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My updates will probably be shorter for awhile because good god do I have a lot of schoolwork in my way.
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Oct 12, 2017 05:30
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I wasn't aware of the RPG deals thread, reposted there. Paizo can get bent as far as I care but the Cystic fibrosis charity is a good cause. I will keep this thread clean from now on.
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Oct 12, 2017 06:09
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I'm listening to System Mastery and have some experience with FFG hams games. And I'm interested, what is a good modern stat heavy game? I'm curious how a system that doesn't abstract a lot of stuff shakes off. Like, how do you make roleplaying skills or stuff like Lora or Perform in Hams not useless? Also, Cthulhutech approach to having regular damage, mega damage and hybrid damage: good or bad?
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Oct 12, 2017 06:14
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FMguru posted:Chase rules have been a solved problem for 33 years, why is this such a shitshow? FMguru posted:e: NBA sounds like its chase rules are descended from JB007
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Oct 12, 2017 09:07
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 CHARACTER CREATION  Fortunately there's a handy little list of how to make a character right here.  Cognitive Deficits/Nostalgias are an interesting concept that is also really stupid. The idea for the former is that kids aren't fully formed mentally and will believe in certain things that they'll grow out of with age. Those are, briefly:
Except y'know that's kind of really stupid because it's not like kids really age out of sexism or racism or believing the world is just or that ugly people are bad people. While I do like the idea that these are here to help you get into the mindset of a kid...these are things that do not go away. Some adults have to learn to enjoy food that doesn't look tasty or looks weird. Some adults believe in ghosts. Some people believe that if you dilute a toxin, shake it, dilute it further, shake it again, dilute it a third time, shake it and drink it you'll be cured of an illness. It's just a baffling simplistic idea for a mechanical system that doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense outside of putting you in a kid's shoes. ATTRIBUTES Attributes! There are nine Attributes. That is way too many goddamn attributes. Adults get 90 points, kids get points based on their age. Kids also have to deal with caps because, well, they're kids. Caps are at least pretty simple because it's just capped by your age, meaning that by the time you hit 16 your cap is now 20. Later options during creation can mess with the Attribute limits, but let's look at the Attributes proper.
Health involves three interlocking systems: Body, Blood and Incapacity. Body is the amount of blunt damage the body can take before it starts going into Blood; when Body is emptied, blunt weapons do double damage to Blood. Blood is the amount of damage vital systems (circulation, organs) can take before becoming mortally wounded; when Blood is empty, all damage goes to Incapacity. Incapacity represents being on death's door and what you can still do before it hits 0. This will be explained more later (as best as I loving can because I legit have trouble wrapping my head around this) but here's what you really need to know for now: Adults have 12 points to divide between all three with a minimum of 1 point and a max of 6. Kids? Well that depends on age. Oh and you can absolutely have health fractions, which is...super. There are subattributes that are bonuses and penalties to things based on your Attributes but ha ha gently caress that, let's keep rolling. CHARACTER CLASSES Kids have access to 9 different classes and Adults only have access to 3. This is because a lot of these 9 classes will basically lead into a reasonable class if/when the kid survives to hit 16 and they become an adult. It's possible for you to shift classes around, but in the beginning your class determines starting money (money in this game is represented in cans of food), your social standing, special advantages and disadvantages (yup, this system is in this game) and your skill costs. Skills are bunched into groups and each group will have a different price based on the class. FYI there's a lot of in-setting fiction I'm glossing over because it's all generally relentlessly depressing. Also this game could use more art that I wouldn't feel bad about sharing. One of the picture in this whole chunk I'm covering is directly tied into a story where a boy is briefly taken into an adult community but expelled when they realize kids carved "MURDERER" into his forehead so adults touching his face could feel it written in the scars. There's a picture of what this boy looks like. KID CLASSES Builders A Builder builds. Well that's easy, onto the next one! Alright a Builder is a kid who has survived by knowing how to make traps, tools, items, weapons and shelter. Builders are generally in high demand in any sort of community because they're able to put skills to bear to back up their creativity and become responsible for properly fortifying structures into a fort. Correspondingly, there's a lot of competition amongst Builders in a community in regards to taking on apprentices and projects and getting supplies they can use. Enslaved Builders are used for manual labor and used for jobs that require precision like plumbing or wiring. Builders who enslave adults will generally try to pick slaves that are knowledgeable in engineering or architecture and treat them fairly in exchange for information. If that's not possible, they'll try to pick strong adults to use to lift and move things. A Builder who goes bad will go bad either due to paranoia or tyranny, isolating themselves with dozens of traps for defense or extorting people more and more for their services. They might also get in pissing matches with other communities that lead to a disastrous arms race of building. Builders who grow older and start to go blind will start to use their sense of touch to compensate for their eyesight or only work in the day or only use magnifying glasses and glasses to compensate. Because blindness robs them of their ability to focus on specific details, they turn to recruiting apprentices for smaller things and focus their efforts on big projects like building forts or structures. As blindness grows, Builders also become more reliant on traps for self defense and learn their homes and traps perfectly. When a Builder becomes an adult, they will probably become a Brain. Mechanically, for every 100 kids there are around 60 Builders of either gender. They start with tools and good money and don't have any disadvantages they can take. They can start play with a fort of their own and can also know how to work metal (kids can't otherwise know blacksmithing). Their three cheapest skill groups are Athletics, Craft and Naughty while their most expensive are War, Combat and Sensory. Cadets Cadets are kids who were turned into child soldiers by the US military and have gone rogue, kids who were army brats/ROTC before the Plague or kids who realized that people with armies have power and willingly joined post-Plague child armies. They live exaggeratedly Spartan lives based on their training and experiences, living separate from other classes and preferring to live in old army camps or on the fringes of communities with other Cadets. Generally speaking their societies are meritocracies based on what they know of the military but sometimes the highest ranked are popular kids. And occasionally you have rogue Cadets who have lost their societies and live as ronin who hold to their old ideals and honor codes. If a Cadet is enslaved, it's because they weren't able to escape the military. Being enslaved by the military is hell but a lot of Cadets are fanatically loyal thanks to brainwashing and indoctrination. On the flip-side are Cadets enslaving adults, generally enslaving their past tormentors who they consider to be demoted, prisoners of war or court-martialed to justify why it's okay to use them as slaves. Adults are generally used as manual labor by Cadets. Cadets who go bad tend to become raiders, bandits or just go mad with power and start declaring war on communities. As they get older, Cadets often become afraid of showing weakness and bolster their insecurity with bravado and abuse. The retirement plan for a Cadet is to be in a position of command and have underlings working for them, becoming a Mouth that leads soldiers who can still see or becoming a Brawn if they can't become commanders. Out of 1000 kids, 50 will be Cadets with more boys than girls. They start with weapons and the optional advantage of having a handgun and/or disadvantage of being AWOL and hunted for it by someone. Their cheap skills are War, Survival and Athletics, their expensive skills are Scholastic, Sensory and Tech. Horse Riders Horse Riders are semi-nomadic kids who have managed to get the horse they always wanted and built their lives around that. Horse Riders function as mercenary cavalry in times of war and messengers, couriers and transportation for kids willing to pay. They don't really live complicated lives. Enslaved Horse Riders are valued for the horse more than the kid, using the horse for labor and using the rider as an attendant, punishing the kid when the horse disobeys. Horse Riders in turn don't really enslave adults so much as they use their horses to run them down and bring them to kids paying for slaves. Which kinda leads us into when Horse Riders go bad: like Cadets they favor becoming bandits and raiders but Horse Raiders will also become slavers. Horse Riders also run the risk of hurting or killing their horses through mismanagement and trying to take a new one from another kid, or they'll lure kids into their group and make them work for them with the promise of giving them a horse one day.  