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Chamale posted:Absolutely. In the deck building thread we've come up with a deck that uses creatures, in a sense, to summon a 60/60 giant death creature on the first turn, and there are decks built around Tendrils of Agony that win games without ever playing a creature. One popular deck in Modern (a format restricted to the cards made since 2003) has only one win condition in it, a single Pyrite Spellbomb, and once it gets going it can return it from the discard pile to play any number of times to kill the opponent. A deck in Legacy has no win condition at all, but uses Cunning Wish to bring in a Blue Sun's Zenith from outside the game. How does that Blue Sun Zenith thing work? Surely X is zero, since you didn't pay any mana at all to play it?
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Feb 26, 2013 19:40
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post where someone was talking about playing a Storm deck against a casual player. It went something like:
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Vampire: the Requiem has a slightly odd thing that I'm not actually sure is deliberate or not. Now, vampires in this setting obviously go around at night since the sun will explode them but more importantly cannot without massive dice roll penalties or a cool special ability be awake during the day because their 'Beast' knows they should be hiding from the sun. So, keep this in mind that they can't just be awake during the day and sleep at night in their underground bunker. Vampires in this setting, rules as written, cannot see in the dark. I believe their senses are slightly more acute than a mortal's but there is a clan-specific power called Auspex whose first level ability specifically states that it allows a character to see in the dark. The clan that has this ability is known to have been introduced to vampire society much later than the others. In addition, vampires are deathly loving afraid of fire. Like, if someone lights a cigarette lighter near them they have to pass a reasonably hard roll to not immediately frenzy and uncontrollably run away. There is a magic power that lets you spend a willpower to not freak out but in the timeline it was invented relatively recently (like the last 200 years). See where I'm going with this? Until electic lights were invented nocturnal vampires were blind as a bat (heh) at night and couldn't safely use any form of illumination. Most GMs effectively ignore this rule and in the new revised edition which is coming out soon there is a cheap Merit called Enhanced Senses that anyone can buy which lets you see in the dark. The reason I'm not sure whether this is intentional or not is because it is actually brought up in the books sometimes. In the Requiem for Rome setting, where you play Roman vampires, it mentions that all illumination is fire-based and everyone is hilariously on edge at all times. Additionally, the Lancea Sanctum faction who historically spent a lot of time reading and writing religious documents are mentioned as having a rank which traditionally went to the most level headed, stable person because it involved being the guy in charge of all the lighting so that they could all see what they were loving doing to write their stuff. The frenzy rules in general are kind of cool and are a sort of anti-Murphy's rule. I know a lot of people ignore them, especially in LARP, because rules as written vampires are actually hilariously, ludicrously unstable. Like, more unstable than Werewolves, whose horror gimmick is supposed to be their Rage. Werewolves need to seriously drop their morality stat to be threatened by Death Rage over something mild like an insult. On the other hand, every single vampire has a chance of flying into a murderous rage upon being embarrassed or humiliated. In the fiction, this is explained as the reason why vampire society is so formalised and stilted - it's all based around trying to socialise without everyone flying off the handle every few minutes. There's this thing called the Predator's Taint where when vampires meet each other (although there are caveats that if you're prepared, like if you know you're going to go to vampire court, you can steel yourself to not have to do this) they essentially have to compare power stats and check to see if the weaker one immediately runs away in panic and the stronger one immediately strikes in anger. There's a very Murphy's Rule thing with one of the vampire magic powers called Protean. I literally don't know anyone who doesn't change this because rules as written the first level reads that whenever you check for Predator's Taint you always act as though you were the stronger, and attack if you fail. Yes, this means that instead of running away from stronger vampires you will now try and kill them instead. This is not useful in any way and is exactly as harmful as it sounds. Fortunately, new revised Protean doesn't do this. There's plenty more Murphy's Rules to write about with WoD.
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Mar 21, 2013 10:59
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Down With People posted:Now to be fair, it's stressed in the rules for Predator's Taint that it should only be featured in-game when story-appropriate, i.e. when a character is ambushed by a vampire they've never met rather than just wigging out at every Elysium. It's true, the default assumption is that Predator's Taint only comes into effect if you're not planning on meeting vampires. Still, it's a hilarious effect. Also considering new Protean 1 is an upgraded version of old Protean 4 I think, it tells you how bad the original Protean 1 was.
