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Jump is an automatically learned technique for the Foolish Samurai prestige class. So in Aether, how much print space does each of these archetypes take up? I ask because there is a shocking number of them and the mechanics seem pretty invovled for a few of them.
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Apr 11, 2017 14:24
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Barudak posted:Jump is an automatically learned technique for the Foolish Samurai prestige class. They improve it to Jump Good later on in the class. Also the capstone is crippling depression so it balances out.
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Apr 11, 2017 16:49
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Rigged Death Trap posted:They improve it to Jump Good later on in the class. Yeah but you also get a gun and a sweet motorcycle mount.
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Apr 11, 2017 17:16
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Barudak posted:Now Im just imaging a game where magic is painfully detailed and consistent and subject to multiple checks just for weak effects while physical activities like "jump" have no checks, the mechanism at work seems totally lost on the author, and it outclass all the magical options many times over. And I'm imagining a heartbreaker where the introduction takes at least 20 pages to explain that it won't feature any magic whatsoever because the author tried and failed to replicate the D&D spells at home. DigitalRaven posted:Counterpoint: Remnants That game does the right thing. It cares so little just why the mecha work that they leave it up to the GM.
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Apr 11, 2017 17:42
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Iron Heroes was written by Mike Mearls under the Swords & Sorcery imprint that he shared with Monte Cook. Monte Cook would write Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved under this line, which was more his style, but that's a completely different discussion. Iron Heroes has a couple of big ideas, which I'll try to cover here: Skill Groups This was their attempt to streamline the 3e skill system. Basically, skills would be grouped together, and then if you put a skill point into one, you'd get skill points in all of them together. For example, the Armiger class has access to the Athletics skill group. If they put a point into Climb, they also gain 1 rank in Jump and Swim. The Executioner class has access to the Athletics, Perception, and Stealth skill groups. If they put a point into Listen, they also gain 1 rank in Search, Sense Motive, and Spot. If they put a point into Hide, they also gain 1 rank in Move Silently. If an Armiger puts a point into Hide, though, it only goes to Hide - they would need to increase their Move Silently skill separately. Also, there are no more "cross-class" skills as defined by 3e. You put one point into a skill, and you gain one rank in it. What's supposed to represent cross-class-ness is whether or not you have access to the skill group to let you save on points. Skill Challenges Basically, take a penalty to a skill check to gain an additional benefit, or, in-combat, succeed at a skill check to gain a bonus, such as an attack roll or damage roll bonus. This technically is something that you could have already with standard 3e, the book just formalizes it as a thing. It's supposed to dovetail with ... Glory Points Whenever the player does something "heroic", the DM should award them with Glory Points. If you choose to spend Glory Points before rolling for an attack, skill check, or saving throw, you add a d10 to your roll for every Glory Point you want to spend. If you choose to spend the Points after you roll your d20, you add a d6 for every Point instead. This is supposed to encourage risky behaviors and heroic actions: you throw yourself into harm's way to earn Points, and then you use those points to pull of skill checks that would normally be impossible. Reserve Points Iron Heroes has no spellcasters, and thus no healers. So Mearls took the Reserve Points variant rule from Unearthed Arcana and applied it here. You have a number of Reserve Points equal to your maximum HP. Whenever you are not engaged in strenuous physical activity, you can convert the Reserve Points into Hit Points. When you're sleeping/resting, you both heal your HP and recover your banked Reserve Points. It effectively gives you twice your maximum HP, but not within a fight. I suspect, but have no way of proving, that the concept of 4th Edition's "Short Rest" and "healing surges" may have had their genesis here. Defense Bonus and Armor as Damage Reduction These are again variant rules from Unearthed Arcana that Mearls made into default assumptions for IH. Armor as Damage Reduction means that wearing armor no longer increases your AC, but instead reduces the damage you take from successful hits. Except Mearls took it one step further and made it a random roll. Whereas plate armor would give you a flat DR 4/- in the 3e variant rule, you would instead have roll 1d8 for your plate armor's DR in IH. And then, since you no longer have an AC bonus from armor, you simply have a Base Defense Bonus, similar to Base Attack Bonus, that takes the place of what your armor should be. (it's also worth mentioning here that the Base Defense Bonus actually goes up to what your expected AC value would be not only from wearing armor, but also from the periodic upgrades of that armor's enhancement bonus, from +1 to +5. This is because there are supposed to be no magic items in IH.) (it's also the case that Base Attack Bonuses are also higher, in order to account for this. A level 20 3e Fighter would have a final BAB of +20/+15/+10/+5, but a level 20 IH Archer would have a final BAB of +25/+20/+15/+10/+5. That extra +5 is from the +5 weapon that