FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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LGD: Sep 25, 2004

PurpleXVI posted:

I have to admit I always had trouble with that approach, though, the idea that things only ran by the rules in the book in the region around the PC's, and everywhere else just worked on real-world logic. It seems... off. But it's a preference thing, obviously. I honestly like those attempts at making rulesets that would result in a more-or-less coherent world if they were applied across the gameworld, at all times.

Obviously it only works down to a certain level of detail, the carpenter doesn't have to make to-hit rolls against every single nail he hammers in, but, still. It feels more right to me, even though that's silly.

I genuinely think it's important, and the notion of "rules as physics" always made sense to me. By this I don't mean that you needed to design things so that someone could theoretically simulate a world in the absence of PC's, or that NPC's necessarily need to play by the same rules as PC's, but that the rules are the primary mediator in the way players interact with their characters and the setting. Consequently it's really important to make sure the mechanics line up with the world (and genre) you're describing, because differences between expectations and results take players out of the game and start prompting serious questions about the setting. So you don't actually need a system that lets you roll to see how well a random peasant does carpentry, but if you let a PC try their hand at it the rules should not set difficulties that imply all such random peasants are actually physical paragons with master-level skills. Designing a system that works similarly for both characters is one approach, but the far more important thing is that you have alignment between what you're telling players their characters (and similar characters) can do on paper and what they can actually do in game.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2016 23:17

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:52

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

I think that's in large part an artifact of the system being designed around lovely ground-level inquisitorial acolytes who'd largely be fighting similarly lovely heretics. In that context sticking with something similar in scaling to the WFRP system makes sense, in a way it wouldn't have if they'd thought about long-term scaling of the RPG system to cover other areas of the universe. This issue is also exacerbated by not having a clear approach to how they'd handle the *extremely* wide gulf between the game's fluff and actual tabletop stats (i.e. tabletop marines are vastly shittier stat-wise than they "should" be). Choices that made sense in OG DH look a lot less sensible when you're trying to make Space Marines playable rather than the equivalent of a giant/vampire/demon your players might fight.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 19:09

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

MollyMetroid posted:

The Wounds are kind of weird in that you can have Dramatic Wounds without filling all the wounds on the way to them, by my reading of it.

Specific excerpts:

honestly the firearms damage rules are probably one of the very worst things about 7th Sea since they break the combat system and require tacit agreement on everyone's part not to play well/intelligently within the game rules if a big lethal fight breaks out, since 4 characters deciding to coordinate their focus is all-but guaranteed to take anybody out of a fight

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 22:24

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

ah yes, a very clear difference from the otherwise low stakes scenario of your entire party drawing naked steel and attempting to shank l'Empereur :v:

I'm not saying the firearms rules ruin the game because the entire party is going to be blasting away in scenarios where it would be dramatically appropriate to have one guy throw down with the other suitor of his lady or whatever (where pistols would be raising the stakes in-genre vs. an honorable duel to first blood)

but in scenarios where you've got a deadly group combat (hardly an uncommon scenario in an RPG) it's an option that immediately presents itself to both sides and makes it trivial for a group of PCs or the GM to instantly remove the most daring/dastardly foes from combat

megane hits the nail on the head- the firearm rules ensure that taking out of genre actions are mechanically rewarded

a truly cinematic and genre-emulating game should encourage and reward cinematic play and adhesion to the genre and in this case at least 7th sea does just the opposite, relying on tacit agreement among the participants not to actually follow through on doing what's mechanically effective- it's just bad design, even if it never emerges in actual play

LGD fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Jul 17, 2018

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 23:33

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

MollyMetroid posted:

Once again, you *literally cannot kill in combat* and it's loving rare for the stakes of a combat in 7th Sea to be lethal, simply because there are so many limitations on how the GM can do killing.

Specifically:

-a Villain must be on the scene
-a PC must be reduced to Helpless
-the Villain must spend an entire action on trying to kill the Hero
-The Villain must spend a Danger Point, a limited resource
-Nobody else must decide to interfere using their action to prevent it.

You're not playing D&D murderhobos here. If you haven't got that "tacit agreement" down before you start playing, I don't know what to tell you.

I was using "deadly" as a shorthand way to designate combats where it would be appropriate, in setting, to pull a gun on someone, because once people have pulled swords and daggers and started a street brawl it's definitely a deadly conflict

the fact that characters almost never *actually* die in combat for genre reasons is largely immaterial, as is the fact that a Villain that a party decides to instantly remove from a combat via pistols isn't *actually* dead - they're still not able to participate in the scene anymore

e:

Comrade Gorbash posted:

The thing is, you don't need a tacit agreement to avoid the best tactics in combat. The simple fact is that the every party member gets to draw down on a single target and deal a bunch of dramatic wounds without them having a chance to respond is just not going to come up unless the players have done something to contrive it. Cythereal's example is the one to apply - if you've managed that, don't bother with combat, the party has already won via other dramatic actions.

