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Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Even when I play a grimdark setting the implication is usually that people acting anything like 40k are the *reason* it's grimdark and that that kind of insane defeatism and wallowing is the adversary to be overcome.

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Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Night10194 posted:

They tried altering the system and writing a new one and oh boy, was there ever a revolt.

There were plenty of flaws in the new system too, mind. But the outcry was enough to go back to Only War but Now With The Inquisition.

The revolt, if memory serves, was that you needed to buy a $100+ box set full of cardboard feelies to play the game. It having a unique dice system was actually sort of cool. Them absolutely refusing to adhere to as simple of a concession as a character sheet was not. Which sucks, because some of the classes were actually neat (I grabbed the 3rd edition players guide thinking that it would give me some insight into the new system, what I got was a whole bunch of "Actually you can't play this game at all")

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Kurieg posted:

The revolt, if memory serves, was that you needed to buy a $100+ box set full of cardboard feelies to play the game. It having a unique dice system was actually sort of cool. Them absolutely refusing to adhere to as simple of a concession as a character sheet was not. Which sucks, because some of the classes were actually neat (I grabbed the 3rd edition players guide thinking that it would give me some insight into the new system, what I got was a whole bunch of "Actually you can't play this game at all")

No, that was for WHFRP3e, which I also passed on because at the time I was primarily playing via IRC and so even if I'd wanted it it wouldn't have worked out to try to use all that stuff pre-skype. I'm talking about DH2e, which tried to introduce an HP-less system like Ironclaw's (though it did it a lot worse), action points in place of the half-action-full-action system, talent trees, and a bunch of other new mechanics. It was a mixture of very messy and also had the problem of a full-on playerbase revolt on FFG's message boards and feedback because most of their player-base wanted something compatible with the prior games. I was disappointed in it from several levels and directions because holy poo poo does the entire WH40KRP system need a rewrite.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 16 hours!
It totally slipped my mind that 40k's system is just WFRP2e in Spaaace! I like WFRP2e for the most part, and the only things I'd really change are the bits that are written in Old High Nerdlinger (having a stat named "Ballistic Skill" instead of "Shooting" is just a relic from 1980), and I'd take a hatchet to the skill list (literally hundreds, perhaps thousand of RPGs need this). It doesn't handle powerful characters as well, and of course the 40k RPGs are full of PCs who could burn Mannfred von Carstein to a crisp in seconds.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Night10194 posted:

No, that was for WHFRP3e, which I also passed on because at the time I was primarily playing via IRC and so even if I'd wanted it it wouldn't have worked out to try to use all that stuff pre-skype. I'm talking about DH2e, which tried to introduce an HP-less system like Ironclaw's (though it did it a lot worse), action points in place of the half-action-full-action system, talent trees, and a bunch of other new mechanics. It was a mixture of very messy and also had the problem of a full-on playerbase revolt on FFG's message boards and feedback because most of their player-base wanted something compatible with the prior games. I was disappointed in it from several levels and directions because holy poo poo does the entire WH40KRP system need a rewrite.

I thought you were talking about the new system they made for FRPG3 cause of the mention of dice :shobon: sorry. I never got to read DH2

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Halloween Jack posted:

It totally slipped my mind that 40k's system is just WFRP2e in Spaaace! I like WFRP2e for the most part, and the only things I'd really change are the bits that are written in Old High Nerdlinger (having a stat named "Ballistic Skill" instead of "Shooting" is just a relic from 1980), and I'd take a hatchet to the skill list (literally hundreds, perhaps thousand of RPGs need this). It doesn't handle powerful characters as well, and of course the 40k RPGs are full of PCs who could burn Mannfred von Carstein to a crisp in seconds.

The other problem with it came early, and that's the Man Portable Lascannon. I am firmly of the belief that this is where poo poo Started To Go Wrong. The weapon is in there kind of like a joke, since in the TT it's often used to snipe special characters since it does double their toughness in Strength and thus insta-kills them. So they gave it 5d10+10 Pen10 Damage, making it blow through any personal armor and one-shot almost anything in the original book (which was generally much lower powered). The problem is, the designers then got it into their head that that meant that's what a heavy or powerful weapon looks like and soon we're up to our eyeballs in 4d10+5 Pen8 Autocannons (the original Autocannon was batshit insane) and rifles that do 2d10+6 Pen8 or whatever when the average PC has Armor 4, Toughness 3, and HP 10 with more HP being ridiculously expensive AND ONLY GETTING MORE EXPENSIVE with each new book, while still only giving you a single HP per advance bought. It is impossible to tank most of the weaponry in 40kRP past the original scale they intended, where people would be in flak and wielding lasguns fighting mostly human cultists. And hilariously they've only made it worse every new game, making the only way to survive to dodge-tank as hard as possible or pray the DM remembers to put hard cover everywhere.

