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I like the *idea* of orders being set ahead of time and having limited options to change it. But drat, not like this
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Apr 4, 2025 16:16
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By popular demand posted:Actual armies heard about the KISS* principle, why haven't wargame designers?
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Apr 4, 2025 16:49
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HIS MAJESTY THE WORM In Actual Play, Part 2: The Crawl and Camp Phases In this episode of His Majesty The Worm in Actual Play, we’ll explore two more game phases. THE CRAWL PHASE The Crawl Phase is dungeon exploration. It’s where you spend most of your time when you aren’t wading through the game’s in-depth battle system. The Bond system is great, the second best I’ve ever seen in an RPG after Delta Green. It combines Delta Green’s direct mechanical incentivization for bond interactions with Unknown Armies 3’s player-on-player bond assignment system, while providing a menu of options that much better reflects how player characters actually relate to each other. You can set Bonds at the beginning but I like to wait until new players have had about an hour of interacting with the other characters before I show them the list of available bonds and tell them to pick one that reflects the relationship that’s already emerged. Bonds are consistently the most popular mechanic in the game. Someone in the OSR thread asked about chance of success on Tests of Fate. Between stat modifiers, situational bonuses, the ability to spend Resolve if you have no situational bonuses, and the ability to draw a second card if you gently caress up, the hit rate on skill tests is pretty good in practice. It's easy to get Favor on skill tests because everyone's rocking three Motifs that grant favor on tests that fit the theme. As in every RPG, the players assign the most skilled character to perform important tasks. Any time the group has a chance to decide who will attempt the test you're drawing at an effective +7. It's similar to Eclipse Phase or the old FFG 40k RPGs. If you're just making flat unmodified rolls your chances are abysmal, you'll poo poo your pants any time your mettle is tested. But once you understand how to modifier stack, you're laughing. It's only when someone gets caught off guard or the whole group has to make saving throws that widespread failure on non-pushed tests is common. Under controlled conditions the players usually succeed, and under uncontrolled conditions they usually fail.  The first dungeon realm explored by the Elite Underman Excavation Guild Characters in His Majesty The Worm have three currencies to manage. The first is Resolve, which you spend to activate Talent powers or to gain Favor when drawing cards. The players have so many other ways to get Favor that they only ever spend Resolve in truly desperate situations. Talent activation depends on your Path. Mages spend Resolve every time they cast a spell, meaning they can very quickly burn through all four points fast. You regen resolve by charging your Bonds through roleplay, then spending those charges in the Camp phase. There’s one Wizard in my campaign and he’s always kibitzing with the other players to charge his bonds, arguing with his rivals, telling his friends how much they mean to him, helping people with skill tests… Lore Bids are your flexible generic system that replaces the panoply of Knowledge skills (Local, Arcana, Religion…) which have accrued around modern dungeon crawlers. You can ask questions about anything related to your Motifs, or if you have a special power that entitles you to ask about other subjects. With three Motifs on tap most characters have a broad range of competencies and there’s at least one person who has a right to ask about any given thing in the dungeon. Ask a question, and if you get an answer from the DM you mark off one Lore Bid. You get four and they restore automatically after a Camp Phase, you don’t have to recharge them. Good mechanic, fits naturally into the flow of play and encourages players to refer back to their Motifs. Your third resource is XP. You use XP to activate any non-mastered Talents on your sheet, either ones from your own Path or from someone else’s Path if you got cross trained (City Action or Camp Action). Sink 7 XP into a Talent and you master it, meaning it no longer costs XP. XP comes from completing Contracts (1), accepting someone’s personal quest (3), completing someone’s personal quest (3) and various City actions like Marriage and Carousing (variable). Starting characters effectively have 3 XP because you take on someone’s quest at the beginning of the game. The rate of XP gain after that is determined by how hard it is to complete quests and contracts. So far I have made personal quests easier than the book implies they should be, able (but not guaranteed) to be completed in a single session of dungeon exploration. I did this because I felt that all the game’s mechanics should be on display in the first session, rather than reserved for followup sessions that might not happen if we didn’t like the game. This means that characters in my game are progressing faster than the implied rate in the book, but in practice it doesn’t seem to have produced a big spike in character power. The players who have the most XP due to regular attendance and carousing every city action have spent it conservatively. Transformative talents like Alchemy and Magic casting have a big opportunity cost because they’re gated behind the need to stuff your inventory with special items.  The Vampire Voivode and his entourage. The Meat Grinder is His Majesty The Worm’s version of the Overloaded Encounter Die. About a decade ago, a guy suggested using the same table to spawn wandering monsters, track resource depletion and provide dungeon exploration clues. Put everything on the same track so you don’t have to check a bunch of things that happen at different intervals (torches last for X turns, random encounters are checked every Y turns, the players get hungry after Z turns…) I was unfairly and cruelly dismissive toward CitizenKeen when he initially described the Meat Grinder. While I was familiar with the concept of the Overloaded Encounter Die, I had not actually run a game that used it before His Majesty The Worm. So how is it in practice? You all know I really like wandering monsters. They make your dungeon feel alive without exhaustive tracking of keyed monsters as they patrol around the map. Combined with encounter distance, reaction rolls, monster motivations and morale a good wandering monster system can create a broad array of friendly, violent or tense encounters. Besides light source depletion, the Meat Grinder combines wandering monsters with Curiosities (clues about the dungeon), Travel Events (something that materially affects dungeon exploration) and Quest Rumors (clue about the group’s currently chosen personal quest). I don’t find that randomly handing out clues in whatever room the players are in is less labor intensive or more helpful to the players than just putting those clues in dungeon rooms where they’re most relevant. Travel Events are interesting. The examples given are either some form of resource depletion (an item gets damaged by a stage hazard, someone gets a minor hiking injury on a failed skill test) or something that alters the battlespace in the event of a combat encounter (the floor of the room is unstable and you can fall into the crawlspace below). The resource depletion thing I’m not a huge fan of. I understand how it all fits into the game’s economy, forcing the players to charge Bonds so they can replenish depleted resources during the Camp phase. But I think a random table that spits out a “deplete X from your character sheet” result is just every lovely trap in every lousy dungeon crawler we all swore we’d never play again. It hits you and you lose some resource that you’ll get back when you rest, and you continue play like nothing happened. The developer even tells you not to do this on page 370 of the book, and he’s right! We’ll return to the topic of the Meat Grinder and wandering monsters when we discuss the Challenge Phase.  