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Alien Rope Burn posted:DX is a pretty drat interesting game. I think its biggest issue is probably the dice explosion fuckery powers because they're so ridiculously dominant that you always want to max them as soon as possible (unless you're doing one of those weird builds that can tell rolling to gently caress off for one reason or another), and I have to wonder how the game would run if they were excised (or just fix dice explosions to some value). Of course, one of the other issues is just that people try and play it like Exalted and fail to realize that you can crawl back up from a downed state as long as you can take encroachment whenever you like, and initial starting characters are supposed to be rocket-taggy rather than perfectly balanced boxing fairies. The other really interesting thing, though, is how durable you can get later. Durability powers, heals, Guard tanking, all of these actually work. A tanky character can take one or two really big hits and a strong healer can put them back together. Despite the rocket tag/glass cannon options, you also have a lot of other survivability options and builds.
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Dec 12, 2018 23:45
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So speaking of Exalted, I think exactly what Aberrant's glassy defenses (yes at the extreme top end they can get nuts but with way more exp invested than the offense needed) need to supplement them are 'spend Quantum for a perfect defense' as a power. As long as it's more expensive to NOPE an attack than it is to MAKE an attack, I feel like that'd be something to explore. Next update by the by is the new Mega-Attribute Enhancements which are actually kinda okay.
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Dec 13, 2018 01:17
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Personally I'd go the way Ex3 did, and give high-level defensive powers the (limited) capacity to nope attacks, ideally with some kind of interesting narrative limitation. Not a weakness you sometimes get hit in, but something like 'you can do this once then you have to fly into space to vent radiation for next time' - let them pull of their no-sell on the super-attack once per fight scene and have some cool side effects. Otherwise you have to make the power very expensive, because any attack power more expensive than NOPE will be made pointless by NOPE.
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Dec 13, 2018 01:23
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That's how DX does it: The Nope powers tend to be high power and 'once per scene' when things have already escalated a lot and both sides are 'running hot', so to speak. You can DO all the crazy hyper poo poo like take two turns, give an ally another turn, totally no-sell someone, attack every enemy you can see, etc. You can just do it once. And have to already have ramped up a lot, which puts you in danger.
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Dec 13, 2018 01:25
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Night10194 posted:That's how DX does it: The Nope powers tend to be high power and 'once per scene' when things have already escalated a lot and both sides are 'running hot', so to speak. You can DO all the crazy hyper poo poo like take two turns, give an ally another turn, totally no-sell someone, attack every enemy you can see, etc. You can just do it once. And have to already have ramped up a lot, which puts you in danger. Is it terribly hard in play to make sure you do not have a Akira-esque meltdown and turn into a genetic monstrosity?
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Dec 13, 2018 01:40
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Dawgstar posted:Is it terribly hard in play to make sure you do not have a Akira-esque meltdown and turn into a genetic monstrosity? Depending on if my understanding of the rules is correct (the translation can make this difficult), if you have the max number of emotional contacts for an adventure and choose to give up some EXP at the end, you can be rolling up to 28d10 to reduce your infection. And only have to get below 100, with 300 having been the max. So it's actually easier than I used to think. More likely you'll have between 4-16d10 (depending on willingness to give up some EXP) but that's still quite a bit. You can go really hot and hard if the situation warrants. And, critically, you don't have a meltdown until *after the session*. And you can always ramp up your infection and get huge bonuses for running hot. If you absolutely have to win a fight, narratively, you can just go 'gently caress it, I'm going to 300, then I'll have my tragic goodbye scene after'. That kind of stuff is why I want to cover it.
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Dec 13, 2018 01:43
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A big part of the reason Double Cross and Godlike work as well as they do is that they're not trying to be a Marvel/DC superhero multiverse, so they can actually have focused mechanics instead of being a generic system that has to be able to accommodate...well, literally anything and everything.
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Dec 13, 2018 02:13
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I think to make a genuinely good crunchy game you have to have some degree of focus. Trying to do anything and everything with one big and complex rules system just leads to systems where it takes 6 hours and a guide to make a PC and 3 hours to run a fight or other mechanically complex scene.
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Dec 13, 2018 02:23
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Feinne posted:Amusingly Grey Seer Thanquol just attacks the party because he's decided he's done loving around, notices him, and blasts him with Warp Lightning when looking for someone to make an example of to scare everyone. To be exact Thanquol was zapping everyone who was not telling him were Emmanuelle was in the party. It was pretty much him going up to people shouting "Where is breeder queen?!" then zapping them when they expressed confusion. He then stumbled onto the assassin who quickly told Thanquol who he was. However Thanquol was mad at the assassin for failing him earlier in the book, but was afraid of Eshin retribution so did not act on it. So he just zapped him while pretending he thought he was another guest so he could have plausible deniability. Still said assassin's brother tried to assassinate Thanquol in his own series for revenge. (Said assassin really cared for his brother even going against Nightlord Sneek's orders to leave Thanquol alone and getting branded as a traitor to Clan Eshin to get his revenge.)
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Dec 13, 2018 03:30
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Night10194 posted:I think to make a genuinely good crunchy game you have to have some degree of focus. Trying to do anything and everything with one big and complex rules system just leads to systems where it takes 6 hours and a guide to make a PC and 3 hours to run a fight or other mechanically complex scene.
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Dec 13, 2018 03:43
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I love everything about Double Cross except the idea of paying XP to be able to still play your character, which just feels like a design choice that you could've picked a lot of better roads to go down before ending on.
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Dec 13, 2018 03:47
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I love everything about Double Cross except the idea of paying XP to be able to still play your character, which just feels like a design choice that you could've picked a lot of better roads to go down before ending on. I believe part of that comes out of the original intent that you'd be swapping PCs (or even which side of the setting you're playing as) reasonably often. The EXP part is a little bit of a problem, but it's less EXP than it seems like at least. I just added in 'if you go nuts you can play as someone else and your other buddies tracking down your old PC to beat sanity back into them' and stuff like that instead, since I tend to prefer games with long term casts. Now I really need to finish rat times.