E: Note, some of the most fun campaigns I've ever run were in Dark Heresy 1e (The Underhive Campaign about Techpriests slowly uncovering the history of their world, meeting the cultures of desperate gangs and outcast peoples, and eventually uncovering an ancient library and discovering how to make their world's surface habitable is seriously one of the most fun campaigns I've ever written), mess that it is, and I've had a good time with both Black Crusade and Deathwatch, even. Just, holy poo poo do they really need to just redo the entire system.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Aug 3, 2016

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 16 hours!
Yeah, if I want to play a game where combat is rocket tag and dodging is God, I have a pile of 90s games like that.

It's been a looong time since I tried it, but I seem to remember that the meltagun is easily the best class of standard weapon, which is weird to me since you hear much much more about bolters in the fluff.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

For some insane reason of taking leave of my senses, I used 40kRP as the backdrop for a Front Mission ('real robot' mecha series about technothrillers and global supranations having proxy wars and wily russians) game I ran and just toning down the amount of armor penetration, giving stuff more HP, and having HP distributed into the robits' limbs and torso and legs did an astonishing amount to fix combat, since it made the randomization of hit locations for full auto actually make it harder to take someone down quick and made armor meaningful again.

I guess after all this prattle I'll have to review DH after I finish Ironclaw.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
Question for the thread: what was the first edition of GURPS like?

I know some of the big changes going from 3rd to 4th: how costs for basic attributes changes and how defenses were calculated. I never hear about the earlier versions though.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Despite having a gaming circle with heavy overlap between RPGs and 40K, I can't say as I've ever encountered the type of player who drags 40k stuff into other games, so that may be a very specific concern there.

I will say, however, that in the goddamn year 2016, people are still pulling that "magic (which is good) and technology (which is bad) are antithetical to each other" poo poo like it was 1997 and people were still huffing Ascension fumes.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
The most obnoxious carriers of that torch that I knew were never into Mage. I think they got it from Final Fantasy and a lazy sort of adolescent romanticism, and god knows both of those are inexhaustible.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I got it from Arcanum and it was strictly based on 'Technology cannot function when natural law is being warped because it relies on it' there.

But that has more to do with Arcanum being the poo poo and absolutely amazing than constant devotion to that trope. Seriously, Arcanum's plot was so good, it actually made up for how poo poo the game part was.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Bieeardo posted:

The most obnoxious carriers of that torch that I knew were never into Mage. I think they got it from Final Fantasy and a lazy sort of adolescent romanticism, and god knows both of those are inexhaustible.

Well the person who lit the torch was Bill Bridges, you can watch the "TECHNOLOGY IS BAD" thread weave through the werewolf books up until the point when he leaves to work on Mage. And then Mage double downed hard on it.

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

PantsOptional posted:

Despite having a gaming circle with heavy overlap between RPGs and 40K, I can't say as I've ever encountered the type of player who drags 40k stuff into other games, so that may be a very specific concern there.

I will say, however, that in the goddamn year 2016, people are still pulling that "magic (which is good) and technology (which is bad) are antithetical to each other" poo poo like it was 1997 and people were still huffing Ascension fumes.

For setting stuff, dragging 40k into basically anything is terrible. But every setting where it is remotely appropriate needs chainswords. They just appeal to my inner teenager as something that will always be cool

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 16 hours!

PantsOptional posted:

I will say, however, that in the goddamn year 2016, people are still pulling that "magic (which is good) and technology (which is bad) are antithetical to each other" poo poo like it was 1997 and people were still huffing Ascension fumes.
Also, dude, what if gods were real but only powered by belief? Cutting edge idea there.

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

I won't lie, one of my favorite games of the moment sold me with the developers being up front with their thoughts on turning the PCs into post-human supermen. "Look, cybernetics are cool. Psychic powers (aka Magic in this game) are also cool. What isn't cool is making there be an arbitrary reason for the PCs to not have everything they want. A Humanity/Essence stat isn't fun because it encourages crunchy minmax behavior and that can detract from your game. Let your PCs have as much as they want of one or the other. Let their limits just be cost, occasional maintenance and upkeep and having the proper licenses. Those are fair limits that make sense."