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Mar 21, 2013 11:54
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Nessus posted:While Rotschreck (this sounds similar; I'm not super up on Requiem's terms) made a lot of sense I thought that the poo poo with having to make a goddamn formal roll to light a cigarette or enter a room with a candle in it was retarded, especially given all the vampire imagery involving, well, totally gothique clove smoking or candelabras. I recall in V20 they say, essentially, 'it doesn't count for minor things, but if someone tries to actually jab you with a cigarette or if a fireplace flares abruptly - maybe then.' Essentially it's extended resolve + composure (so an average person is rolling 4 dice) each successful roll stalls frenzy for a turn until you reach target successes, any failure means immediate frenzy - so an average or above average person is only going to have something like a 10-25% chance to fail any given roll, which isn't actually too bad. If it's at a safe distance or otherwise under your control you get +2 dice, if it's a surprise you lose a dice. A cigarette lighter means you only need 1 success, a flaming torch is 2, a bonfire is 4, obscured sunlight is 7 all the way up to 10 for direct sunlight. It's not actually too bad for PCs. Unfortunately, for Mr Average with 4 dice, a sudden cigarette lighter (not an uncommon occurance if out clubbing or in a bar say) will make him hulk out like a motherfucker 35% percent of the time. For our Requiem for Rome vampires, being surrounded by flaming torches means that 58% of the time they'll wig out. While ancillae and elders are almost certainly above average stats, what this means is that for every meeting of vampires pre-electric times, a significant proportion show up and immediately run away. Now let's look at anger frenzy while I've got the numbers in front of me. Same roll mechanics as fear frenzy. Here, the success thresholds are generally higher. 2 successes for the smallest offense, such as someone dinging your car, or an unwanted beggar asking for change. Being insulted in public or dealing with hours of frustration and delay (so like, anything political) is 3 successes. 5 if you already dislike the person who insults you. If the offense attacks your virtue or aligns with your vice you lose 2 dice. If you're hungry (which is reasonably common if you use disciplines a lot) lose another). Let's take Mr Average 4 dice again. He has an enemy he's trying to outmaneuver politically. If that guy insults him, 75% of the time he is going to wig out and try to kill him, drat the consequences. He will fight until he is dead. If the guy remains frostily polite but Mr Average spends an unsuccessful few hours trying politics, 58% of the time, Average will snap and go find his enemy to try to pull his loving heart out. If Average has been using disciplines to gain an advantage and is now hungry, it's 73% of the time. Let's assume this guy is Average's enemy because he's trying to close down a homeless shelter to use as a Haven and the Charitable Mr Average is fighting to keep it open. If his enemy insults him in public while Average is hungry, hoo boy. He needs to get 5 successes on 1 dice without failing a roll or he's going to go green and tear all his clothes off. Don't even think about vampires in combat. If being insulted sets this guy off, what do you think being stabbed does to him?
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Mar 21, 2013 14:24
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El Estrago Bonito posted:The Twilight setting is actually a pretty good one for an RP, it's just that the books and movies are: I've been itching to have Twilight vampires show up in a World of Darkness: Hunter game for ages. They're terrifying - they're effectively invulnerable to everything shy of bunker busters, they move faster than people can see, can powder solid granite in their hands, have no weaknesses whatsoever and have a reasonable chance of possessing some kind of insane power like telepathy or futuresight. The fact that they look like fabulous sparkly mincing idiots makes this even better. Especially considering 95% of all vampires in Twilight are like Humanity 1 on the WoD scale.
