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In Shadowrun 2e and 3e, Light Pistols and Holdout Pistols are useless. Pistols in Shadowrun are split into four categories, largely by caliber:
All guns of a type tend to have the same damage and the same firing rates, with rare exceptions. Damage codes are split into two parts: The power of the attack, which is a number, and the damage of the attack, which is a letter. The letter determines how many boxes on the condition monitor are lost: one for Light, three for Moderate, six for Serious, and all ten for Deadly. For reference, Heavy pistols typically do 6M and a three-round burst from an assault rifle does 7S. Now, the way attacks and damage works is like this:
The combat pool is a pool of dice that recovers each turn from which you can use dice on attacks, defense, and soak rolls. Since there's a spiral of death, there's really only two strategies here: Either use all your dice on one attack and hope to kill your enemy instantly, or spend it all on dodging (or, if your armor is good enough, soak) the first attack coming against you because those dice will be much worse after you get hit. Now, the last piece of information: Light Pistols have a damage code of 4L. So, if we've got a person with decent skill (3) unloading a light pistol at someone with average Body (2 or 3), the victim will almost certainly survive with only minor injuries. Worse, if that person is wearing any kind of armor, it's nearly impossible to even injure them- and Shadowrun's setting is so spectacularly crime-ridden that ordinary civilians often wear armored clothing, which offers 3 points of ballistic armor. And it never gets any better- you can only kill someone with a light pistol if you're waaay better at killing them than they are at soaking damage. So why is this? Well, in SR 1e, light pistols were the absolute most deadly weapon in the game, because of how damage codes worked there. 1e damage codes had a third number, it's staging, which was how many successes it took to stage the damage up or down a letter. Heavy Pistols were 6M2, just like 2e or 3e. Light pistols were 4L1, so if you could get 3 extra successes on an attack, you could deal Deadly damage. And that was an easy enough task that you could build a light pistol specialist that could easily kill anything in a single bullet.
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Feb 18, 2013 07:46
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BlackIronHeart posted:Thanks for this write-up. I've been playing with a group that has used SR3E rules for the last 20 years and it's nice to know why my Not-Combat-Oriented Face character has to kill someone 1 box at a time. I'm glad to be of help! On review, I was wrong in some places- Light Pistols do 6L and Heavy Pistols do 9M. But it doesn't really change the analysis. Anyway, some advice: Pretty much everybody in 2e and 3e ended up using at least a Heavy Pistol. But I can understand not wanting to do that, because it ruins the lining of your coat. Not to worry. Because Ratoslov has a solution for all ills: Cannon Companion's firearm creation/customization rules. Cannon Companion has an incredibly poorly thought-out firearm creation rules kit. In addition to being completely unable to make many of the weapons in the game, it's also capable of making absolutely ridiculous firearms. This is how it works: First, you pick out a frame. By 'frame' it means the general category of firearm, such as Light Pistol, Submachine Gun, Sniper Rifle, whatever. Frames have all the stats that firearms have, and a plain frame is a perfectly acceptable, if generic, firearm of it's type. They also have a cost (measured in DP which stands for Design Points) and a FCU capacity, which stands for 'Firearm Construction Units'. FCUs are an abstract measure of how customizable a gun is, and are intended to be a balancing measure when combined with cost. The designers must have forgotten how much money a PC is willing to spend on a totally loving broken gun. The next thing that happens is that you select a number of Design Options and Customizations for your gun. The entire difference between Design Options and Customizations is that you can only apply Design Options to a gun you're making, and not one you're customizing. Each Frame has limits on which Design Options you can put on it- for example, you can't make a break-action Machine Pistol or a fully-automatic Assault Cannon. If you're going to make an absolutely broken gun, the first design option you want is Improved FCU. Yes, you can just buy more FCU and thereby more broken. It's wonderful. The final step is figuring out the final cost of the weapon, which is very simple: Multiply the DP by five, and that's