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
Don't get me started on all the different bits and pieces of shadowrun that don't play nice with each other for "Balancing" reasons.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 16 hours!
I find that some kind of Resources mechanic, like what Fragged Empire and some other games use (have I fellated this game enough yet? No, I haven't, it's amazing) is better than actually measuring the precise nuyen cost of a cyberleg. Keeping track of exactly how many bux the PCs have is a headache in cyberpunk games.

I never realized how powerful mages were in Shadowrun because we played basically one-shots with loosely connected continuity, enough to reuse characters. So we didn't summon spirits with that pesky Immunity to Normal Weapons power. And I think we were just disallowed from taking that spell that mimics Wired Reflexes.

Mr.Misfit
Jan 10, 2013

The time for
SkellyBones
has come!

Halloween Jack posted:

And if you want to play fascism porno, just take my advice and use Marvel Heroic Roleplaying to play out more Marvel movies.

There´s a joke in there, but I just don´t see it. Care to elaborate for the uninitiated?

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Mr.Misfit posted:

There´s a joke in there, but I just don´t see it. Care to elaborate for the uninitiated?

There are some fascistic undertones to The Avengers, as far as they're a group that could do whatever they wanted to the world and the world could do very little to stop them if they really wanted to. I mean, Civil War (and the second Captain America movie, which is better) even tackles these issues directly.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!
It's a criticism you could level at most superhero fiction, but it feels rather point-missing to me.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 16 hours!

Mr.Misfit posted:

There´s a joke in there, but I just don´t see it. Care to elaborate for the uninitiated?
This is a tangent, so I'll keep it short. In the MCU, only a tiny elite matters. Understandably, you can reply "It's a superhero movie. Of course it's about a small team of heroes taking decisive action without convening a committee first." But the MCU is downright meticulous about showing us that "the people" do not exist, and democracy only appears as a ploy by the villains. Every character who questions the Avengers' actions on behalf of the people has villainous ulterior motives, or is at best a dangerous fool. SHIELD's high command orders a nuclear strike on New York City. The senator who opposes Stark is an agent of Hammer, then of HYDRA. The UN oversight committee immediately decides to imprison Scarlet Witch and murder Bucky without trial.

Even SHIELD, whose command structure makes so little sense that the DoD pulled support for The Avengers because they were confused, is revealed to have been stabbing our brave heroes in the back all along. As of Age of Ultron, the Avengers are literally a paramilitary gang funded by an energy/munitions corporation, and this is presented as a good thing.

The only concession to real controversy is showing the heroes as people with relatable flaws. But even when they make huge mistakes (like building Ultron) everything they do is ultimately justified because they're all that stands between us and huge external threats. Only Tony Stark's Avengers can succeed where the Weimar Republic SHIELD failed and protect us from the looming threat of International Jewry Thanos.

Like, if you want to play the badass lords of an essentially fascist setting, the MCU is far more accessible and has better rules published for it than 40k. Just add some skulls and head-tubes.

LaSquida
Nov 1, 2012

Just keep on walkin'.

Hostile V posted:

I won't lie, one of my favorite games of the moment sold me with the developers being up front with their thoughts on turning the PCs into post-human supermen. "Look, cybernetics are cool. Psychic powers (aka Magic in this game) are also cool. What isn't cool is making there be an arbitrary reason for the PCs to not have everything they want. A Humanity/Essence stat isn't fun because it encourages crunchy minmax behavior and that can detract from your game. Let your PCs have as much as they want of one or the other. Let their limits just be cost, occasional maintenance and upkeep and having the proper licenses. Those are fair limits that make sense."

So, what game is this?

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

LeSquide posted:

So, what game is this?

Either Eclipse Phase or Fragged Empire, that's my guess.