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Mar 31, 2013 16:50
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theironjef posted:They have two pretty clear weaknesses. Their heads come off like opening a soda, and they're so stupid for blood that they'll go all feral-charge at the tiniest whiff of it, so they're probably pretty easy to trap. Plus I guess you could introduce them to a really bland authorial insert and watch them all just rip each other up like fighting fish. As far as I can tell, their heads come off for other vampires who can also powderise solid granite and hit a baseball to supersonic speeds (oh my god is that latter example retarded though, I cannot believe that was ever written) but for everyone else, you're trying to chop the head off of something that is literally solid diamond. I'll give you the latter one, but I'm not convinced a pissed off superman is any safer than a sane superman. Mors Rattus posted:So you haven't seen the Players bloodline yet, then? WoD is awesome. Uh, for content, having a Teleportarium and Murder Servitors in Rogue Trader basically means that when you do the 'get really close to them' maneuver in space combat you get absurd, ridiculous bonuses to attempt to board them for obvious reasons. Now, in the core rules (I believe it was errata'd later?) this is ludicrously overpowered and is definitely the best combination of options for a starship and tactic to use in space battles, hands down. On the other hand, this is 40k and a teleportarium involves opening a portal to Hell and sending things through while vaguely hoping for the best. Considering your entire ship is millennia old and you have no idea how it, nevermind the much older and more complicated Teleportarium - nobody in the galaxy knows how to build one anymore - works this seems dumb. Furthermore, murder servitors are criminals or other undesirables who have been lobotomised, fitted with cybernetics and guns out the wazoo and turned into, well, murder machines. They're not stable at the best of times. Anyone find it confusing how there's not even a GM sidebar for "Hey, this tactic could go horribly wrong and lead to Chaosified supermurder servitors rampaging around both ships? In gameplay this is an obvious fix if your players start abusing the tactic but RAW it just doesn't happen.
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Apr 1, 2013 02:08
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The most powerful weapon in the Shadowrun universe is a Zeppelin with a Ballista attached. The way bows work is off your Strength attribute rather than a flat damage code, and for vehicles, the Body stat replaces Strength. Fit a bow to a Zeppelin - the vehicle with the highest Body in the game - and you have a weapon that can annihilate main battle tanks and mechs alike with good ol' muscle power.
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Apr 9, 2013 00:06
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Coward posted:Of course, by their nature, there are a lot of ways of breaking superhero systems. Notably Wild Talents and its famous sidebar titled "Trust" featuring the power that can permanently turn off the sun for 42 points per die, which is perfectly attainable for everything but very low powered games. This is, of course, the game that points out that 400 points can buy you literal invincibility within the system, in that a 400 point invincibility power takes 10 of their dice away after they roll (so ignoring any modifiers they might have) in a game in which you are only allowed to roll 10 dice. On similar One Roll Engine lines, let's have some silliness that I've just realised a player in my REIGN game is working towards. REIGN is a slightly unusual fantasy setting where everyone and their grandmother has access to magic. Despite this, magic is not the most broken thing in the system - apart from a few eyebrow raisers, by and large magic is very balanced. It's Fighting Styles that can get silly. As a quick example, it is physically impossible to stab somebody with Ultimate Supreme Monkey King in the legs, ever. Just doesn't work. My player is going for a specific synergy between two combat styles based around being a loving madman - Winnowing Axe and Black Thirst. Winnowing Axe is based around using a waraxe to gently caress up hordes of scrubs and Black Thirst gives you mad bonuses to attack with a poleaxe at the cost of making it easier for people to hit you. As a brief aside, minions in REIGN are modelled a bit like in 4e. 10 minions is a pool of 10 dice that you roll at once, and any successes are one of the minions actually blocking something or getting a hit in. A hit on a minion kills one, they have no health. The pool would then go down to 9. Winnowing Axe has an ability that allows you to make a second attack after you kill someone. It has another ability that lets you kill multiple minions in a single swing. These combine to allow you to kill a whole lot of people in one round. The way this synergises with Black Thirst is thus: the fourth tier of Black Thirst reads: "Black Slaking (4 points): Every time the character kills someone, he adds +1 Killing damage to all his polearm attacks for the remainder of the combat. It’s cumulative. If he kills someone on the first round, he gets a +1 damage bonus on the second round. If he kills two people that round, he gets a +3 damage bonus thereafter and so on. This bonus can never exceed +10." Round one: Kill ten mooks in two swings (very achievable) Round two: One-shot any opponent for the remainder of the combat. +10 killing damage is huge. In REIGN, each hit location (head, torso, arm, etc) have their own health. The largest hit location is the torso, which has 10 wound boxes. Full plate would take away three killing damage. However, those 10 damage are added to whatever normal damage you would do, which is going to be at minimum 3 killing. Splat. Hitting anyone in the head would decapitate them, hitting anyone in the limbs would sever the limb immediately and bleed over enough damage to the torso to send them running home to their mother. Nobody thought this through, goddammit. Caveat: You have to switch weapons to activate each fighting style, but a third style, Path of the Razor Heart, lets you do that as a free action.