On the run from the Vampire’s rat servants, the Guild chop a Fly Demon to pieces How about the torch depletion part of the table? Well, you ever tell someone you don’t like [food], and they tell you “no you just haven’t had GOOD [food]”? So you go to the restaurant they tell you and order the thing they tell you and, surprise surprise, you still don’t like it? That’s me with tracking Light. For years I’ve considered it a waste of time. I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how atmosphere in RPGs works and you’re never going to create the real life feeling of being in a dark confined space by monitoring the depletion of an imaginary resource. I think as a method of applying time pressure it’s inferior to the wandering monster system, which produces danger and punishes dawdling without the need to track resources. And whenever I tell anyone this they say “torches are good, you just have to make tracking light matter!” His Majesty The Worm makes tracking light matter, and I still don’t like it. All it does is fill the players’ inventory spaces and hands. It adds an extra step to every interaction where I ask the players who’s holding the light source and then they get to continue doing whatever they’re doing. Technically you’re supposed to impose numeric penalties on players who stray too far away from the light, and have the guy holding the light narrate getting closer to help with any fine detail work, but I very quickly stopped doing it because it was such a gigantic pain in the rear end. In a way it’s freeing. I no longer have to feel like I’m missing out. I played a game that took torches seriously and gave them the best possible showing, and now I can confidently say it’s not for me.  The Guild trip and grapple the Vampire as his wives rush to his defense. You may remember that inventory management is a huge part of His Majesty The Worm. You need to track what’s in your hand, what’s on your belt, what’s on your backpack, and constantly erase and rewrite it all any time it changes. This is hit and miss. Nobody likes “Simon Says” DMing where you have to say you’re equipping the shovel to your hands and put the lantern on the ground before digging the hole. But the players also recognize that tracking cookpots and blocks of lard and tents and bedrolls and where they store their weapon on their body is foundational to the “slice of life” mechanics that they genuinely like. Speaking of slice-of-life elements, let’s talk about sex. Actually no, let’s talk about romance. In my experience the average RPG player is much more embarrassed by romance than by sex. They feel pathetic even discussing the prospect of their fictional character being attracted to another fictional character. In his Majesty The Worm, romance and relationships are a normal part of gameplay. Marriage is ⅓ of every human’s Arete quest, and an option offered by locations that can spawn during City creation. The Bond system offers a spread of possible romantic entanglements between player characters. This game is based on a bunch of anime and manga and webcomics where romance between adventurers is normal and accepted, not something to be ashamed of out-of-character. I respect the dev for having courage and encouraging the players to do the same. The Alchemy system is cool. This is a subsystem for Cups characters that gets its own chapter toward the end of the player facing rules. When you harvest the corpse of a monster for parts, you can use your Camp Action to turn those parts into one of three alchemical items: a Bomb (throw it at someone), a Potion (drink it yourself) or an Oil (smear it on equipment). The book provides a huge spread of examples for monsters in the bestiary and what you can turn them into. It’s very easy to improvise based on the prompts given and the players have really enjoyed their brief experiments with it. It reminds me of the Doctor from Esoteric Enterprises, which had an even looser flexible-but-mostly-improvised system for chopping up monsters and doing weird things with the parts.  The Vampire lures the Guild into the hippodrome, where the Skeleton Lancers attack I’ve never met a player who enjoyed dungeon Mapping, only a handful who reluctantly submitted to it as a chore. Going to a DM drawn map in roll20 and revealing portions using the fog of war tool was an immediate improvement in everyone’s enjoyment. His Majesty The Worm takes the next step and just gives the players a map of the dungeon area they’re currently in. It fits the paradigm of self-directed questing where the players already have some idea what they’re looking for. I don’t find secret doors that interesting but you can still include them if you like and just leave them off the map. Because His Majesty The Worm does not, for the most part, use precise measurements for most of its systems, your maps don’t have to be laid out on a grid and to-scale. This makes designing dungeons a lot easier since I can just draw whatever I want rather than using software or a grid. Even if you aren’t artistically inclined you can just do an Esoteric Enterprises style balls-and-sticks map with passages leading between abstract representations of rooms. CAMP PHASE Camping in the dungeon is practically free. It consumes one unit of food per character and one unit of wood for the entire group, both of which are in the lowest cost category of items. The chance of being attacked during your camp action is the same as being attacked walking into any dungeon room, and can be further reduced if a character takes the Patrol action. If you’ve got charged Bonds and you’ve got Resolve missing or damage in need of healing, you should camp. Even if only one guy needs to rest up, the entire group can take camp actions that give information about occupied dungeon rooms, bonus Resolve or even bonus Cards from Talents like High Cant… In my game the players didn’t camp at all until someone wanted to use Alchemy, which takes a Camp Action. After they realized the benefits they started doing it regularly. The basic economy of this game is similar to every dungeon crawler you’ve ever played. Explore, fight, maybe spend some consumables, rest and restore HP and powers in exchange for some trivial resource, repeat. The big difference is that camping is cheap and leaving the dungeon is punishing. We’ll get more into that in the City phase, but it tees up a discussion we’ll have in the next update: His Majesty The Worm’s economy is, for the most part, well-tuned in the context of the game system and the fictional world. The point of contention for me is whether it lines up with the game’s pacing out-of-character. Look forward to that in part 3: the Crawl Phase.
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Apr 4, 2025 17:12
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The solution to managing your light is incredibly simple once you realize it: torchspear. (Oglaf is an NSFW comic, but this page is safe.) I liked the way light worked in Darkest Dungeon. You could keep light very high to help boost morale, but that was more wasteful of supplies than keeping it at a lower level that was more neutral. Or you could let things get dark to find more loot but also risk very tough encounters. I think being able to choose a "light level" at camp might be a neat way of implementing that. A given dungeon would have a certain light level, and you could use supplies to increase the light level or magic to set it at whatever level you wanted.