NGDBSS
Dec 30, 2009






Night10194 posted:

The other problem with it came early, and that's the Man Portable Lascannon. I am firmly of the belief that this is where poo poo Started To Go Wrong. The weapon is in there kind of like a joke, since in the TT it's often used to snipe special characters since it does double their toughness in Strength and thus insta-kills them. So they gave it 5d10+10 Pen10 Damage, making it blow through any personal armor and one-shot almost anything in the original book (which was generally much lower powered). The problem is, the designers then got it into their head that that meant that's what a heavy or powerful weapon looks like and soon we're up to our eyeballs in 4d10+5 Pen8 Autocannons (the original Autocannon was batshit insane) and rifles that do 2d10+6 Pen8 or whatever when the average PC has Armor 4, Toughness 3, and HP 10 with more HP being ridiculously expensive AND ONLY GETTING MORE EXPENSIVE with each new book, while still only giving you a single HP per advance bought. It is impossible to tank most of the weaponry in 40kRP past the original scale they intended, where people would be in flak and wielding lasguns fighting mostly human cultists. And hilariously they've only made it worse every new game, making the only way to survive to dodge-tank as hard as possible or pray the DM remembers to put hard cover everywhere.
The community also isn't so great at actually examining the system's design choices and mechanical knobs. That lascannon? It was printed in the very first release of DH1E - the one by Games Workshop, not FFG. And yet every so often a thread pops up on the FFG forums in which someone's got hot and bothered about Accurate weapons (which turn a poo poo-tier weapon into a solid mid-tier one). Or someone else tries to put out a bunch of mechanical bells and whistles in their choice of subsystem without understanding that the given subsystem already has a bunch of detail, perhaps too much, and that Gitting Gud is already a solved problem.

My group still plays 40K RPGs, but I totally understand not wanting to get into them as someone new to things. Why do we do it?
  • I'm the person in the group who can most easily cut through extraneous detail, so as the GM no one minds me giving advice on what the top-tier stuff is. (And as pointed out, there's a huge difference between some tiers.)
  • Gear really matters, and holy gently caress is there a lot of it. Which is why I compiled all the poo poo I could find and distributed it in a bunch of packets printed from Excel sheets.
  • We've stuck to Black Crusade and Rogue Trader (well, a hacked-up version running on the newer chassis of DH2E), so generally the point for the PCs has been to do something bold and wild without caring too much about the fascism of the setting. Plus they're actively trying to fix the fascism of the Imperium, a colossal but commendable task, so in general the group is in more for the 80's-metal-album-cover feel than the grimderp.
  • If a subsystem does come up but turns out to be poo poo (mass combat from RT), we'll still step back to examine it.
  • It's something we're used to. :shobon:

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Young Freud posted:

Either Eclipse Phase or Fragged Empire, that's my guess.
It's neither, actually! Eclipse Phase never crossed my mind as one of those games because I don't have much of a history with it, but that's a good guess in retrospect. I'll be covering the game I'm talking about pretty soon because I'm finding myself enjoying the core mechanics and approach in spite of it being a sort of d20 game at heart but not really.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I do not think there has ever been a good subsystem in a 40kRPG. It's to the point that I think a trademark of FFG's 40k design is 'This sounds interesting and exciting in the elevator pitch but then has no depth and doesn't do anything and will either become a chore, a millstone (because we baked it into every level of the rules) or get dropped.' See: Comrades, Gear Assignment and Random Mission Gear, Starships, Endeavors, Kill-Marks, Squad/Solo Mode, Subtlety, and basically every other thing like that. I think only the Infamy-Corruption track in BC really worked.

I think my favorite unintentional thing is that Aptitudes actually ended up making characters far more uniform because the costs are so immense to do anything out of your specialization, and the 'good' talents and few actually useful skills are so well known by now to anyone who has been playing the system for awhile.

MJ12
Apr 8, 2009

Hostile V posted:

I won't lie, one of my favorite games of the moment sold me with the developers being up front with their thoughts on turning the PCs into post-human supermen. "Look, cybernetics are cool. Psychic powers (aka Magic in this game) are also cool. What isn't cool is making there be an arbitrary reason for the PCs to not have everything they want. A Humanity/Essence stat isn't fun because it encourages crunchy minmax behavior and that can detract from your game. Let your PCs have as much as they want of one or the other. Let their limits just be cost, occasional maintenance and upkeep and having the proper licenses. Those are fair limits that make sense."

Which game is this? You have to tell me.

NGDBSS
Dec 30, 2009






Night10194 posted:

I do not think there has ever been a good subsystem in a 40kRPG. It's to the point that I think a trademark of FFG's 40k design is 'This sounds interesting and exciting in the elevator pitch but then has no depth and doesn't do anything and will either become a chore, a millstone (because we baked it into every level of the rules) or get dropped.' See: Comrades, Gear Assignment and Random Mission Gear, Starships, Endeavors, Kill-Marks, Squad/Solo Mode, Subtlety, and basically every other thing like that. I think only the Infamy-Corruption track in BC really worked.