they should have had, had they been playing in a setting where magic is real) Feat Mastery This is a big change, and a big fiddly change in a game that's already full of fiddly bullshit. Feats are divided into two categories: General and Mastery. If it's a General feat, then it's the same thing as normal 3e feats. You learn it, you get the effects. Improved Initiative is (still) a General feat. You learn it, you get a +4 bonus to initiative rolls. If it's a Mastery feat, you can take it multiple times, and the benefit you gain is based on your Mastery Level. Let's try an example: At level 1, a Berserker has a Power Feat Mastery of 1, and nothing else. At level 5, a Berserker has a Power Feat Mastery of 3, and Armor Feat Mastery of 2, and a Feat Mastery of 1 for all other categories. Foe Hammer is a Power Mastery feat. As a level 1 Berserker, you can only take its Mastery 1 version - whenever you hit a target, the target must have a Fort save DC 10+half-damage-you-inflicted, or suffer a -2 injury penalty to attack rolls until the end of their next turn. As a level 5 Berserker, you can take either its Mastery 1 version, or its Mastery 2 version - you may take a Full-Round Action to make a single attack. If it hits, the target must have a Fort save. If the target fails, its speed will be reduced by half. As a level 11 Berserker, you can take the Mastery 1, 2, 4, or 6 versions of the feat. The Mastery 6 version will let you replace the a confirmed critical hit with inflicting the Sickened condition. You have to wait until you get to level 15 Berserker to get access to the Mastery 8 version of Foe Hammer. But at level 15 Berserker your Armor Feat Mastery is only 7, and your Feat Mastery for everything else is only 6, so make sure you remember that! But probably a bigger issue than the complicated mess of this thing is how the book manages to split up previously useful feats into buckets of warm spit. Improved Trip: the first feat at Mastery 2 removes the OAs for Trip Attempts. The Mastery 3 feat gives you the +4 bonus in the opposed roll for the trip attempt. The Mastery 4 feat gives you the free attack after a successful trip attempt. So you need three feats and anywhere between character level 3 to 4 before you can get what you used to be able to have with just one feat from the 3e PHB. The fact that IH gives you feats every odd level, and that there's a Mastery 6 upgrade of Improved Trip (target falls prone in adjacent square instead) and a Mastery 8 upgrade of Improved Trip (target must pass a Fort save or be stunned) doesn't really earn back all that you lose from this Feat Mastery system slicing up whole feats into mealy-mouthed quarter-feats. === I'm going to end this post here to give us something to chew on, because the individual class discussions are going to be much longer, but suffice it to say that the general rules framework that IH is built around is this creaky, unoriginal structure cobbled together from Unearthed Arcana variant rules that only serves to wreck all possible easy conversion to other d20 games.
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Apr 11, 2017 18:05
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Oh look, it's The Feat Problem again. Why do you have to take the feat multiple times for all the mastery levels? Spells do that stuff for free, and Wizards get two per level! Why can't you take it once, and get them all? You only get 10 feats, unless you're a fighter, and this would make fighters actually scary with their huge pile of feat benefits to compete with the Wizard's huge pile of spells.
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Apr 11, 2017 18:21
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wiegieman posted:Oh look, it's The Feat Problem again. Why do you have to take the feat multiple times for all the mastery levels? Spells do that stuff for free, and Wizards get two per level! Why can't you take it once, and get them all? You only get 10 feats, unless you're a fighter, and this would make fighters actually scary with their huge pile of feat benefits to compete with the Wizard's huge pile of spells. Because realism.
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Apr 11, 2017 18:37
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wiegieman posted:Oh look, it's The Feat Problem again. Why do you have to take the feat multiple times for all the mastery levels? Spells do that stuff for free, and Wizards get two per level! Why can't you take it once, and get them all? You only get 10 feats, unless you're a fighter, and this would make fighters actually scary with their huge pile of feat benefits to compete with the Wizard's huge pile of spells. I assume it's because, since there are no wizards in IH, the idea is to give players more "stuff" to buy and fiddle with to build their characters. Of course, this is an utterly rear end way to do that, and betrays that base d20 non-casters are hosed yet going forward no one involved would try to undo this implicitly acknowledged problem.
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Apr 11, 2017 18:46
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Aethera is making me want to play Pathfinder. Holy crap.
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Apr 11, 2017 19:16
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wdarkk posted:Aethera is making me want to play Pathfinder. Holy crap. It's a trap!
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Apr 11, 2017 19:38
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wdarkk posted:Aethera is making me want to play Pathfinder. Holy crap. Me too. It's a very interesting setting and I like what they're doing with new classes. Have they said if they're going to come out with more books? I will try to post two V20 Dark Ages posts this week but I've had to work on some papers for school and unfortunately I'm not getting a Masters in Vampire Studies.
