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I'm not sure it's possible to make a system that can go from medieval-style battles to "if you're in the open you're dead"-style WW2 battles with just one rule change. It might be better to have two separate rule-sets for melee-heavy and ranged-heavy settings.
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Jan 15, 2016 14:47
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Countblanc posted:Marks absolutely stack, yes. This can lead to "no win" situations for enemies, but it's usually not actually that bad since marking multiple enemies isn't actually that easy outside of the high level "mark 3" ability. Speaking of "no win" situations, my group is very fond of "mark enemy with a melee fighter, then do the archer's area denial on them". Attack the fighter and get hit by arrows, move and get hit by the mark.
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Jan 18, 2016 10:35
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Having played Strike to the higher levels (party's level 9 now) I'm not really loving how monster damage increases as level goes up. Player-character hitpoints stay the same, but they gain a couple of new powers that negate attacks, which presumably is supposed to make up for the monster damage escalation. What this means is that players take a couple of hits to go down, but once you're hitting a player-character's hitpoints, they're going down in a couple of hits. I've had situations where a player-character has gone down in a single attack. It's not a huge deal since there are lots of ways for a player to get back up (1 in 3 chance on death rolls, leader healing, rallying) but it still feels a bit lovely for the player to be on full health and down in the dirt at the end of the action. It might be better if monster damage stayed static throughout the game, but the DM was advised to use larger "encounter budgets" (EG: At level 1 you use one normal monster per PC, at level 10 you use two) as the party levels up.
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Mar 31, 2016 20:35
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Speaking of Archer Blitzer Strikers, when are additional sources of damage multiplied on a crit? So for instance, there's a level 10 archer power that adds 15 damage to an attack. If you critical with that, does it get multiplied up to 30? How about the extra damage from melee shooter? ----- The other thing is the Area Denial at-will. Every fight seems to be the defender marking all the enemies either with her triple-mark role power or Come and Get It, then Area Denial from the archer - the enemies can either fight the Defender and take five extra damage for not moving, or defy the Defender's mark and get blasted for that. It's at the point where the archer barely uses any other powers, and when he does I'm always thinking "Why not just use Area Denial instead?" It's also a bit of a silly visual where the archer charges up into melee range every encounter and just fires arrows into the air over and over. Non-silly powers like the boxing-glove arrow barely get a look in! 
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May 8, 2016 18:58
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If you're in the mood for giving me exactly what I want, some treasure and traps would go really nicely with those monsters
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May 18, 2016 17:30
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Look Around You posted:I know there was some discussion of it earlier, but am I the only one that thinks Area Denial is extremely powerful for an at-will? It almost feels powerful enough to be an encounter power, especially compared to the other Archer at-wills. It's definitely mega-good and also kinda weird in that it's enemies-only. Many of the fights in my campaign have the defender/martial artist rushing in and marking everyone, then the striker/archer runs up next to her and area-denials everyone including the two of them from melee range. It's such an effective tactic that it's used on most of their turns, and stuff like the trick and super-trick arrows get neglected.
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Jun 4, 2016 17:46
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I think "applies to all creatures" makes most sense for Area Denial.
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Jun 5, 2016 09:16
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Zarick posted:That might work mechanically, but thematically it's really stupid, in my opinion. Is the archer out of control, so he shoots his friends if they move? Hell, as a melee archer that means they could end up doing 3 damage to themselves for not moving out of their own Area Denial. This is the way many other powers work. Are you suggesting we get rid of every "target: all creatures" power?
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Jun 5, 2016 17:04
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It kinda goes wrong fictionally for me when it's used in melee and therefore covers areas behind the archer, I guess.
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Jun 5, 2016 19:31
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I want traps and treasure (plus the monster book I know you're already doing) I know they're hard but that's what we have professional game designers for
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Jun 27, 2016 20:06
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Jimbozig posted:Can you refer me to a book from another game that has really good traps? This is the trouble - I don't actually know any. I'm after the sort of trap-room you get in films, like the garbage compactor in Star Wars, or a crushing spike ceiling or rolling boulder like in Indiana Jones, or the bus in Speed...