I think my favorite unintentional thing is that Aptitudes actually ended up making characters far more uniform because the costs are so immense to do anything out of your specialization, and the 'good' talents and few actually useful skills are so well known by now to anyone who has been playing the system for awhile.
A bunch of those subsystems would likely work better if they weren't bolted to an out-of-its-depth system to begin with, but the community has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards any semblance of change.

That said, my group uses Mathhammer for starships (to make macrobattery salvos less modal, among other things) and a retooled experience chart for aptitudes (to not require specialization so hard). We're not running on zero houserules here.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

NGDBSS posted:

A bunch of those subsystems would likely work better if they weren't bolted to an out-of-its-depth system to begin with, but the community has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards any semblance of change.

That said, my group uses Mathhammer for starships (to make macrobattery salvos less modal, among other things) and a retooled experience chart for aptitudes (to not require specialization so hard). We're not running on zero houserules here.

Well, yeah, much like D&D I doubt anyone actually plays 40kRP exactly as written.

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

MJ12 posted:

Which game is this? You have to tell me.
Alright, it's the game Corporation, another one of those games I heard about years ago and looked into recently. Unlike Brave New World, it's pretty good in my opinion.

Wapole Languray
Jul 4, 2012



Chapter 2: Combat

The combat chapter is less about the mechanics of combat, which was covered in Chapter 1, but more edge-cases, special rules, and how to adjudicate certain actions that can come up in combat.

The first section is just an elaboration on Damage and Protection and how equipment modifies it. All weapons have a Damage Rating or DR, which is a fixed amount of damage that is caused by that weapon on a hit. Melee and some ranged weapons have their damage modified by the character's Strength modifier as well, or have special rules attached to them. Magic weapons can also just have an increase to DR via the standard +# notation scheme. A +1 Longsword does DR9 damage instead of the DR8 of a mundane sword. They also include a table of damage ratings for various non-weapon damage sources such as punches and kicks, environmental damage such as burning and drowning, and special tactics like shield-bashing and choking.



I honestly do like just rolling environmental effects into damage over time instead of creating an entire useless subsystem that overcomplicates the game and will be hand waved out of existence by GM’s every time. Also, incorporation of terminal velocity into falling damage instead of falling bodies accelerating infinitely until they explode by touching something.

Protection Rating or PR works as the opposite of DR and is used for armor and other protective things. Armor absorbs it’s PR in damage from every attack, so if you attack something with a higher PR than you have DR, they straight take no damage from a normal attack. Enchanted armor adds to its PR the same as weapons get enchanted addition to DR.

Shields do not provide PR, but instead improve your defense and ability to avoid damage. They provide a bonus to your ability to Parry attacks based on the Shield skill, in addition to a blanket -2 to the attack die roll of any enemy. They do have a disadvantage of creating a -2 to any rolls by the player based on Dexterity, to represent the awkwardness of doing stuff with a big metal thing strapped to your arm. If you don’t have the Shield Skill you use Combat Rating as the attribute, and enemies get a -1 to their rolls and you get a -4 to dexterity to represent the lack of training you have at using a shield. Otherwise you treat them like doing any unskilled action.

The majority of the chapter is about the various combat tactics and how to resolve any edge-cases or apply any special rules to these situations. First up is:

Attack

This covers… attacking. Any attempt to do physical harm to an opponent in Combat. Talislanta 4th Edition categorizes attacks into four varieties: Close, Ranged, Grappling, and Subdual.

Close attacks cover melee, hand-to-hand, close range attacks meant to do damage. It’s treated as an Opposed Action unless the enemy is completely unaware of your attack, or actively makes no attempt to protect themselves. The only special rule associated with this type of attack is that if the attacker uses multiple actions to attack a single enemy, are treated by the defender as though they are a single attack. This means the defender only has to “defend” once, instead of for each individual attack.