A cavalry of Horse Riders vs. a platoon of Cadets. Aging Horse Riders are in a pretty good position of having their horse act as their eyes for them, preferring to stick with their trusty steed and work in tandem with their horse to become a more functional combined being. This can run the risk of the horse recognizing laxness in their rider and becoming more disobedient. Either way, there are generally 20 Horse Riders in a population of 1000 kids with there being slightly more girls in rural environments and way more girls in urban environments. Horse Riders start with a stock or saddle horse and know Horse Riding and Animal Husbandry 1 for free. Their cheap skills are Athletics, Pets and Naughty and their expensive skills are Combat, Scholastic and Sensory. Optional advantages are having a hunting or riding horse, optional disadvantages are starting with a pony or an untrained horse. Ferals Ferals are generally kids who lived those four years on their own out in nature or were adopted and raised by packs of wild animals. Or they were so traumatized by the Plague years that they had to claw their way back to a sense of sanity and stability out in the untamed world. Either way, there really isn't much of a place in kid communities for Ferals. Their ability to interact with other kids depends on what age they went feral and how long they lived by themselves or with the animals. They focus on their own survival based on what they know and tend to be more friendly with Scouts or focus on taking care of animals. Ferals enslaved by adults are considered useless or kept in cages to be used for tracking and hunting. It's hard to imprison them and use them so adults don't really bother. In turn, Ferals are rarely slave owners. It's a concept foreign to them but they're also generally shy around adults for their own protection. A bad Feral isn't much more than a wild animal, capable of cannibalism and unblinking violence against other kids if it means their own survival. Going blind is tough for them. They either rely more heavily on the animals around them or they give up the wild entirely for protection amongst other humans. Their big advantage while blind is that their feral lives means they know how use their smell and hearing more effectively as Brawns. Only 5 out of 1000 kids are Ferals with a split between boys and girls. They're all generally 7-9 because any older than that and you'd have had more of an experience with the world. They only start with money but they also get a buttload of mandatory advantages:
Inheritors Inheritors are kids who assume a role that they believe is vital to society like doctor or cop or fire fighter. Some of them are apprentices, others are kids who made a promise to dying parts and some of them are just kids who thought being a doctor sounded cool. Their role in society depends on the role they're playing and whether or not they're actually good at it or if it's just a cargo cult. Inheritors don't often enslave adults, but when they do they mostly just keep them alive to use them as training manuals and repositories of info. In turn, enslaved Inheritors do their best to stay on the good side of their captors and make themselves useful as apprentices to learn more. The downside of Inheritors is that a lot of them are just kids playing at roles. A kid cop can go mad with power because they think people have to listen to them as a cop, a kid doctor might be wildly negligent, a kid fire fighter might not have water to put out a fire, etc. Aging Inheritors tend to become more respected as they get older and get more used to the job they're playing...which is both good and bad. A lot of them don't ask for help which leads to them either assuming that guessing is just as fine as knowing what to do. A fully-grown Inheritor tends to become a Mouth who either does or doesn't know what they're doing. There are around 70 boy and girl Inheritors per 1000 adults. Their cheap skills are Care, Athletics and Naughty, their expensive skills are Combat, Sensory and Tech. They only get optional advantages such as actual cop training, actual doctor training, skill expertise, rare goods or a working vehicle they may or may not know how to drive. Nurturers Nurturers are kids who protected younger kids and helped raise them. Babysitters, kids forced to raise siblings, the right kid in the right place at the right time all tend to make up Nurturers. You're either playing a house or doing a vital job being a parent to those younger than you. Their main role in societies are to keep the younger kids alive and safe. The downside of this is, well. Kids raising kids. Abusive behavior isn't uncommon along with kids just plain loving up. The worst Nurturers end up forming cults of personality venerating them as a parent-god. Enslaved Nurturers are often used to control and educate the younger or more rebellious kids. Nurturers enslaving adults will either use them as tutors and sources of info for the kids...or as live targets for the kids to learn how to kill or fight adults. Nurturers who live long enough to go blind will generally train the young kids they look after to become their assistants along with teaching kids how to help other blind teens. The average Nurturer becomes a Mouth upon adulthood and there are around 100 Nurturers in a 1000 kids taking care of 250 other smaller children. Most of them are girls because gently caress you. Their cheap skills are Care, Naughty and Athletics, their expensive skills are Combat, Sensory and Tech. The mandatory advantage they have to take is that they take care of a bunch of kids who are 15 years old if you add up all of their ages and all of the kids are less than seven years old. Solve for X. This doesn't really sound like an advantage because, well, they're small childrens. You can have 2 six year olds and a three year old or fifteen one year olds or etc. The big upside is this: Yeah. Free Leadership. Take 3 five year olds to guarantee that they'll be able to help you within a reasonable amount of time before you go blind. Then there are a bunch of optional disadvantages: you have to care for an extra toddler on top of the other kids, you are taking care of a baby, one child will absolutely never listen to you and can't be disciplined by you. Radicals Radicals are the bad kids. If KidWorld had a Camarilla, they'd be the Anarchs. Okay actually they would probably be Sabbat given what the book has to say about Radicals when they go bad. Radicals survived by breaking the rules of the old world or just having a rebellious background in the past. They're survivalists and scavengers supreme and often reject the societies of communities for being restrictive. Rarely Radicals end up leading their communities which are...well, probably the purest thing you'll ever get to anarcho-capitalism. Cadets plan for battles but Radicals actually fight. And the problem with the fact that Radicals fight is that they're the most common class of kid and this can lead to mobs in bad situations. When enslaved, Radicals are often used for everything and kept in line with beatings. When enslaving, Radicals like to use adults as mounts by riding on their shoulders and steering them if they're not keeping them as sources of knowledge. And god only knows what happens when they go blind because every Radical takes to it differently, either becoming Brawns or Mouths. There are around 600 Radicals for every 1000 kids with a bit more of a male slant. Radicals get money for armor/weapons and their cheap skills are Athletics, Naughty and Pets while their expensive skills are Combat, Scholastics and Sensory. The only advantage they can get is a discount on having Prison/Juvy experience. So yay for that? Scouts Either boy scoots or girl scoots or kids with other practical experience out in the woods, Scouts know the woods and they know what's good to eat or not. They're pretty drat helpful when it comes to finding things, finding landmarks and hunting. They're also good at procuring goods for sale and trading to help communities. Enslaved Scouts escape easily...unless the adults are holding something dear to them hostage. If they can't escape, Scouts are used as guides for adults, spies or food-gatherers (which makes adults even more paranoid because the Scouts can just poison them with nightshade and poo poo). On the flip-side, Scouts have limited uses for slaves, generally using them to be driven ahead and find dangers the hard way or simply using their size to discourage predators from attacking. And of course if they go bad they tend to become psychotic survivalists who hunt other kids. There are around 100 Scouts per 1000 kids with a bit more boys. Scouts often go a little nuts when they go blind, focusing