the cost in Nuyen. Why is this even here? Because after-market customizations are more expensive, and instead multply their DP cost by 8. Aftermarket customizations are also limited by the gun's FCU, but standard guns don't have a FCU stat. You're supposed to figure out what it's maximum FCU and current FCU are before you do any customizations, but I don't know what you're supposed to do with guns which have features that aren't on the list or exotic firearms like the gun-cane that don't have a listed frame. Whatever. Anyway, let's make a terribly broken gun! Let's start with a shotgun. A standard shotgun frame has a power rating of 8S, is semi-automatic, has a concealability of 3 (which is terrible), weighs 4.5 kilograms (because the weights of everything in SR are hosed up), holds 5 rounds in an internal magazine, has all the standard accessory mounts, and has 2.5 FCU and a cost of 130 DP. So we first buy up all the extra FCU possible, bringing totals to 3.5 FCU and 170 DP. Now, if we get Ceramic Components so it's invisible to metal detectors, and then make it a bullpup and shorten the barrel to increase concealability, you lose some range but increase it's concealability to 7. For comparison, the most concealable Light Pistol in the main book is the Fichetti Security 500, which also has a concealability of 7. All of this only costs us 1.75 BP, so we've still got more than half our budget to go! Next, we make it clip-fed, which for some reason costs no FCP and sets the clip size to 4. That's okay, though, because the Extended Clip modification also has no FCP cost and can extend it to up to 50 rounds with no loss of concealabilty. To compare, the Increased Ammo Capacity design feature for revolvers and internal magazine guns costs FCP and reduces the gun's concealability by 1 for every 4 rounds. So you'll never have to reload this sucker, either. Which is good, because we're going to make it burst fire. Final cost: 2265 nuyen. That's not even all the FCU, but I'm getting tired of this exercise. There you go. A fully-automatic shotgun that won't crease your suit if you stick it in your coat pocket. Ratoslov fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Feb 22, 2013 |
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Feb 22, 2013 13:06
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sfwarlock posted:I thought all of unhinged (and unglued) fell under that. There's an actual format for playing unhinged and unglued. There's regular Un-card stupid, and then there's R&D's Secret Lair stupid.
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Mar 15, 2013 00:23
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Kasonic posted:D&D never stops giving me interesting things to do with my rear end in a top hat. Someone care to explain the Asssplodeomancer?
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Mar 17, 2013 23:11
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GottaPayDaTrollToll posted:RAW, it should work if you can prove that the two of clubs in question actually has magical powers, and thus fulfills the requirement of being a "Magic card". Good luck doing that, though. That's easy. Pull it out of someone's ear.
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Mar 19, 2013 06:11
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And there's also critters whose CR is totally inappropriate for their level or who can easily be put into circumstances where they are essentially invulnerable. Shadows are, of course, the classic example of the former. They're CR3, but they're flying incorporeal undead that drain strength with incorporeal touch attacks, and when your strength is reduced to 0, you rise as another shadow (and cannot be ressurected with anything short of a Wish. Incorporeal means that any attack against them by a non-magical weapon has a 50% miss chance. They can fly through walls, and they've got a base speed faster than any level 3 PC. So if your party isn't kitted out with magic weapons and a cleric, these things are a guarenteed TPK, and even then they're pretty likely to kill someone. Similar is the infamous Monstrous Crab, which is guarenteed to kill at least two PCs in the party. Basically, it's a giant crab that only shows up on the coasts of large bodies of water. It's got two claws, each of which can grab a character with a +19 grapple check and, since it's large, it can move full speed while grappling someone. It's combat strategy is to grab as many PCs as possible, then retreat into the water. It's got enough HP, AC, and resistences (because it's Vermin, and therefore immune to mind-effecting stuff) that it's highly unlikely the PCs will be able to stop it before it does this, and then once it's in the water it's all over.