Ranged attacks are ranged, projectile weapons, thrown items, and attacks using siege weapons like catapults and ballistae. If the target is unaware of the attack, or is stationary, the difficulty is based on the range to the target, how big the target is, and if they are in any form of concealment or cover. If the target is actively trying to dodge or block the attack, then you also add their opposition to the other factors. Helpfully, they just give you straight guidelines for calculating modifiers so you don’t have to pull numbers out of your rear end:

Range Attack Modifiers posted:

  • Target is within half effective range: no penalty

  • Target is beyond half effective range:-5

  • Target is beyond effective range: -10

  • Target is beyond 2 times effective range: -20

  • Target is moving:-3, plus an additional -1 per point of target’s Speed Rating

  • Target is protected by cover:-1 per 10% cover

  • Target is smaller than man-sized:-1 to -10

  • Target is larger than man-sized: bonus of +1 to +10

The range, firing rate (how many times you can fire per round with multiple actions and how many rounds it takes to “reload”) and such of each weapon is in the Equipment chapter. The exception is thrown weapons, which are always 50 feet plus 10 feet per +1 STR, or minus 10 feet per -1.

Both Close and Ranged attacks use pre-defined results on the action table as follows:

Attack Action Table Results posted:

  • Mishap: The attack fails due to a mishap of some sort; the attacker stumbles and falls, hits himself, hits an unintended target, breaks the weapon being used, etc. (GM’s ruling)

  • Failure: The attack misses the intended target.

  • Partial Success: The attacker scores a glancing blow that only does half the attack form’s total Damage Rating (rounded-up to the nearest whole number).

  • Full Success: The attack does its full Damage Rating.

  • Critical Success: The attack does full Damage Rating and achieves the attacker’s stated Intent. If the Intent was to injure or kill, the victim suffers a Critical Wound, and must make a roll using his Constitution Rating to determine how badly he is hurt. Subtract the Damage Rating of the attack from this CON roll. Partial Success means the victim suffers a penalty of -5 on all further actions until healed of the Critical Wound. Failure or Mishap means the victim is incapacitated until healed.

And yes, a critical hit can straight kill you with a bad roll. Combat in this game is kinda loving deadly, if I didn’t tell you already.

Grappling Attacks aren’t a giant pain in the rear end! Yes, a loving grappling system that isn’t overcomplicated trash. When you want to grapple someone, which means to grab, restrain, or throw them, or use the grappling attacks of some special weapons the attacker just rolls like a normal Close attack. Grappling has it’s own results on the action chart separate from the normal attack results:

Attacking Grappling Action Table Results posted:

  • Mishap:The attacker has twisted himself into an awkward position and failed to effectively hold his opponent. The opponent receives a +5 bonus on their next attack vs. the grappler.

  • Failure:The attacker fails to grab the defender.

  • Partial Success:The attacker gets a partial hold but has little leverage. No choke or throw attacks may follow this attack. The defender gets a +5 bonus to his or her attempt to escape this hold.

  • Full Success:The attacker achieves the hold they were attempting. They may throw or choke the defender with their next action, or simply continue to hold.

  • Critical Success:The hold is especially well-placed and strong. The defender takes an additional -5 penalty to any escape attempts.

When the target is Grappled they can take no actions except to attempt to escape from the grapple by making a successful Escape roll:

Escaping Grappling Action Table Results posted:

  • Mishap:The defender twists them self into an even worse position. They take an additional -5 penalty to any further escape attempts. Note that further Mishap results do not add to this penalty. The maximum is -5.

  • Failure:The defender remains in the hold.

  • Partial Success:The defender slips part-way out of the hold. Add +5 to their next escape attempt.

  • Full Success:The defender escapes the grapple.

  • Critical Success:The defender performs a perfect reversal. The defender may make an immediate attack on their opponent at full skill, flee, or perform any other action.

This roll is made either with a Strength attribute roll, or if they are trained in the Brawling skill, or one of the Martial Arts skills they use those at a -3 to the roll. If the defender cannot escape, then the attacker can either Throw, Body Slam, or Choke the grappled opponent. Throwing is at a distance of 5 feet plus one foot per +1 of STR, Body Slam damage is on the chart I posted earlier and does DR3+STR damage, and choking is probably the best option: It does DR 4 and ignores armor. The average HP for most humanoid enemies will be around 20, so 5 rounds of a guy in a chokehold can end the fight there, assuming your friends aren’t all stabbing the guy you’ve just completely immobilized to death. Yeah, not that great in 1 on 1, but completely immobilizing an enemy for a round can be a death-sentence in this game.