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Dec 13, 2018 03:56
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There's a novel where a border fort gets attacked by Skaven plus some shenanigans, resulting in the heroic beloved commander who was secretly going to betray the Empire dying right before the Skaven launch their attack on the unprepared Imperials. Our heroic adventurer party was sent to figure out wtf was going on and salvage the situation, so they get the general's rigor mortis corpse, dress it in spare armour, cram a helmet on his head (it was too small, they had to shatter the skull a bit) cut his eyelids off so it looked like he was awake, break his joints so they could pose him properly, and tie him to a horse before having him appear to rally the Imperials. Not only did the Imperial army love it because their hero had returned despite being reported dead, the Skaven were terrified. Naturally, they set their jezzail rat snipers to immediately kill the man-thing hero, but no matter how many anti-tank bullets they punched into him he wouldn't fall or even bleed, which caused further panic. Meanwhile the horse is just panicking and stampeding around the battlefield trampling random clanrats while the Imperials charge after it. It's strongly implied that Sigmar was watching out for them in this battle, protecting the horse from injury and such. And at the end of the battle the general just so happened to be illuminated by a ray of moonlight and then fall off the horse, appearing to die of his injuries before anyone could get a closer look.
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Dec 13, 2018 04:48
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The good ol' El Cid ploy, I can picture that loving with Skaven heads pretty hard. And I can picture a Skaven spy network being exactly as efficient as is convenient for the plot. On one hand, Eshin like any good assassination network knows the value of good intel, on the other hand not only are Nazis famously inept at spycraft and prone to infighting and everyone keeping their own black books on each other, but they usually have a hard time actually understanding how other races think.
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Dec 13, 2018 05:27
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So I think the thing to remember is that Clan Eshin are in fact good at spying objectively because they're also probably the least racist Skaven clan (I think it's strongly implied they didn't like steal the Art of Silent Death in Cathay, they just befriended ninjas and did some mutual exchange poo poo and probably still do). Like they still think Skaven are the best but they just like Mors are unnaturally upright folks for Skaven. Manifesting in this case by being way more honest than any Skaven expects any other Skaven to be. The other thing to remember is that Clan Eshin being mostly honest means you don't get on their poo poo list, because they absolutely WILL fabricate poo poo on you and it will be believed because almost all of their intel is good. Anyone else doing spy poo poo who isn't part of Clan Eshin is probably either being spied on by Eshin themselves, are secretly Eshin spying on the clan in question as well, or are correctly afraid enough of the Council to just spill their guts on the side because you Do Not gently caress With The Council and in general you should expect them to have mostly accurate intel on anything relevant at any given time that they will very, very studiously not share with anyone, even people who need to know it. The TLDR is that the Skaven probably do have literally the best intelligence network on the planet and in practice only the Council, possibly the Grey Seers, and high-ups in Eshin have access to any of that information. The Grey Seers are also weird because while they of course all hate each other they are way low-key on trying to get each other killed because it's frowned on to just loving stab another Seer once you're past the Apprentice stage. In principle the Seers are supposed to be on the same page and working together for the good of the Skaven race and they work very hard to keep the veneer of that going. Feinne fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Dec 13, 2018 |
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Dec 13, 2018 06:14
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I think Clan Eshin is where the Skaven tip over from "unique, flexible antagonists" to "a little too much." Thematically, Skaven are rats, so I get the Black Death bit, and they're Nazis, so I get the jackboots and the Wunderwaffe, but having the Best Ninja Assassins feels like we've just gotten too conceptually broad. Plus, targeted assassinations require patience, subtlety, and coordination, which is what I'd point to as the key weakness of the Skaven, so now they feel like they're covering their own bases. Best tech, biggest numbers, best at disease, and they also have the best assassins who can pick off anyone at any time, so nobody can ever seem truly safe from retaliation. As a bunch of backstabbing cowards, yeah, I get that they'd have experienced assassins, but I'd picture it more like a mob hit or with the Klan--chucking a pipe bomb through someone's window and running off, ambushing someone and spraying them with machine guns, setting their house on fire after blocking the doors--something artless and relying more on excessive force rather than perfect synchronization. Their real danger is that they're underestimated and human security measures don't think in terms of how rats move. Master Assassins feel more like a Dark Elf or Vampire thing, the factions that better fit having an elegant, 47-step plan to finally defeat their rivals once and for all (A Skaven plan also starts with 47 steps, but once there's a hitch in step 3, it's time for a panicky display of overwhelming numbers or firepower).
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Dec 13, 2018 07:53
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Precambrian posted:I think Clan Eshin is where the Skaven tip over from "unique, flexible antagonists" to "a little too much." Thematically, Skaven are rats, so I get the Black Death bit, and they're Nazis, so I get the jackboots and the Wunderwaffe, but having the Best Ninja Assassins feels like we've just gotten too conceptually broad. Plus, targeted assassinations require patience, subtlety, and coordination, which is what I'd point to as the key weakness of the Skaven, so now they feel like they're covering their own bases. Best tech, biggest numbers, best at disease, and they also have the best assassins who can pick off anyone at any time, so nobody can ever seem truly safe from retaliation. Dark Elves do in fact have Assassins. Arguably significantly better ones in most circumstances, for what it's worth. Skaven aren't even the best at disease (By definition, Nurgle is better), and the only reason their tech is more advanced is because they don't remotely care about safety. It's ahead of everyone else, sure, but it's not better in every regard and humans and dwarves have tech that is significantly more likely to actually accomplish what they're trying to do. Best is a long shot. Even their numbers advantage only goes so far. What the Skaven are is second best or a very qualified first in a lot of fields combined with a societal structure that can't make good use of what they have. They constantly misuse their assassins because they're unwilling to comprehend the idea that they might put the cause ahead of backstabbing and are unwilling to use them for the sort of thing they'd actually good for because they think it'd put themselves at too much risk. They have a technological edge that does them no good because none of their tech actually *works* when push comes to shove. They have powerful diseases that they're incapable of capitalizing on because of their fundamental inability to understand how other races function, and they have access to those diseases only through allowing individuals in who are more interested in purity of belief than in actually accomplishing goals. They are, essentially, equally matched against everyone else, and ultimately, because of their paranoia and self-serving nature, generally worse off. But they can do a lot of damage.