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Apr 4, 2025 21:30
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  Drive-Thru RPG Store Page. Itchio Store Page. Okay, a dog isn't technically a monster, but the concept is offbeat enough that it's a worthy inclusion for this review thread. For those not in the know, Dungeon Crawl Classics is one of the most popular OSR games on the market. It has generous third party support which is further encouraged by the parent company Goodman Games. Zines are a particularly enduring form of product, and Breaker Press' Rabid Dogs was one such line. Designed to support the homebrew Stennard setting, one of their biggest hits was the Canine class. The idea sprung from a scenario when a PC died, but their animal companion survived. This is something that can easily happen in Dungeon Crawl Classics, on account that more than a few of its 0-level occupations give a PC a domesticated animal as their starting "equipment." Breaker Press eventually made an updated version of the Canine class as its own standalone product, which we'll be reviewing here. I will also note what has changed between the two versions near the end of this review. The Canine easily represents virtually any breed of dog. When it comes to supernatural powers and uncanny intelligence, the class is closest to Lassie in theme: the Canine can be far smarter than they seem, but in terms of story is still an "ordinary" animal. The class has a modest 1d6 hit points per level, cannot wield typical equipment but fights with bite and claw attacks which deal 1d4 damage, and gain access to Mighty Deeds of Arms and a Deed Die much like the Dwarf and Warrior. Most Canines are smaller than adult humans, so they can fit into areas most bipedal humanoids cannot access. While Canines can be equipped with armored coats, their baseline unarmored Armor Class is 12, and their movement speed is a nimble 40 feet (human average is 30 feet). While Canines can understand simple words and their meanings in most languages, they cannot speak save via barks and growls, which attentive people can get the gist of it. Without conventional weapons or magic to fall back on, Canines that become PCs must be lucky in order to survive, so they get better uses for spending Luck. Instead of gaining a flat +1 bonus for each point of Luck spent, a Canine adds a Luck Die for each point of Luck instead. The Luck Die is the same as their Deed Die, meaning it starts at a d3 at 1st level and climbs up by 1 (d4, d5, d6, etc) every level until 8th onwards, where it increases by 2, to a maximum of d16 at 10th level. They also recover lost Luck every night in the same manner as a Thief. Canines also use the Monster Critical Hit Table when they crit, and their saving throw progression is rather average all-around. On the roguish side of things, Canines can Sneak Silently and Hide In Shadows like a Thief, but they also get a unique skill, Detect and Follow Tracks, which works much the same as a Thief Skill but is for tracking the scent of other creatures and learning details about said creatures; such as when they were last in an area, and how many are in the group. The bonus a Canine receives on these skills is determined by a relevant ability score modifier, level, and alignment. Lawful Canines have the best progression when it comes detecting/following tracks but the worst at hiding; neutrals are the best at sneaking silently but worst at following/detecting tracks; and chaotic ones are the best at hiding but worst at sneaking. When it comes to Mighty Deeds of Arms, a Canine has access to any Deeds that would make sense. The book calls out several from the core book such as Disarming Attacks, Trips, and Throws. The class has two unique sample Deeds: Pounce, where they make a rushing attack at a target to knock them off-balance, and Tenacious Grab where they tightly bite the target as a grapple. The Pounce Deed’s greater effects can leave the target on the ground for longer and cause them to lose the use of their action die as potential results, while Tenacious Grab can impose automatic bite damage while the grapple’s maintained and even trigger a critical hit on higher results! Finally, the book wraps up with Canine Occupations & Other Tables. We get a d10 occupation table for determining the role they were raised for and thus their starting Trade Good. For example, a Herding Dog begins play with a rag doll, while a Tracking Dog has a favorite stick. We also get dog-centric equipment such as different types of armored coats (range from 0 to +3 AC), bells, brushes, collars, and the like. The +0 AC armor is a Warm Coat that makes the dog more comfortably subsist in cold environments. For differences between the more current class and the old one from Issue 1 of the Rabid Dogs Zine, the formatting in this one is more streamlined, such as combining the smaller size and fast speed into one paragraph rather than as two distinct class features. Pounce and Tenacious Grab originally functioned like Thief Skills rather than Mighty Deeds. They still had a Deed Die, but Pouncing and Grabbing were their own rules. In being reduced from 5 Thief Skills to 3, this allowed for a more balanced progression: for example, chaotic Canines originally had good progression in Pounce and Grab, but average in the stealth and tracking skills. Furthermore, the dog-specific equipment didn’t exist back then, either, and the wording for Canine language was eased up on. For the latter example, the original text implied that the player would have to pantomime or flat out not be able to get across all but the most simple concepts. Canine 2.0 has it so that they cannot speak in the conventional sense as their major limit. Overall Thoughts: In terms of party role, the Canine is a sort of Warrior-Thief hybrid. Its d6 and Deed Die make it sturdier than the latter class in a straight-up fight, but it lacks the staying power of a Dwarf or Warrior who get much access to much better gear and have larger Hit Dice. And while a Canine can do a decent job at remaining undetected, its lack of other iconic Thief Skills such as Find Traps and Climb Sheer Surfaces means that they can’t wholly replace that class either. The Canine’s ability to Detect and Follow Tracks is perhaps its most unique niche, and can be quite useful in determining the presence of nearby and fleeing enemies. Their ability to spend and recover Luck faster and with better bonuses to rolls can pair nicely with their Mighty Deeds in making the most of an otherwise middling attack roll result. If there are any major weaknesses or shortcomings, it’s that the Canine lacks any significant form of ranged attack. Additionally, their lack of opposable thumbs means that a lot of unique gear and magic weapons that PCs recover in adventures may be unusable by the party dog. Relatedly, their only major ability to deal damage coming from their natural attacks means that enemies that are dangerous just to touch or grab will be extra-deadly to Canines. And while it can be assumed that non-Canine PCs will understand their four-legged companion, GMs who enforce the limited speech can make social interactions in general a lot more difficult for them to contribute. For these reasons, while the Canine does look to be a fun and unconventional idea without any significant balance issues in and of itself, I’m not sure of how well they can last in a longer campaign. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Apr 7, 2025 |
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Apr 5, 2025 05:41
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JcDent posted:
It's a verse from a Slayer song, "War Ensemble" Sport the war, war support The sport is war, total war When victory's a massacre The final swing is not a drill It's how many people I can kill
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Apr 5, 2025 08:53
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Oh, I understand as much, I was trying for another layer on the "illegible lyrice" joke
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Apr 5, 2025 12:55
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I really like the idea of a canine class, although I'd probably allow them to wield bladed weapons in their mouths
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Apr 6, 2025 01:49
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Fuligin posted:I really like the idea of a canine class, although I'd probably allow them to wield bladed weapons in their mouths When I’ve kicked around the idea of canine PCs, I’ve just kinda assumed that they’re exceptional specimens and granted them two things: one they can speak normally because gently caress charades bullshit, and two, their mouth/paws/body can manipulate objects as if they had one hand, so they can do a lot of stuff but not everything. If they have armor harnesses it’s assumed that they can don it themselves by rolling around and working the straps and poo poo as necessary and they can use a knife or cast spells if they want who gives a poo poo? Having a canine body still presents more than enough challenges when dungeon delving. You’re unlikely to find much treasure that you can use, climbing a rope or sheer cliff is right out, picking locks and disarming traps designed to be manipulated by someone with two hands is difficult at best, etc.
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Apr 6, 2025 02:28
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You know, if you're a cyborg dog, most of these problems go away.
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Apr 6, 2025 02:36
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Fuligin posted:I really like the idea of a canine class, although I'd probably allow them to wield bladed weapons in their mouths I mean, if you want to play as Koromaru, I'm sure there's rules for it in Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Conception.
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Apr 6, 2025 04:52
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Snorb posted:I mean, if you want to play as Koromaru, I'm sure there's rules for it in Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Conception. It is in fact trivially easy to play as a magic dog, though I'm not sure there's any that have swords as well
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Apr 6, 2025 12:44
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Pathfinder 2e added an 'awakened animal' heritage that plays somewhat fast and loose as to how anthropomorphic you have to be though hands and legs are highly suggested.
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Apr 6, 2025 17:00
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Kurieg posted:Pathfinder 2e added an 'awakened animal' heritage that plays somewhat fast and loose as to how anthropomorphic you have to be though hands and legs are highly suggested. 