Ratoslov fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jun 13, 2013 |
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Jun 13, 2013 20:13
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Halloween Jack posted:IF you're near water, you can use the folding ship to bypass the encounter completely. Yeah, but that makes you vulnerable to yet another CR 3 Completely Unfair monster, the Wyrmling Black Dragon. Since it's got swimming and a acid breath attack, if the adventurers are on a boat in the middle of a lake or something, the dragon can just hang out under the water and acid-breath them from 30' under the water every 1d4 rounds until they're all dead. My little brother had a rant about these things, and he was joking about making an adventure, the Journey to the Island of Totally Unfair CR 3 Monsters. Water tends to feature prominently in these things.
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Jun 20, 2013 10:02
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Weird Uncle Dave posted:Well, Shadowrun also didn't have Cyberpunk's "Mr. Studd" implant. Incidentally, both cybernetic breast implants and penile implants have a (very small) capacity score. Which means you can stick all sorts of other devices in them. Like a cell phone, or a pen, or poison glands, or a very small gun.
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Jun 28, 2013 05:56
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Vavrek posted:There are a lot of silly possibilities that come from misreading the capacity rules. My mistake. Sorry!
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Jun 28, 2013 07:48
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Jimbozig posted:If a wight kills a squirrel and it comes back as a squirrel-wight would it still have 11 INT? Nah. You attach the Wight template to a squirrel. Admittedly, you have to make that Wight template, but since all undead are assumed to be based off of Humans, that's pretty easy. A Squirrel-Wight would have 1 higher INT than it normally has, so it's merely preternaturally intelligent, but it's also got +16 to Stealth on top of whatever it already is- so it'd have stupidly high stealth, be capable of squeezing through a knothole, is smarter than most animals, and can kill you instantly. Oh, and it has a burning hatred for all living things, so it'll be out there making an army of mouse-wights, bird-wights, and fish-wights to hunt you down no matter where you go.
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Nov 18, 2013 19:02
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Can you energy-drain plants? If so: Wight grass. 
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Nov 18, 2013 19:43
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That'd be a pretty clever game mechanic if the dramatic failure effects weren't so much more useful than the regular effect.
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Nov 19, 2013 05:31
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kafziel posted:The answer is, it doesn't. Universal Solvent works on Sovereign Glue, Tanglefoot Bags, Kuo-Toa secretions, and nothing else. Which, happily, means that sovereign glue fiberglass armor with a layer of paint or lacquer has a level of indestructibility that's only exceeded by artifacts or the Tarresque. The only way to get rid of it is either to chuck it in a Orb of Annihilation or to strip the paint off of it, then use Universal Solvent. Or, I guess, a Wish. The bad news is, this feature is nearly useless, since your armor being indestructible offers no bonuses to AC. It'll be useful if your GM's a fan of sundering armor, but aside from that it interacts with the rules system in no meaningful way.
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Jan 11, 2014 09:14
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Cassa posted:So could you apply this wonder coating to any item you don't wish to have destroyed? Weapons, boots, etc? I'm not sure. See, Sovereign Glue doesn't set the hardness of the item it's coating to infinite, it's just indestructible. I don't think a Sovereign Coat counts as a separate item, so it can't give the item it's covering cover against attacks. However, a Sovereign Fiberglass box will offer 100% cover with infinite hardness to any attacks against objects inside it, and if you make stuff out of Sovereign Fiberglass to begin with, yeah, it almost certainly won't get destroyed. Although I bet there's some spell out there that destroys objects that'll still be able to hurt it, but that's wizards for you.
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Jan 11, 2014 13:06
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Of course, why they didn't say "a well-made katana is a masterwork longsword" or whatever is beyond me, but so is a lot of d20 design. You totally shouldn't say a well-made katana is a masterwork longsword. It's a masterwork scimitar. They're both single-edged one-handed slashing swords. Since there isn't a general 'saber' class, that makes it a scimitar.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:52
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Jabor posted:And then they instantly master the weapon as soon as they grab a second one in their other hand. This reminds me of the weapon profiencies in Shadowrun, which are all kinds of hosed up because they're by firearm type, which means you can be hypercompetant at firing an assault rifle but completely useless at firing a semiautomatic sport rifle, or you can be good at firing machine pistols but not regular pistols. This gets worse, naturally, with exotic weapon proficiences, which cost the same as regular weapon skills but can only be used with one specific model of a exotic weapon. In some editions, all flamethrowers are exotic weapons, which means you can be a master of one brand of flamethrower but utterly incompetant with a mechanically near-identical flamethrower made by another company. Exotic weapon proficiencies, therefore, were only worthwhile if the weapon was worth building your entire character around, which meant the only one anyone actually used was the one for the monofilament whip.