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Jun 27, 2016 20:38
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You can also have the "room fills up with water" trap be the terrain for a fight.
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Jun 27, 2016 21:18
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It might've been me. I was just ripping off the puzzle mechanics from the board game Mansions of Madness. The puzzle rules are in this PDF starting on page 17. The short version is that in that game a player might choose to spend his turn attempting to solve a puzzle (which might be a magic thing, or rewiring something, or picking a lock, and so on) and the puzzle is represented by a sliding-tile puzzle of actual physical cardboard squares. There are a number of different kinds (like for tumbler locks there are a number of cylinders whose sides need to match up with each other so you rotate them) but the basics are that you get an end state you're trying to work towards, and each action you spend on the puzzle gives you a number of moves equal to some stat (I believe in MoM it's intelligence, but you can easily make a puzzle that revolves around strength since you're moving boulders about or something). Mansions of Madness is very much a race-against-time game, so the puzzles in it weren't exactly hard, but you were trying to find the way to solve the puzzle in the fewest actions, which added a bit of nuance. I also liked how using the character's stat but the player's brain engaged both the character and player in the puzzle.
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Jul 2, 2016 10:13
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I could see cyberware being a way to make rolls to do things that would otherwise be impossible. A human shouldn't be able to punch down a wall (in a Shadowrun game) without either magic or cyberware, but get a cyberarm or a hydraulic jack, and that option's now open to you. Now make a skill check.Kai Tave posted:edit; also here's a thought, handle hacking using the chase rules. Yes! Spycraft 2.0 used its chase rules for so many things - chases, seduction, infiltrating an organisation, hacking... I never played the game, but the rules looked good.
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Jul 8, 2016 07:53
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Not sure if I fed this back, but I recently finished a level 1-10 campaign of Strike and these were the major points I'd like to feed back on: 1. There aren't enough pre-generated monsters. I'm a lazy GM who can't be bothered making my own every session. (You're dealing with this and I'm going to buy the book) 2. We had three characters - a martial artist/defender, a wizard/leader and a blitzer archer/striker. By the higher levels, the damage the former two characters were doing was barely worth writing down. It was actually annoying as a GM to write down the 1 damage the martial artist was automatically doing with her stance, and the wizard's guaranteed 3 damage felt pathetic to everyone involved. Maybe a bit of a boost for the non-damage roles is in order? Even if it means weakening their primary role 3. You've got too many chunks of rules. We stopped using "awesome points" and just started giving everyone two action points a session. Kits felt like "too much" character - we introduced them around about level 6 and people barely used the abilities from them. Likewise fallback powers. Likewise team conflicts - they looked complicated and reminded me in a bad way of skill challenges from 4e. We pretty much just used the class/role powers and skills. The skill system is loving awesome, by the way. Sorry if I'm blunt, but I love your game generally and think you deserve honest feedback. Looking forward to the monster book!
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Jul 12, 2016 20:52
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The Lord of Hats posted:Team Conflicts are 100% worth doing to cover large scenes without getting bogged down horribly. So far, our group has used them to escape a burning building, break into a mansion, and traverse a swamp on the way to ancient ruins--the sorts of things that are too big or complicated to put in a single skill roll, but that you also can't really do at the most granular level without it taking forever. To me that sounds like a chain of skill rolls in a Dungeon World "conversation" fashion. "Bob rolls a 2 on his strength roll, so he has crashed through the burning door but a bunch of beams have collapsed behind him, blocking that exit. Kate, the flames are getting closer, what do you do?" Gort fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jul 12, 2016 |
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Jul 12, 2016 22:15
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The wizard in my game took superhuman with the option of swapping places with people. On one occasion she jumped off a building and swapped with an enemy on the way down, killing them, and another time she jumped between two ships that were about to collide then swapped with an enemy, killing them. We allowed it because it was cool and she wasn't doing it all the time, but it might be worth writing something in to codify it - as it is the swapped enemy doesn't even get a saving throw and the swapper doesn't need an attack roll.
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Jul 15, 2016 09:33
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You can get by without the board since tactical combat is optional. The way I played it was with 2D6 per player so you don't have to pass dice around or roll twice if you get advantage.