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Apr 6, 2025 18:58
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HIS MAJESTY THE WORM In Actual Play, Part 3: The Challenge Phase Welcome back to His Majesty The Worm. It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, THE CHALLENGE PHASE Quick refresher: the Challenge Phase is a hidden information card bidding game, like the Battlestar Galactica or The Thing board games, where the players try to make optimal use of their hands and help each other without revealing exactly what cards they're carrying. The action economy lets the players and monsters take bonus actions out of order if they have the appropriate suited cards. It's rare that you get to do exactly what you want, but you never feel like you can't do anything and you never feel like your turn is wasted. His Majesty The Worm is the only game I’ve played where the DM plays to win. In most RPGs the DM has essentially perfect information about the players' combat actions, and if they acted directly to counter that the game would be unwinnable due to the massive information asymmetry. In this game, the DM is not supposed to know what’s in the players’ hands or their initiative cards at the beginning of the round. The rules author envisions the DM engaging in a complex game of bluffing to ferret out what the players are doing and counter it. On the player side it’s supposed to be like Battlestar Galactica, where the players can hint at the status of their hand but can't say exactly what they’ve got. In practice the hidden information element often falls by the wayside because the players inadvertently reveal what they’re packing to the whole table. There are also monster stat blocks that override specific tactical considerations, stating that reckless monsters always play low initiative cards to go first, always attack under certain circumstances…   The Fire Giant Forge The DM Mulligan is a lousy kludge solution. It’s possible for the DM to draw a hand of cards and have no legal moves, because the Major Arcana can’t be played for initiative or for most suited actions. If that happens you discard your hand and try again. Problem is, there are only twenty one cards in the Major Arcana, and a third of them are Greater Dooms. If you’ve got a lot of monsters who need initiative cards and you’re drawing extra cards for their actions (because they outnumber the players or they meet one of the other conditions to get extra cards) then you can quickly exhaust the Major Arcana. If that happens you reshuffle it. Dumping your hand because you have no legal moves isn’t the end of the world but it’s an obvious copout. My guess is the dev tried a bunch of fixes like further subdividing the Major Arcana into two decks for combat, but found that caused cascading problems elsewhere in the game. Speaking of getting extra cards, let’s talk about Action Economy. The monsters don’t get many cards. Unless they outnumber the players or have special monster types in their roster, they only get three cards for actions once initiative is accounted for. Combined with the Lesser/Greater Doom system that prevents ⅓ of the DM’s deck from being used for most things, this means the monsters are starved for actions. In a fair fight they don’t stand a chance. Groups of monsters can all act at the same time using a single card, either on their turn or as a minor action, meaning it’s not completely hopeless for them. A mob of attackers can distribute damage and debuffs across a party, or gang up on a single guy. The mass attack system deals increasing damage as thresholds of monsters outnumbering players are passed, so a group of five beasts focusing one guy doesn’t just instagib him. Large or Elite monsters also give the DM bonus cards to play with. They typically have special powers they can activate with Greater Dooms, meaning they can actually use all their cards to harm the players.  The Fire Giant family The Roughhouse action is crazy strong. Start with a solid menu of options that let you disarm, immobilize and debuff the enemy. Add a special menu of options from the Fight Dirty talent that any Pentacles character can use, letting them break enemy weapons or silence spellcasters. Clearing debuffs is an unsuited action according to the DM advice, but it costs a card and cards are a much scarcer resource for the DM than for the players. If you outnumber the enemy you should always Roughhouse, they’ll never get a word in edgewise. Weapon balance is all over the place. Daggers and Maces are the best. Daggers let you deal piercing damage to Roughoused enemies. Maces (or hammers) deal two points of damage if the value of your attack action is double the target’s initiative, which gives you lots of opportunities to pile on the pain. I haven’t seen ranged weapons get a ton of use, but I haven’t been as fastidious as I should be about dividing the battlefield into lots of little zones for the players to traverse. Swords and Spears aren’t that great, riposting is rarely as good as just attacking the enemy. Flails win ties against shields, which is such a niche use case you’re not going to remember it even if it comes up. It’s hard to balance weapons against anything that increases raw damage. Inventory Management in combat is simple for most characters. Keep a weapon in hand and maybe a shield in the other and you're golden. If you’ve got consumables, stick them in your quick belt slots so you can easily retrieve them. For mages it’s more complicated. Casting spells requires holding a reagent in your hand. Grabbing an item from your belt is an unsuited action you can do with any card, but taking one out of your backpack requires a Cups card. You’ve got four belt slots and two hands, so you can hypothetically enter battle with half your spell list in easy reach. If you’re attentively managing your inventory up to the point you enter combat, you’re probably fine. If not you’ll be left fumbling for items while the battle rages around you.  The Guild scouts the Fire Giant Forge My beef with the Challenge Phase is all about pacing. For me, the dividing line in a dungeon crawler is whether combat is brisk enough to be dropped into the game at any given moment through a wandering monster system, or beefy enough that you have to stick to set piece encounters. His Majesty The Worm is written like a brisk wandering monster game, but combat is way too chunky and involved. The economies of resource depletion and regeneration all work in the fiction and in the rules, but they don’t work with the amount of table time it all takes. This is my single biggest problem with the game. Combat takes a long time because of the Minor Action and Interrupt system. Every single action prompts a full table of players to shuffle through their hands looking for the optimal play. This improves over time as the players get more familiar with the action system, but there's a limit to how quickly it can be done because the value of a hand of cards changes with every action everyone else takes. Even if everyone is on the ball and ready to go when the call for minor actions goes out, there's always that extra step of checking what you want to do against the legal moves you have available and the latest battlefield conditions. Multiply that by four player turns and however many monsters/monster groups you got, and things are going to take a while. You’ve got your mitigating factors like the morale system to stop things from becoming a total slog. Monsters outside dumbass undead and berserkers are not supposed to fight to the death, and in my experience the players will also run away at the first sign they’re losing a battle of attrition. This is good because there’s a lot of HP to chop through in His Majesty The Worm. Outside of a couple special weapons and monster abilities most things in the game do a single point of damage, so even a small group of fodder enemies can take a while to whittle down.  