The actual real world case in a game like this is that pistols are something that either gives you an edge or lets you delete one or two minor combatants per encounter. You aren't realistically going to be reloading in combat except in rare cases, and while occasionally you can come in with a brace of pistols on hand, much more often you may have one or two available. And all this assumes you actually hit with them.

That's why they deal dramatic wounds. Firing a pistol in a fight uses up a pretty significant resource. In D&D 4e parlance, they're encounter powers.

the "something" a party needs to do is invest extremely minimal character resources in knowing how to shoot a gun and deciding to pack one (or more) whenever possible, and then deciding that one of the Villains present at the scene is the most dangerous/detestable swordsman or sorcerer on hand - that might not necessarily be the Big Bad if they're a low Strength/High Influence type but the point is that there is nothing preventing a party (or group of Villains!) just instantly deleting any character they choose from a scene [though Hero points can counter this somewhat] by combining "encounter powers" in units of 4 (and note that everyone can decide how many "encounter" powers they each want to pack, within the limits of reason enforced by the GM)

accuracy does not come into it since there is no way to negate the dramatic wound from being shot at, which is part of what I mean by it only taking extremely minimal character resources- this isn't a rules exploit that requires a party to decide to all be expert gunmen and invest a lot in that, it's something that just requires the party to pick up a handful of small pistols and decide to use them (at which point they will almost certainly be more effective at disabling major foes than if they all decided to use the kickass swashbuckling skills they invested heavily in)

LGD fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jul 18, 2018

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 23:56

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

Comrade Gorbash posted:

This argument is dumb because the prior is wrong. Guns are very strong, yes, but five party members shooting the villain to initiate combat almost certainly won't actually defeat the villain, between misses and villain abilities to negate hits/wounds/otherwise gently caress with the situation.

It gives you a big advantage, yes, but it's not a casual win button. You really have to sell out on firearms specialization to have it work reliably, and then you're going to be sub-par at basically everything else, to the point that shooting things is pretty much going to be your only viable option.

just gonna clear this up- anyone saying that you need to "invest" in a "firearms specialization" and can "miss" absolutely does not understand how 7th sea rules work, full stop

for a clear illustration of this just look at the core book's example of actual play

7th Sea 2e, page 184 posted:

GM: Bustillo sneers at Brand. �I�ve come too far to be stopped by the likes of you! You�ll have that gem over my dead body!� She�ll spend her Raise and level her pistol at the mouthy Vesten.

Brand: Maybe I didn�t think this through...

GM: She spends a Raise and pulls the trigger. Brand, you take 1 Wound, and 1 Dramatic Wound from being shot.

Brand: Oof, that hurts! Can I spend a Raise to reduce those Wounds?

GM: Yes, you can spend a Raise to avoid the Wound, but not the Dramatic Wound. Not even Heroes can dodge bullets. Who has themost Raises?

also note that the villain actually isn't going to be able to do anything about it unless they're specifically a monster with the regeneration ability (in which case they'll quickly blow through all of the Danger points to survive, something that can be negated by just shooting them again)- human Villains don't get extra wounds/danger points don't negate dramatic wounds/there are not actually a plethora of ~~(i.e. any)~~ dramatic wound negating abilities for them to take

quote:

This whole discussion is based on a misunderstanding of the mechanics in question, and that's before we get to the fact that the 5 party members vs 1 villain situation is atypical for the kind of game this is anyways. If the party has managed to create that circumstance and the villain doesn't have the tricks to negate it - don't do combat! They almost certainly did a lot of work to create that situation and by pulling it off they've already won the encounter, same as you shouldn't bother having an 11th level D&D party fight level 1 goblins after they snuck around to the hidden back entrance of the evil fortress.

The game can already handle party members carrying around a couple of pistols each, even as powerful as they are. It's not going to negate encounters or rule out quip filled sword play.

it doesn't *need* to be 5 on 1- the point is that even in scenarios where the party is equally matched or outnumbered numerically, choosing to use the completely unprecedented and powergamey tactics of "carry pistols in a pirate/swashbuckling adventure setting" and "focus your attacks on the big threat" means any 4 characters can remove any other character from the scene with no recourse once per round (once for every pistol each of them carries)

they don't need to put in effort and they don't need to put in skill- in D&D terms any grouping of 4 level 1 commoners can use pistols to instantly kill an elder dragon or lich, and in turn a level 20 wizard PC can be taken out by 4 kobolds

that's actually why it's a problem- the power of heroes and villains doesn't really matter in the face of firearms and they're actually entirely capable of negating many encounters or eliminating opportunities for quip filled swordplay, and it's something that can be stumbled upon fairly easily (since again all it requires is that people have guns and notice how much better they are than anything else on a per-action basis)