on honing their hearing and memorizing patches of land. They become community leaders or they become bandits who know pieces of land by heart or become teachers. Often they end up as Brains. Scouts carry either hunting knives or pocket knives and get 4 free levels in a Survival skill of choice. They get Athletics, Survival and Pets for cheap and pay more for Combat, Scholastics and Tech. Their sole optional advantage is being an actual Gender Scout...because you can show people your badges and make them trust you. Students Students are smart kids who believe knowledge is power and knowledge will save the ruins of society. Find books, read books, hoard books, love books. They work with Builders or try to muscle out Builders or Nurturers, using the knowledge they've gleaned to teach or plan or lead or help. Enslaved Students are made to study specific things to become repositories of specific knowledge for things like surgery or electrical engineering. Students enslaving adults will just force them to teach them absolutely everything they know or use them as living libraries. And of course on the bad side of things, Students will jealously hoard knowledge, destroy knowledge or accidentally end up loving everyone over because they don't really know everything and people rely on them for info. Going blind is, ultimately, no big thing as long as they have access to Braille or other equipment and often become Brains. Students come with 15 monies worth of book and two points in Read/Write. Their cheap skills are Create, Athletics and Naughty, their expensive ones are Sensory, Combat and War. Their only advantage is being able to be a prodigy which means you have a max cap of 20 Intelligence. And ultimately there are 30 Students per 1000 kids with more girls than boys. ADULT CLASSES Well kids are all well and good but I'm speaking to an audience of adults (generally). How about them? They get three. Three classes. Hooray. Brains Brains are adults who survived thanks to being smart enough and using that as an edge. Doctors, strategists, mechanics, engineers, trappers, Brains come from all walks of life. Their role depends on their area of intelligence and what kind of community they're from. When enslaved, Brains are monopolized by various classes of kids depending on what they're needed for. When enslaving, Brains often act as teachers and instructors for kids. The downside of Brains is that they, uh, try to figure out what caused the Plague and this leads to a lot of bleeding and screaming when they go bad. Or, worse, they sabotage others out of jealously to ensure their worth. There are 300ish adults in a community of 1000 adults with more women than men. They get Scholastics, Tech and Rapport cheap while Combat, War and Crafts are costly. For advantages they can be Doctors, Scientists or hoarders who had a bunch of stuff to give them extra rare stuff. Brawns Brawns brawned their way to muscular survival, pecs and biceps glistening in the night air as sweat rolls down their lean muscles, flexing musclefully as their marvelous deltoids strain against their tight tank tops. Or something like that. They survived by being fit and strong is what I'm saying. That or combat skills. Brawns do physical labor or fight for their communities, doing what they can to work around their limitations and get the job done. When guarding, a common trick is to attach threads to a Brawn so they'll know what's coming their way. When fighting, they tend to be armored and fight with staves they can use in sweeping area attacks. Enslaved Brawns are used for manual labor, their communities thinking they're too dumb to escape and nothing more than pack animals. On the other side of things, Brawn slavers beat their captives and are responsible for capture and retrieval.  A Brawn on guard duty using the thread trick. 400 adults are Brawns in a bunch of 1000...but there are twice as many male Brawns than there are women, which is...I mean, I'll just whisper the words "-4 Strength" and leave it at that. The dark side of Brawns is that when they lead, communities devolve into clans of raiders, slavers or eye-eaters that rule through fear and violence. They get Athletics, War and Tech for cheap while paying more for Crafts, Combat and Rapport. The only advantage they can buy exclusive to them is martial arts training which means five levels in combat skills of choice and the ability to own forbidden combat skills. Mouths Mouths survived with charisma or leadership. Politicians, therapists, priests, salespeople, etc. They take whatever role they know or can talk their way into, able to get folks to work together and bridge the gap between Brains and Brawns. They often tend to lead communities as a result and some even lead kid communities by talking their way into it. When enslaved, they offer the help they can and try to talk their way out of slavery. On the other hand, they make excellent slavers because they can prey on kids' views of adults and pretend to be caring and loving to trap them. Bad Mouths are amoral self-centered grifters in it for themselves using fast-talking and misdirection to make threats and exploit weaknesses. There are 300 Mouths per 1000 adults with most of them being women. They get cheaper Rapport, Tech and Naughty with more expensive Combat, Crafts and Survival, most of their skills being pretty affordable across the board as a trade-off for the fact that they don't get any special advantages. SKILLS Okay I promised fast and dirty. Let's do fast and dirty. Everyone gets 100 points for skills which run 1-6 but can only be 5 max at chargen and of course the price of skills depend on the price of groups. Skills are a little different than you'd think; every rank past the first level adds +4 to skill checks. There are others that always give +4 per level from level 1 but gently caress you if you think I'm differentiating and singling those out. BRING OUT THE SKILL HELL!  Bask in this poo poo. Yo-Yo Fighting. Florentine Swords. Knot Tying. "Neighborhood". The fact that Pick Pocketing is known as Pocket Picking. It doesn't get any better than this, baby.  Skills run the next 14 pages. There are just...sample DCs for so much poo poo. Building an Igloo is a DC 30 Find Shelter check. Explaining how insulin works is a DC 20 Biology check. Exponential equations is a DC 20 Arithmetic check. It's DC 10 Sleight of Hand to make a penny disappear from your hand. I could just drown you all in the asinine sample skill DCs like my right hand is the Tigris and the left is the Euphrates and I'm fixing to turn your brain into the Fertile Crescent. But that would take forever and it would ultimately be a tedious slog. And just when you think Mesopotamia is doing fine and dandy, here comes Persia aka the Equipment Zone! EQUIPMENT Alright now hold your breath and don't die.  Exhale. Ignore the burning of your lungs. We're not out of the woods yet. The baptism is not yet complete. This is everything that costs less than Five Monies, monies in this case being canned food. All canned food. You can't buy rare or extremely rare things without advantages. There are rules for encumbrance but I don't care. There are also disgustingly in-depth drug rules which I am totally ignoring. They are stupidly intricate.  Hold your breath again. Feel yourself get crushed beneath the weight of the sea, the sheer size of everything there was and everything there shall be, everything you desire and everything you can't have. Feel yourself black out as your lungs scream and your brain is strangled in its ivory crib. Look for patterns. Look for glittering stars that you only see when you're lying on the silt bed and the sky is dark above the waves.  And when you're done with that come on down and peep some Advantages and Disadvantages! ADVANTAGES/DISADVANTAGES You only get Bonus Points by taking disadvantages, nobody starts with any BP to buy advantages. They can also be used to buy things like attributes. These are paid with Bonus Points that are converted as follows:
  There are only two things I want to discuss from these lists. They are, specifically, Gender Incongruity and Pregnancy. One is funny for how detailed it is. The other is...eurgh.  This book came out in 2008. 2008 was not a great time for...stuff. There's nothing really in this book that, uh, discusses gender dysphoria or nonbinary gender or transitioning or gender identity expression. This is really the closest it gets outside of the book discussing things like children using gender-based slurs to indicate they dislike things (which as someone who was in highschool in 2008...yeah that was a thing and man that hasn't aged well). A very curious oversight is that the book lists sexism and racism as childish delusions but...not homophobia. But yeah this is...badly aged and also quite tone deaf and I seem to generally just recall this being the case from IDA but it's also been a hot minute since I glanced at that book. I feel like Vajra kinda also has an issue with addressing homosexuality and stuff like that? Which y'know written in the 2000s but. I can't remember. I've dwelled way too much on this because it stuck out at me like I licked an infected tooth. If this makes no goddamn sense, forgive me, it's literally 4 AM EST as I write this. Let's move on to something more lighthearted: pregnancy!  And on that note, NEXT TIME I'll see y'all back here for the end of chargen and me just ignoring most of the rules.