The last kind of attack are Subdual, which is your standard non-lethal knockout attacks. These attacks need to be made with a blunt attack, so no knocking someone out by stabbing them in the face. This works the same as any other attack, but if someone is reduced to 0 HP or lower by a subdual attack they are just knocked out for a minimum of one round. The rules say 1-20, but give no indication as to how to determine this, which is honestly the first time I’ve seen an arbitrary number in this game.

I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be based on a roll of a d20, so 1d20 rounds, though you could also tie it to HP, with a minimum of 1 and another round unconscious per -HP caused by the subdual attack to a maximum of 20. As I said though, this is basically a houserule, but I think this was just caused by poor editing instead of an intentional hole in the rules.

When the target awakens, they will heal from all subdual damage done either within 1-10 minutes, or with a successful CON roll against Difficulty 10. Once again, this might by a 1d20 /2 roll for the minutes, or tied to the amount of HP lost in the subdual attack to a maximum of 10 minutes. Either one works perfectly well though, so apologies for my minor houseruling.



Defense

Defense in Talislanta is split into two actions: Dodge and Parry. The player has to declare if they are defending against an attack before the attacker rolls for their attack. The defender rolls first, as a Full or Critical success means they dodged the attack, so the attacker doesn’t need to waste time rolling.

Dodge is the simplest, and is about just not getting hit at all. It’s performed with either the Evade or Mandaquan (A form of martial arts) skills, the Acrobatics skill at a -5 penalty, or a Dexterity or Combat Rating roll. That’s all.

Parry is a bit more complicated. It’s used to deflect or block the attack by actively intercepting or redirecting the attack. If someone with the Shield Skill uses a shield to Parry they get a +3 to their roll, while people without the Shield skill still get a +1. A shield’s enchantment level applies to Parry attempts with the Shield, so a +1 shield would provide a +4 bonus to a trained wielder. You can use your chosed Weapon Skill, the Guard or Shield Skill, or a Martial Art skill to parry. You can also use Brawling to parry unarmed attacks, though it will be with a -5 penalty to parry weapon attacks. Parrying uses Combat Rating if you are untrained in any applicable skills.

Movement

In combat movement is a bit more complicated that general movement, which is abstracted in most situations. Movement in combat is broken into three types: Retreat, Flee, and Advance.

Retreat is when you attempt to escape from a fight, but in an intentional and orderly manner. You can only move up to half your Movement per round, but can continue to fight and defend as usual.

Flee is when you want to get away ASAP and don’t give a poo poo what happens. You can move your full movement rate every round, but cannot attack or defend. If you try and flee from an opponent you were engaged in Close Combat with, your opponent gets one free unopposed attack against you. This applies to every enemy that was in Close range with you when you ran away, so it can get very nasty against multiple opponents. Your enemy can’t do this though, if on previous round you successfully dodged or parried an attack from that enemy.

To see if you can safely get away after fleeing, you and any pursuing opponents must make a Speed Attribute roll every round of the chase:

Flee Results posted:

  • Mishap: stumble and fall; you’re injured and cannot continue next round.

  • Failure: stumble and fall; you can get up and continue next round

  • Partial Success: move up to half your maximum Movement Rate

  • Full Success: move up to your maximum Movement Rate

  • Critical Success: maximum Movement Rate plus you gain an additional 50' on opponent

Advance is used to close with an opponent. You can move up to half your movement rate without penalty. If you advance at full Movement then it is called a Charge. While Charging, you cannot Defend, but can make attacks at a penalty of -3 for Close attacks or -5 for Ranged. If you hit someone while Charging with a close attack though, you add your Speed to the DR of the attack.

Stunt

This is a final catch-all category for any sort of action in a fight that doesn’t fit the above. There are no actual rules for stunts, this section is more advice for adjudicating them for GM’s. Of note is the recommendation that if a stunt-like action would naturally flow into another action, such as leaping over a table to stab a guy on the other side, the stunt-action shouldn’t be rolled for or accrue a multiple-action penalty. Stunt actions should be discrete and separate things, not just part of an Attack or Defense.

The final part of the Combat chapter is actually super important:

Aimed Shots

Aimed shots are super freaking important. An aimed shot falls into two categories: An action intended to do a very specific thing, such as aiming for a particular body-part, parrying an attack to a specific direction, dodging in an exact way, etc. These actions may have some additional penalty, but the main rule is that to succeed with an Aimed Shot, you have to roll at minimum a Full Success, as a Partial Success is treated the same as a Failure.