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Apr 11, 2017 19:38
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:unfortunately I'm not getting a Masters in Vampire Studies. why not  13th Age part 13: First, roll 3d6 six times... Let's look at character creation, top to bottom, to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of 13th Age's character design process in practice. Cease to Hope posted:Since I'm moving on to actual rules next, I'll need some sample characters to walk through character creation and play examples. In F&F tradition, does anyone want to suggest any character concepts? In particular, I need a class and One Unique Thing - I can handle the rest. I got some good answers to this, although everyone wanted to play a wizard so I'll have to be picky. Meet our cast. One Unique Thing Nessus posted:"Stone Cold" Stogo Appleshire. His OUT is a profound mastery of beer, or possibly the crowd. Ego Trip posted:Kilroy the wizard, whose OUT is that he is a giant robot. (I may have played this character.) Barudak posted:Rudy the Wizard, his OUT is "Wishes he were a fighter" e: this is going to change a little Ability scores come before One Unique Thing, but we're skipping them for now. There's no good way to know what ability scores you'll want until you pick a class. Stone Cold Stogo works just fine. Before getting into adventuring, his roving displays of physical prowess earned him fans - and his cheekily blasphemous gimmick earned him a few haters, too. His One Unique Thing is "Appleshire 3:16". Kilroy's player wants to be a giant robot. His player ALWAYS wants to have a giant robot. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), we're not playing Dragonmech. The OUT section does help us with this - just let people be whatever they want, and only clip it down when it would get in the way of the story. A giant robot is probably too much, but how about a robot who is a giant? Kilroy is okay with being a seven-foot tall Forgeborn. Kilroy can be Large-sized, too. It doesn't have any default game effect for him to be large, so he is, what the hell. The top of his head is always scuffed. Kilroy's One Unique Thing is "Robot Giant". Rudy The Wizard's player wants a wizard who wishes he were a fighter. This would be a perfectly workable OUT, as long as Rudy doesn't get too suicidal, but I need a non-wizard for character building examples, so let's push Rudy a little further down his aspiration path. Rudy The Wizard - that's what everyone calls him - has succeeded in his initial ambition. Rudy The Wizard is a fighter, and his OUT is "former wizard, thankyouverymuch". ("Magical academy dropout" isn't unique enough to be One Unique Thing.  )Ability Scores If everyone involved was new and didn't know what they were doing, this would still be a very bad time for figuring out ability scores. However, 13th Age does introduce itself as intended for GMs who are already experienced with other D&D or D&D-like games, who know the D20 basics and can walk any new players through character creation. It makes putting ability scores up near the top a little more defensible - it's traditional - although we won't need to know what they are for quite a while in any case. 13th Age suggest 4d6 drop low (ahahahahano) or standard 3e-style point buy, with 28 points. Unfortunately, there's just the point buy chart. PantsOptional posted:FWIW, the book does indeed have stat arrays. They're at the end of the book in an appendix, right where you wouldn't think to look for them during character creation. e: Apparently I'm an idiot and missed where it says, "See page 309 in the appendix for sample point-buy arrays." It's several chapters before we get to modifiers for race and class, but let's incorporate those now because, realistically? People are going to do point buy with that in mind, and incorporate the stats immediately. Also, they're all even numbers because, like 3e, raw ability scores mean nothing: all that matters is your modifier, which is (STAT-10)/2. Stone Cold Stogo is going to be a halfling barbarian. (He slams a beer when he rages out, or rages out at the lack of beer, either/or.) He's strong, not as agile as you'd expect because of a lingering neck injury, and not all the brightest dude but not totally unlikeable. He's taking the STR from being a barbarian and the CON from being a halfling. STR 20 DEX 10 CON 16 INT 8 WIS 8 CHA 12 Kilroy is a forgeborn wizard, because it's the class that gets STR 12 DEX 12 CON 14 INT 20 WIS 8 CHA 8 Rudy the Wizard is a wood elf fighter. He just wasn't cut out for magical instruction - it was mostly a thing his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents pushed him into. Imagine how overbearing your family would be if you had multiple hundreds of years of relations alive at one time! He'll want the STR from being a fighter and the WIS from being a wood elf. (Trust me on this second one.) STR 20 DEX 8 CON 14 INT 12 WIS 12 CHA 8 Icon Relationships This fits in well here. Understanding how your character fits into the world might work a little better if it came after Backgrounds, but either way works. Stone Cold Stogo made his rep on good old-fashioned traveling Kilroy doesn't have a great grasp on where he came from or what he was doing before he got into this adventuring business. What he doesn't know yet (but his player does) is that rumors of the wandering magical giant have made it to the ears of the Archmage (1pt conflicted), Dwarf King (1pt conflicted), and Lich King (1pt conflicted), all of whom would like to know more about this oddity. Rudy The Wizard (who is a fighter) is technically on an extended leave from his magical studies at an imperial magical academy (1pt positive with the Archmage), but more importantly, he has an extended elfish family that is Very Concerned About Him but doesn't yet know he's basically dropped out (2pt conflicted with the Elf Queen). Backgrounds There is no way to get around the fact that the correct way to spend your eight background points is on two backgrounds. A +5 and a +3 or two +4s are always going to be better than a bunch of points scattered randomly. It's just how the system works. As a result, everyone is going to pick a Main Thing and a Secondary Thing, or two equal Things, with the idea that those things are what you apply whenever you want to do a task your character reasonably could do. So, while Dexter's single point in Inexplicably Surviving Disaster was amusing, we're not going to be doing that and I recommend you don't either. Stone Cold Stogo has Famous Exhibition Wrestler +5. He can impress people with his ale-consuming and bodyslamming prowess, work a crowd make a hit look like it hurts a lot more or less than it actually does, and sometimes just pull off "Don't you know who I am?" He also has Working Carnie +3 - when he lets his persona down, he can handle pack animals, put up or tear down all sorts of temporary buildings, and say "kayfabe" without