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Oct 12, 2017 09:20
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Pregnancy RAW forces your character to want to have the kid? Homophobia isn't something to grow out of? This game's coverage of Mature Issues feels vaguely conservative Christian.
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Oct 12, 2017 13:58
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Legend of the Five Rings: Conditional Acceptance Conditions are, generally, temporary negative effects. Afflicted means you are haunted, possessed or otherwise tormented by evil spirits that threaten to taint you. While Afflicted, whenever you make a check with the Afflicted Ring, the GM may change one Kept Ring die to an Opportunity+Strife result. Also, when you haven Outburst, one or more of the following happen depending on the Afflicted Ring or Rings:
Bleeding means you're bleeding, internally or externally. While Bleeding, when you suffer a Strife, you take equal physical damage that ignores Resistance. Each time wounds inflicted this way cause a crit, its severity is (Strife). Any character at range 0-1 of a Bleeding character can make a succcessful TN 2 Medicine/Earth check as a Support action to cure them of Bleeding. Burning means you are on fire. While Burning, after performing an action, you take 3 physical damage that ignores Resistance and 3 Strife. Each time wounds inflicted this way cause a crit, it is severity 5. Burning can be removed by smothering the flames with a successful Fitness check (TN 2, Water 1, Air 4) as a Movement and Support action. Dazed means your focus or vision is impaired. While Dazed, the TN of Attack and Scheme actions is increased by 2. At the end of your turn, if you did not perform an Attack or Scheme action, you lose Dazed. Disoriented means your senses are hosed up. While Disoriented, the TN of Movement and Support actions is increased by 2. At the end of your turn, if you did not perform a Movement or Support action, you lose Disoriented. Dying means you're dying. You have a set number of rounds (or amount of narrative time) before you die. Once that runs out, you are dead at the end of your next turn (or after completing a single task in a narrative scene). If Dying is removed before then, you survive. Any character at range 0-1 of a Dying character can make a successful TN 3 Medicine/Air check as a Support action to cure them of Dying. Enraged means you are loving pissed. While Enraged, you increase the severity of all crits you suffer and cause by 2. The first time you kill a character in a scene while Enraged, you gain 1 Void Point. You may make a TN 3 Meditation/Void check as a Support action to lose Enraged. Otherwise, it goes away at the end of the scene. Suffocating means you can't breathe. At the beginning and end of each of your turns, you take 2 Wounds and 2 Strife, but cannot suffer crits from this damage. At the beginning of your turn, if you are Unconscious while Suffocating, you must make a TN 3 Fitness/Earth check. If you fail, you die. There...does not appear to be a way to remove Suffocating mechanically, which seems a bit of an oversight, given there's a spell that puts water in your lungs. Fatigued means you're exhausted. It is mostly gained by going 24 hours without sleep. While Fatigued, you gain 1 Strife after you perform any check. When you sleep for 6+ hours, you lose Fatigued. Immobilized means you can't move. While Immobilized, you cannot perform Movement actions or reposition during your turn, and cannot change your stance. At the end of your turn, if you didn't perform a Miovement action, you lose Immobilized. Incapacitated means you're unable to act. While Incapacitated, you can't do anything that'd require a check, but can still make checks to resist effects. The severity of any crit you suffer increases by 5. You lose Incapacitated when your Wounds drop to or under your Resilience. Injured Body Part means what it says. The possible versions are:
Intoxicated means you're drunk. While Intoxicated, you double all gained and lost Strife. At the end of each scene, you may make a TN 3 Fitness/Water check to lose Intoxicated, and you automatically lose it at the end of any downtime scene spent resting. Prone means you fell over. While Prone, you cannot move more than one range band per turn. At the end of your turn, if you did not perform a Movement action, you lose Prone. Unconscious means you're knocked out or asleep. While Unconscious, you cannot move, perform actions or act upon the world. You may still make checks to resist effects, however. The severity of any crit you suffer while Unconscious is increased by 8. Any character at range 0-1 of an Unconscious character may make a successful TN 2 Medicine/Fire check as a Support action to cure it. Also, it goes away on its own after a few hours, and if you're Unconscious for any reason besides physical harm, you will lose it if you suffer harm, hear a loud noise or otherwise experience something that'd awaken someone sleeping. Now, let's talk Mass Battle. Samurai tend to serve as leaders in battle - particularly PC samurai - and even when not officially in command, ashigaru troops tend to look to them for leadership. Mass Battle conflicts are primarily for largescale battles in which the PCs play a significant role. If the PCs have no ability to influence the greater battle strategically, it's probably a skirmish in a battlefield with battle-based narrative events around it. Likewise, if the PCs are being an elite strike team doing a vital task while the greater battle goes on around them, that's probably a skirmish. Typically, a Mass Battle will involve two Armies - abstractions of the forces of either side. (In theory you could run with more than two sides; the game believes this will be a rare occurrence and not worth talking about much in the beta). Each Army has one Commander, who directs the whole army. This character is chosen during the Assessment phase, and will usually have been decided on prior by narrative events. If there is conflict over who leads, the character with highest Status is expected to be in charge. The rest of the army is made of cohorts - units of soldiers with a distinct Leader. It is generally a good idea to have about as many cohorts as there are PCs that need to do important things, and there is no limit on how many cohorts an Army can have. Cohorts do not suffer damage - all damage is dealt to the Army itself, as a damaged cohort can usually be reinforced before being wiped out. The GM may, however, rule that a particularly devastating attack destroys a cohort - usually, an Assault that deals at least a quarter of the Army's total strength in damage. If this happens, the Leader takes a severity 10 crit and their cohort vanishes. At the beginning of every round during a Mass Battle, the commander selects the Army's strategic objective for the round, which influences what the Leaders will do. If the Commander dies, the army immediately takes 10 Panic, and the character with highest Status picks a new Commander for it. The Commander selects all of the army's Leaders during the Assessment phase, and depending on the size of the battle, they might well be generals in their own right, or just squad leaders. Generally, each participating PC will be a Leader, and the GM should assign a similar number of NPC Leaders to the other Army. In each round, each Leader selects an action and attempts to do it with their cohort. The Commander can be a Leader, but that makes them much easier to target by the enemy. Armies have two primary attributes: Strength and Discipline. An army's Strength is an abstract representation of its ability to take casualties without breaking down. This includes raw numbers of soldiers, good infrastructure, supplies, equipment and proper rest. The game can't decide if the equivalent of Wounds for this is called Casualties or Attrition. I'll be going with Attrition. At the end of each round, if Attrition exceeds Strength, the army is routed and most of its members are killed. Individual leaders, particularly PCs, probably survive, but most of the soldiers do not. It is rare for this to happen - most enemies will flee due to morale loss first. Discipline represents the army's psychological state and ability to function despite the horrors of war. Most of it is training, but it also represents confidence or belief in a righteous cause, and can be lowered by deprivation, fear or prolonged conflict. The damage here is Panic. At the end of each round, if Panic exceeds Discipline, the army has a collapse of morale, breaks and flees or otherwise collapses. This is the most common end of a battle, though there are some troops who are disciplined enough to fight to the last, especially when backed into a corner or dealing with Shadowlands forces. Armies and individual cohorts may also have special abilities, which