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Jul 29, 2016 08:18
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So yeah. I'm the guy. I ran an entire Strike campaign from level 1 to level 10 and only just found out what a miss token is.
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Oct 6, 2016 21:26
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Ferrinus posted:Your main problem is that PC damage increases with level but that PC hitpoints do not. I've never tried it myself, but I'm guessing that pvp is fine from like, levels 1-4 but is insane laughable rocket tag at level 10. Yeah, it'll probably be the first couple of hits being eaten by reactive "Nuh uh you didn't actually hit me" powers and then the next hit vapourises someone.
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Oct 18, 2016 19:45
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What should a level 1 bombardier/blaster do in a fight against a solo? Kinda feels like they don't have a way to deal with only one target.
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Dec 22, 2016 17:24
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Kai Tave posted:Obviously Jimbozig has more important priorities than elfgame stuff but I'd legitimately pitch money at a Kickstarter for a Strike Builder program. If we're just throwing out product ideas I'd pay money for a monsters, treasure and traps book for Strike.
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Feb 15, 2017 23:25
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The gambler at-will that's "Do two damage, ignore the next source of damage" (shield trap) seems to suck the tension out of fights for the gambler. We had a fight where three standard enemies (two defenders and a grappler) went against three players, and the gambler just chose the same at-will over and over and was able to fight his guy with no chance of being hurt at all. Was that the intention with that power?
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Mar 11, 2018 12:28
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Phoenixes probably shouldn't be able to fireball themselves to death, but a goblin should absolutely be able to trap himself under his own net.
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Apr 13, 2018 10:14
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spectralent posted:Personally I hugely prefer it since often the only explanation for why __ didn't happen is "the whim of circumstance", at least without making the explanation be "you just hosed up inexplicably". It's much nicer to be told "you get halfway up the rock-face when you realise it's crawling with blood-sucking bugs" than "you just forgot how to climb and fall off lol". Like, yeah, people sometimes gently caress up stuff like climbing, running, etc, but there's a reason you don't usually see that kind of failure feature in movies outside of comedies. Yeah, for some reason it feels much more natural to chalk up screw-ups in Strike to circumstances outside of your control - probably because the dice are smaller than D&Ds D20. When someone in D&D rolls a 1 or a 20 on a D20 roll it's such an unusual occurrence that it feels natural to make it out to have been because the character was amazing or terrible - see all the stories about "I wanted to do impossible thing and I rolled a 20 so the DM had to let me". In Strike the dice are much smaller so 1s and 6s come up all the time, so you don't treat them like big events.
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Jun 14, 2018 21:06
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You could call it "the upper hand". So "the character that has the upper hand in the duel". However, I don't think there's an opposite to that like "the lower hand".
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Jul 20, 2018 07:52
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Just want to make sure I've got the monster-making rules right. Let's say I'm making a level 6 champion crowd control monster. It has a burst attack targeting everyone within 2 squares for 1 damage and the Weakened effect. Since it's a champion, we increase the damage on the attack by one, so now it's two damage. Champions also have "all traits and powers of a Standard Monster at double its level", so it counts as a level 12 monster, giving it the Super Damage trait, so now the attack is four damage. Have I got this right? A monster handing out four-damage multi-target attacks three times a round seems crazy powerful. It also has a recharging multi-target five-damage encounter power in a 3x3 blast, which gives it the ability to take out characters in a single hit on a critical.
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Oct 13, 2018 11:03
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That champion got chumped, so I guess I was worried about nothing.
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Oct 22, 2018 07:49
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Ysengrin posted:In practice I've found players tend to zero in on obvious boss types and alpha strike as hard as they can, and keep it coming as fast and long as they possibly can. The scary attacks just add a little confirmation bias for them to say "yeah always nuke the boss" with more emphasis. Well he was pretty much alone in the encounter (being a champion and all) so this wasn't going to be a factor in any case.
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Oct 22, 2018 17:56
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I'm still desperate for badass treasure and trap rules for Strike. If character classes are the focus, I'd like to see more takes on the "guy who shoots things with a gun" since all my players want to play is Shadowrun Strike forever - that ruleset where you gain powers based on your equipment loadout looked perfect for it.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:24
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Moriatti posted:Somebody talk me out of using a traditional wealth system for my heist game I'm putting together. The wealth system fell flat for my group, I wouldn't worry about using a normal one.