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Oct 1, 2013 11:26
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PantsOptional posted:In the new FFG Star Wars system there's an ability called Scathing Tirade which is primarily available to social-fu type characters. The long and short of it is that you take a combat action to make a Coercion (aka Intimidate) check in order to deal strain (nonlethal) damage to one or more targets. This is already a little silly in that you scold someone into unconsciousness, but it gets even better. So Star Wars characters are literally Spina vampires?
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Oct 22, 2013 10:49
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The Gyropistol wasn't awful, especially if you had a non-zero chance of having to shoot somebody underwater or in space.
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Mar 17, 2014 16:46
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Dr Pepper posted:
Mostly because that's a feat that makes you 100% more effective in combat and thus would become completely mandatory at lower levels. Death to multiple attacks.
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Mar 18, 2014 13:21
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Something a friend and I have been chatting about recently is how absurdly broken the nWoD crafting rules are. Like many things, they utterly break down and become nonsensical at high levels. We tried this out to see what would happen and the results are - well, see for yourself. A couple of things for those who are unfamiliar with nWoD's mechanics. Attributes (things like Strength and Intelligence) are rated 1 - 5, representing how many dice you get in your pool from your raw stats. Same with skills. If you're playing some sort of mega-vampire or mega-wizard, the nWoD equivalent of Epic Level D&D, stats can go up to 10. We're gonna make a bow that needs 60 strength to use. In the Armory book, there's a couple of sentences about making bows - clearly a random aside they put in in case you ended up stranded in the woods or something - you do an extended Dexterity + Survival (oddly not Crafts) roll, and every 10 successes you get gives the bow a weapon rating. 30 successes, a rating 3 bow: which is pretty respectable, about what a shotgun does. That rating 3 bow takes 3 strength to wield. Pretty sensible, right? Enter Hattori Hanzo, the Man Your Man Could Make A Bow Like Hattori is a grossly minmaxed bowyer built as a 100xp vampire. code:Extended Actions in nWoD allow you to make a number of rolls equal to the size of the dice pool. With +2 for the Hobbyist Clique and +2 for Patient, Hattori can roll 39 dice 43 times in order to make The Deathbow. There is more scumming we can do. Vampires can blood buff, where you burn vampiric vitae for bonuses to physical rolls - like Dexterity checks. He can blood buff 10 times for 20 more dice, each roll. Of course, a human has about 7 blood points in him so this is a lot of death to feed this bow. Additionally, we could have bought an arbitrarily large amount of Retainers at 5xp each and had them assist us in the roll for [their successes on a 10 dice pool] more dice and more rolls. But none of that is actually necessary. Why? Because ignoring the rote action, ignoring 9 again and even ignoring 10 again, the average number of successes on 43 rolls of 39 dice is 559. Adding in 9 and 10 again puts us easily over 600 successes, giving us a rating 60 bow. As an aside, 600 successes is important because that's how high we've managed to get Strength on a playable character. With the blood buff and spending willpower for rote action, you can actually get something far more absurd like a rating 139 bow. The only thing we can think of that would be able to wield that is if you got a Mage to someway, somehow build a Size 139 golem, giving it 139 strength. A jumbo jet is something like size 40, so you'd actually have to build Gypsy Danger to be able to wield Unlimited Bow Works. But I digress, back to the slightly saner realm of our rating 60 bow. Each roll is a base of 4 hours. 