sounding like a total moron. Kilroy has an intimate and inexplicable understanding of Multidimensional Travel +4: he isn't 100% clear why, but he has an excellent knowledge of creatures who don't belong on this world, and feels instantly more comfortable when it comes to portals and teleportation and realms beyond this one. He also has an innate affinity for Arcanomechanics +4. He's more comfortable with magical machines - especially when reproducing magical documents - than he is with other people. Rudy The Wizard (who is a fighter) is a rabid fan of Heroic Sagas of Past Ages +5, from which he learned everything he knows about swordplay, adventuring, climbing to the tops of mountains, and slaying the giants in their halls. He also wasn't that bad a Magical Undergrad +3 - he understands magic on an academic level, and can do magical things when presented with academic bureaucracy. (They haven't even technically noticed he's on leave yet.) Race We're skipping feats and gear because you need to know your class before you even know which you can take. That's sixteen pages (plus a few pages of general RP advice and a few pages of art) that get totally skipped until much later in the process. It's not well laid out! Similarly, this section has a bunch of info on races - but they're things you'd probably want to know before picking your ability scores, One Unique Thing, and backgrounds. The icon descriptions help somewhat, but there's a ton of obvious character hook material here. Stogo got +2 DEX from being a halfling, as well as an ability to dodge an enemy's blow to force them to reroll. For him, it's less "Evasive" and more "No Sell". Being a halfling comes with all sorts of annoying BS about which weapons you can use in other D&D/D20 games, but not here: Stogo is technically Small, but all that does is give him a small AC boost against opportunity attacks. Halflings make completely awesome barbarians. Kilroy gets +2 CON from being forgeborn, and we're going to say he needs air intake to function and food - if sometimes weird food - to power whatever alchemical process it is that powers him. You could probably tell he isn't particularly large bugbear or a smallish ogre in heavy armor if you had him take off all his clothes. He's used to the attention - there's nobody else quite like Kilroy. He also gets Never Say Die, which might let him use a recovery as a free action if he's taken out. Rudy The Wizard (who is a fighter) is a wood elf, and got +2 WIS from it for reasons I'll get into later. This is in part because Rudy's thinks that a family of long-lived overbearing relatives is hilarious, and in part because Elven Grace is some totally overpowered bullshit and he can't miss out on that. Class Stone Cold Stogo is a barbarian. I'm not going to go fully into his stats, but I will note his high CHA is basically useless. The only stat it could affect is his Mental Defense, which uses the middle stat of INT, WIS, and CHA. The only benefit he's ever going to get from it is on background checks. We maxed out his STR because his melee attacks are all based on it, so that's +5 to hit and damage on every attack forever. Like 4e, there's no reason not to start with an 18, 19, or 20 in your main attacking stat. Also like 4e, he's utterly incompetent at ranged attacks, because they are entirely DEX-based. He can Barbarian Rage, of course. The feats for it are really good at higher levels, less so right now. So, he's going to take the Building Frenzy talent, for an extra damage-boosting rage that stacks with normal rage, and the Adventurer feat to improve it. For the other two, I guess we go with Strongheart to help make up for his bad defenses, and Slayer because it's the least situational of the super situational junk talents. Barbarian talents don't have a lot of choices! Kilroy has maxed INT for his spells, and surprisingly balanced defenses. Unless he busts out the whacking stick, he's going to be swinging INT at everything at every range. His talents are Evocation and High Arcana because they both rule, and Wizard's Familiar because detaching bits of himself to use as a scout seems funny. Wizards get absolute poo poo for adventurer feats, especially since he's using Magic Missile over Ray of Frost (use Ray of Frost), but the Color Spray feat is okayish so let's go with that. Rudy the Wizard (who is a fighter) illustrates one non-obvious trick: you can safely dump dex as a martial character, as long as you don't care about ranged attacks. AC uses the middle of CON/DEX/WIS, and physical defense uses the middle of STR/CON/DEX - so you can shift from DEX to WIS to help with your mental defense (which is based on INT/WIS/CHA). This is quietly a large help to clerics, who will tend to have better-than-expected defenses across the board. Also, since nobody has any other mechanical reason to pump two mental stats, very few characters have good mental defenses - except for wizards  and paladins because of their higher base MD before stat modifiers.For talents, we're taking Power Attack for some occasional extra damage, Skilled Intercept because it blunts a lot of damage and helps keep enemies in melee, and Comeback Strike. I like Comeback Strike a lot: it's not a reroll on a miss, but a second attack, which means it lets you get a miss maneuver then make another attack that could also trigger a maneuver. For maneuvers, let's go with Carve an Opening, Deadly Assault, and Heavy Blows - with that set, any attack always triggers a maneuver. He probably calls them Rudy's Inexorable Advance, Rudy's Gruesome Evisceration, and Rudy's Overwhelming Force. As for a feat… Rudy The Wizard Isn't A Wizard What we want here for Rudy The Wizard (who is a fighter) is Ritual Casting. Both of his backgrounds can theoretically use it, his OUT justified why he'd use it, and it's not impinging on the other characters for him to use magic out of combat. In fact, he'll grudgingly be using his backgrounds to do magical things all of the time, it's part of his whole concept. The problem is that Ritual Casting requires you to expend spells, and he doesn't have any. Ritual Casting uses your class concept, rather than your character concept, to take part in the freeform, non-combat portions of the game, and it's one of the few rulesets to do so. Not only are you expending spells as a resource to power rituals, but you're also using your spell list as a rough approximation of what sorts of things you can do. As a result, barbarians, fighters, and rogues just can't participate in this part of the game. There's no conceptual reason they shouldn't be able to: barbarians can pray to their ancestors as a class talent, rogues are so tricky they're basically magic with a couple different abilities, and while fighters aren't magic they could certainly have magic backgrounds or OUTs. There's just no ruleset for it: their Ritual Casting resources are zero and their powerset is undefined. This is a step backwards from 4e. In 4e, anyone with the proper skills could learn and cast a ritual. Certain classes favored them because of their skill lists, but that wasn't a straitjacket. Granted, 4e rituals were impractically expensive, because any money spent on one-time ritual expenses came at the cost of permanent magic item boosts, but lots of GMs just houseruled these costs away or handled them narratively. 