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Feb 7, 2019 17:19
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Sir Kodiak posted:Ah, yeah, that makes sense. When I came up with an equipment table for my Shadowrun adaptation, that certainly involved deciding a range of equipment that was expensive enough to be worth tracking while not so expensive as to be irrelevant given their means: cars and cyberware and magic spells, but not soyshakes or aircraft carriers. But that's easy enough to do even if you're giving everything in that range a price in gold/dollars/nuyen and is necessary whether or not the group's wealth is evenly distributed or narratively concentrated in one character. The game I ditched the wealth system for in favour of a traditional "You have X money and here's a price list" system was also a Shadowrun adaptation. Mostly money has been used to replace pieces of the Shadowrunners that have been lost due to twists/costs.
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Feb 8, 2019 10:28
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Anyone who's played a striker shapeshifter got any tips?
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Mar 6, 2019 20:26
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So, defenders get a feature that lets them regain HP when they roll a 3-6 on an attack. Duelists get a feature that makes their rolls of 2 count as 6s, when targeting their duel target. Do duelist defenders regain HP on rolls of 2-6?
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Mar 9, 2019 19:49
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Haven't had an issue with 1s causing strikes so far. What's the variant exactly?
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Mar 28, 2019 18:53
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ShineDog posted:I think my biggest issue with d6 is how easy it is for a few enemy 6s to just blat a player down without them getting much of a chance to act, particularly if a sniper type is around I wonder how much of that was rules fuckup causing us to double ALL damage on a crit, rather than only doubling the damage and leaving damage on the effect line undoubled. I feel like there's something off with the damage on some monster types as well: The "Striker" generalist at level 10 uses an at-will power called "Striking Strike" which does 2 damage, with an effect line of 2 damage more. They then get the "Super damage" trait, which effectively makes it 4 damage with an effect line of 2 damage, meaning a critical does 10 damage, which is enough to drop a character in a single hit. The "Sniper" generalist has the same kind of thing, but at range. They each have a less damaging alternative at-will, but they're both a lot less good than "2 extra damage right now". On the other hand, the "Brute" specialist at level 10 uses at-will powers with 2 damage, and gets the "Extra damage" trait, effectively making it 3 damage, half of what the Striker and Sniper do. It feels like the striker and sniper just do too much raw damage to be balanced with other kinds of monsters, and criticals from them are enormous - a combat full of strikers and snipers will be much nastier than one full of defenders and crowd-controllers, for example. It's a shame, because snipers and strikers can be the most attractive monster choices for encounters you're making up on the fly, or monsters who aren't supposed to be the focus of an encounter - "Guy with sword" and "Guy with gun" are pretty ubiquitous, and they're very simple to run. I also don't get why generalists get extra damage at level 6 and specialists get it at level 10. Is the idea that specialists have much more powerful effects than generalists?
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Mar 29, 2019 10:03
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Jimbozig posted:Not dumb at all. Sounds cool! In my UFO Strike! project, roles are determined by gear. I've been excited about that one for a while.
