Enhanced Defense

[adunaphel]

Hi,

I'm happy to post the first rule question

Enhanced defense says it can be selected for an active defense.

But, passive defenses are subject to the same -2 cumulative malus as active ones (except Armor).

So, why can't enhanced defense be used with Toughness or Absorption For exemple ?

[LakeSide Len]

Hi,

We didn't want to create 2 different ways of getting to the same place. If Toughness + Enhanced Defense effectively is the same as Armor, then the only difference is cost, and character creation becomes an exercise in "which option is most cost effective". To avoid that, we wanted to make Enhanced Defense apply only to active defenses. It's better than a normal active defense, but it's still not like Armor, which is always there even if you are surprised, tied up, etc.

Thanks,
Len

[adunaphel]

Thx for the reply.

I understand the link between toughness + enhanced defense and Armor.

But toughness has other uses (resist poison for instance), and some passive defenses could make sense with enhanced defense (absorption for instance).

Could that perk be permitted with toughness but only for other uses than resist damage and other passive defenses ?

[LakeSide Len]

Hi,

First and foremost, it's your game, so you can do ANYTHING. )

What you are decribing isn't super breaky or anything like that. We just wanted to avoid creating an option for you to have, effectively, 10d Toughness and 10d Armor and pay only 12 hero dice instead of paying 16 hero dice. That's the main reason why the rules say that you can't apply Enhanced Defense to Toughness.

EDef is there mainly to make evasion-based characters more viable. They still aren't tanks in the way they would be if they were armored due to the active nature of those defenses, so we thought it was a fair balance.

Could you apply EDef to something like Absorption? I think so, although why not just buy Immunity since at that point you are talking about resistance to only one specific type of damage (I think the Quickstart Hero Generator is set up this way, IIRC).

And I think the same logic applies to other resistances: you might be able to apply EDef to it, but I am not sure if you would want to when you could just go with Immunity.

At the end of the day, EDef is kind of a nitpicky perk that applies only in the conext of this game's specific dice decay mechanic. It can be applied in other ways, but I'm not sure you would necessarily want to. If you do, however, it won't break anything, as long as you avoid making EDef a must-have due to it's cost effectiveness -- and even doing that isn't a problem, it just means that everyone everyone everyone is going to have EDef.