13th Age's rules are more practical, but they also bring class into a part of the game where class doesn't usually matter, with no clear way to fix that. There's lots of possible house rules here, but it's the first time we're going to see the crunchy combat half of the game get in the way of the loose story-driven one. Rudy's not going to rely on house rules to open his brain to the maelstrom. Instead, he's going to take the Deadly Assault adventurer feat, for an extra .35 damage per level on half of his hits. Yeehaw. Finishing up We already did feats! Everyone's gear is given to them free by their class, and they can spend 25gp on whatever if you care but I do not! We're done! Using the a fillable character sheet PDF made by an official forums poster:
Next: If you do it, roll a d20 to see if you do it Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 19:40
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Thank you for that excellent effort write up on characters and confirming my suspicion that there were some unseen issues with trying to go across the martial/magic divide. Poor Rudy, coach will never put him in now. Kilroys items are a good joke.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:35
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Dragonmech: MECHA OUT YOUR EARS The Talon is a Colossal steam mech, 35 feet tall and crewed by 4, that is primarily used by dwarven merchants. It's a transport designed to be able to defend itself on dangerous routes, armed with a pair of buzzsaws, one to each arm. It's got room for four passengers to sleep comfortably, or three times that many if they're very cramped, and that area can be used to ship goods if there aren't passengers. Talons try to avoid combat when possible, but those buzzsaws are nasty if they're forced. They'll make use of terrain to avoid ranged weapons if possible. Fortunately, they are rarely forced into large battles - just fights against raiders or monsters.  The Totem is a name to refer to the mechs most often found among nomadic mech tribes. They are usually Gargantuan, man-powered things around 25 feet tall and with a crew of 6. They are usually former steam mechs scavenged and converted to a cheaper power source: oar-based engines. The steamtech weapons get chucked to make space, leaving the thing armed with a single shoulder-mounted catapult, and often the armor is stripped to reduce weight. Totems are rarely able to survive combat with other mechs, but they're not raelly meant to fight them - they're transport and protection for the tribe against raiders and beasts. They will typically launch catapult shots until foes close, then do their best to punch them to death, but they're rarely much good at fighting due to lack of crew - there's barely enough room for the pilot and 'engine', let alone gunners. They're called Totems because the tribes usually decorate them with totemic iconography.  Verdant Fury is the personal machine of the elf ranger Juna Darkwalker. It's a Huge, magically animated machine, 15 feet tall and barely large enough for its one-man cockpit. Juna and his former adventuring companions each made their own mechs when the rains came, and each have gone to defend their ancestral lands. Verdant Fury is made of mithril with a layer of living bark on the outside, allowing it to disguise itself as a tree. It has no visible weapons, but stores four magical +1 dancing longswords in its torso to deply. It typically hides until an enemy is in ambush range, then charges and punches, pulling out one sword per round after that to minimize the periods in which there are no blades attacking. It is designed to fight monsters from the moon rather than other mechs, and is poorly armed to deal with other kinds of foes, but is quite good at taking on infantry and lunar monsters. I think Juna was one of the party members of the personal game that DragonMech was born out of.  The Viper is an exceptionally common machine at this point. It's a Gargantuan clockwork mech, 25 feet tall and with only a pilot. It was originally built by a dwarf in Edge and quickly caught on as one of the best one-man mechs around. It's rarely seen in armies, but is great for travelers and mercenaries. It's got enough space for the pilot to sleep on board, plus good armaments in the form of a steam cannon and big sword. It's a pretty good mech for a one-man crew, and easy to maintain due to being clockwork and so not very fuel-hungry. The next chapter is the equipment section. A bunch of new equipment is added - mostly siege weapons for mechs to wield and stats for mech-scale weapons, but there's also the hooked axe and barbed blade, which are sword and axe variants that increase critical damage and allow you to trap foes from moving away. There's also stats for stuff like bore punches (hydraulic blasters that fire a spike into the foe and then, if the foe doesn't move away, opens the spike up to allow boarders in), changlers (a bunch of chain whips all strapped together to better entangle mechs) and lobster claws (weaponized vises).  Oh, and chainswords. There's also a bunch of new bombs/grenades, ranging from explosives to things that cause massive rust to signal flares. There's flamethrowers and steamblasters. Armor also has some new entries - one designed for comfort in mech cockpits, less good (but cheaper) chainmail made out of discarded machine parts, and hydraulic power armor. The power armor is notable for the powers it grants: an air filter that gives +4 against gas attacks, a shaded visor for +4 against blindness, increased unarmed damage, +4 vs bull rushes from stability, a big penalty to Hide checks due the giant smoking steam engine (-8, so a really good rogue can still manage it) and a set of jumping springs that let you jump without an armor penalty as if you had Str 20. Next time: Magic items, which can get weird.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:42
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Barudak posted:So in Aether, how much print space does each of these archetypes take up? I ask because there is a shocking number of them and the mechanics seem pretty invovled for a few of them. The shortest of them takes perhaps a quarter of a page, but that's an extreme outlier (the Listener Oracle). More often the short ones take half a page, and the longest are two whole pages or more. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Me too. It's a very interesting setting and I like what they're doing with new classes. Have they said if they're going to come out with more books?
