Designing a Fighting RPG based on Dragon Ball: how do you represent differences?

[MonkeySage]

Let's say that the human Spiritualist, Cherie, wants to arm wrestle an alien.
Her strength score is 2(with average human being 1), the alien's strength is 30.

What dice would you use for their opposed strength checks?

The alien in this case is far stronger than Cherie.

[Lord Raziere]

the question you should be asking is: is there any chance at all for Cherie to beat the alien?

because if there isn't, dice don't matter in this situation, because no roll will make a success for her, and no roll will make a failure for the alien.

therefore there is no point of rolling at all. because dice should only be rolled for when the outcome is not sure.

is the outcome not sure?

[Talion]

If we're going directly off of Dragon Ball, it's important to remember that absolute numbers aren't necessarily the most important measure of your opponent. There the strategy aspect, of course, as well as racial bonuses (the Namekian's regrowth and body alteration abilities vs Saiyan's raw combat strength and ability to come back stronger after a beating), but when it comes down to the numbers? It's all about ratio.

For example, Nappa, if I recall correctly, had a power of 4,000. This means that he was roughly 3x to 4x as powerful as any of the Z Warriors, minus Goku, at the time, as they were in the 900-1200 range or so. This allowed him to shrug off even their most devastating attacks with little more than a minor inconvenience. Similarly, Vegeta regularly showed that even a ~30% difference could mean death, as per what he did to Kwii during their meeting on Namek, while he himself struggled against the Ginyu Force at the high 20,000's to the low 30,000's.

In Dragon Ball proper, everyone's actual power rating was on a much smaller scale, so a difference of just a few points meant a huge change in the combatants ratios, which allowed Goku to rapidly progress past his enemies after they gave him a good fight.

That all being said, you probably want an overall smaller Die to represent opposed checks to properly emulate Dragon Ball, perhaps a D6 or a D8, D10 on the high end. Your presented example, without having a special ability on hand to edge things in their favor, would be at such an exponentially severe disadvantage that there'd be almost no way to win. After all, by the numbers their opponent is 15x more powerful than them. EDIT: As an example, this match up is about 20% worse than Nail (Power Level 42,000) vs Frieza stage 1 (Power Level 520,000). As was shown, Nail was absolutely helpless against his extremely bored opponent.

Special abilities put a bit of a wrench in the equation (Primarily ones with long charge times, such as the Spirt Bomb, Final Flash, and Special Beam Canon, though there are some, such as the Destructo Disc, Solar Flare, and Tri-Beam/Ki-Canon that are viable even with massive disparities of power). However, even these have their limitations and most (except solar flare) come with their own penalties (usually time investment, or direct health drain).

[Bruno Carvalho]

I got two suggestions:

1) Check out the FINAL STAND (http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/timdenee/FinalStand.pdf) rpg. It's a free 2002 game that simply have one of the best wuxia combat systems I've played. It's quick, its fun, its crunch-light, its pretty tactical.

2) When I was pretty young and DBZ was THE thing to watch, I did an DBZ conversion to old Storyteller (please don't judge me, I was a kid). Anyway, it worked pretty well and there is a insight you could use. Power level was calculated by addind everything in the sheet (with different bonuses, so physical stats gave more points per dot than social stats, and combat-related skillsl gave more points per dot than scientific skills). After you calculated your Power Level, you gained some floting bonus dice to spend in your actions. So a low strenght human would be at a severe disadvantage against a monster alien, but if the human had a bigger power level (due to other things like Chi and special moves) the human could direct his bonus dice to his strenght check and beat the alien.

[Talion]

Though that does remind me, I forgot to ask a very important question regarding this: What sort of scaling are you hoping to achieve and where do you expect most games to end in terms of power level? That'll be important in determining the absolute scale of Die you require.

[MonkeySage]

For now, probably keeping the lower limits at Kid Goku pre-Roshi, and the upper limits with Piccolo when he faught Goku at the Tournament... for now.

[Talion]

For now, probably keeping the lower limits at Kid Goku pre-Roshi, and the upper limits with Piccolo when he faught Goku at the Tournament... for now.

Alright, well, going by the Dragon Ball wiki, we're looking at a range of about 10 (Kid Goku when he's first introduced) to about 500 (King Piccolo at full power; though for some reason they also list the Ox-King as having a Power Level of 900, which just seems all kinds of wrong). But, for safety's sake, let's say that 900 is the top tier, if we include charged attacks like the Super Kamehameha wave, since we know that nobody actually reached 1,000 during that saga.

At lower tiers, rank ups come pretty quickly, so after even a couple days of rigorous training you can close the gap on lower power opponents. Scaling slows down immensely afterwards, so that by the time Kid Goku is around 150 he's able to take on the Red Ribbon Army by himself, in larger and larger quantities, with relatively few road bumps.

There's a few options you could use, with regards to the above information. You could provide a Die Pool for X amount of power in a given stat (Spirit Power, Resilience, Physical Power, Speed, etc), which'd probably be D6's. Or, as you seem to want, you could probably use a single die. This is immensely powerful and dangerous at lower levels where the roll regularly outplays the actual power of the character, but is trivial by late game. So, honestly speaking, you might want to play around with a Dice Pool system.

[MonkeySage]

So I had a few different ideas: A mixed die pool could be viable for up to 46 points using only 4 dice at any given time.
A d10 dice pool system could use the level of the character as a reference; maybe the difficulty for a character within 10 levels of you could be 5, with characters 10 levels lower being 4, higher, being 6, etc. Dice pools increase with individual scores, etc.