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Reacquainting myself with 6th edition Call of Cthulhu for a game I'm running at a convention next month has reminded me why people get excited for tremulus, NEMESIS, and 7th edition. This started as a hilarious comparison of how much damage kicks do in comparison to firearms, but it rapidly turned into me gawking at the weapon list and seeing a lot of wacky poo poo emerge. The thing about Call of Cthulhu is that at its core it's still a poorly-balanced, not-entirely-correctly-implemented RPG from 1981. I'm suddenly and powerfully tempted to do a FATAL and Friends writeup. Until then, though, here's a section on how karate kicks are the best melee weapon, and how only shotguns and goofy-rear end automatic weapons rules trump 'em. At no point in the core rulebook do they flat-out tell you how much damage fighting unarmed does. There's one oblique reference under the Martial Arts skill: they mention rolling under both Fists and Martial Arts doubles your damage to 2d3. How much damage does a kick do? A headbutt? Not mentioned. You have to check the full character sheet at the back (1d6 and 1d4, so you know). Speaking of. With Martial Arts, a kick does 2d6 damage. That's flatly better than most melee weapons, including pokers, torches, and swords. Hell, a headbutt doing 2d4 is a flat improvement over most improvised weapons. On the other hand, a chainsaw does 2d8 damage! That's pretty good, and you get an untouchably good 4d8+random severed limb on a critical hit! Unless you have a damage bonus, which does apply to kicks and doesn't apply to chainsaws, at which point you kick for 2d6+1d4, higher average damage and same maximum as a chainsaw, or (if you're really swole) 3d6. You don't randomly remove limbs on a crit, but you're also striking silently and saving loads of $$$$ at the pump. (Impales, which sharp objects get and kicks don't, do allow non-kicks to do more damage. However, impales are only when you roll under 1/5th of your skill rating. 50% Kick and 50% Martial Arts will let you do 2d6 damage every time you hit, whereas 50% Saber will only let you do 2d8+2 10% of the time.) But, you're asking, how does a kick compare to firearms? A kick with no DB deals damage on par with .45 automatics and .45 revolvers (both 1d10+2), and those can only attack once per turn like a kick. Rifles generally do 2d6+1 damage and can only attack once per round--or once every few rounds for the older rifles. If you have a +1d4 damage bonus, or lucked into a +1d6, you can do more damage on average by kicking that ghoul than by shooting it, unless you thought to brought along a Desert Eagle, which deals 3d6+3 damage, the only (occasionally) civilian-legal non-shotgun weapon on the list which does more damage consistently than a martial arts kick! Alas, here is where the kick fun ends, because 12-gague shotguns will hit at double accuracy and for a whopping 4d6 damage at close range. (You're still better off kicking than using 20- or 16-gague rounds, though.) If you have access to military firearms, or are in the 1920s and can buy yo'self a Thompson, you can finally hang up those kicking boots, since you can just squeeze out 10 shots a round to get 1d10 hits of 1d10+1 damage and up to double your hit percentage. Also, there's technically no rule against firing all (say) 50 shots out of your huge-rear end rattling drum magazine for, oh, 5d10 or 1d100/2 attacks in one round. See, when you fire in bursts, you roll to hit once, then roll "an appropriate die" to determine how many bullets land. There are no rules RAW for maximum shots per round, merely an observation that GMs may only allow no. of shots per round equal to something you can roll with regular dice. Or if your GM will smack you with the rulebook for that, just get your Pistol skill to 60% or higher, then attach laser sights to your dual Desert Eagles and dual wield to your heart's content, because laser sights+60% skill+practice is the only limit to doing this. A trench coat is suggested, but you can pass up on the katana in favor of steel-toed boots. What I'm saying is sweet Christ may 7th edition come soon. TombsGrave fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Feb 24, 2013 |
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Feb 24, 2013 14:50
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Speaking of overkill, the Serenity RPG included this rule for if you got exposed to vacuum, e.g. dumped out of an airlock: pick up every die at the table and roll 'em. That was the damage you took. The obvious idea is that you were gonna get killed the hell out of, and there was no getting around it. ...except that space isn't that deadly. If you exhale as thoroughly as you can manage, you can survive about half a minute or so, and have roughly ten seconds--a full round action!--of consciousness before you drop out entirely, and being a wily space cowboy you or your wacky buddies can clearly manage it in that time. You're going to feel like absolute poo poo upon return and you probably won't come back unscathed, but it's not an instant POP.
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Feb 28, 2013 18:55
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I'm legit curious about why parrying doesn't exist or isn't allowed, culturally, in Rokugan. That stuck out as much as the horrible success chances. Hm, content, content... Just a little one, and another Call of Cthulhu tidbit, for now: NPCs can have personalized or custom skill ratings in BRP, usually relating to something they're good at that an investigator isn't likely to know. This can range from the special attacks of Leng spiders (Web 60%, f'rex) to humans with skills not covered in the core rulebook. Don't get excited--I've yet to see an NPC with, say, Black Magic Fireballs 99% or Ninjitsu 76%. (Then again, I don't have the Japan supplement.) The best skill I've ever seen was in the Dunwich supplement--a logger with the skill Fell Tree Accurately, at something like 90~%. This enables him to call where he's going to land a tree when he chops it down and have that be true 90~% of the time... ...except that skills are only rolled in adventure-critical or high-tension situations. A skill of 50% is enough to earn a living--it means that you have an even chance of success or failure when poo poo goes down. This means that this lumberjack can accurately fell a tree while being chased by Dark Young or shot at by cultists. Note that there are precisely zero in-game mechanics for this other than "he can fell trees accurately most of the time," and combat rounds are defined as "however long it takes to do something significant." It's not infeasible that he could use this skill in combat to fell trees accurately and onto enemies' heads.
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Apr 1, 2013 15:37
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PoptartsNinja posted:Speaking of stat changes Intelligent weapons don't have physical stats or character levels, so the un-fun answer would be "those parts of the effect are wasted." The armor bonus and Fortitude save would both be useful for making it harder to hit and damage, as I recall, so it's not a complete waste. But the rules as written don't have any way for the poor angry sword able to wield itself. That reminds me of a brief mid-level Pathfinder game I was in wherein my character was approximately three characters--a socially maladjusted psychic warrior (1) who mainly talked through her psicrystal (2) and had an intelligent sword (3). The intelligent sword had (IIRC) Alter Self as a power, and used it to take human form when, as I recall, we needed an innocuous scout who didn't look like a recently-escaped prisoner. Thus we could get some basic information without any threat to ourselves. The game didn't last very long on account of the GM having, historically, a bad time of realizing what our characters could do, especially with players moderately versed in breaking d20. TombsGrave fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jul 24, 2016 |
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Jul 24, 2016 04:55
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