2 hours with our Good Time Management, so each bow takes a little over 3 days to build. This requires no expenditure of blood or willpower and Hattori is a vampire so doesn't get tired or fatigued. Hypothetically, if he was a Nosferatu with the Merit that lets him stay awake during the day if he's far enough underground, he could crank out a doomsday weapon every 3 days for the rest of eternity. And make no mistake, a rating 60 bow is a loving doomsday weapon. So, we've got the bow. Which, relatedly, is made out of literally just normal wood according to the crafting rules. This is a bow that can only be drawn by somebody who passed "can throw a jumbo jet like a baseball without a roll" 20 strength points ago but if you thought we were inventing whole new areas of materials science to achieve that - nope, just wood. Hattori now hands the bow off to his friend Tonk Largehuge, the Man Your Man Could Shoot A Bow Like. Tonk is also a vampire - a vampire in the Sotoha bloodline and a member of the Carthian Movement to be exact. Tonk needs 60 strength on the 1-10 scale to be able to wield this bow. How do we achieve this? Gross, gross powergaming. Strength 10, Vigor 5, Celerity 5, Blood Potency 10 and the A More Perfect Monster Threnody from Blood Sorceries. Vigor passively adds to Strength, ignoring all caps so Tonk already has Strength 15 on the 1-10 scale. There's a Carthian Devotion that lets you convert Celerity 1:1 into Vigor so now we have Vigor 10 and therefore Strength 20. At this point Tonk frenzies, remaining perfectly calm thanks to the Sotoha bloodline discipline and still capable of acting rationally. This adds his BP to his physical stats - Strength 30. Now he goes off and casts A More Perfect Monster which flat doubles all his physical stats for Strength 60. At this point Tonk picks up The Doombow, nocks an arrow and fires it. What happens? Bad things. Strength 60 + 10 Athletics, an Area of Expertise in Archery for +2, +1 to the bow rating from the Archery fighting style, 9-again and rote action from Professional Training: Archer, +20 for 10 blood buffs means 92 dice rolled meaning, on average: 59 successes of damage plus 61 damage from the bow for a total of 120 lethal damage. Your average human has 7 health levels. You just did 120 damage to him. He loving vaporises. To put this into perspective, a single shot from this bow could travel through 4 bank vault doors (damage reduction 10, health 18) and still have enough punch left on the other side to instantly kill a tough human. 120 damage is completely nonsensical in the WoD system. There's nothing this doesn't kill. An assault rifle is rating 5, being shot in the face by a main battle tank is rating 28, being hit dead-on by a 122mm high explosive artillery shell is rating 25. Tonk Largehuge can do average 120 damage every single round thanks to the archery fighting style and he can do it at sniper rifle ranges thanks to his monstrous strength. As a final, bonus Murphy's Rule, the explosives rules in WoD are terrible and thanks to the final entry on the table being "+1 damage for every doubling in the mass of explosive used after this", it would take more TNT than the mass of the universe to do as much damage as Tonk can do with a wooden bow and arrow. So Shadowrun, the system where the most damaging thing in the game is a Zeppelin with a cranked ballista, can eat its loving heart out.
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May 12, 2014 16:23
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Flavivirus posted:Not going to argue that the crafting and explosives rules are awful, but weapon damage modifiers (like almost all modifiers to your dice pool) top out at +5. God-Machine changes weapon damage to be automatic successes rather than a modifier to your dice pool. Nowhere that I can see in God-Machine does it say that weapon damage is capped at 5.
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May 12, 2014 17:21
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Mighty Dicktron posted:By not using grapple rules because they are always stupid and no one likes them. Bizarrely, for all its rules jankiness, Scion had really sensible grappling rules. You can make a Brawl attack and just say you're grappling someone. You do normal damage, both of you have to spend an action doing nothing and then they make a brawl check on you to get out.
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Jul 11, 2014 02:45
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El Estrago Bonito posted:In one edition of D&D there was no rules about the actual space you could create water in making it so you could basically weld two tubes together and have your own water powered wizard gun. Some physics major friends of mine once sat down and did the maths on an Epic Level Create Water spell and four Walls of Force in a pyramid shape with an arbitrarily small hole in the top. Since there, RAW, was nothing stopping you putting all 21 litres inside this atomically small area, what you ended up with was a pressure differential so large that a free electron laser shot out the top and probably destroyed the city. It was important that it was an Epic Level water creation spell, since you couldn't kill gods with it otherwise. This led to the similar discussion of buying a bucket of Epic created water and finding 1HD gods to drown in it for mad xp.