I actually mostly quite like the new version 7th sea, it's just still a John Wick game- I don't know why people are so resistant to the idea that it has some underbaked rules elements that are broken in half and to my eye this is the most egregious

LGD fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jul 18, 2018

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 18:10

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

Comrade Gorbash posted:

There is literally a dueling style in the post above yours that can negate dramatic wounds from gunshots.

yeah I should remove the "any" there to be accurate, though I'll fully cop to not being aware of all the abilities in supplements, but a handful of abilities existing doesn't really change the nature of the criticism much

(for completeness I should also note I ignored the "hard to kill" quality (gives an extra dramatic wound) and some forms of sorcery (specifically glamor's bullet catch and mother's touch's regeneration) that would allow you to spend danger points to counter a limited number of gunshots)

LGD fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jul 18, 2018

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 18:34

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

Comrade Gorbash posted:

This is precisely my point. You're crafting a nightmare scenario that requires pretending a bunch of other mechanics in the game don't exist, and then saying other people don't understand the game.

Maybe the reason you're getting push back because you don't actually know what you're talking about.

nah, I can own it when I overstate things - there are a small handful of abilities a player or GM can pick from that can make pistols marginally less effective and can require the opposing force to scrounge up an extra shot or two

but with the sole exception of "hard to kill" those abilities are extremely not generic or common things (which imposes limits on credible opposition if you think this is the proper "counter" to gun supremacy), and with the sole exception of Bullet Catch they don't actually do anything to make pistol blasting less optimal vs. other approaches (and for those without the rules: this isn't because Bullet Catch is a particularly strong counter, it just only applies to thrown/shot objects rather than everything like regeneration)

to my mind that's a bit different from misunderstanding the core resolution mechanism vis-a-vis "missing" with guns being a possibility, or thinking using guns effectively requires substantial character investment when it manifestly doesn't

LGD fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 18, 2018

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 19:02

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

PurpleXVI posted:

This is actually what I'm doing with my own, certainly doomed homebrew at the moment because I'm tired of systems with 900 classes that each have one gimmick and exactly three and a half of which aren't useless or boring. Once it's something approaching done I should let someone here take a crack at making fun of it.

I'll just say that I think its way more important that the gimmicks you can access not be useless and boring in the first place (and you're not pigeonholed too hard) - an extremely broad "fighter" with endless false choices for build-defining feats isn't really different from a system with a bazillion useless specialty classes

if you haven't yet, I'd strongly suggest you take a look at how Shadow of the Demon Lord does it (however imperfectly) - it has 4 extremely broad base classes that bake in a lot of the assumed power for a role in a generic fashion (so you'll never be too underpowered), and then you select two classes as you level up (with no prerequisites) that give you more specific/defined gimmicks, with a rough minimum of combat power each (even for non-combat focused classes)

there are definitely substantial power differentials between different builds, but it does a good job both ensuring baseline competency and that characters have access to the gimmicks they want

# ¿ Aug 3, 2018 21:08

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:52

LGD: Sep 25, 2004

Halloween Jack posted:

Aztechnology is also at the forefront of cybermancy, so you can always bring back mooks as Zombie Bane.

(I should add that as a general rule, I hate the trope in Cyberpunk/Shadowrun of sending an elite death squad after the PCs with revenge as the rationale. You're expendable assets who don't know anything and that's the point)

I agree, but it really depends on what sort of game you're playing - games where shadowrunners need to be icy professionals who leave no trace and massive firefights downtown get treated as modern-day terrorist incidents are pretty different from games where the average level of societal violence is assumed to be "opening of Demolition Man" (which the game definitely supports given things like the number of gangs presented, prevalence of body armor, easy/cheap licensing of automatic weapons, multiple competing armed combat ambulance services, fiction featuring shadowrunners gunning down security, etc.)

I also think it's overused precisely because the players are supposed to be expendable assets - it's supposed to immediately makes it clear that the last job/GM's current storyline is a Big Deal and it's a pretty familiar genre fiction storyline that seems like it should inject some tension into the narrative

its fine as a very occasional device, but I think the problem is that a lot of GMs envision their campaign proceeding as a self-contained thing akin to a spy thriller/heist movie so it actually ends up occurring all the time as a result (along with the similarly troublesome "being set up/betrayed by an important NPC who should have your back due to being family/a mentor figure/a long-standing ally/bffs")

they're not necessarily bad devices (which is why they're used so much in the genres shadowrun emulates/incorporates), but they're such easy-to-use cliches for "exceptional circumstances" that they can easily feel routine/de rigueur - I think its something the game should caution against overusing (since both devices are much more effective when they're actually contrary to expectations rather than assumed/obligatory)

I'd honestly say that if you wanted to do a campaign starting with the overused "johnson sets up the team and puts them on the run" plotline it'd almost certainly be better to start in medias res immediately after or right as the team is getting screwed rather than playing it out

LGD fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Aug 6, 2018

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 18:46

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