm I can think of works the same way. - Hapushet

No. What I am saying is that it is the rule on page 185 that means you translate "add half your Essence to DV" into "add Essence to defense pool". This does nothing to cut the efficiency of this charm. - Wordman

But the Charm does not say that. No Charm except for the Excellencies does. Every other Charm says to add directly to the calculated value, in direct violation of pg. 185, and mentions nothing about adding to the pool first. Either you have ignore pg. 185 or rewrite the Charm - or put up with Charms that only work half as well as they are supposed to, and I'm asuming that option's out. Pg. 185 is quite simply not how the game works. The game works the way pg. 147 says it does - the successes are added to the DVs directly, and do not jump through the inexplicable pool-addition hoops that pg. 185 tries to force upon them. - Hapushet

Part of what you are saying is convincing, but you are barking up the wrong tree with this "half efficiency" argument. What you seem to be thinking is that people are saying that pg.185 means that if a charm says "add +1 DV", then you add one to the defense pool. Page 185 doesn't say that, and no one (but you) is claiming that it does. What it does say is that charms that alter DV work via a mechanism of altering the defense pool. It does not say this happens at a one-to-one rate. What it does say is that you "normally have to add two dice to increase a static value by one". This implies the converse, that a charm that appears to add one to a static value is actually adding two dice to the pool. In other words, charms that alter DV work like the second excellency does (however that might be).

So, here come the numbers. Lets say you have Essence 4 and use a charm that "adds half Essence to DV". Your claim is that this means you would divide Essence by 2 and add the resulting +2 to DV directly, after all pool math was done. The pool-based claim is that pg. 185 means you interpret this as saying it "adds your full Essence to your defense pool". Thus, it increases the defense pool by 4 dice. Once divided, this ends up adding +2 to DV. Regardless of which of these arguments is correct, the result is exactly the same. There is no "halving of efficiency".

Now, lets make the example more complicated. Say you have Essence 3 and use the same charm. What happens? Using the "direct" method, you add +1.5 to DV. Since this isn't possible, you have to make a rounding choice at some point. When do you make it? Lets say you divide like the charm tells you to, then round up, then add the result directly to DV, thus getting +2 DV. Lets say you also use another charm that also "adds half Essence to DV", which is rounded the same way. This would add another +2 DV, giving you +4 DV, even though 2 * 1.5 = 3, not 4. If you decide to round these down before directly adding them, you have the opposite issue, ending with only +2 DV. Suppose, however, you hold all fractions (even from the defense pool division) until the very end, then round only once. In this case, you get +3 DV, like you might expect; however, notice something here. If, instead of the direct method, you used the pool method (adding full Essence for each charm), you get exactly the same result as adding successes under the "hold all fractions until the end" strategy. Note also that the pool method completely eliminates any ambiguity of how rounding is supposed to work.

So, what's the difference? One difference is that rounding also makes pool limits work slightly differently. The claim of the direct method is, essentially, that charm text like "add +1 to DV" explicitly sidesteps pg.185. Presumably, however, this does not extend to eliminating the part that says "regardless, no combination of charms... can increase a static rating by more than half the [dice cap]", which seems concrete enough that a charm would need to have text saying "this charm ignores dice caps" in it to get around this rule. So, rounding up or down might make the "direct method" have a slightly different limit than the "pool" method (plus or minus 1, usually, depending on exactly how you round). Again, the difference largely is that with the former, rounding can have weird side effects, but not the latter. Even then, though, the results are often identical.

So, again, what's the difference, really? It turns out that the main difference is timing. Somehow Second Edition always comes back to timing problems. The direct method can survive a pool brought down to zero, because it adds successes after this happens. Not so for the pool method. So, we are now back to my earlier "magic beam". How do you want it to work?

One last note: all of the "bread and butter" defense charms in the solar Melee and Dodge trees completely ignore this argument, because they are all penalty reducers. This may be more significant than it first appears.

- Wordman

First of all, let me say that you are right inasmuch as I am letting my pedantic tendencies run away with me. The practical differences between the two methods are, in fact, pretty minor. Let me also say that I am well aware that no one is arguing that we need to cut the value of DV Charms in half. The point I was attempting to make is that the apparent end result from the most literal interpretation of the books of which I am capable, involving the fewest unwritten rules/rules changes/extensions/interpretations, appears to lead to that conclusion - since that conclusion is unacceptable, we will therefore have to either ignore certain portions of those rules or add to others in order for the system to function. In other words, I was trying to point out that no matter what, we cannot simply rely on the rules as written for our answers, because they are inadequate.

Having established that, let's look at what we have. Pg. 185 says that DV enhancers work by adding dice to the (Attribute + Ability) pool from which the DV is derived. The Excellencies all explicitly work in that fashion. No other DV enhancers do, however, which leaves us with two options. We can either a) assume that pg. 185 is always correct, and then be forced to translate DV modifiers into dice bonuses, despite the lack of any Charm text suggesting we need to do so (the option being taken by this page); or b) simply ignore pg. 185, either as incomplete or flat wrong, and accept that Charms can modify DVs without modifying the base dice pool (the option I am advocating). The former option has the benefit of avoiding rounding issues and maintaining coherence with the dice cap rules, but suffers from having to "translate" DV bonuses to dice bonuses without clear instructions to do so, and for every non-Excellency Charm out there that boosts DVs. The latter option is both intuitive, bringing the DV enhancers in line with other Charms that add successes to dice rolls, and simpler, because one does not need to go through the extra steps of converting DV bonuses into dice bonuses and then dividing to reconvert those dice into a DV. On the other hand, it requires one to just flat-out ignore pg. 185 (and encourages ignoring the weirdness of the 1st and 2nd Excellency mechanics as well), as well as creating a separate DV cap that is not integrated with the standard dice cap. The decision to ignore certain portions of the rules is made a little less onerous by both the combat chapter, specifically pg. 147, which describes the 1st and 2nd Excellencies working in precisely the fashion I have described, as well as the simple fact that the 2E core has so many conflicting and outright contradictory rules elements that I've gotten really used to ignoring parts of the rulebook.

It should be noted, too, that I'm not really arguing from the position of "what do I want the game to be able to do" here. It's probably my background in literary analysis, but I'm mostly focusing on the validity of the interpretations based on the text itself, not the consequences of those interpretations. Once I know how the rules work, I'll be content to follow them either way. I just think my position makes more sense, whatever that may be. - Hapushet, trying to make sense of what makes sense to him

OK. I revised the "Pool Adder" and "Success Adder" sections. The intent now is to treat the rules as if they are (somewhat incoherently) describing two different mechanisms of getting the exact same result. The players, then, can use whatever one fits their brain better. I have to do some examples to make sure the descriptions I have now really do have the same math (they definitely are pretty close, but I might be off by +/-0.5 DV). The result in either case is a DV bonus that is applied during step 6 and meets the dice cap limit. Does this work a bit better? - Wordman

This may be slightly off topic, but it's something I'd like to know. It's clear that DV works (by canon) as an external penalty. Does this therefore mean that things which subtract from external penalties (There Is No Wind comes immediately to mind, as it ignores all of them completely) can work through or around DV? I've tried to find a solid example either way but failed, so I'd like your help and opinions on the matter, and I think here is the place to put it? Apologies if not.
-- Darloth

DV is applied as you say, but it is also applied after all other external penalties. This seems to imply that the only way to eliminate the penalty from DV is to penalize it or render it inapplicable, which are explicit effects in themselves. I admit that's pretty tenuous, but sadly I can't find anything more explicit keeping There Is No Wind from being an incredibly inexpensive way to render both DVs inapplicable. - IanPrice