modify how they act. So, strategic objectives. If a PC commander has no idea what to name as one, they can make TN 1 Tactics check at the start of the round to have the GM offer them a strategically valid course of action, or help them come up with one themselves. If they already know what they want to do, no check is needed. The game gives a few example strategic objectives, but they're hardly the only ones you might use. At the start of the round, the commander selects the objective for the entire army, filling in some specifics and details to fit the narrative. Once a strategic objective has been fulfilled, it can't be fulfilled again in a round. Whichever Leader performs the action that fulfills it gains 3 Glory, and the objective's completion resolves. Examples: Capture a Position: A specific fortification or piece of terrain must be taken. (Fortifications grant the Fortified Position advantage to the cohort occupying them - depending on the size, they reduce any damage done to the cohort by anywhere from 1 to 5.) To capture a position, Leaders must inflict 8+ Attrition on the enemy army, or the enemy must vacate the position and a friendly cohort must perform the Reinforce action to claim it. When this objective is completed, the enemy is driven from the position and no longer counts as occupying it. The leader that completed the objective may immediately choose to occupy the position. Cut Off the Head: A specific Leader or Commander must be killed. This objective is completed when they are dead. When this objective is completed targeting a Leader, the enemy army takes 10 Panic. When this objective is completed targeting a Commander, the enemy army takes 20 Panic. Draw Them In: The enemy must be made to attack a position as a trap. This objective is completed when the enemy performs an Assault action that does 5 or fewer Attrition to the cohort occupying the chosen position. When this objective is completed, the enemy army takes 5 Panic and your army loses 5 Panic. Grind Them Down: A number of enemies must die. This objective is completed when when the enemy army takes 10 or more casualties this round, total. When this objective is completed, the enemy army takes 5 panic and your army loses 5 panic. Seize Victory! The battle must be won. This can only be chosen after a specific number of other objectives have been fulfilled - usually 4, but the GM can modify that. This objective is completed when the enemy army takes 10 or more casualties this round, total. When this objective is completed, the enemy army is driven from the field and the battle is won, though the enemy may still exist - they just can't achieve victory right now. While a Mass Battle does not use range bands and any cohort can reach any position on the field in a single round, terrain features and fortifications are important to note anyway, as they can be used strategically and tactically - you might drive foes into them or occupy them for their benefits. During Mass Battle, the Command with the higher Initiative choses which side acts first. If they have the same Initiative, the one with lower Honor acts first. Starting with the army that acts first, each Commander picks a single Leader that has not yet acted this round, alternating back and forth until all Leaders have acted. It is assumed that at the end of the sixth round, the battle ends in a draw because you've been fighting literally all day. If a commander decides to press on, however, both commanders must make a TN 4 Command check each round. If they fail, their army takes (10+shortfall) Panic due to fatigue. The following actions are usable in Mass Battle: Assault: Your cohort attacks an enemy cohort. As an Attack and Movement action, you may make a TN 2 Tactics check to lead your forces to strike. If you succeed, you deal (bonus successes*2) Attrition. Challenge: You challenge an enemy Leader to single combat. As a Scheme action, you may make a TN 1 Command check targeting one character at range 0-5. You must stake 10 Honor and 5 Glory on the challenge, which you forfeit if you intentionally avoid fighting or sabotage your target's attempt to participate. If you succeed, the target must accept or decline. If they accept, they stake 10 Honor and 5 Glory, which they forfeit if they take any Attack or Scheme actions before the end of the round. At the end of the round, you and the target enter a Clash. If you win the Clash, their army takes 5 Panic. If they decline, they forfeit (Command+bonus successes) Glory and you gain 1 Void Point. Rally: You move to support an allied contingent. As a Support action, you may make a TN 1 Command check targeting one friendly leader's cohort. If you succeed, your army loses (bonus successes) Panic. Succeed or fail, the target counts as having your assistance on their next check before the end of the scene. Reinforce: You dig in at a position. As a Movement and Support action, you may make a TN 2 Tactics check to dig in. If you succeed, the TN of Assault checks targeting your cohort increases by (bonus successeS). If you choose an unoccupied fortification or piece of terrain this way, you are considered to be occupying it until the start of your next turn. Retreat: You flee the battle. You must forfeit 10 Honor, and if anyone knows you willingly retreated, you must forfeit 10 Glory. If you leave your cohort leaderless, your army gains 10 Panic. If you are ordered to retreat by your lord, you must instead stake 10 Honor and 10 Glory on accomplishing whatever task your lord has given you rather than staying and fighting. You may spend Opportunities the following ways during Mass Battle: On Earth checks, you may spend Opportunity symbols to remove Panic from your army, 1 for 1. On Earth checks, you may spend 2 Opportunity symbols to choose an allied leader other than yourself. That leader's cohort cannot be targeted by Attack actions until the beginning of your next turn. On Fire checks, you may spend Opportunity symbols to deal Panic to the enemy army, 1 for 1. When performing an Attack action against an enemy cohort as a Fire check, you may spend 2 Opportunity symbols to deal a crit to the enemy leader with severity of your weapon's Deadliness. On Water checks, you may spend Opportunity symbols to choose an allied leader other than yourself and reduce the TN of their next Movement check by 1 per symbol spent. On Water checks, you may spend 2 Opportunity symbols to choose an enemy leader. That leader's cohort cannot perform Movement actions until the beginning of your next turn. On Air checks, you may spend Opportunity symbols to choose an allied leader other than yourself and reduce the TN of their next Scheme action by 1 per symbol spent. On Air checks, you may spend 2 Opportunity symbols to choose a leader in a fortification. That leader's cohort loses the benefits of the fortification until the start of your next turn. On Void checks, you may spend Opportunity symbols to to deal 1 Attrition to both armies per symbol spent. When performing a Support action as a Void check, you may spend 2 Opportunity symbols to immediately perform a Challenge action against an enemy cohort's leader. When a mass battle resolves, there are different effects. If the losing army lost due to Attrition exceeding Strength, all Minion NPCs that were part of it are scattered to the winds, and all Adversary NPCs and all PCs that were part of it take a severity 12 crit. The GM may choose to instead have any PC or Adversary NPC be captured or left for dead on the field. If the losing army lost due to Panic exceeding Discipline, all PCs and Adversary NPCs are able to escape in the confusion. If the losing army lost due to the Seize Victory! objective, then it is relatively intact but has failed in its strategic goals, and only suffers narrative consequences for its defeat. A lovely, basic peasant conscript army is Strength 35, Discipline 20, and has the Conscripted ability: Each leader increases the TN of their Assault actions by 1. Your average Ashigaru army has Strength 55, Discipline 35, and the Rank Formation ability: When a leader in this army performs the Reinforce action, they may spend Opportunity symbols on this ability. If they do, after an enemy cohort attacks that leader's cohort, they take Attrition equal to the symbols spent. (Presumably this triggers just once, and lasts until your next turn? It doesn't say.) An army made entirely of samurai is an elite force, rarely seen. It has Strength 50, Discipline 60, and two abilities. The first is Hardened Veterans: Whenever the army loses panic, it loses (commander's Glory Rank) extra Panic. The second is Elite Training: each leader may pick an ability for their cohort from the following list:
Next time: GM Advice
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Oct 12, 2017 15:00
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Hostile V posted:
quote:This book came out in 2008.