Breadrick loots the bedroom and Candella prepares to shove the Duergar off the balcony while the Hellhounds rush to the second floor At the five session mark I've got players who like the battle system and players who tolerate it because they like other aspects of the game. Outside the core of regulars we've got a rotating cast of new players, and it's possible some of them aren't coming back because they dislike how long the combat system takes compared to everything else. His Majesty The Worm is the only game I've ever enjoyed that required me to learn a separate vocabulary of actions. You can't just walk up to the enemy and hit them on your turn, you have to know which combination of cards allows you to do that and when. One of my favorite parts is translating normal D&D monsters into Worm-speak. The Umber Hulk's confusion gaze forces you to draw your cards face down. The Mind Flayer forces you to show your cards to the DM. The Fire Giant can Displace enemies an infinite number of spaces with the Roughhouse action, allowing her to throw people down wells like the guy in G3… I like dungeon design a lot, but this is the only game where I’ve ever enjoyed Encounter Design. We can talk about this more in the DM section of the book. One thing you can do to help your players is annotate the Minor Arcana with each card’s value in Arab numerals. Hypothetically it should be easy for the players to remember all the Face Cards (Page 11, Knight 12, Queen 13 King 14). In practice every aspect of His Majesty The Worm is already designed to create friction and you really don’t need player memory issues adding more. Rather than count on everyone else being on the ball, take direct action to solve the problem.  I would not do this with a nice deck, but I got some cheap tarot cards from the shelf at Half Price Books that I use for the Minor Arcana. This leads to my other advice, use different decks for the Minor and Major Arcana During the battle phase the table very quickly becomes strewn with loose cards. It’s easy for the Minor and Major Arcana to be scooped up and deposited in the same discard pile at the end of the round. You can try and enforce strict card hygiene to make sure every card is quickly stored in the appropriate heap, or you can solve the problem yourself. The amount of time taken to resolve even a single action and cycle of reactions means the players often forget what they put down for initiative. Hypothetically it's easy to remember one number, in practice even experienced players will forget what they put down. Remind them to periodically check their hole cards, and do the same with the monster initiative cards you put down. At the beginning of the game, but even a few sessions in, it’s common for players to spend most of the challenge phase face down in their Challenge Action Reference Sheets, especially when the call for Minor Actions goes out and they’re not sure if they’ve got the card they need. You should just ask them what they want to do, then tell them the suit of card they need. If they don’t have what they need it’s ok to hang on to their cards rather than taking a minor action just for the sake of doing something. Actions taken on the player turn are more powerful since you don’t have to match the suit and get to add the relevant statistic.  Gary the Mage covers the group’s retreat, narrowly surviving being thrown into the forge by the Giantess Finally, I’ve never seen a player use The Fool correctly. You’re supposed to play it alongside an action, at any time during a combat round, to turn that action into an Interrupt. In practice, even after repeat explanations, they usually play their Main Action, do one Minor Action and end the round with The Fool still in their hand. My experience is that RPG mechanics which “break the rules” or run parallel to an existing system are typically sidelined or forgotten in actual play. I’m thinking of the metacurrency economy in Dune 2d20, which had two separate pools of points: Momentum and Determination. Momentum is used for everything, while Determination is used as a fallback metacurrency when Momentum won’t cut it, and has its own subsystem for spending and regeneration. In practice the players are so laser-focused on managing the Momentum economy that they never spend Determination, absent a level of prompting that basically amounts to playing the game for them. Our next phase will be the CITY PHASE and maybe some of the DM section. Glazius posted:I liked the way light worked in Darkest Dungeon. You could keep light very high to help boost morale, but that was more wasteful of supplies than keeping it at a lower level that was more neutral. Or you could let things get dark to find more loot but also risk very tough encounters.
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Apr 9, 2025 19:45
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mellonbread posted:The Roughhouse action is crazy strong. Start with a solid menu of options that let you disarm, immobilize and debuff the enemy. Add a special menu of options from the Fight Dirty talent that any Pentacles character can use, letting them break enemy weapons or silence spellcasters. Clearing debuffs is an unsuited action according to the DM advice, but it costs a card and cards are a much scarcer resource for the DM than for the players. If you outnumber the enemy you should always Roughhouse, they’ll never get a word in edgewise. Want to highlight this - the Roughouse action along with stuff like Displace being easy to inflict gives fights a really nice physicality. I saw more grapples/shoves and more "embodied" action in one fight of Worm than I saw in 8 sessions of Daggerheart (which has a traditional D&D-like combat loop).
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Apr 9, 2025 19:57
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Ahhhh his majesty the worm. I actually do like it's light system as a "you haven't played a good light system!" in so much as torch tracking is the "nothing happens" of wandering monsters, nothing happens, ergo the timer counts down, move on. I like a lot of things actually for being the OSR game that actually tells you all the assumed processes that go into an OSR game, and for that i give it a lot of respect. ......i do not like the challenge phase.
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Apr 10, 2025 22:39
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This is wild to me. HMTW is the only F&F I ever finished writing, so it holds a special place in my heart. I found everything outside the challenge phase fine, but the Challenge Phase was just sublime at our table. One of the most vivid and dynamic combat systems I’ve ever run.
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Apr 14, 2025 04:17
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CitizenKeen posted:This is wild to me. HMTW is the only F&F I ever finished writing, so it holds a special place in my heart.
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Apr 14, 2025 17:28
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mellonbread posted:Is it finished? The last post says "NEXT TIME: Underworld Creation" Wut. I wrote them all up. Let me look into this this week. I hang my head in shame. Related: So is inklesspen / letsyouandhimfight are defunct? Has anything risen to take its place? Mors Rattus did a complete write-up of the Infinity line, yes?
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Apr 14, 2025 17:51
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Believe so
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Apr 14, 2025 18:37
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CitizenKeen posted:This is wild to me. HMTW is the only F&F I ever finished writing, so it holds a special place in my heart. I could see some of the difference here being between people coming from an OSR background vs a more 5e-ish background and expectations of how much can get accomplished in a session. For people coming from a background where combat is often avoided and relatively quick when it does happen, the challenge phase in HMTW can feel like a huge derail. For people coming from a background where the expectation is that most sessions are built around a small number of setpiece combats, the challenge phase just creates really dynamic interesting fights. I like the challenge phase in a vacuum, but in the bi-monthly HMTW game I'm playing it does feel like it can eat up a bit much of the session. The game has a lot of cool ideas, but I'm not sure what its staying power is going to be purely because it feels like exploration progress is going so slow.
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Apr 14, 2025 21:21
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Snorb posted:I have absolutely no idea why anyone would want to engage with that chart. Just looking at that is insanity.
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Apr 16, 2025 18:37
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Halloween Jack posted:Some of us have nostalgia for Final Fantasy Legend. Yeah, but you didn't have to deal with triple fusions, special fusions, or fusion accidents in Final Fantasy Legend. I'm presuming you get to in Tokyo Conception.
