Murphy's Rules: Your Favorite Game Is Weird

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Murphy's Rules: Your Favorite Game Is Weird

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Mors Rattus posted:

In C^ontinuum, when you first start learning athletics, you become literally incapable of running.

It's sillier than that! You become literally incapable of moving if you run.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 00:08

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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 16:19

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Ratpick posted:

The DC to recognize a creature with the relevant Knowledge skill is 10+the creature's Hit Dice. Most deities have in excess of 30 hit dice, meaning that the DC to recognize a deity with Knowledge (religion) will be in the region of at least 40. A level 20 Cleric with maximized ranks in Knowledge (religion) and average Intelligence will have a +23 bonus to Knowledge (religion), meaning that they'll have only a 20% chance to recognize a deity with only 30 hit dice.

Also, the more powerful (and thus, likely more influential) the deity, the more difficult will they be to recognize.

It's more amusing than that.

"I thought this cave was deserted. What's that?"
"A baby red dragon. From the ridge markings and the position of the horn it's the child of the legendary Arcaladrax, Mother of Dragons, despoiler of the Kingdom of Thernos. We should hurry."
"And what's that outside the cave?"
"I don't know. It's a huge red flappy thing that's coming this way. It looks pissed at something."
"But what is it? It looks a bit like the baby here but much bigger."
"I don't know. It's not like anything I've seen before."

And the red dragon incinerates the PCs.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 01:11

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

LightWarden posted:

3.5e has the Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords, a book designed to give fighting characters more awesome abilities divided amongst nine different schools of battle. One of these schools is Iron Heart, focusing on determination and weaponskill to achieve almost supernatural things.

One of those maneuvers is Iron Heart Surge.

There are lots of things you can use this maneuver for. Iron Heart Surge your way out of a debilitating spell, or maybe shake off a disease or poison. But what is an effect? Can you use Iron Heart Surge to end hunger or thirst? What about the infirmity of old age? Or poverty?

And it says that "that effect ends" not "that effect ends for you", so if you use it to shake off a spell cast on your whole group, it ends the spell entirely for everyone, not just relieving them of the effect for a round.

Well, Drow and Orcs are blinded by bright light, and dazzled if they linger in it. So if a drow in daylight uses Iron Heart Surge... daylight ends immediately.

The depressing thing about Iron Heart Surge is that it might be able to end gravity by the rules as written but it can't end dazes or dominates because it takes an action to use.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 02:27

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Housecats. Just housecats.

A 2e domestic cat had a THAC0 of 20, an AC of 6, and a bite doing one point of damage and a claw and potential rake doing a point and a half each.

Against a Veteran (L1) fighter with Str, Dex, and Con 14 and no armour, the fighter has an average of 6 hit points. The Cat hits 50% of the time - it's doing 0.5+.75+.375 = 1.625 DPR - or over 1/4 of the fighter's hit points per round. The fighter (wielding whatever weapon he's trained in but not specialised in) hits only about a third of the time.

Never mind a wizard, a housecat in 2e is almost a match for a veteran fighter unless the fighter's wearing armour or using his favoured weapon. Two domestic cats will probably kill a veteran fighter - and if the fighter's only using improvised weapons (-2 to hit as not proficient), one's probably a fair fight.

In 3.5 the standard cat has an AC of 14, an attack bonus of +4 and has three attacks each doing a minimum (and maximum) of 1 point of damage. It's not as dangerous. Or is it.

This time our housecat attacks Sir Rustsalot. Now Sir Rustsalot is an aristocrat with average stats (all 10s and 11s), but being an aristocrat he can afford and is wearing full plate armour. AC 18. BAB+0. Hit points 5 (average). And attacking with a gauntlet. Both sides hit on 14s. Our cat gets three attacks and an opportunity attack for every attack Sir Rustsalot makes and needs to hit five times before Sir Rustsalot hits once. I think the odds are in Sir Rustsalot's favour here, but not by much if so.

Two housecats are simply going to murder Sir Rustsalot even in plate armour.

Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Cats of War!

# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 03:59

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

AlphaDog posted:

That's how I initially read it. But from memory when you read it closely, A-B-C is cheaper than A-C even if you land at B. Which is dumb. Unless what you mean is "shorter hops are always way cheaper because orbits". If that's what you mean, I'll concede the point because my entire knowledge of orbital mechanics comes from playing Kerbal Space Program and either crashing my guys headlong into Mun or accidentally flinging them off into deep space.

Playing devil's advocate, the problem might be maintaining e.g. the oxygen supply in deep space. You get to move a certain distance under SOP with the oxygen (or any other limited resource) working perfectly, then you need to put exponentially more energy and work in to recycle the oxygen once you've exceeded the range of the ship. Not that you can't do it (burning fuel cells like there's no tomorrow) but for practical purposes you have a limited range.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2013 14:52

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Wields Rulebook Heavily has just reminded people of this official 2e rule from the High Level Campaign book.

quote:

It�s important to remember that magic is unlike technology in that most spells do one thing and one thing only. Magic missile, for example, harms creatures but has absolutely no effect on inanimate objects; knock can force open doors and locks, but it can�t bowl creatures over or effect portals such as portcullises and drawbridges. Players tend to have modern minds and they often expect their character�s magic to be as adaptable as technology. Make sure that they don�t get away with doing that.