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Oct 12, 2017 16:05
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As you grow up you put aside your racism and homophobia so you can become an extremely muscular blind broodmare who lusts for babies. Wait what?
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Oct 12, 2017 16:21
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Evil Mastermind posted:Jesus, this game is some loving 90's design level charts. Green Intern posted:Pregnancy RAW forces your character to want to have the kid? Homophobia isn't something to grow out of? This game's coverage of Mature Issues feels vaguely conservative Christian. To a certain degree of the game's credit, it does acknowledge homophobia as dangerous, and I think if homophobia was to be a cognitive bias it would be as awful and uncomfortable in execution as being allowed to start the game as sexist or racist. I understand the argument is that they are not fully baked children and don't know any better. You're still giving bullets to the wrong types of players should they ever decide to play this game (they wouldn't, nobody really should want to play this game). Also realtalk it hasn't come up yet but A: the subtext is that kids don't know about abortions and...well, outside of eating certain aborticant plants, just how in the hell are you going to perform an abortion on a teen when your options are children with medical training or a blind adult and also B: adults are sterile in the text, the majority of adults have been rendered sterile by the plague and teens are the only ones who can really HAVE babies and it's less a matter of "it would be neat to have a baby" and more the survival of the human race. The game would rather you risk accidentally losing the baby but making childbirth safe and harmless than put you in a position where you can solve the condition by immediately going to get an abortion because boy howdy would that be a strange thing to do around the game table. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Oct 12, 2017 |
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Oct 12, 2017 16:22
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Green Intern posted:Pregnancy RAW forces your character to want to have the kid? Homophobia isn't something to grow out of? This game's coverage of Mature Issues feels vaguely conservative Christian. Yeah, the fruit of wanting to make mechanics for everything and not thinking things through when actually making them. Maybe they wanted to avoid making abortion rules. I’m thankful we’re not getting those, too. Also, I’m getting the decided impression that eyeball eating is going to be a thing. How bad is will it be?
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Oct 12, 2017 16:31
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You're eating the eyeballs of children to see again. There are rules for how this works and for how long your sight returns. It's, uh, it's not great, clearly.
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Oct 12, 2017 16:40
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Hostile V posted:You're eating the eyeballs of children to see again. There are rules for how this works and for how long your sight returns. It's, uh, it's not great, clearly. 
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Oct 12, 2017 16:52
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Does it make you want to have children? 'cos I read it as an Impediment: you now have to keep this baby from dying, not Impediment: You Need To Have An Another Child STAT
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Oct 12, 2017 17:08
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kommy5 posted:Yeah, the fruit of wanting to make mechanics for everything and not thinking things through when actually making them. Maybe they wanted to avoid making abortion rules. I’m thankful we’re not getting those, too. I have no doubt that any rules for abortion would be about as nuanced as a brick to the face.
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Oct 12, 2017 17:29
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I mean, 2008 was a different age and all that, but wowzers I wasn't aware that acting outside of your assigned gender was just homosexuality in action. Have I been doing it wrong?
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Oct 12, 2017 17:35
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Green Intern posted:I have no doubt that any rules for abortion would be about as nuanced as a brick to the face. Knowing this game, I think it's probably going to be a brick to the Abdomen. open_sketchbook posted:I mean, 2008 was a different age and all that, but wowzers I wasn't aware that acting outside of your assigned gender was just homosexuality in action. Have I been doing it wrong? Don't you know? Boys can't play with Dolls cause it makes them Faggots. (ramps replica general lee off of embankment into liquor store)
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Oct 12, 2017 17:41
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Boys shouldn't play with dolls because Action Man is more expensive than any Barbie Ah, all that wonderful window shoping... 
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Oct 12, 2017 18:30
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 Starfinger Core Rules Part #15: "I actually went in thinking: 'Oh yeah, starships are just how you get from Place A to Place B.'" James L. Sutter, Starfinger Creative Director, Game Informer interview posted:Like, what I want is delving into bizarre ruins on alien planets. And then some of the other people on the staff, most notably Erik Mona, the publisher, and Rob McCreary, one of the senior developers, were saying, “No, that’s crazy, this game needs to be about starship battles and strafing a star destroyer and flying through an asteroid field. That’s the science fantasy that we’re interested in.” So we ended up with this dual mandate: The game needs to be both. So while you absolutely can play a game that’s just entirely in one location, or where starships don’t play a big part, the base assumption is that your adventuring party is not just an adventuring party, but a starship crew.  (Also, don't get too excited by the big space battle above, Starfinger rules don't support something like that on any practical level.)  But before we see one of Starfinger's biggest faceflops, we get some of the first setting detail we see in the book. Apparently, though the "Pact Worlds" were able to develop a variety of interplanetary drives, they couldn't do interstellar travel. But three years after "the Gap", there was "the Signal" that sent out information on how to create an interstellar drive through dreams and crashed space probes or scrawled by robots across the universe. In short, he plot boot dropped and suddenly space travel happened. However, only cultures that were advanced enough to use it could, you had cavefolk occasionally getting starship plans that they presumably took a big cave poo poo on and forgot about. Then, a god named Triune showed up before the Pact Worlds and was like "So, how about those space engine plans I just farted out, hot poo poo, huh? Worship me." It seems Triune was a trinity of networked minor gods that discovered "the Drift" and used it to become one of the most powerfulest gods thanks to various cultures now venerating it for space travel.  So, spaceships go through The Drift to get to anyplace fast, as it serves as this game's stand-in for hyperspace. The Drift is another plane only accessible through technology (so no plane shift-ing there), and Triune oversees it and makes sure nobody seriously fucks with it. But there's an issue where making space jumps through the Drift tears away a piece of a random plane (at first I thought it was the plane you're jumping from, which would be logical, but no, it's random) so you might accidentally tear a chunk of Heaven or Hell into the Drift with your space travel. Nobody seems to care too much about that aside from the gods themselves, but they aren't doing much about it, from all appearances. It's rumored that Triune is trying to increase the size of the Drift and decrease the size of other planes for mysterious reasons. It's a space oddity. We get travel times by conventional thrusters and or by drift tech. In settled regions, there are space beacons that one can orient by, and so travel is relatively fast, around 3d6 days with a small chance of a random encounter (10%). Traveling into uncharted areas within the galaxy is 5d6 days with a notable chance of an encounter (25-50%). Nobody has returned from attempts to perform intergalactic travel with Drift technology. There is also Absalom Station, which contains the "Starstone" that apparently makes it easy to travel to for unstated reasons, and you can safely travel there in 1d6 days regardless of your location - and so it's clearly intended as a central hub for characters. Travelling with Drift engines requires you to stand still for 1 minute, so attempting to do so is essentially banned from combat unless you're willing to just take hits for sixty seconds. It doesn't mention this here, but ships with better drives divide these numbers by their drift rating.  