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Dec 13, 2018 09:04
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OvermanXAN posted:They constantly misuse their assassins because they're unwilling to comprehend the idea that they might put the cause ahead of backstabbing and are unwilling to use them for the sort of thing they'd actually good for because they think it'd put themselves at too much risk. Also because they constantly underestimate their foes, they'll have a tendency to send a dozen clanrats to assassinate someone who really merits a gutter-runner gank squad- which is a perfect way for a bunch of PCs to find out about their operations.
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Dec 13, 2018 09:28
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Precambrian posted:I think Clan Eshin is where the Skaven tip over from "unique, flexible antagonists" to "a little too much." Thematically, Skaven are rats, so I get the Black Death bit, and they're Nazis, so I get the jackboots and the Wunderwaffe, but having the Best Ninja Assassins feels like we've just gotten too conceptually broad. Plus, targeted assassinations require patience, subtlety, and coordination, which is what I'd point to as the key weakness of the Skaven, so now they feel like they're covering their own bases. Best tech, biggest numbers, best at disease, and they also have the best assassins who can pick off anyone at any time, so nobody can ever seem truly safe from retaliation. Eshin doesn't have the best assassins or the best spies in the world. What it does have is some pretty decent spies and assassins, and the best *marketing department* in the world. "Our best assassins are too dangerous to use. The Grey Council itself has forbidden them in case it brings down the whole under-empire." That's frickin' genius. There's now no limit on how dangerous clan chieftains can think Sniktch is since it's impossible for him to ever fail. The important thing about assassins after all is that everyone should be afraid of them. Fear is the product they're selling, not death. And they kill people a lot as well of course. The good assassins never get used against mere humans of course, they've got much more important rats to kill. The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Dec 13, 2018 |
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Dec 13, 2018 09:51
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Ratoslov posted:Also because they constantly underestimate their foes, they'll have a tendency to send a dozen clanrats to assassinate someone who really merits a gutter-runner gank squad- which is a perfect way for a bunch of PCs to find out about their operations. That's a good point. Clanrat Chieftain: "Why share-share glory with Eshin when we can do it ourselves! No need-need others! Two-sixes of my finest Clanrat warriors can sneaky-stab the target with ease!" *The chieftain puffs himself up* All: *Excited, agreeable chittering* *An hour later...* *Five Clanrat warriors, emitting the Musk of Fear and sprinting in full panic mode, being chased by the entire Docks District of Nuln* *Flames abound* *Riots* *Wholesale higgledy piggledy* *Above a sole Gutter Runner ruminates on the folly of trying to horn in on a hardworking Skaven's area of expertise, and thinks sneaking a message to their target was clearly the right choice*
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Dec 13, 2018 14:48
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Dawgstar posted:*Wholesale higgledy piggledy* Now that's a new one. 
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Dec 13, 2018 15:40
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Cooked Auto posted:Now that's a new one. 
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Dec 13, 2018 15:42
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Precambrian posted:I think Clan Eshin is where the Skaven tip over from "unique, flexible antagonists" to "a little too much." Thematically, Skaven are rats, so I get the Black Death bit, and they're Nazis, so I get the jackboots and the Wunderwaffe, but having the Best Ninja Assassins feels like we've just gotten too conceptually broad. Plus, targeted assassinations require patience, subtlety, and coordination, which is what I'd point to as the key weakness of the Skaven, so now they feel like they're covering their own bases. Of course, anything that has to do with internal Skaven politics is fun to read on the toilet but not especially useful if you're running a campaign with the Skaven as antagonists.
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Dec 13, 2018 16:03
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat Better than stunt-things! So the next section is made up of a cute little description of each of the Skaven's units, through two commentators. One is a Grey Seer, one is a terrified human researcher like our original pamphleteer at the beginning of the book. The scholar's stuff is all 'OH WOE IS US THE TERRIBLE RATMEN ARE NUMBERLESS!' while the Seer is usually like 'Yes-yes, very good squeak-kill!' I actually really enjoy the contrast between the overwrought, panic-stricken purple prose and the rat wizard just tossing off a short little fragment about his minions. Until they get to the description of the Grey Seers, where the Seer obviously slows down and goes into great detail about how amazing they all are. Below each pair of quotes is a more normal description of the unit. Whoever said what Eshin is selling is fear, you get a prize. That's the overwhelming focus of the Grey Seer's description of the Assassins: That all Clans fear them. As I said when we first got to them, the greatest fear for all Skaven is death. Knowing that you, the great Grey Seer or mighty Warlord, might get your throat cut in your bed or that Snikch might even now be wandering around, carefully assessing how he's going to make it look like an accident The Seer is all on about how the duty of the Clanrat is to die for their betters, while our scholar describes the average Clanrat as 'fed to bursting on fear and paranoia'. Apt enough. They're the squeaking tide of expendable cannon fodder that runs when you kill a quarter of 'em. Clanrats are pathetic and easy even for non-combat 1st tier PCs; they're some of the easiest 'serious' foes in the game, only a step or two above goblins. Senior clanrats are called 'Clawleaders' and lead a 'Claw' of Clanrats as a unit champion. They are still very sad and will generally lose to a 1st tier fighter, but they might be able to beat a Ratcatcher. Might. Clanrat Slaves are the only thing worse than Clanrats. The Seer actually waxes poetic for a bit about how Slaves are a sign of a 'strong-powerful' clan and how essential they are to society, while the scholar notes they still have ambition and even in this terrible position, most are still doing all they can to avoid their deaths. Slaves are Skaven that the Skaven want dead. They're the only thing weaker than a Clanrat: A Clanrat with almost no equipment who's malnourished and has been given a diet of daily beatings for the last couple of weeks. Sending them into battle with a pointed stick is how Skaven try to tie up more important enemies, then while they're busy killing the slaves the rats drop a laser cannon blast on them. Globadiers are described by the scholar as the moment he realized the Skaven weren't beastmen, while the Seer goes on about how beautiful the poison mist is. These little assholes can be picked out by their big backpack full of glass globes, their adorable little gas-masks, and their full body rat hazmat suit. None of these things will actually protect them that well if they drop a globe. The globes are full of mustard gas. Like, they can call it whatever they want, the rats are running around throwing glass mustard gas grenades at people, by paw. The description (accurately) notes