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Apr 17, 2025 05:20
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 Part 3: The Iron Kingdoms.... for real Prior to the Orgoth invasion, humanity had a complicated relationship with Magic. It was either a gift from the divine via the shamans and the clerics of the gods, or a heretical abomination wielded by the lords of Morrdh and followers of Thamar. So when the first human arcanist was born in 137 BR, roughly 400 years after the orgoth invasion started, it was not met with open arms by the humans Or the Orgoth. The Orgoth for their part slaughtered her entire family line, but it did not prevent sorcerers from appearing all over western Immoren. More importantly was the discovery that many had the potential to become arcanists, they just needed to be taught. An early arcanist named Sebastien Kerwin penned the first dissertations that would become the foundation of Human Arcanistry, disguising them on treaties on alchemy, which the Orgoth viewed as beneath their notice. Meanwhile in Ios, things were not going well. In 150 BR, the priests of every god but Scyrah went loving insane, lashing out in fits of mania or falling into catatonic fugues. The Priests of Scyrah tried to help their colleagues to no avail. More alarmingly the priests who died from their affliction rose up as spectral undead known as riven, and elves started being born without souls. Eventually the goddess Scyrah returned to Ios quietly and without explanation, slipped into the fane of Lacryr with little ceremony and remained there under the watch of her priests. She spoke little between her long periods of slumber and offered no explanation as to what happened to her brethren gods. The elves believed that somehow the rise of human arcanists were responsible. They weren't exactly wrong, but also it's still the elves' fault. We'll get to it. The rebellion started in earnest in 1 AR (Duh) when an Orgoth governor demanded a tithe of slaves to be chosen by lots. As the slaves were chosen it became increasingly obvious that the priests of Morrow and Menoth were being almost exclusively targeted. The citizenry rose up and overwhelmed the Orgoth, taking the city and placing the governor's head on a pike. Their rebellion was eventually quashed but the greater rebellion had begun and could not be so easily wiped out. The Alchemists of the Order of the Golden Crucible invented firearms in 28 AR, refining their design in secret until 86AR When the city of Leryn managed to win it's independence and hold firm despite the orgoth outside their walls. The first city since Caspia to do so. In 83 AR a plague known as Rip Lung spread through Immoren, affecting humans and orgoth alike. The orgoth put entire cities of dead to the torch in an effort to halt the spread but this just raised the ire of the rebellion even more, as cremation without the oversight of the priests was thought to imperil the soul's journey to urcaen. What saved the rebellion was an Arcanist and Alchemist named Corben who created a cure and spread it amongst the human nations. His ascension to divinity at the side of Morrow legitimized the arcanists in the eyes of the church. From that point on they started offering shelter to the arcanists, smuggling them through underground tunnels between houses of worship and allowing the magic rebellion to proceed in secret under the eyes of a city's governor. In 149 AR the Khardic horselords drove the Orgoth out of Korsk. And in 164 the leaders of the rebellion founded the Council of Ten. While primarily a human alliance it also included a Trollkin. The Orgoth were not kind to the Dhunian races, viewing them as little more than animals and driving them west into the thornwood, but only the Trollkin joined the rebellion. In 191 AR the first Collossal warjack strode out of the foundries in Caspia, soon followed by five others. These were ridiculously massive machines, unlike the warjacks of the 'modern day', but were similar in function. They still needed to be guided by an arcanist, and their cortexes were incredibly crude. Each Collossal needed to be followed by a small army to protect the arcanists who were driving them, forming the foundations of modern Immoren combat doctrine. And by 201 AR, the Orgoth had been driven from the continent, never to return Until 10 years after the timeframe of the most recent RPG Printing The Iron Kingdoms were formed by the Council of Ten by the Corvis Treaties. Khador in the north, Cygnar in the south, Ord in the west, and Llael in the east. All were happy with this arrangement except the Khards, who wanted to go back to the borders of their old empire (which included Ord and Llael) but in the wake of the rebellion, and with their own collossal foundries having been destroyed by the Orgoth, they had no way to actually enforce these demands. Next time: Catching up to the 'modern day'.
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Apr 23, 2025 16:43
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Sorry for the delay, it's been a miserable month and this is not exactly light reading, particularly when I'm summarizing and cross referencing four different books.
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Apr 23, 2025 16:44
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It's all right buddy, do whatever it takes to leave the bad days behind. The review can wait.
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Apr 23, 2025 19:17
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Lemon-Lime posted:Healing is fairly simple: taking a Rest (camping for the night, a long period of mostly uneventful travel, etc.) clears all Marks and Harm (unless you were Dropped – in which case the Harm pool has to be rolled to heal). Conditions with a pool associated get their pool rolled when someone or something treats that pool (removing 1-3s, like any other diminishing pool). Rest counts as a source of treatment for Conditions when it makes sense in the fiction. Looks like I wasn't the only one complaining about the rules for healing Harm in Grimwild - they just pushed out an updated PDF that removes healing pools for Harm entirely (for anyone who cared). The new system is much simpler (and better!):  You also can't spend Spark to downgrade Rattled to a Vex any more (I thought it was nice that you could, but the same thing should exist for Bloodied), but Vex outbursts no longer take +1t to the roll (so now Vex only forces you to pick one of four responses, instead of doing that and also making any action rolls more likely to fail). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Apr 23, 2025 |
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Apr 23, 2025 20:35
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Whirling posted:Many words about space magic mixing with hard sci-fi I'll be honest with you, I've never run Lancer in its default setting. The setting I have run it in is one of my own where magic is explicitly real, but is treated more like a science and the bounds of what it can and can't do are pretty well defined. That said, from what I know, Lancer is mostly hard sci-fi, but it doesn't seem that way. Even the spaceships use a bunch of paracausality nonsense in their own scale of combat (yes, ship to ship combat exists in Lancer and it is rad), and the stuff about the setting that is hard sci-fi is generally beyond the limits of what that space magic can do. The system does have Bonds, special powers that Lancers can access, but none of them are magical. You definitely aren't getting a healing spell after a game. While I haven't dug into the lore (I intend to do that here so we can suffer together), I kind of got the sense that while the quantum space magic is very powerful and seems prevalent, what it can actually DO is limited by its very nature, and it is dangerous to muck around with. Practically every Frame that uses some weird space-magic bullshit has, as part of its fluff, some horrid disaster mentioned in passing, that the product is very dangerous even to its pilot, and/or that the creator is utterly horrified by what they have created. Another thing to keep in mind is that the mechs and warships are generally where the weird space magic lies, excepting things like NHPs... And the average person in the setting is unlikely to come across ANY of this stuff, ever, in their entire lives. We only see so much of it because we have the top-down view as readers of the game. Hell, even most of the NPC mechs are completely normal, and the grand majority of pilots in the setting are in one of those, not the incredible monstrosities that are PC Frames. Two of the most dangerous NPC units in the game are the bog-standard "I shoot you now" damage dealer and a tank. Not a magic tank, not a superheavy tank, just the average tank you see on the battlefield in this setting. Just a tank. Personally, that says to me, "it doesn't matter how much space magic you have, if a tank wants you dead you're in serious danger". And I'd personally say that's pretty hard on the Moh's scale. Still, if Lancer isn't for you, it isn't for you. I'm just throwing my own two cents in.  