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Jun 15, 2020 15:01
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So this post started as a reply to the ongoing action point conversation and turned into an effortpost about everything Strike. There's a ton of criticism but it really is one of the best RPGs I've ever played. In my long-running Strike campaign I also found that nobody was using complications since they felt that the bonus of an action point didn't line up with the amount of trouble the complication could provide. (EG: We're sneaking into the Renraku corporate facility guarded by cyberbasilisks and Red Samurai - is an action point really worth auto-failing the stealth roll?) That may have been a symptom of how I run my games - I basically have a plan for what'll happen in the session (EG: The players told me last session that they want to break into the Renraku facility, so this session I've got an idea of how the facility's laid out, they'll come across this opposition, there'll probably be a fight against two Strikers and a Charger etc) and the players will broadly follow that plan, with off-the-rails stuff being handled by quickly-thrown-together encounters and ad-libbed skill checks. Maybe in other people's games the players are constantly invoking their complications and getting into situations based on them, but in mine they didn't feel an action point was enough payback for the trouble failing a skill check could cause. I also found that there was pressure for the players to come up with excuses to give their "awesome points" to whoever needed an action point, not really as a reward for doing something truly awesome. The result was that players effectively had two action points per session, so I just chucked out the awesome point mechanic and gave everyone two action points per session. ----- While I'm being critical, I'll give some more random feedback from my campaigns - we've done two from level 1 to 10, one was a Warhammer Fantasy thing, the other was Shadowrun: * I never found a situation that I felt Team Conflict or Chase could handle better than the basic (awesome) skills system. Both systems feel like a lot of interacting with mechanics, rather than fiction being advanced by light mechanics, which is where the skills system really shines. * We never really interacted with the Wealth system. There's nothing to buy, with no set costs, so in both campaigns the party was just sort of assumed to have whatever they needed to use their powers and skills. I'm not saying you should make a huge list of equipment to buy with set costs or anything like that, just that characters with different levels of wealth in their backgrounds didn't play any differently in the campaigns I ran. * I'm not a fan of monster damage increasing as you go up in levels, but player health staying almost static. It means the counterbalance to monster damage increasing is stuff like damage reduction increases (which only some characters will have) and powers that negate hits. The result is that at higher levels hitpoints become a lot less of a buffer between a character being up or down, and more of a binary thing where some characters are one bad round away from floored once their defensive powers are used up. It might be better to have monster damage, player damage reduction, and hit-negating powers be things that are all static at level 1 and never change. * Characters get too many feats for how many good feats there are. Characters get five feats each by level 10, and there aren't that many good ones. I saw a lot of characters with toughness and fast reactions, and every archer had melee shooter and fast archer, for example. I was thinking it might be better if characters only had something like two feats total, but they improved with levels. So at level 1 your battle robot character might have the feat Huge, gaining 3 HP and becoming large. Then at level 3 they could be used as cover by friends. Then at level 5 they gain reach. Then at level 7 they can gain a second feat (which might be off a separate list of "advanced feats" that you can't start with), which improves a step at level 9. That way there'd be less cherry-picking of the best mechanics, and more commitment to the theme of a character. * I'm a lazy GM, so I'd love more pre-made monsters, and especially traps, particularly ones that can be an encounter on their own, like the garbage compactor from Star Wars. * I like treasure. It'd be cool to have some pre-made stuff like a flaming sword that gives you a fireball encounter power and an at-will firebolt or something like that. Maybe it could also be a skill, "I'm gonna roll flaming sword to cut through Shelob's webs". ----- Hopefully that doesn't just read like a giant wave of negativity. Strike might be the best RPG I've ever played, and there are things from it I've stolen to use in other RPGs I run. Like the Zeitgeist campaign I'm running in 4e D&D, I threw out their sea combat rules and I just use the skill system from Strike instead. And stuff like combining the to-hit and damage roll into a single throw of a D6 is straight-up brilliant. There are also nice bits like being able to combine any Role or Class in a character instead of being pigeonholed into one particular class if you want that playstyle.
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Aug 7, 2020 13:56
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Jimbozig posted:Thanks both of you for the great feedback. That's really awesome and useful. I mostly used Flaws when Costs came up. So if someone was trying to run a blockade in their sailing ship and rolled "Twist with a Cost", a player might get lost overboard as the Twist, and the ship gets holed on the waterline as the Cost. I'm not sure we ever used major Conditions - and minor conditions were usually Winded and Exhausted. I'm generally not that big a fan of attrition in RPGs - one of my favourite things about Strike is that you can have a session with four combats in it, or a session with one combat in it, and you can balance them roughly the same. In 4e if players know there'll only be one fight that day, they know they can blow every daily power and healing surge on it, which changes the balance of that fight dramatically.
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Aug 7, 2020 15:26
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fool of sound posted:I frequently give players gear items, with the rule that they can't have more than 2 in combat and 2 out of combat items at a time. Almost all of mine give them an additional power, rather than a passive bonus. Here's a few examples: Those are rad, and the exact kind of thing I'd like to see as Strike treasure.
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Aug 10, 2020 20:07
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