this is not a safe profession, and wind or bad luck can end up blowing the poison gas back into the Skaven, or a globadier can try to shot-put his big glass orb and slip and kill his entire unit. When they work, they're deadly as hell. When they don't, they're hilarious. The Skaven motto, really. Grey Seers are described by the scholar and the Seer both as the leaders of Skaven society. The Seer speaks of how they are the ones who truly know the Horned Rat's plan, the dream of the Great Ascendancy where they will become 'master-killer' of the world. These are powerful wizard rats who run around scheming to unseat one another and scrabbling for the Horned Rat's favor. They have all survived a dangerous apprenticeship where their peers were trying their best to kill them, and every one has successfully made it through the LABYRINTH OF THE HORNED RAT (of course it's the white rats that get put in mazes) to prove he favors them. Surprisingly, none of this has anything about their magic. We'll get to it soon enough, but these little bastards are dynamite. The scholar is all on about how deadly and perfect the Gutter Runner assassins are, while the Seer just shrugs and says 'Good for kill-kill behind enemy lines'. Oh, Skreelin. Gutter Runners are the first sort of 'serious' Eshin unit. Always sneaking and stabbing, those lot. They're fairly dangerous (you may remember how a single Gutter Runner almost got at least one of a competent 1st tier party in the Ashes material before I abandoned it) but definitely beatable, a good sort of 'early game' boss for players to fight, since these guys do the bulk of the 'delicate' work of Eshin. They're just good enough to handle serious work while being expendable and numerous enough to be a bit fire and forget for their superiors, unlike Assassins. At higher levels, your PCs might encounter whole teams of them as skirmishers and commandos. Also absolute dicks at Blood Bowl, but that's neither here nor there. The scholar talks about the slow winnowing of the Night Runners down into Gutter Runners by seeing how many of these little ninjas in training survive long enough to make it. The Seer basically calls them puffed up Clanrats who are just a little faster and still useful. These are the ninja mooks that try to ambush you as you're coming out of the tavern and get killed en masse the minute PCs show up. They're no better than Clanrats, really, just a little quicker on their feet (which probably helps their lifespan a lot). I kind of suspect Eshin is aware of the law of conservation of ninjitsu and sends these guys out to get killed until the badasses rise to the tops in their ranks, decreasing the number of ninjas to increase their ninja power. The scholar is, again, going on about the matchless skill of Moulder's Packmasters in handling their charges while the Seer just shrugs and goes 'Eh, they're good enough I guess'. Packmasters are the entry level Moulder unit, going in with whip and Things Catcher (a bear-trap on a stick) to prod Rat Ogres and other monsters into eating/killing who they're supposed to. Often they ignore their Packmaster and eat the Packmaster. They're actually an important critical point when fighting Moulder: Kill the handlers and the beasts will lose direction. A rampaging Rat Ogre might forget what to do entirely or turn around and attack his fellows. Shoot the little rat with the whip first! The scholar has some histrionics about Plague Censer Bearers (Skaven Flagellants of Pestilens) while the Seer points out most die of their own poison. These guys are legitimately extremely dangerous. Also playable, but, uh, this is like a Slayer crossed with a Flagellant who is also a fanatical The scholar talks about how dangerous it is that Plague Monks of Pestilens spread disease and how their fearless nature is surprising to people used to fighting cowardly rats. The Grey Seer instead huffs about how the stupid rats don't understand the Horned Rat or his ways, and their impudence will eventually be the death of their entire heretical clan. These guys are all diseased, and generally much braver than is normal for the Skaven. Basically Clanrat berserkers. With how poor Frenzy is, this doesn't help them that much. The most dangerous thing about them is whatever disease they're suffering from at the moment, not their little knives and ugly green robes. Even the scholar can't work up being that scared of Rat Ogres, noting they're likely to get bored or turn on their allies if they don't have supervision. The Grey Seer calls them tough-strong, but hard to control. Rat Ogres get a big writeup here about how they're made and then made to fight one another to make only the absolute strongest and best come out on top, and it reads like a Moulder advertising pamphlet. They're not actually that dangerous. Their training 'would impart many valuable tactics and strategies, if they could remember anything for more than a day'. They are fantastically, tremendously stupid and surprisingly unskilled in combat. A PC team will likely beat one even at low levels on action economy and the Rat Ogre's poor damage resistance. The scholar says finding and killing the breeders is possibly the only way to destroy the Skaven. The Seer puts it more simply: "There are no Skaven females. Just Skaven broodmothers." We've been over this topic and I'd rather not rehash it a third time, though there's an odd little bit in the end of their description. "So cloistered are they from the rest of their race that they do not learn their chittering speech, nor even the simplest social skills...or so the Skaven believe." Bit of an odd note, that. The scholar buys the Stormvermin's hype, as he does for everything, describing the black-furred Skaven as the pinnacle of war. The Seer is more pleased that the Stormvermin make loyal bodyguards for his order. Stormvermin are weird in this book. See, the thing about Stormvermin in the Tabletop Wargame is that they're 'elite' Skaven, by which I mean they're on par with an Empire Swordsman instead of being a shittier soldier, while still being just as cowardly as Clanrats. Their main selling point as elites is they have actual armor and a halberd. In this book, though? When we get to the actual rules for playable Stormvermin they're absolutely goddamn murder-machines, getting a huge Weapon Skill, Strength, and Toughness bonus and being much braver than most rats. Stormvermin are unusual in that they're raised from birth to be Stormvermin, and so much of them don't have designs on anything but raising their rank within the Stormvermin. They like to strut about and bully units of common Clanrats, to the point that this builds an actual sense of unit cohesion around their love of bullying normal rats. They still backstab all the time, but their units hold together a little better than other rats due to their love of flexing and showing off together. Finally, the Warlock Engineers: The scholar is, as per usual, losing his poo poo about them. Especially the way they can make cyborgs. The Seer just says 'Warlock Engineers have strong technology, better than stunt-things.' He's wrong and he's not. Skaven tech is very powerful, as the description is right to point out. Skaven tech is also VERY unreliable. One moment, the Warlock Engineer will be shooting crazy green lightning out of his warp-halberd while his thrumming little backpack hums along nicely. Moments later the backpack has fused with his back on a conceptual level and begun The Countdown and then he and all the other rats around him are gone in a puff of green fire because he flipped the wrong safety override trying to turn on his cigarette lighter. 'These machines do not always function flawlessly', says the book. 'Many Warlock Engineers meet their doom at the hands of a malfunctioning warp accumulator', says the book. These are understatements. Next Time: Holy poo poo, game rules?