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Sep 23, 2014 11:22
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Aren't AKs worth like 50 bucks in some places? So you go to Somalia or something and you can start pulling AKs out of your pocket. They ain't made out of pure iron and it's difficult to imagine a simpler assault rifle.
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Jan 14, 2015 15:44
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The group I play GURPS with once played in a 3E GURPS Age of Sail swashbuckling game that was using the GURPS vehicle rules. Apparently they broke the game over their knee when they got hold of the rules and built their own ship. It was some sort of tri-hulled hydrofoil monstrosity that was leaps and bounds ahead of any other ship on the water at the time. For entirely unrelated reasons, we have central heating, fridges and iPads in our TL0 neolithic caveman setting.
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Feb 3, 2015 11:48
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In the World of Darkness, you can throw a jumbo jet twice as far as you can throw a car, assuming you're strong enough to do both. Why? Jumbo jets are aerodynamic, which doubles the distance an object can be thrown. gently caress how big they are or any other factors. This happened when I was GMing and it was very difficult for me to argue that jumbo jets are not aerodynamic.
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Feb 4, 2015 13:53
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It's a thing that weirded me out that 1gp lovely items like lanterns and shoes are literally worth like, two fistfuls of gold. That's loads of loving gold, people. That's thousands in today's money.
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Mar 29, 2015 12:04
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karmicknight posted:I initially read that as paladin swat team. A friend of mine keeps going on about doing a D&D Doorkickers campaign where the party are the Gray Hands of Waterdeep and we basically reenact police action movies, SWAT teaming warehouses full of drug dealing beholders and poo poo. Provides a bit of structure to the whole 'kick in the doors' gaming approach. I believe the hypothetical party was a Vengeance Paladin on door smiting duty, a plate-clad Storm Cleric as aerial support, a Bone Zone necromancer to set up cordons with a skeleton army and a grappler Bard to wrestle perps to the ground and restrain them.
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Nov 20, 2015 16:30
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bewilderment posted:In Reign, two lightly-armored novice swordsmen swinging wildly at each other while simultaneously trying to dodge each other will almost never hit each other and may take several rounds to kill each other, if they get that far. Their rolls will just barely beat or tie each other. Royalty is a smooth and continuous cutting motion.
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Nov 4, 2016 14:00
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I think the most fun way to resolve it is to just let both squeeze into the same space, neither aware of the other. There's an Esoteric Discipline (a special power which upgrades a regular skill, something roughly equivalent to a D&D feat but actually good) in Reign called Dancing Unseen which changes the Stealth skill from an opposed roll vs the guard's Sight to an unopposed roll where 'X people based on how well you roll simply cannot see you'. The fluff for this was that you were dancing around and completely avoiding line of sight, darting from cover to cover and swerving to avoid their gaze. This explicitly looked ridiculous to anyone who could still see you. An actual situation which came up in a Reign game I ran was that two thieves had broken into the same office to steal something and both passed a Listen check vs Stealth to hear that someone else was sneaking around in the room and both immediately started using Dancing Unseen. Had there been any other people in the room, they would have seen two thieves frantically ducking, stepping, twisting and contorting themselves to avoid the sightlines of someone that they themselves couldn't see. So there's two people boogying spastically, hearing the slight movements of padded feet in a small one-person office and swerving to avoid the invisible other's theoretical lines of sight while they both finished their respective burglaries. I think in the end one of them decided to literally just hide in a cupboard until the other went away. After that, the PC thief went and bought another Esoteric Discipline called Autumn Warfare, designed around making you completely silent, so that situation would never happen again.
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May 16, 2017 13:48
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Phanatic posted:You walk on down to the elevator and then slide right past it. I don't know why but even just thinking about that cracked me the gently caress up.
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May 26, 2017 00:01
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