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Apr 12, 2017 02:13
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I love how Dragonmech does the same thing Marvel Role Playing did where they give you a bunch of adjectives that all mean the same thing and make you remember if Gargantuan is bigger than Colossal when comparing two mecha.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:13
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I know right, would it kill them to just stick a number on it? Ex: Gargantuan (size 7), Colossal (size 9) When I'm paging through summary descriptions I need concise numbers.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:20
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We're doing a LARP again (they have to come up every once in a while) and this time it's a fun excuse to dance around finally covering Call of Cthuhlu by covering the LARP version instead. With that, here's Cthuhlu Live.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:22
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Midjack posted:I love how Dragonmech does the same thing Marvel Role Playing did where they give you a bunch of adjectives that all mean the same thing and make you remember if Gargantuan is bigger than Colossal when comparing two mecha. That's because it's literally just using the standard d20 size categories (plus extending the scale out past the standard Colossal).
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Apr 12, 2017 02:27
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senrath posted:That's because it's literally just using the standard d20 size categories (plus extending the scale out past the standard Colossal). I guess that works for the abuse survivors but I never played d20 at all.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:28
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Bar Crow posted:Mech games hate mechs. Actually it's weird that I forget to mention it given that I'm currently in a game of it, but Battle Century G is a pretty good mecha game that would probably be my first go-to if I were to run one. theironjef posted:We're doing a LARP again (they have to come up every once in a while) and this time it's a fun excuse to dance around finally covering Call of Cthuhlu by covering the LARP version instead. With that, here's Cthuhlu Live. Not for long because it's Cthulhu getit ayyyy. (Wouldn't that be better as "Cthulhu Lives?" Oh well, that's a missed opportunity.)
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Apr 12, 2017 02:39
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Midjack posted:I guess that works for the abuse survivors but I never played d20 at all. I'm saying they didn't come up with it, not that it isn't stupid.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:50
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The sizes they did invent are literally just 'Colossal with a number stuck after it' so.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:52
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Midjack posted:I guess that works for the abuse survivors but I never played d20 at all. it's a setting for 3e
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Apr 12, 2017 02:56
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e: fuckin awful.app
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Apr 12, 2017 02:58
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Midjack posted:I love how Dragonmech does the same thing Marvel Role Playing did where they give you a bunch of adjectives that all mean the same thing and make you remember if Gargantuan is bigger than Colossal when comparing two mecha. Yeah but Marvel RPG put that giant table of adjectives and colors on the player-facing side of the DM's screen. It was the simplest thing in the world to play.
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Apr 12, 2017 03:15
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Cease to Hope posted:13th Age suggest 4d6 drop low (ahahahahano) or standard 3e-style point buy, with 28 points. Unfortunately, there's just the point buy chart. There's no standard point buy arrays described, so everyone has to laboriously count add totals (or use an online calculator, which is what I'll be doing). FWIW, the book does indeed have stat arrays. They're at the end of the book in an appendix, right where you wouldn't think to look for them during character creation.
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Apr 12, 2017 03:22
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theironjef posted:We're doing a LARP again (they have to come up every once in a while) and this time it's a fun excuse to dance around finally covering Call of Cthuhlu by covering the LARP version instead. With that, here's Cthuhlu Live. I played that, it was called 'growing up in New England'. Every so often one of us would suggest playing CoC in one of the omnipresent Civil War graveyards or ruined churchyards, but it never really happened.
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Apr 12, 2017 05:06
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There are two more big concepts in Iron Heroes that I forgot to mention: No Races Everyone is assumed to be human. Instead, every character has two "Traits", which provide certain bonuses that are supposed to take the place of whatever abilities you would have normally gained from having a race. Traits are subdivided into Background, Mental, and Physical categories. Characters can only have two Traits max, but are limited to one Background Trait. These are things like: Artisan - Gain 4 ranks in Craft at level 1, and your Craft skill always increases by 1 rank each level. Raw materials for crafting cost 10% less, and you have a choice between [Taking 20 on Craft checks halves the time expenditure], [you deal 2x damage to items when trying to destroy them], or [you gain a +2 bonus to Appraise checks and can sell items for 10% more]. Bloodthirsty - when you kill an opponent, you gain a +1 bonus to damage and a +2 bonus to Will saves. There's a very pedantic clause attached to this that says the opponent had to have been killed from a positive HP score; that Coup de Graces don't count. Desert-born - you get a +2 bonus to all saves versus Fire. When you are in the desert, you can always make Survival checks even when untrained, and you gain a +4 bonus on Survival checks. You only consume half as much food and water when you are in the desert. You also have a choice between [gain a +2 bonus to Balance and Tumble checks while walking on sand], or [when you are reduced to less than 0 HP, you can make a Fort save to not fall unconscious and continue to fight normally (Camel's Tenacity)] There are Mental Traits that give you a +2 bonus to your Charisma or Intelligence or Wisdom. There are Physical Traits that give you a +2 bonus to your Strength or Dexterity or Constitution. However, these always come with a -2 penalty to something else, unless you take the Trait a second time to remove the penalty. But that already eats up both your Traits. More Hit Points Since this is a gritty, Conan-esque implied setting, characters need to be hardier. So instead of a Hit Die, characters now have a flat HP amount plus a rolled value. A Thief in Iron Heroes, for example, has a Hit Die of [1d4+4], as opposed to a 3e Rogue's [d6]. So a Thief's worst HP roll is only going to be 1 less than a Rogue's best HP roll, and a Thief is going to have 2 more HP per level than the Rogue, on average. That Old Tree posted:I assume it's because, since there are no wizards in IH, the idea is to give players more "stuff" to buy and fiddle with to build their characters. Of course, this is an utterly rear end way to do that, and betrays that base d20 non-casters are hosed yet going forward no one involved would try to undo this implicitly acknowledged problem. The problem is that if you increase the number of feats that everyone gets, but then subdivide the feats into 3 or 4 parts, then you're really coming out behind.