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Dec 13, 2018 16:07
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PurpleXVI posted:AD&D: 2nd Edition I was actually quite fond of 2E's initiative back in the day, even with having to reroll every round, because it helped make combat more fluid (compared to 1E) and it also meant that weapon speed factors and spell casting times actually mattered. So it was a good idea to have a fast weapon like a dagger on hand so you had a better chance of stabbing the magic-user when he started waving his hands around, before he could finish his spell.
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Dec 13, 2018 17:14
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AD&D: 2nd Edition Chapters 10 through 14: Treasure, Encounters, NPC's, Time & Movement, Vision & Light  These chapters are all extremely vestigial in the PHB and I suspect they only exist so they could have the PHB and DMG chapters neatly mirror each other, because the PHB really doesn't have a lot to add about treasure except "sometimes the GM says you find nice things," for instance, and the NPC's chapter is really just a short list of what you could potentially hire. Movement is a bit more full, including a surprisingly detailed table of climbing modifiers, I suspect there was a lot of mountaineering going on in the devs' personal games(though I've never had any in a game I've run, at least not enough to need to call for any rolls...). And after this, the book is mostly just spell appendices, Cleric and Wizard respectively. Analyzing Chapter 10: Treasure and Magical Items  What takes up roughly two pages in the PHB is about six or seven times as much here, because knowing when and how much loot to hand out, and what can be handed out, is pretty important to the GM. The starting section is more or less a call to creativity, to not just hand out X gold coins, but perhaps some commodities(which may take effort to move and sell), deeds(attempt to redeem them or just trade them?), knowledge, etc. which is pretty important. Hell, handing the players something that's valuable, but not something they can just cash in down at the store for a suit of platemail("I'm sorry sir, but I don't 'have change' for a- [adjusts spectacles] -twenty-foot basalt idol of Norpgorp the Bleak, which menaces with spikes of adamantium and has giant emeralds for eyes. Try the fellow down the road.") can often be an adventure in and of itself. First you've got moving the drat thing, then finding a buyer, then dealing with the results of hauling around something so conspicuous. The chapter also deals with the prevalence of wealth, why there are hoards of it lying around in ancient dungeons, who's got the wealth, how much there is, how common magical items are, etc.  Plus sometimes some of the DMG's intentionally comedic writing still gets a grin or smirk out of me, even if I've read it ten times before. There are also a few paragraphs on where it makes sense to find treasure, both with regards to animal-intelligence and smarter creatures. In the stomachs of enemies capable of swallowing characters whole, in the refuse piles outside animal-intelligence monster lairs(presuming they're not of the kind of the kind that find fascinating with and hoard shiny things), used to build a monster's nest, etc. while giving some pointers on how and where intelligent creatures may choose to protect their hoards rather than just stashing them under their bed or having them lying around in plain sight. Of course after all this it then indicates how you should use the random treasure generation tables rather than putting in any hard work and just gently caress your game sideways with whatever irrational poo poo it coughs up. And then it finally gets to the part that I love about this game, one thing that really sets it apart from the later editions... magic items. Like, from 3.x onwards, magical items have a price point and it's assumed that you'll be able to buy them, or clap them together from a standardized recipe, with relatively little effort. In part because your non-mages are desperately going to need those +'s to stay competitive(and the mages to keep those lowly martials from getting uppity). In 2nd ed, it's a lot different. No magical items have a default price point, because, as the game points out: You're never meant to be able to just go shopping for magical items. Personally I like it because it keeps some of, well, the magic of magical items intact. They're not just standardized and mass-produced, they're relatively rare, and even finding just a couple of them can be a major gamechanger for the party and its capabilities. Especially limited-use items suddenly become something the party has to carefully consider if they're going to use or hoard when there's an opportunity. The justification for the dearth of magical items is threefold, in essence: Firstly, no one's selling magical items in large amounts. Player characters certainly aren't, so why would anyone else? They're hoarding that poo poo as dearly as PC's would. Secondly, magical items aren't being mass-produced, because outside of the simplest potions, their creation is usually bespoke and tends to involve rare components or even rarer accomplishments. Thirdly, even if they could be mass-produced, part of the process is inherently dangerous for the spellcaster: In order to create a permanent magic item, once all the actual enchanting is done, the mage has to cast a Permanency spell on the item, which runs a 5% chance of permanently draining a point of his Constitution. Considering that wizards are rarely the burliest of dudes and dudettes in the first place, that's a pretty considerable risk to run, especially considering that this also eats into the mage's System Shock rolls, which certain powerful spellcasting can also put strains on. So you're unlikely to find a wizard who's willing to just risk eating up part of his own mortality to give you another +1 for a few gold pieces. Oh and even then there's a percentage chance the enchantment just plain fails even at the end of all that effort. For PC item fabrication, it's more or less planned that players will create very few items over the course of their lifespans, since they're intended to be adventures in their own right, essentially. Something closer to when the dwarves of the Norse myths forged the chains of Fenris, using legendary and riddle-esque items, or at the very least something that requires long journeys, collecting stuff, actually parsing out what the required items will be, etc.  