The other use for Aimed shots is a much bigger deal: It lets you ignore an enemy's PR. To do this, you add the target’s PR to the Difficulty of the attack in addition to the other modifiers. If the attack is a success, then it ignores enemy PR completely doing full damage. This is meant to represent aiming for chinks in the armor such as eye slits on helmets, unarmored armpits, gaps in a monster’s chitin, etc.

And that’s it! Combat is finished! This whole chapter was 7 pages long. But next time we start getting into the really interesting stuff:

MAGIC

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 16 hours!
Talislanta is awesome. What do you think of the 5th edition? Didn't that replace some of the special skills with feat-like abilities?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Kurieg posted:

Well the person who lit the torch was Bill Bridges, you can watch the "TECHNOLOGY IS BAD" thread weave through the werewolf books up until the point when he leaves to work on Mage. And then Mage double downed hard on it.
I wonder how this ties into the later Werewolf stuff where they both get a little more in depth about the Weaver and its fruits, and also make it clearer that the Weaver is not necessarily your friend or the solution to everything. I thought that was more balanced, really.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Nessus posted:

I wonder how this ties into the later Werewolf stuff where they both get a little more in depth about the Weaver and its fruits, and also make it clearer that the Weaver is not necessarily your friend or the solution to everything. I thought that was more balanced, really.

Yeah that's all from Skemps tenure. The idea that even the Wyld isn't exactly your friend, and everything happened because Balance is literally gone. Too much of anything is bad.

potatocubed
Jul 26, 2012

*rathian noises*

Hostile V posted:

Alright, it's the game Corporation, another one of those games I heard about years ago and looked into recently. Unlike Brave New World, it's pretty good in my opinion.

Wait, this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_(role_playing_game)

I've had a copy of that sitting on my shelf for... God, ten years or so. It never grabbed me at the time, but I'd be eager to hear what you have to say about it.

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

potatocubed posted:

Wait, this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_(role_playing_game)

I've had a copy of that sitting on my shelf for... God, ten years or so. It never grabbed me at the time, but I'd be eager to hear what you have to say about it.
Yeah, that's the one. The premise and the world sound sort of silly (and it all definitely sort of is) but I'm honestly liking some of the design decisions, mostly in regards to the approach they take with augmentations and keeping your players in line.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Hostile V posted:

Yeah, that's the one. The premise and the world sound sort of silly (and it all definitely sort of is) but I'm honestly liking some of the design decisions, mostly in regards to the approach they take with augmentations and keeping your players in line.

Yeah, I have a cursory connection with it. It felt like "Syndicate: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game" and I can totally see why it would take that approach. I went with Eclipse Phase initially largely because they don't have a limiting mechanic for augmentations save cost, but then again, you can bodyswap anywhere from a loving tank to an elfin social butterfly for pure minmaxing to fulfill a specific role and had the resources to do so. The only thing that keeps most players from overinvesting in augmentations is that you could just bodyswap into a better body for that money.

Young Freud fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Aug 3, 2016

Comrade Koba
Jul 2, 2007

Crasical posted:

These two words elegantly sum up why I'm completely sick of 40k.

In particular, why I'm sick of a certain type of online tabletop game board poster who the franchise creates, who peppers their speech with 'Heresy' 'Traitor' and 'Purge' and parrots the 'kill the mutant/heretic/alien/other' slogan of the Imperium any chance they get, and tries to jam the philosophy into completely inappropriate settings.

Yeah, buddy, it's sure edgy that you think we should purge all the elves and dwarves as inhuman scum. You're really a mature and cool individual. I'm glad you came to enlighten us about how all aliens need to be executed via flamethrower in our Star-Trek style scifi setting.

This photoshop feels pretty appropriate.

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FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

Question for the thread: what was the first edition of GURPS like?

I know some of the big changes going from 3rd to 4th: how costs for basic attributes changes and how defenses were calculated. I never hear about the earlier versions though.
Pretty much the same as 3E. Much smaller skill and advantage and disadvantage lists, no system for magic or psi or superpowers (those books had yet to be written). I think the way guns and shooting worked changed massively between 1E and 2E, but I can't remember the details. Using 1E/2E/3E adventures and supplements interchangably is pretty smooth.

4E is the one that redid a number of core mechanics and is crunch-incompatible with everything that came before.

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