But uh, I'm back. Dunno when my next post will be, or where I'll go from here, but I'm still trying. The world has not exactly been in a good place lately, and neither have I, but maybe things like this are what I need to focus on instead of those things. So, last we left off, we did the Heracles, so now it's time for... Intercorp posted:Nestor  I may have spoken a little too soon about the Heracles being the flagship product of Intercorp, but in my heart, it is, not the Nestor. So whatever. Either way, stat-wise, the Nestor is basically exactly what its fluff implies: An Everest clone but with its own identity. With its basic stats, that's hardly noticeable: The Nestor has identical stats to the Everest, save that it sacrifices 1 point of base Heat Cap for 1 point of Armor, which is fair, honestly. Everything else is the same, even its mounts are a mirror match. But its traits are where it starts to diverge. The Nestor not matching the Everest or Sherman make sense because it's not quite as focused on being a Frame that can do everything, or being an all-rounder with a really big gun. Instead, the Nestor can be half of a Raleigh and reload all its weapons with Loading once a scene, and it can go to ground as a Free Action and get both hardcover and +1 ACC on a ranged attack. Which certainly aren't bad traits. If you want an Everest, but want to focus more on survivability than mobility, the Nestor is your Frame. You'll still have to be in a GMC mech until LL2, so it's more like a successor to the Sagarmatha, mechanics wise, but more selfish in its abilities. But where the Nestor shines in truth is how hard its pilot can push it. Unlike the Heracles, the Nestor is outright designed to be pushed to its limits near-constantly, and still come out more or less intact. Its Core Power reflects this: on popping that CP the Nestor becomes immune to most status effects and refuses to even acknowledge major damage, ignoring the effects of the next Structure or Overheating (I think they mean Reactor Stress here) checks. And on top of that, any weapon that has Ordnance loses it, allowing the Nestor to power through firing a BFG while scooting onward without pause. That's pretty impressive in my opinion! Play a Nestor if you want to be the Little Mech That Could.   License I Serrated Machete: It's kind of weird that the literal first thing you get out of a mech that seems to be entirely focused on ranged combat is a melee weapon... But it's a THROWN melee weapon, so maybe you can do some weird throwing build with a Nestor that'd do great. Either way, the Serrated Machete is extremely reliable damage-wise, and that's not just because it has the Reliable tag. It has as much stable damage as it does die size, which means on average it'll actually probably be doing slightly more damage than most Main melees, since they usually do 1d6 or 1d6+1. Despite being on the goddamn Nestor, this is a great License to dip into if you want a weapon for a melee build that you can really rely on to be consistent. Cushioned Cockpit: This on the other hand is more the Nestor's speed. Being Stunned by Structure means will only mean you lose standard movement, Overcharge, and the ability to Barrage. You can do everything else as long as you have this system. It's also only 1 SP, and for a situation that is definitely going to happen on a semi-regular basis. License II Ripjaw Particle Cannon: In one form, this weapon is a cannon that does less damage than most other cannons, for the sake of gaining Reliable 3. But the other mode is almost identical to the Death Head's Railgun, just with Loading instead of Heat 2 (Self) and gaining Reliable 3. I'd say it's a fair trade-off, Loading is a harsher negative tag than Heat 2 (Self). It's a really solid weapon, for that, and it benefits from the Nestor's traits. It could also be a great idea for a Raleigh, if you want to run a Raleigh as Artillery. Trajectory Reconstruction Matrix: For the low price of 2 SP, 1 Heat, and checks notes being targeted by a ranged attack, the most common type of attack in the game, you get to inflict Lock On to the aggressor for free. Sure. This is kind of bananas, actually. There is absolutely not a single Frame or Build in the entire game that wouldn't want this. The only rubs here are that it's 1/round, which isn't even really a problem and that you might not have enough SP to fit it into your build. That's it. What? It's two LLs in and you might not want to spend two LLs just on getting this? Well, it's a good thing you get access to at least one other thing that will benefit your build no matter what it is out of the bargain as well, right? Okay, I can see that you might not be able to spare 2 LLs for this if your build is really specific, but c'mon, is it really? License III Pylos Class NHP: "Hey where did the rest of this go in the Licenses image" It goes here because this needs its OWN image.  Just... Soak this in for a bit. This makes the Nestor go from a mere Striker to a Striker/Controller who supports their entire Wing with a plethora of combat options that drastically enhance the ability of the team to both survive and ensure the other side doesn't survive. It is an incredible System that deserves its steep SP cost and the fact that your mech can go Sergeant Hartman on you whenever you take Structure or Stress. Even with Trajectory Reconstruction Matrix in the Nestor's Licenses, this is a big contender for the place of the best gear on the Nestor Licenses. Even if you're not in the Nestor, if your character regularly takes the position of the party's "leader", this is one of the best Systems you can take for that particular role. And keep in mind that while you can only take a particular Reaction once in a round, these are not the options for a single Reaction. Every single one of these is its OWN Reaction which you gain access to for a Quick Action. One Quick Action gives you five entire Reactions for four situations that are absolutely going to happen in any particular round, and one that is at least mildly likely to happen in a round. That's one action for four loving actions at least. Underslung Attachment: So in essence, you get to attack with another weapon for free when you use one particular other weapon, as if that weapon were an Auxiliary. It can't be Heavy or Superheavy, but it can be a Main weapon, so... Yea. The fact that you can't make another weapon attack is kind of a steep cost, but the trick here is that this Mod works best not on the Nestor, but on any Frame that doesn't have multiple Main/Flex/Heavy mounts on it, which allows them to get the effects of a Barrage in a Quick Action. Generally, Frames like that have better things to do with their actions than using them both on a Barrage, like Tech Attacks, so this Mod actually works very well on Frames like the Emperor or Goblin. It's still great for the Nestor, mind you; if you also have the Pylos Class NHP, it allows you to fire two weapons and still get all those Reactions. The issue is that the cost of both in SP will take a pricey amount of your build's, so be ready for that. Next up: A Frame I don't really understand but still kind of love, the Orpheus! Intercorp posted:Orpheus  For the most part, statwise, the Orpheus is your quintessential tech-mech. It has a big save target, it has high E-Defense and Tech Attack, but has very little in the way of survivability, and will take structure damage from an Assault or Ronin just looking at it. Its base Heat Cap is distressingly low for a Tech-focused frame, though, and its Sensors is approximately merely just outside the mech in all practicality. But it DOES have a bunch of Speed, and its Evasion is incredible, as is its Base SP. The reason for the oddities of the Orpheus compared to other hackers is that the Orpheus is an odd Frame all around. It can Jockey other mechs, climbing on them and shredding them while also being much more successful at hacking them. While it is liable to get squished in this situation, a jockeying Orpheus is going to very quickly make the mech it's on wish it had stayed very far away, as it is now both a sitting duck to the Orpheus's wing AND being hacked constantly. The lack of weapon mounts doesn't really hurt the Orpheus in any way, since it's going to be likely spending all its actions on Jockey and Tech. The Core passive allows the Orpheus to support allies as well as harm enemies, letting it use Jockey to grant Overshield and clear Heat for a single Quick Action! A lot of the License gear supports this just as much as climbing on an enemy. Not to mention being on a wingmate is generally safer than being on an enemy, but keep in mind that the Orpheus has pitiful Sensors. So unless that ally is in melee or CQB range of an enemy, you won't be doing much offense in this situation. The Core Power, on the other hand, allows you to control the mech you're riding on, forcing them to act the way you want. And afterwards, the target will only have a single Quick Action left, if any at all. This shuts down most Artillery NPCs entirely, disallowing them from doing anything at all to benefit their side, and being an active detriment to their own... And best of all, a mech controlled in this way has very little ability to fight back and harm its new owner. Play an Orpheus if you want to be the master of puppets.  