Comparatively, scrolls and potions are easier to make than any other sort of items, being the only ones that don't require Permanency spells and which have more-or-less fixed costs and components. They're still time-and-money consuming endeavours, but the sort of thing a player could conceivably bash together during downtime rather than forging an entire adventure around them. Next there's a section on Artifacts and Relics which, hoo. AD&D has always had a problem with artifacts. Because they're meant to be these immensely powerful items that also have a commensurately nasty drawback so they're not completely unbalancing. But they more or less never get it right. Either the artifact's LEGENDARY POWERS amounts to a few first-to-third level spells a day, in return for which you turn into a corn cob under the light of the full moon, or the artifact can crack the world in half and the drawbacks are only really drawbacks if you're not enough of an rear end in a top hat to use the powers in the first place. Whoever originally created the rules also seems to have had a weird obsession with making even fully-statted artifacts wholly or partially randomizable, so congrats, you found the Legendary Hat of Beards, now let's see [rolls, rolls again, confers on sub-table, bites lip, rolls three more times, does mental maths] it lets you sense lies, cast Phantom Stench twice a day, you can also destroy the Sun once per week and every time you wear it, you have to roll a Save vs Death or die. At least the pre-generated abilities and drawbacks have some attempt at balancing, but once you use the randomly rolled stuff(I believe there was a review of a book with Dark Sun artifacts some years back, it's a good example of it) you may as well give up any pretense of having a well-balanced or thematically sensible item. Analyzing Chapter 11: Encounters In what's more or less a running theme for the DMG, the Encounters chapter is a lot of good advice and then stuff that feels like an archaic leftover.  So let's start with the good part! First things first, for the new GM's(and frankly some old GM's could stand to read this bit as well), it describes what an encounter actually is and how it fits into D&D. It defines an encounter as being made of two things: Firstly, the players are dealing with something the PC's have set up, not just interacting among themselves and secondly, it has to be a situation where the players can make one or more choices, and those choices will have an impact. But I'll let the book speak for itself here with the following page.  I remember when I first read this section, the first time I picked up the DMG. It blew my mind. Like... just the idea that a situation wasn't a good or interesting situation unless the players had a choice, or had some sort of decision to make. It's probably something we've all internalized at this point, but it's still really important poo poo. The other cool part is that when it describes how to write up an encounter, the DMG points out: "Hey, you wrote a really cool scene here, but remember that at some point your PC's will probably try to intervene. First figure out the course of events if they just watch while having a smoke, then figure out what things they're likely to do, and then the consequences of those actions." With the example being the PC's witnessing an attempted kidnapping, where the DMG points out that probably the PC's will try to foil it on instinct, so if they manage to do so, be ready to have the victim's story ready. Then after all this focus on handcrafted, bespoke encounters the DMG tries to sell us on how random encounters are totally the coolest thing ever. I especially love how the random tables provided has everything from "hello this thing will vomit out endless save-or-die checks at the PC's" to "oh, it's something harmless, how delightful." It always just felt like a half-assed solution to me. I mean, you don't need to keep track of the entire world's population, but a dungeon with maybe ten wandering encounters? It's not that hard to keep a mental map, if not a physical one, of where the enemies are, and who's nearby to react if the PC's make a racket, or who's patrolling/wandering where if the PC's hang out there for too long. For overland travel it makes somewhat more sense, but... I just don't like them. How many people actually use random encounters? To me it just feels like they take away from the thematics of an area by making it random rather than designed. Maybe if someone really wants some sandboxy old-school-feel adventuring, but at that point they may as well just play a videogame, because if they just want rolling on tables rather than referee calls and design, the GM is kind of pointless.
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Dec 13, 2018 17:55
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Night10194 posted:We've been over this topic and I'd rather not rehash it a third time, though there's an odd little bit in the end of their description. "So cloistered are they from the rest of their race that they do not learn their chittering speech, nor even the simplest social skills...or so the Skaven believe." Bit of an odd note, that. It feels like a setup for a revolution among the female Skaven, or that they'd perhaps be open to the idea of being liberated by wandering adventurers or something to get away from their awful conditions and treatment.
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Dec 13, 2018 17:56
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That section on what is and isn't an encounter is pretty legitimately good advice.
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Dec 13, 2018 18:08
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I remember Thanquol in one of his books visiting another Grey Seer and being shocked as hell that said Grey Seer did not have any bodyguards in his chambers, just two Broodmothers. Then he realized that said bood mothers were super muscular and well built basically having arms and legs built like Rat Ogres, and so thought of his rival being a genius as skaven are always comfortable around brood mothers, and would never think of them as threatening bodyguards like the two before him. He still had difficulty putting his guard up despite the fact the two skaven could easily tear him in half.
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Dec 13, 2018 18:33
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This might be straying too close to oWoD-style conspiracy glut, but my pet theory is that Eshin wants nothing to do with the rest of the Skaven, but the Under Empire has lots of warpstone, so they have a token presence in the old world while the rest enjoy being rat weebs.