Can anyone think of ridiculous applications of spells given that? Hunt The Doppelganger?

# ¿ Feb 17, 2013 21:30

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

1e WFRP had the following Petty Magic spell.

Glowing Light
Spell level: P
Magic points: 1/hour
Range: Touch
Duration 1+ hours
Ingredients: Any object touched by the caster.

The spell is cast on one object, which the caster must be holding. The object glows brightly, giving off light equivalent to that of a lantern (see Light and Darkness). The light lasts for 1 hour but this duration can be extended by the expenditure of further magic points. At the end of the spells duration, the object disappears.

Glowing Light. a.k.a. Lesser Disintegrate Object. As well as doing Fezzik/Dread Pirate Roberts style stunts it could be used to get rid of inconvenient corpses, belt buckles (or rather send another PC scurrying to replace his belt), warpstone and other magic items, etc. And that's when you weren't using it as a timed trap.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2013 21:51

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Rulebook Heavily posted:

Or just straight up Castle Drakenhof. A Castle is an object, right?

I'm not sure you can meaningfully hold a castle. But that's about the only limit given.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2013 03:21

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Boing posted:

Every nice guy nerd knows that girls always go for the guys who treat them like poo poo, this is just codifying that.

Jade Regent: Pathfinder dating written by Pick Up Artists.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2013 03:35

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

sighnoceros posted:

What about something other than a square or a circle? What does a rectangle on the grid look like in game, when you have multiple squares along the edge that are all actually the same distance from the center? Some weird blob with protrusions where the farther squares are? What about more complex polygons?

I think the problem here is that 4e was meant to be run on a hex grid. And at the last minute they withdrew it for tradition. Because seriously, bursts and blasts both work really well on hexes.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 02:56

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Coward posted:

It does remind me of something from fellow superhero RPG, Silver Age Sentinels. This was some time ago and I don't have the book any more, so someone feel free to correct me if this is badly wrong.

I created a character called Dr Blob. He had basically no attributes and was designed to just be an unformed protoplasmic blob that couldn't do anything except the one thing all the power points went into.

I can't remember if the power is called Contagion or Infection or something similar. I think it was in there to basically model Vampirism or Lycanthropy. Essentially if you used the power, the other person would turn into what you were.

The other piece of the insanity was that like many other hero systems, you could put points into enhancing a power, giving it better attack rate or adding fire to it or whatever. I pumped as many points as I could into range and area of effect.

From what I worked out, Dr Blob could convert a quarter of the planet into him in one action from anywhere on the globe. And the only thing all those poor people who had been turned into unmoving barely sentient blobs could do was turn other people into unmoving barely sentient blobs.

Of course, by their nature, there are a lot of ways of breaking superhero systems.

I'll see you that and raise you a 50 point GURPS ability that can selectively hit anyone in the universe for 1hp of damage that can't be reduced. 300 times per second.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 08:59

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

darthbob88 posted:

Confirmed. Other oddities:

Bwuh? Yes, confirmed. Apparently they can do non-lethal damage at -4 the way a melee weapon can. Go figure.

Also twice as expensive as regular arrows: Arrows which shoot farther for less damage, though I'm not sure how much less,[/quote]

As if one size category smaller. Which works. Ish.

quote:

and whistling arrows, which I can't think of a non-RP use case for.

On the other hand turnip head arrows were a real thing. Hardly a murphy.

quote:

Arrows which don't break as easily cost 20 times as much as regular arrows. The fact that any magic they're imbued with is single-use leads me to wonder why the hell they're included, since the only advantage is one that could/should be hand-waved away.

Do people seriously track every single arrow in PF? Plus the 50% breakage chance? Aagggghhhhhh!!!!

quote:

Thistle arrows, which do bleed damage for 1d6 rounds, cost 1gp each, while bleeding arrows, which do normal impact damage + 1/round bleed until the arrow's removed, cost 360gp each.

Also lodestone arrows. Arrows that because they have magnets get +4 to hit someone in metal armour. And aren't drawn off to hit the wrong target?

# ¿ Jan 20, 2014 12:42

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Double Monocle posted:

For classes who benefited from normal magical armor and weapons, yes. But for monks/druids/arcane casters it was stupid good.

Monks really aren't. They aren't even stupid good by Monk standards. It's not the numbers - it's the flexibility, and Vow of Poverty means that you can't use all the spell-casting items.

Yes, it does make DZilla even better than it already was. Not so much the Wizard because you can't craft or buy scrolls to learn from so can't play the "Ring binder of scrolls" approach, and wizards don't care about free magic weapons.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 17:13

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Bacon In A Wok posted:

4th Edition rules no longer list explicit physical dimensions for power cells.

The GURPS 3E vehicle rules probably contain Murphys of their own. But given the formulae for vehicles involve the weight of the chassis being proportional to the square of the cube route of the volume, and you picked the engine based on power not speed, I'm not aware many people got far enough through to work out what the Murphys were. I assume getting rid of power cell size also ditched that nonsense.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2015 21:36

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

PresidentBeard posted:

If prowrestler vampires are wrong I don't want to be right.

For a one shot I freaked the rest of the table out with a warforged vampire brawler fighter called Iron Maiden.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2015 22:22

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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 16:19

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Is there any way to combine infinite clubs with the peasant railgun to get the clubs up to arbitrary speed?

# ¿ Oct 4, 2015 15:37

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