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Mar 17, 2014 03:35
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The plan falls apart once characters with actual bushi schools get multiple attacks to lord over you, but until then, "All creature will die and all the things will be broken." It'd actually be pretty appropriate if the Ronin's simple, effective techniques managed to be roughly on-par with noble techniques, but the game-book keeps referring to them as strictly inferior. And every time the game fiction describes a fight between similarly skilled Samurai and Ronin, the Ronin feeds the Samurai his teeth and takes his lunch-money.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:29
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Rulebook Heavily posted:To die from ability score loss you have to have 0 in it. Undead have -, so they'd survive. Oooh, I just found a Murphy's Rule regarding Undead in Pathfinder, though. Undead use Charisma to calculate their hit-points. This is because "For undead creatures, Charisma is a measure of their unnatural 'lifeforce.'" Famously, Undead do not have a Consitution score: quote:Undead creatures do not have a Constitution score. Undead use their Charisma score in place of their Constitution score when calculating hit points, Fortitude saves, and any special ability that relies on Constitution(such as when calculating a breath weapon’s DC). However, you can't actually kill a Undead creature by Charisma damage. What does Charisma damage do? quote:Ability Damage: Damage to your Charisma score causes you to take penalties on Charisma-based skill checks. The Ability Damage penalty also applies to any spell DCs based off Charisma and the DC to resist your channeled energy. If you want to actually kill an Undead creature, you need to do Constitution damage. There is nothing that says that Undead are immune to Consitution damage, despite not having a Consitution score. quote:Ability Damage: Damage to your Constitution score causes you to take penalties on your Fortitude saving throws. In addition, multiply your total Hit Dice by the Ability Damage penalty and subtract that amount from your current and total hit points. Lost hit points are restored when the damage to your Constitution is healed.
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May 12, 2014 05:08
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Maleketh posted:I don't know about Pathfinder, but in 3.5 undead are naturally immune to physical ability damage. Even Constitution damage, which they shouldn't be able to suffer due to nt having a Constitution score. Goddamnit, you're right. quote:Not subject to nonlethal damage, ability drain, or energy drain. Immune to damage to its physical ability scores (Constitution, Dexterity, and Strength), as well as to exhaustion and fatigue effects. Ratoslov fucked around with this message at 05:33 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 05:30
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Heffer posted:Or transmute a pit trap into pocket change? The opportunities for hilarious terrain manipulation using this trick alone are worth more than the Fighter's entire class. Anything in your way? Turn it into gemstones or tiny stone figurines. Need a fortress? Build it out of 5' by 5' stone blocks, piles of lumber, and prefab barricades. Transmute a locked door to a identical copy of that door except it unlocks with a key you own. Transmute a door locked with an expensive lock into a door locked with a expensive-looking cheap lock and trapped with something you know how to not arm by passing through. Transmute a marble statue into a ballista. The possibilities are only limited by time and the price listings in the gear books. 
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Aug 6, 2014 20:54
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palecur posted:No real need for explosives at all, really; just turn a foot of the bedrock the support columns are on into air and let gravity take its course. Or turn it into shoddily-maintained supports that just happen to be about to collapse now. Paradox can suck it.
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Apr 29, 2015 14:37
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Splicer posted:It's entirely possible to accumulate multiple of these cards without passing their individual thresholds, only to have a relatively minor tap to the chest suddenly cause all your limbs to violently detach from your body. gently caress YEAH 
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May 5, 2016 17:50
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Pretty much. She's more like a setting conceit or feature than an actual character. Yeah, and also it's entirely reasonable to have your player characters in a fairly long Planescape game run around in Sigil from level 1 all the way up to the epic levels and never actually encounter her or hear of her doing anything directly. She's just kinda there, like Sigil itself or the Big Wheel.