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Dec 13, 2018 20:13
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat Guns GUNS GUNNNNS! Oh hey, it's that point halfway or more through every Hams book where now we've got game mechanics. Nice. Except they aren't very good, mostly. I'm also going to be referencing the game's Errata because there's something in it I find hilarious, and another thing that I'm sure has our boy Steve's fingerprints on from Medical chapter of WHFRP Companion. So, at long last, let's talk about the cool toys you get for killing people as a ratman. First up, on melee weapons, we've only got a few new melee weapons, some of which are pretty cool. The Punch Dagger, the Tail Blade, the Plague Censer, the Ratclaw, and the Things-Catcher. The Punch Dagger completely obsoletes the entire Parrying weapon proficiency except the Swordbreaker (not that it was ever a useful prof anyway) by being an SB-1 Ordinary Defensive weapon with no offensive off-hand penalty. Now, nowhere does it actually say if you get a free-parry while wielding it off-hand, but given the Defensive and the fact that it's a dagger type weapon designed to be used in pairs, I'd say probably. Maybe this is something the rules should have covered (it is). The Censer is a flail, using the flail proficiency, that does an extra 1-5 damage if a target fails a -20 Tough test. Then another 1-5 damage if they fail a -10 Tough test the round after. AND causes a Mutation test at Tough+10 24 hours later. Also it causes a Tough save every round or everyone around the wielder (wielder included) just loses 2 wounds a turn while it's lit. Do not get hit with plague censers! The mutation is an extra gently caress you and I'm not sure I care for it; a disease check might've been better as a less-long-term gently caress you. The Rat Claws are Knuckle Dusters that lose Pummeling but instead give +10% to climbing tests, because you've got spiked fighting claws on your hands and feet that also work as climbing pitons. They make you do SB-3 damage unarmed, without doubling enemy AV, so that's nice for martial artist ninja rats who plan to be climbing and scampering a lot. The Tail Blade is specifically meant to be used with the Tail Fighting talent (available to Eshin Assassins) and is an SB-2 Fast weapon wielded in a Skaven's prehensile tail. Tri-wielding is mostly for flavor and any ordinary weapon can be tri-wielded, so this weapon actually doesn't have a huge amount of purpose. There's also no clarification on how tail fighting interacts with the free parry rules. It's an after-thought that doesn't really do anything that was tossed in because a famous ninja rat does it. The Things Catcher is another winner of a weapon, being a Two-Handed SB+1 melee weapon that also has Snare from Entangling. Snaring someone with your last attack of the round will hold them in place and force them to spend their action trying to break free. Until they do, anyone attacking them in melee OR ranged gets +20 to hit them. As for why the Things Catcher hurts so bad, it's a bear trap on a stick. This weapon and their whip makes the Packmaster a great starting rat class to have around (especially as the errata for the game gives them the prof to actually use this thing). For guns, we have the useless Blowgun (Uses its own special prof, does Damage 0 at short range, only useful for delivering poison, which any other ranged weapon could do) which is 'often used as a snorkel by Eshin hiding in ponds'. The Poisoned Wind Globe is where it gets complicated. It has a very short range (4 yards is the close range, 20 yards the long) and when thrown, if you miss your BS test, has a 20% chance to fall at your feet and break open or and 80% chance to scatter in one of eight directions d10 yards. It creates a small, moving AoE cloud of gas that sticks around for d5 rounds, drifting in random directions (d5 yards) every turn like the original scatter roll for a miss, with a 10% chance of staying still and a 10% chance of dispersing immediately. Anyone caught in it needs to make a Tough-10 (Tough+10 if you have a little gas mask) or take 5-14 Wounds, no reduction. Get used to this. There's more armor ignoring (and TB ignoring) stuff in this book than anywhere else in the line and I hate it. Next we have the most hilariously useless weapon in the Skaven arsenal. The Ratling Gun. This is, recall, the loving gatling gun the rats bring to 17th century line engagements. This is a goddamn HMG firing warpshot at a massive rate of fire that also tends to jam or explode because Skaven. In this game? It's a Damage 3 Shrapnel weapon. Exactly the same as a cheap human blunderbuss. You fire, then everyone in a 4 yard line out to 30 yards makes an Agi test to avoid the Damage 3 hit. You still roll BS to see if the gun explodes from Experimental (2% chance, higher chance of jamming) and it's still a huge gun that needs a two rat crew to haul, load, and use. It only fires one of those attacks before needing to reload, just like a human Blunderbuss, and it takes longer to do so. It has a ten round reload time! For the exact same effectiveness of a lovely human coach gun loaded with forks. This weapon is SO BAD that the Errata specifically had to address 'Yes, we made it act exactly like a Blunderbuss on purpose, stop asking'. How do you look at people saying 'um, are they meant to be this poo poo' and not realize you made them poo poo? I'd think it was a concern for game balance, except for all the other crazy poo poo the rats get like the globes and the upcoming flamethrower. This weapon is so worthless I had to make up my own, different rules for Skryre gun teams for the 'oh god we're getting blasted with rats' Vermintide-esque session I'm getting read for tomorrow. There's also little smoke bombs the little ninjas can throw down before vanishing. They're cute. They work exactly like a poison globe except they don't kill anyone and instead reduce vision inside the cloud to 2 yards, meaning that a character stuck in the smoke cloud can't actually shoot out of it. The Warpfire Thrower is a loving nightmare weapon. Thankfully, just like the Ratling Gun, the two-rat team firing it gets one shot and then it'll take 10 rounds to reload. But it fires out a large cone of fire with apparently no BS test AND no test to avoid the fire. Anything hit takes Damage 4, No Armor Permitted (TB is, at least) and has to make an Agi save or catch fire. Remember fire loses you d10 wounds a round, without reduction. You can put the fire out with an Agi-10 roll or by jumping in water. Also, it mutates you like the Plague Censer. This is just plain horseshit, due to the totally unavoidable nature of the weapon; if the rats open fire, you're getting hit. At least they only get one shot, and it takes many rats to carry one flamer around. I'd probably add a Dodge chance to it since it's sort of a prototype to a Dark Heresy flamer anyway. The Warplock Jezzail and Warplock Pistol are the mainstay firearms of the ratman armies. The Jezzail is, as came up in the thread, a very long barreled rifled musket with the reach of a Hochland Longrifle. The pistols are just 10/20 instead of 8/16 range pistols. Both do Damage 5 AP instead of Damage 4 Impact like a human firearm, giving them slightly better damage potential but making the damage less consistent than the 'roll 2d10, take best' and less likely to crit than human guns. They're solid, interesting weapons and a neat sidegrade to human firearms. The Skryre