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Here's a few from Chaos 6010 A.D., an obscure game I've been reviewing over in FATAL & Friends. I'm sure almost nobody has heard of it outside of that thread but I'll post 'em here for posterity/as an example of what not to do. First up, the Revenant! They are actually a pretty cool race of undead cyborgs. Like, they take bodies of dead humanoids, slap some cybernetics in 'em to make 'em functional again, and install an independent A.I. that kinda sorta remembers bits and pieces of the organic's former life. So all Revenants are cyborgs. All of them. To reflect that, they have a Spirit of 20, whereas most races have half that or less. Spirit is basically a pool of points you can use to install cybernetic implants with, so having twice as much as normal means you can have twice as many parts. Now, having cybernetic parts comes with a downside - you take double damage from electrical attacks. In fact, if your Spirit falls too low, you take triple. Revenants, being cyborgs, all take triple damage from electricity. Except that penalty is a racial trait and has nothing to do, rules-wise, with having cybernetic parts - which the Revenant don't get automatically. So if you're a Revenant and you decide to install any parts whatsoever, those multipliers get combined and your electrical vulnerability jumps up to x5 damage. Which is enough to turn even mild shocks into lethal blasts. As a result, Revenants are the worst cyborgs in the game. The other gem comes from an ability called Beckon Foe: Beckon Foe posted:This is an ability that is used to taunt a creature from attacking a different member in the crew. The character that beckons the foe must make a charisma check. This check will be resisted by the enemy’s willpower check. If the check succeeds, the enemy must only attack that character for the remainder of the round unless slain before that. This ability may be used once per round, OOT, and costs 0 actions. Thugs (a class) get this ability at level 2. Now, when used by players, this ability is fine and works kind of like a 4e D&D Mark. But NPCs in Chaos get class levels and class abilities, and a group of Thugs can be really annoying if they want to be. It goes something like this: let's say Dave is a Thief, and he wants to stab Thug #1. Naturally, he has to get into range, so he spends an action moving up to his target. But Thug #2, standing just ten feet away, decides to interfere by using Beckon Foe. He can do this because it can be used Out Of Turn (OOT). If he wins his contested roll, Dave is forbidden from attacking Thug #1. No penalty, he just can't do it, period. The only person Dave can attack is Thug #2. But since Thug #2 is 10 feet away, he's not in melee range, so Dave has to spend another action moving over to him. At which point Thug #1 is free to use Beckon Foe on him. So long as the number of Thugs equals or exceeds the number of actions a PC has, and so long as that PC has no ranged attacks - entirely possible at low level - they can keep him running around impotently as long as they keep succeeding at their opposed checks. It costs them nothing to attempt this, and there are abilities that allow you to spend points for a one-off bonus on a Charisma check.
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Feb 17, 2013 08:46
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theironjef posted:Oh man the book of humanoids is legitimately amazing. It's a huge book of neat PC races with something like 60% of the book given over to trying desperately to convince you not to use them. Play as an aaracokra if you want to fly badly, be weak, and suck at stuff! Play as a goblin if you want nothing but stat penalties! Half of the races are limited to something like two classes, and then you hit the Saurials, where the magic of intelligent humanoid dinosaurs shines right through the "why the hell can't you just be a dwarf like the rest of us, Brian?" syndrome with glorious cheesy goodness. The Saurials (all four subraces) all receive the insanely rare U for Unlimited in a class level progression! Outside of humans, I think the only race/class combo to ever get that poo poo was half-elf bards. I loved that book endlessly and would drag it to every D&D session hoping to convince DM after DM to let me play a lizard man or a bullywug. No one ever went for it. Really it deserves a writeup over in FATAL & Friends because the book was equal parts amazingly awesome and incredibly stupid.
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Feb 18, 2013 13:53
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A quick one from Palladium's Robotech game: all classes have an IQ requirement. That's the stat that covers your character's intelligence, it's roughly equal to 1/10th the real-world equivalent IQ. As a result, two things are simultaneously true: 1) The RDF (the military force that the PCs belong to) will accept recruits with an IQ as low as 60 to be giant robot pilots. IQ as a measure of actual intelligence is kind of iffy, but anyone capable of scoring that low would be obviously and severely developmentally disabled. The war effort must be pretty desperate. 2) Since anyone with an in-game IQ stat of 5 or less doesn't qualify for any classes, but IQ is determined by a 3D6 roll, you have just under a 1-in-20 chance of rolling up an unplayable character. There are no rules in place to handle this, not even a simple "if your attributes are too low reroll," so at this point RAW you've BSoD'ed character creation. Bonus fun bit: an IQ stat of 6, representing a real-world IQ of 60, is functionally identical to an IQ stat of 14, representing a real-world IQ of 140.
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Mar 6, 2013 19:30
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Asehujiko posted:Well the fish could technically dredge up the One Ring for you depending on how much they know about it's power.
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Jun 4, 2013 14:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Wrestling grants the ability to automatically pin or incapacitate a foe on a roll of 18-20. There are no rules for breaking free. That means a child on his school's wrestling team has a 15% chance to bodyslam Hercules and pin him indefinitely. Like I said though it's been a while so I might be misremembering that.
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Jun 27, 2013 19:16
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Double Monocle posted:Illusionary constructs (% real illusion) work really weird in DnD. Basically the rule of thumb is that they are treated as "real" until you make your will save. The material component is "a small piece of cat fur sealed inside a small box," which I just now noticed.
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Jan 3, 2015 07:33
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Wood has 10 HP per inch of thickness. At 6 inches in diameter a block of firewood would burn in, on average, 9 rounds, or just under a minute. Camping for 8 hours would use up at least 480 logs, which if we assume 2 feet of length per, is over three football field lengths of lumber. Edit: clearly the answer is to stand them on their end so that it's 24 inches thick but only 6 inches long. This gives the block 240 HP and it'll last just over three times as long. Masiakasaurus fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Nov 25, 2015 |
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Nov 25, 2015 03:09
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homeless poster posted:are you assuming the "ignore hardness and double the damage damage" edge case of fire vs wood? Yes, sorry that wasn't clear. I was responding to Eox who asked if firewood would burn really fast under the ignore hardness x2 damage ruling, should have quoted him.
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Nov 25, 2015 04:29
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Glagha posted:I mean the Edition That Shall Not Be Named (4e) solution was you get a saving throw to not fall into bad things on forced movement but we're not allowed to take good ideas from that system because it is unclean and this is Pathfinder.
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Aug 22, 2019 21:31
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