Building Starships So, even at Level 1, player groups generally get a starship unless the GM declares otherwise. No credit price is put on them, so forget buying one conventionally even if you theoretically could. Instead, you get Build Points (BP) based on your spaceship's tier, and players get a tier of spaceship based on their average character level - 55 BP at Level 1, and 1,000 BP at Level 20. You choose a basic frame, from a small racer or fighter to a carrier or dreadnought, each of which has a BP cost. You then add on the power core (which gives you a budget of "Power Core Units" to power systems) and the thrusters which also cost you BP. Once that's established, there are optional-but-often-necessary systems like armor (+AC,-TL*), computer (bonus to ship-based skill checks), crew quarters, defensive countermeasures (+TL), drift engines (bigger = faster), expansion bays (cool rooms and cargo bays for the most part, but also a few things like escape pods), security (various systems from anti-hacking to a self-destruct system), sensors (better range and bonuses, can scan other ships), shields (add regenerating SP to a ship), and, of course, weapons. Note that unlike all other equipment, nothing is level-based here - it's all point-buy. Note that ships are considered to be on a scale entirely different from normal engagements, and it's suggested that starship attacks on characters be treated more like hazardous environments with explosions going off all around than straight-up fights. TL = Target Lock, your ability to avoid being locked onto by homing missiles and the like. I know, it sounds like it would be your ability to lock on, but it's the opposite.  Mind, it's hard to evaluate the system without building a ton of ships, but I'm sure ship optimization will have a field day on forums. In general, ship size breaks down into three categories on account of the classes of weapons you can mount: racer to explorer (light weapons), transport to bulk freighter (heavy weapons), and cruiser to dreadnought (capital weapons). A ship's HP level up only every 4 levels, and damage remains fixed by weapon, so the only real way to improve your damage is to make get better (more BP cost) weapons for your size or get a bigger ship, since damage isn't affected by PC level or abilities. Heavy freighter is probably the largest ship that can be crewed by PCs alone, requiring 6 stations (which means if you have 6 PCs, presumably one's sitting on their thumbs rules-wise because the rules are based around 5 PCs). Having a bulk freighter or anything larger is going to require an NPC crew, which will cost you (2 x skill bonus) credits a day. However, since they won't be making rolls, I imagine you just need to make sure they have the skill; recruiting a gaggle of incompetent redshirts would seem to be the way to go. Conversely, small one-pilot fighters have a serious problem where they can't pilot or shoot at the same time, and have to rely on computers or the like to do one of the other for them while doing the other, resulting in penalties. These rules are focused largely around mid-sized ships and everything else has scaling issues. For example, the larger ships will require multiple power cores. In general, that starting 55 BP won't get you much of a ship. Power cores and weapons are limited by size, and in turn thrusters, drift engines, computers, shields, and defensive countermeasures require decent numbers of PCUs. Drift engines are the biggest hogs, and though you can theoretically put drift engines on a fighter, it's not the most practical endeavor and you'll end up with a notably weaker fighter. Sorry, would-be x-wings. Ironically, better drift engines have a "maximum size" so the best drift engine can't be put on anything larger than a transport, though the BP cost is pricey to the point it'll cut into your budget for fighting, if you go too far. (And, as aforementioned, warping takes a minute no matter what, so don't think your fast drift ship can just avoid combat that way - in fact, it'll likely have to shut down shields or weapons to afford the PCU cost of the drive itself.) In general, the starship rules look solid enough, but the point-buy system means you have to be wary of choices which impact your ship's ability to fight at its tier level. For example, there are luxury quarters or recreation rooms which do nothing but add fancy thematics to your interiors, but still cost you BP. Granted, this is nothing new for point systems - it's a problem that's dogged them since the days of Champions - but it remains an issue here.  Then, get get sample ships known within the Pact Worlds, whatever those are. There's no frame of reference for these yet, mind, since we haven't heard much about the setting. I know as much as you do. I'm not going to talk about the statblocks too much because they aren't that interesting and are pretty much what you'd expect.
 Next: "Never tell me the odds!" Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 12, 2017 18:40
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Hostile V posted:You're eating the eyeballs of children to see again. There are rules for how this works and for how long your sight returns. It's, uh, it's not great, clearly.
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Oct 12, 2017 19:10
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Two details worth noting about Starfinger's ship building: 1. Since the drift drives can't be used when fighting, they aren't counting as a drain on the reactor. As long as you have a reactor of x size or higher, you're fine. 2. There is a (fairly mandatory) upgrade for medium+ ships that lets you stick in additional reactors. Ships pretty quickly reach a point where the have plenty of internal space but are starved for energy. I'm betting they hosed up on designing the reactors to be able to provide sufficient juice for the bigger ships and just stuck in a quick, "Oh, uh, yeah, you can add more reactors." as a bandaid.
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Oct 12, 2017 21:36
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FMguru posted:
I've heard of that game. I know that it didn't let you create characters for some inexplicable reason, but did it have any glaring faults beside that?
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Oct 12, 2017 21:39
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Those starship rules look like they might give Rogue Trader's 'Hey look almost everything on your boat applies to the lovely half-baked Adventure Victory Points System that no-one actually uses' Starships a run for their money.
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Oct 12, 2017 21:42
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PurpleXVI posted:Thing is, psychological horror isn't something any sort of system is ever going to support, in my opinion, only good roleplaying and investment from the players and GM. Like, is there any system that does it as something more than a Brain HP track that eventually terminates in gaining some sort of mental illness rather than dying outright? Because I definitely don't feel like I've ever seen that.
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Oct 12, 2017 22:06
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Starfingat: Some of the ship designs look kinda nice, at least! Kidworld:  ^^^^^ don't rest your head also works for a kinda dreamlike horror, too. The Lemondrop Dandy fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Oct 12, 2017 |
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Oct 12, 2017 22:21
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The Lemondrop Dandy posted:^^^^^ don't rest your head also works for a kinda dreamlike horror, too.
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Oct 12, 2017 22:31
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Valatar posted:Two details worth noting about Starfinger's ship building: Thanks for the corrections! You read a thing twice, and still... In any case, updated the post with a few corrections and clarifications.
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Oct 12, 2017 22:34
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The Demolished Ones is indeed like Dark City and it's also a...particularly underwhelming game? The ideas behind it are nice. Ultimately it's up to the GM to figure out what's behind everything once you get past all of the setting details and the existing NPCs. The thrust of the provided adventure hook is that the characters are being lied to and manipulated but, like, kinda transparently so and it's not hard for the PCs to derail things. Which is fine but then, like, have more stuff to "they find out they're being lied to and rebel". I'd also argue Penny For My Thoughts counts as well.
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Oct 12, 2017 22:37
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MightyMatilda posted:I've heard of that game. I know that it didn't let you create characters for some inexplicable reason, but did it have any glaring faults beside that? The system was the typical anemic 1980s TSR design, IIRC, drawing from the same well as Star Frontiers and Gangbusters. The chase system was the only thing that stuck out to me, because 1) it actually had one and 2) it wasn't entirely bad, if my memory serves me right.