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Apr 12, 2017 05:21
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What's the consensus on Arcana Unearthed/Evolved? I remember really liking the ideas when I read it but then I played an ice witch in a game & it was dead boring.
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Apr 12, 2017 05:25
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Berkshire Hunts posted:What's the consensus on Arcana Unearthed/Evolved? I remember really liking the ideas when I read it but then I played an ice witch in a game & it was dead boring. A problem that came up in my game was that giants rode Huge mounts which were were CR 5 or 8 or something. So my Huge mount was a better fighter than any of the mundane characters in the group.
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Apr 12, 2017 05:57
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Specifically, casters were brought down by making the spells less powerful. The wizard equivalent is actually more powerful in terms of class features and flexibility of spellcasting... but the spells available aren't as powerful, leading to a less powerful class overall.
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Apr 12, 2017 06:15
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That really is the big problem with all the spellcasters in d&d: spells are just too good. Fix that and you fix 50% of the balance issues.
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Apr 12, 2017 06:48
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PantsOptional posted:FWIW, the book does indeed have stat arrays. They're at the end of the book in an appendix, right where you wouldn't think to look for them during character creation. oh, didn't even realize. it even says right there, "See page 309 in the appendix for sample point-buy arrays."
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Apr 12, 2017 06:52
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Berkshire Hunts posted:What's the consensus on Arcana Unearthed/Evolved? I remember really liking the ideas when I read it but then I played an ice witch in a game & it was dead boring. The biggest thing in AU/AE (though like IH there are more than a few big things) is that spells were not just completely redone from core 3e, but they were further subdivided into Simple spells, Complex spells, and Exotic spells. Simple spells are common and easily learned, Complex spells need to be researched or otherwise externally acquired, while Exotic spells are rare and difficult to learn that they require a feat slot. There's not a strict rules framework of the distinction between Simple and Complex, but the impression I get is that it gives the DM an "out" against the 3e design of the Wizard learning two new spells per level. Now that either doesn't happen, or only happens with Simple spells. While the redoing of spells and the three-tier spell learning system does "depower" casters to a significant degree, and while Cook did experiment with "martial abilities" in Arcana Evolved, I would still suggest that you play in this system as a caster (or a caster-hybrid) because the full BAB classes still aren't very good compared to Tome of Battle.
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Apr 12, 2017 07:49
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wiegieman posted:That really is the big problem with all the spellcasters in d&d: spells are just too good. Fix that and you fix 50% of the balance issues. Martials arent good enough more like. Make them better and Flitbop the wonder wizard now cant dominate the floor but still also continue to do his shenanigans.
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Apr 12, 2017 11:35
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Iron Heroes classes The big idea for class design in Iron Heroes is tokens. You earn them through a variety of means, and then you cash them in to let you perform abilities so that you're not just a Fighter doing Full Attacks all day. I'm not going to go through every class, but let's start with the Archer, as that's the first one in the book, and it's a straightforward example of how this system works: The Archer has a [1d4+4] hit die, it has full BAB when using ranged weapons, but 3/4ths BAB everywhere else, has access to the Agility, Athletics, and Perception skill groups, and has Projectile feats as its best Feat Mastery. The token pool used by the Archer is the Aim Token. At the start of a turn, an Archer can designate a target that they're aiming at. If the target was the same target as last time, and the target did not move in-between rounds, the Archer gains 1 Aim Token against that target, for free If the Archer spends a Move Action to aim (which basically means "do nothing, stare at your navel), they gain 1 Aim Token against that target If the Archer spends a Standard Action to aim, they gain 2 Aim Tokens against that target If the Archer spends a Full-Round Action to aim, they gain 4 Aim Tokens against that target At level 1, and at every odd level afterwards, the Archer gets to select a one of the following Shots that they can spend their Aim Tokens on: quote:Accurate Shot: For every 1 Aim Token you spend, you reduce the target's AC-bonus-from-cover by 2 At level 10 their gain Aim Tokens faster. At level 11 and every odd level afterwards they get a second set of special shots to spend Aim Tokens on, ranging from stuff like "make a ladder out of arrows" to "make an intimidate check by shooting a target's ear" to "8 Aim Tokens to guarantee that your next hit converts into a crit". That should give you the general gist. Right away there are a couple of problems with this. Anyone who's familiar with Mike Mearls work in 4th Edition D&D's Essentials line is going to have not-nice things to say about the Shroud Assassin, and how they had to "build up" Shrouds on their targets, and then spend them to deal extra damage. This was a lovely design because a lot of the time the target would die before your Shrouds ever got to build up, and once they died you were at zero Shrouds again and had to rebuild. This is the predecessor to that idea. If