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Nov 20, 2016 04:53
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spectralent posted:I love all the undead apocalypses D&D can cause It's especially funny since they all tend to come from the low-level mindless trash dudes that exist to fill out a room with a treasure-chest, and not from the high-level chewing-on-the-scenery boss-fight monsters. Those guys are relatively benign, compared to the global existential threat of a shadow getting lose in a chicken farm.
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Jan 4, 2017 18:37
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:At a conservative four same-level encounters per level up, that's ~19 trillion first level entrants per level 20 fighter. Combats in dangerous terrain increase the xp of the encounter, don't they? Fill the arena with spike pits, swinging blades, water hazards, etc. Then give both combatants bizarre exotic weapons they don't know how to use, so there's some suspense.
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Jan 8, 2017 16:40
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PMush Perfect posted:No, because that would actually be fun. Also, because logic and rhetoric are an Ace Attorney's bread-and-butter, so this is totally the wrong system. (Also, insane bluffs.)
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Apr 3, 2017 16:12
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Live spiders and tiny custard pies.
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May 11, 2017 11:52
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Also, candles (not necessarily lit, which means not necessarily un-lit)
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May 11, 2017 12:27
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Prism posted:Presumably they just lie in their coffin and think about their poor life decisions for eight hours. Oh god, that first twenty minutes before sleep but 24 times over. Those poor dears. 
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May 14, 2017 15:29
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MJ12 posted:This is a Murphy because it means that far from throwing fireballs or death curses or chi-powered punches, the best way of fighting in oMage is literally "I CAST GUN." No murphy. Operating as intended.
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Jul 30, 2017 04:24
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Why did the hipster halfling burn his mouth? He ate elevensies before it was cool.
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Aug 6, 2017 14:54
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Mr. Maltose posted:A developer tried to teach their housecat to use a kitchen knife and failed so obviously it's impossible in all situations. I have no doubt that a skilled animal trainer could teach a tabby to use a knife to stab people. Teaching it to stop, however...
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Sep 7, 2017 12:25
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Wait, who was saying crossbows weren't viable in combat and why? This is inexplicable.
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Sep 8, 2017 22:28
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Madurai posted:Panzerblitz and Panzer Leader famously gave artillery units very high attack values, but split the attack between everything in the target hex. So, the way to defend against artillery strikes was to cluster more targets together. Oh god.
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Sep 21, 2017 16:35
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Banana Man posted:Can you fireball someone ducking in a barrel of water (whom might start drowning and never stop) or does total cover mess with area attack damage Total cover should prevent area attack damage, since that's traditionally the kind of cover you use to describe someone on the opposite side of a stone wall that you can't see at all, for example. Whether or not that's true is another matter, of course.
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Jan 23, 2018 04:54
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The best part is, there's a spell/magic item power that lets you just ignore this entire system if you want. It's about as complex as the rest of the combat system and players are only likely to engage in it voluntarily if they spend all of their character resources, but it can get negated by a single spell slot or a bit of jewelry.
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Jun 13, 2018 02:04
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Mr. Maltose posted:If the designers were really obsessed with luchadores we’d have multi page rules for leaping attacks off the top rope. In a better world than this one, Mr. Maltose.
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Jun 13, 2018 05:13
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Toshimo posted:It should also be noted that the Lion and Scorpion clans are diametrically opposed on virtually every axis of society... ...and they share a border.
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Nov 23, 2018 21:09
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Look, this is a spy-movie game. It's totally appropriate to have the entire melee weapons list be:
Making swords better than guns is totally not appropriate, and it's especially not cool to make katanas even better than swords, because who uses katanas in a spy movie aside from that one old Bond film with a ninja clan? Nobody.
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Jul 18, 2019 02:30
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