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Oct 12, 2017 22:37
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Hostile V posted:The Demolished Ones is indeed like Dark City and it's also a...particularly underwhelming game? The ideas behind it are nice. Ultimately it's up to the GM to figure out what's behind everything once you get past all of the setting details and the existing NPCs. Insylum has the exact same problem, probably worse. It's up to the GM to decide the Big Occult Secret behind The King in Yellow, they play that drove everyone mad. He's supposed to construct it from the PCs' recovered memories...but when players spend Memory to do that, the GM has veto power. It's, like, a game about collaborative storytelling with a strict and purely antagonistic relationship between the GM and the players. For readers of this thread, I could probably best sum it up by comparing it to Sorensen's The Farm, but set up so that the premise, the goal, the means of achieving said goal, and what the PCs actually do is irritatingly vague. Mechanically it's quite simple: the PCs want to accumulate different types of points faster than they lose them. The system is diceless and runs on blind bids, so it's set up to be rather dispiriting. It's like the whole game was designed as a prank, with the goal of driving players to sock their Auteur Director GM right in the kisser.
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Oct 12, 2017 23:32
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Funny enough I had never heard about Insylum until you brought it up in the context of when I reviewed the farm. Everything is wonderfully cyclical.
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Oct 12, 2017 23:42
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Alien Rope Burn posted:They're only very vaguely like the Pathfinder chase rules (which are much closer to a variant of the combat rules), and d20 Modern didn't have formal chase rules that I'm aware of. The original TSR Indiana Jones game has better chase rules. Spycraft 2.0's Chase rules are great by the way.
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Oct 13, 2017 05:47
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Starfinger Core Rules Part #16: "And there's going to be, at the very high levels, it'll be more or less some of the small ships against giant capital ships are going to be fantastic battles that'll probably be told around your gaming table for a while." Jason Keeley, Starfinder Design Team Member, Gencon Q&A posted:Whether you win or lose them, of course, you might just get blown out of the sky. It's not a great story, but it's still a story.  Single-eseat fighters like this, as previously mentioned, aren't actually supported well, as we'll see... Starship Combat There are several roles you can take when piloting a ship in Starfinger: captain, engineer, gunner, pilot, or science officer. For ships with large crews, only one character is in each role, and people required to crew the ship beyond the core five are presumed to just be going whatever pleb job they have assigned for them and take no notable actions. "What if we don't have exactly five players?", you may ask, and that's a reasonable question! Unfortunately, no good answer is provided - if you're missing a gunner or pilot, any role can fill in and do a half-assed job at either. You can probably go without a captain, engineer, or science officer at notable drawbacks - only the pilot and gunner are strictly necessary. Of course, if your ship has less than five positions, this can be problematic. The worst are fighters and racers, which run into the huge issue that the pilot has to act as both a gunner or pilot, but can't do both at once, meaning the types of actions they can take will be limited and generally done at penalty. We're told that the Starfinger Flip-Mat: Basic Starfield and the Starfinger Core Rulebook Pawn Collection are the "perfect accessories" for this mode. While you're at it, you can bust out you can wear your Starfinger Blood Orange IPA to prove your brand loyalty.  So, combat. Usually  Some more details:
 However, there's one major issue with all of this, it's that the DCs for making many of the required rolls for starship positions are badly broken. Many have rolls with DCs of 10-20 + (2 x tier) or 10 + (3 x tier). As such, they ramp up faster than PC skills can keep up. At a certain point, piloting, commanding, engineering, etc., becomes improbable or impossible for high-tier ships. By levels 11-16, certain actions will become near-impossible or outright impossible for PCs to make, depending on how much they've invested in their ship's computer and their own maximization. See, one of the key points is that these skill rolls also ignore any class bonuses, so even an Operator or Envoy's skill boosts are no good in this situation. While you can use Skill Focus, it's a stopgap measure. Now, Paizo has now acknowledged this and said there will be a fix. But it's not out yet, so I can only judge the game in front of me. There are various fan fixes, but as it is right now, the game was published with a bush-league d20 error - the kind already seen and infamous from products like D&D 3.5's Tome of Magic. Another observation is that the technology flavor text earlier implies there's a lot of magic being mixed in with technology, and that it's a space fantasy setting, but you can't see it at all in the spaceship rules. There are no fireball cannons, no spaceships cloaked with invisibility or consecrated as holy, and really not much way at all for spellcasting to interface with starship usage. Now, there are obvious reasons for the spellcasting limitations, not wanting wizards to dominate in spaceship combat, but the lack of any cool magic powers or weapons to buy for your ship seems like a real oversight. Granted, every part of the secondary systems in this book (vehicles, equipment, spaceships) speaks to the designers being rushed, possibly to hit this book's GenCon 50 release date. But ultimately, for a system they were proud to tout... somebody should have caught this before publication. Next: The terrible spellcasters of space.
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Oct 13, 2017 05:51
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how were the scaling DCs not caught by playtesting?
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Oct 13, 2017 05:58
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I imagine Paizo doesn't bother testing into the high level ranges; AFAIK even they're aware that d20 math starts breaking down in the teens, or at least ignore it because there aren't many campaigns in that range to sell to. It's why there's almost no support for level 16+ adventures - I think only one official adventure path focuses on that that adventure range and another veers into it, but for the most part they deliberately neglect that level of play.
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Oct 13, 2017 06:10
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I'm sorry if this is rhetorical, because I know it is, but if you're not going to support or heavily endorse play past level 15 or so anyway (even 5e does this), it seems like you shouldn't include that into the game at all. A lot of poo poo would be a lot easier to design for if you only stopped at level 10 to 15 and the relative power level that that implies.
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Oct 13, 2017 06:37
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Here's an additional fun bit of absolute idiocy in the starship rules section. Can anyone in the class tell me why this is a fundamentally stupid limitation to place on teleportation magic? Planets rotate. Really, really fast. Valatar fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 06:53
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It's a sacred cow thing, that's all. As for APs, a quick look over them shows that the vast majority of them include play of at least level 16 in the final book. I think only one of them goes to 20, though, and that one also has the travesty of the Mythic rules bolted on top. Valatar posted:Here's an additional fun bit of absolute idiocy in the starship rules section. Yeah, they didn't really think that one through. They introduced a specific spell to get around that issue when teleporting between planets, but they forgot to take into account what that means for teleporting on the same planet. senrath fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 06:56
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senrath posted:Yeah, they didn't really think that one through. They introduced a specific spell to get around that issue when teleporting between planets, but they forgot to take into account what that means for teleporting on the same planet. We already have a winner! If teleportation requires an absolutely fixed point in space to work, it cannot possibly work on a planet, given that Earth rotates at 1,000 mph and is moving along its orbit at 70,000 mph. Any attempt to teleport would be instantly lethal, leaving the person nineteen miles above or below the destination point, assuming a six second casting time.
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Oct 13, 2017 07:17
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I love how they explicitly exclude basically the entire skill system to…what? Including normal bonuses and keeping the math largely the same (lol) wouldn't be hard at all. Because of rider-abilities? They have no problem gating various subsystems from each other all the drat time. The prior big sticking points for me—weapon math and planetary vehicles—are obviously just half-assed attempts to do something I can understand. But I seriously don't get what the gently caress they're even trying to do with the starship rules.
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Oct 13, 2017 07:24
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