the Archer targets anything else, they lose all their Aim Tokens. If the target dies, the Archer has to target something else ... and they lose their Aim Tokens. This whole token system also represents a critical misunderstanding of just how long d20-era combat took: a goblin has 5 HP and wears leather armor, which is good for 1d2 DR in IH. An Archer with a 1d8 longbow is going to drop the goblin in one hit about 30% of the time. Even if you retained Aim Tokens across targets (which you don't), you're going to be on your third goblin before you have enough tokens to really do anything special. And this is an example of an Iron Heroes class that works well. For an example of what a bad class looks like, let's go to the Armiger. This is the flavor description for the class: quote:While other warriors rely on speed or canny parries to defend themselves, the armiger trusts in his armor. Armigers create their own protective gear and improve it over time. They can stand before dozens of opponents, confident that their armor will shield them from harm. So they're supposed to be the tank, right? A heavily armored warrior that punishes those that try to hit him. The Armiger has a [1d4+6] hit die, full BAB, has access to the Athletics skill groups, and has Armor feats as its best Feat Mastery. At level 1, the Armiger moves one speed category faster while wearing armor, so heavy armor such as plate, which would normally reduce a 30-foot base speed into 15-feet, now only reduces the Armiger to 20 feet. They also get Tough as Nails, which allows them to use either their Strength score, or their [Constitution score + Strength modifier] to determine encumbrance limits, whichever is higher. They also get Master Armorer, which gives them free maxed-out ranks in Craft (Armor). That's it. I'm not kidding, that's loving it. They get nothing that would make them particularly better at combat compared to a "Warrior" NPC class. At level 2? Still loving nothing! It's a dead level with no special abilities granted. At level 3 they finally get to start earning Armor Tokens. For every 10 damage that is soaked up by an Armiger's Damage Reduction rolls, they earn 1 Armor Token. To give the design the least bit of credit, at least the Armor Tokens can be spent against any target that has previously attacked and hit the Armiger. These Armor Tokens can be spent on the following abilities: quote:Armored Trap: Spend 1 Armor Token to activate this ability, then ready an attack when you are hit by a melee attack. When you make that readied attack, you may spend additional Armor Tokens, gaining a +1 attack bonus for every Token spent this way. If you hit, you gain a damage bonus equal to the amount of damage absorbed by your armor from the attack that you just reacted to. You will see a problem with this ability set right off the bat: How the poo poo does the Armiger gain any armor tokens?! Earning tokens requires them to be hit, but there's not one thing that the Armiger can do to earn any tokens if the DM just decides to never attack them, and if they're not attacked, then they don't earn any tokens, so how can they force the DM to attack them? Indomitable Wall of Iron was at one point errata'd to not need a minimum investment of Armor Tokens, so you can actually use that at zero tokens, but even then, if you use it on a target, and the target fails the Will save (they might pass since the token-less save DC won't be very high!) then they get a penalty to hitting you, which makes it even less likely that the DM will want to attack you, and if they ever do, it's actually harder for them. And then the problem of the rate of token acquisition being completely hosed rears its head again: 1 Token = 10 damage absorbed by DR. Even if you have a gentleman's agreement with the DM to please let you tank because you said so and need it, a goblin smacking you with a 1d6 morningstar is going to take 3 to 4 rounds to give you ONE Armor Token. True, there's probably more than one Goblin, but at the same time there's also more than one of your in the party trying to kill these goblins at the same time. I could go on, but I think that's enough to give you a basic idea of what the game is like. You need TOKENS TOKENS TOKENS to be able to do anything, but even for a class that frontloads Token earning like the Executioner, there's not going to be enough rounds of combat for you to be able to do anything with it. If there's any other specifics people would like to know, I'd be happy to get into it, but that should be it for this broad look at Iron Heroes.
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Apr 12, 2017 14:11
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I like the idea of tokens, but man that implementation is screwy. Seems like the problems are easy enough to identify though.
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Apr 12, 2017 15:21
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Abstractly, tokens are a fine idea. The problem here is manifold, because a) everyone generates the completely uniquely making synergy difficult or seemingly not even considered b) the tokens come in at too slow a drip for how little they do and c) there doesnt seem to have been real thought put in to how generating them would work in practice.
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Apr 12, 2017 15:26
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Rigged Death Trap posted:Martials arent good enough more like. The problem is that 3e gets so crazy at high levels, even without supplements, that boosting the fighter to spellcaster levels just makes an unmanageable game that much worse. Now, you can make the fighter very good at combat by just giving them hefty bonuses, better feats, and immunities so that a flying invisible wizard can't just teleport you and the ground you're standing on into the sun. But that doesn't give you the same out-of-combat utility as a spellcaster, and managing 3e at high levels requires getting rid of some of those "shenanigans," such as Divination spells.
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Apr 12, 2017 15:38
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