Skirmisher 1st tier starts with either a Jezzail or a small brace of pistols and they're cool. They're a good weapon that's neither too weak nor too strong. The Errata, however, has other ideas. I'm gonna guess this rule is Steve because it's got his favorite buddy, the 'Surgery Check' that's Heal-10. The Errata proposes something to make warplock guns 'more exciting', whereby the warpstone shot causes mutations once a week (Tough or gain a mutation) until someone with Surgery makes a Heal-10 check to remove the bullet, if they caused any Wounds at all. Yeah, I'm glad that didn't make it into the main book. These guns are nasty enough as sniper rifles and high quality high velocity handguns without that. Clan Skryre also gets its own special gear: The Gas Mask (+20 to Toughness against gas) is quite nice. They can also get a 'superpowered Warp-Power Accumulator' to supercharge their adorable little exploder backpack, giving a Warlock Engineer's Warp Lighting Impact. However, if they get doubles on the Impact roll, the backpack goes crazy! Int-20 or the backpack explodes, destroying the item and causing Damage 5 to the engineer and everyone within 6 yards. The Upgraded Warp Condenser gives warp-powered melee weapons an extra +1 damage and also lets the Warlock Engineer use an extra casting die for shooting lightning at people. The Warp Blades are powered halberds and hand weapons that do +1 damage and let the Engineer cast Warp-Lightning through them. So a fully tooled out Engineer has a halberd (or sword and shield) that does SB+2 Impact (Or SB=2, but having the free parry) and shoots out Damage 6 Impact lightning as a ranged spell for a half action. Except they forgot to include rules for how to use the Warp Blades to cast the spell. At all. It's in the Errata (you can cast Warp Lightning at Mag 2 if you have one, basically) but come loving on! You forgot to actually put in the 'how do I use my magitek casting tool to cast magitek' rules!? In the section on magitek!? You put in all the fiddly poo poo about the upgrades you can make to your lightning projector, without remembering to actually write the rules for projecting lightning? This is some pretty awful work, rat writers! Similarly, all these items cost Warpstone Tokens instead of Gold Crowns, because ratmen don't use Gold Crowns. We're told to just 'work out' how much anything else costs. How much is a Hand Weapon? Who knows, make it up yourself. A simple 'for purposes of converting costs, a warpstone token is 5 GC' or whatever would have been easy and allowed a GM to easily convert material from the other books into ratmoneys. But no. Not like you paid for this book for people to make that kind of work easy on you, you're going to need to go do it yourself. Similarly, there isn't much about equipment availability in the book. For instance, Skaven are implied not to have Plate armor (because they don't in the TT game, only Imperials, Chaos, and Dwarfs do) and top out at mail. But there's nothing really reflecting this anywhere except in the fact that no career gets more than Medium armor on their trappings, so nothing stopping you putting your rats in little plate power suits or something. It's just a shoddily done section, and I'm afraid that's gonna be the pace setter for all the actual game mechanics in this book. Next Time: The Eternal Perfect Palpatine
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Dec 13, 2018 20:49
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Halloween Jack posted:Historically, a competent and self-directed espionage corps is a lot more dangerous to your own government than it is to the enemy, which does fit in with the whole backstabbing Nazi thing. (In that regard the Skaven actually remind me more of the satirized Stalinist Klingons from original Star Trek.) The nazis are not known for having a competent espionage corps, though. They were in fact incredibly bad at it.
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Dec 13, 2018 22:03
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Zereth posted:The nazis are not known for having a competent espionage corps, though. They were in fact incredibly bad at it. Wasn't the head of the Abwehr betraying the Nazis almost from the word go once the war started?
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Dec 13, 2018 22:09
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No argument here, the Abwehr were hilariously bad.
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Dec 13, 2018 22:12
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Night10194 posted:Wasn't the head of the Abwehr betraying the Nazis almost from the word go once the war started? Yes. He was anti-Nazi and the most hilarious part is that from what I recall Hitler never cottoned on to this.
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Dec 13, 2018 22:16
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Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to play a non-evil Skaven in a group. Like a rat Drizzt.
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Dec 13, 2018 22:21
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Night10194 posted:Wasn't the head of the Abwehr betraying the Nazis almost from the word go once the war started? IIRC his issue was that he considered the war effort doomed and felt that the sooner Germany lost the less damage it would take and the faster it could rebuild.
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Dec 13, 2018 22:23
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Personally, I never make any sentient species have to be evil at all times. What's interesting about the rats is that they're the product of upbringing, environment, and ideology. They're not infected by a dominating magical force like Chaos. It's just more likely that any rat like that would get eaten by the others before acting on it. But then, playing/writing exceptions is part of the fun of playing RPGs. E: Basically, the Skaven are as they are because a bunch of people within their Under Empire have made choices that led them to be this way. Choices to perpetuate their oligarchic power and keep their people divided and distracted by hate and constant need. The period in their history when they just lived in Skavenblight after Kavzar and the fact that the first thing they tried to build was just a digging machine to expand their living area rather than trying to kill anyone does suggest things could be different. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Dec 13, 2018 |
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Dec 13, 2018 22:25
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Plus the Abwehr was being conned out of their minds by the British Double Cross System, which managed to suborn all the German agents sent to England except one who committed suicide. From then on these double agents fed a carefully tailored collection of bullshit back to the Nazis, most notably from Juan Pujol Garcia whose entire plan from the start was to act as a spy loyal to the Allies.
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Dec 13, 2018 22:45
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It is kind of hilarious to imagine a Skaven pup being adopted by a bunch of Imperials and raised as if he was just a very unfortunate mutant, on the basis that clearly there's no such thing as Skaven.
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Dec 13, 2018 23:06
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