Isaac can do a pole dance if he wants to.  License I Surgical Implants: Not very effective weapons, but that's not really the main purpose of them. The main purpose is to fix other mechs to keep them free of impairments so they can work as effectively as possible. Considering that the Orpheus has one weapon mount that is not going to see a lot of action(s), this seems like the perfect choice for that slot. Overarching Principles: United We Stand basically provides every ally within a hex of the target soft cover, as well as the target itself. I phrased it like that to make it clear that this is incredibly effective for reenacting the beatdown scene in Vento Aureo as well as providing the wing some tactical benefits from staying together. Divided We Fall prevents a target from benefiting from cover. I phrased it like that to make it clear you can totally use United We Stand on an enemy and then Divided We Fall to make the beatdown even worse. License II Systemic Ambivalence: Companion can't really be used offensively like United We Stand can be, but it's still a nice effect that will help an ally get some juice to their attack rolls while providing cover for the Orpheus. False Friends lets the Orpheus do the opposite of that for an enemy, but instead of only getting the effect once, the enemy has the effect as long as the Orpheus is either next to them or Jockeying them. This kind of makes False Friends a little more powerful, but Companion is really helpful if the Orpheus needs to back off to cooldown and/or recover HP. Near-Threat Spring Actuators: Insert Sonic spring sound here. It's pretty great for escaping from Jockeying an enemy mech or getting from Jockeying an ally to a nearby enemy to start ripping them apart, all without putting yourself at any risk. And as a Protocol, without an action, either. License III Crowning Ceremony: Rightful Heir gives an ally some defense, especially since the allies the Orpheus works best with are melee-focused builds. Giving them Resistance to all forms of damage for one attack is something any wingmate in melee will be happy for, especially since it compliments the Orpheus's ability to grant Overshield, which might prevent damage entirely. Usurper to the Throne is equally effective in the opposite direction, allowing the Orpheus to prevent the enemy from benefiting from any Resistance OR Armor. CUBE Injection: A particularly horrifying Tech Attack, but keep in mind it's not marked as Invade, so it doesn't get any benefits from Traits or Talents that enhance Invades. Basically, CUBE Injection is a corpse explosion ability, except that the marked enemy is also impaired the whole time. It takes a Full Action to maybe clear the mark... And on the explosion, every single enemy affected by the explosion ALSO get marked if they fail their Systems save... And then you get to do your best Kobold impression on top of that! This gear is honestly strong enough to be a Core Power itself, and it's not even limited. This is the most powerful weapon in the Orpheus's arsenal, hands down, and it's completely safe to utilize in a mixed melee because it specifies only hostile characters are affected. Wowzers. Next up: the Penultimate Frame from Intercorp, and one that desperately is trying to avoid copyright lawsuits from HA: The Pollux. Intercorp posted:Pollux  Even for a Defender, the Pollux is a tough nut to crack. While its HP and Armor are nothing to write home about compared to other Frames with the roll, and its Evasion is less than average, the Pollux just outright gains Overshield equal to its probably prodigious heat. Considering the Pollux, like HA Frames, loves Heat and does everything it can to inflict Heat on itself, you may well end up with as much or even more Overshield than HP! Which is good, because with Slow, you're not going anywhere any time fast and you're going to suck at avoiding explosions. On top of that, while the Pollux has horrid Tech Attack, its above average E-Defense makes it actually quite difficult to hack, meaning that most of the time, enemies are just going to have to try and break through that mountain of HP and Overshield. SP isn't bad, either. Insanely, the Pollux can also use a Reaction to make the effects of a Meltdown or Self-Destruct instant, giving hostiles no chance to get away before they eat 4d6 explosive damage to the face. It's definitely a last resort kind of thing, but it's a lot easier to pull off than in other Frames. Finally, the Pollux has a solid amount of weapon mounts... Including what it needs for a Superheavy. For the Pollux, consider actually ignoring Hull for the most part and instead investing all your Mech Skill points into Engineering, instead, as this directly increases its survivability AND damage, as you'll see with the Core Power. More Systems to boost its E-Defense couldn't hurt either. Flush Plasma Vents is one of those simple but effective ones. When it's activated, the Pollux gets half its Overshield in bonus damage 1/round, which can drastically increase its damage. The Overshield on the Pollux is already going to be nasty as hell, and will only get moreso the more Engineering it has. That's it. It's just gonna make the Pollux's attacks hurt more. Play a Pollux if you're too hot to trot.   License I Reactor Failsafe: I can't think of many things that would complement the Pollux more, honestly. For 1 SP, it's Custom Paint Job but for Stress instead of Structure, but most importantly, it keeps the Pollux at max Heat for maximum Overshield. Shame it only has a roughly 17% chance of happening, but it's 1 SP. External Coolant Ports: "Hey buddy, can I have that Heat instead?" the Pollux asked. "Sure, man, I don't really want it," the Orpheus replied. And then the Pollux's Overshield became stronger. License II Solstice Shield: This time I just forgot to add the actual thing this gives you, so here:  So in practicality, you cut what's received half into damage, and half into heat, which is exactly what should happen to the Pollux. It's a no brainer for a Frame that has a surprising amount of SP for a Defender. Refractor Drone: Not sure why you would limit it so that AoEs don't trigger it. It requires some big Engineering investment to give it more than Limited 1, and even then the damage created would be pretty negligible compared to the amount of actions it takes to set up a bunch of them for them to just HAPPEN to be hit by an AoE of specifically Energy damage. It could do a bunch of damage, but the restrictions and limitations to the effect, the fact that it's Limited 1 and Unique... Unless you can guarantee someone or something is going to target something with an Energy attack that would be really stupid to target with an Energy attack and be within Burst 2 range of, this system is just not worth it. Sure, you or a wingmate could use an ability that forces an enemy to move into it and target it, but there's so many other things you could do with your actions and SP that'd be more worth it than this. Hard pass. License III Apollon Converter Cannon: The question you have to ask yourself, really, is when are you not going to be at max Heat when firing this thing? The answer is: Almost never. It is worth the two weapon Mounts needed to equip this. It'd be worth it if it cost SP, too. While clearing Heat might seem counter-productive for the Pollux, the fact is you'll definitely be getting that heat back, and you don't want to Stress over and over, either. Give your enemies a giant chunk of damage and yourself a little wiggle room. Castor Class NHP: I screwed up with this particular license gear image, sorry! Here's the actual scoop on it:  You may use this to just declare what your Heat is, which is wonderful. The issue is the limitation: You only get it once per Scene. It's also Limited 1, but a bunch of Engineering will take care of that, and this effect is just incredibly useful for the Pollux. More than enough to justify the 2 SP and all the Engineering you're going to have on the Pollux anyway. We'll end it with the last Frame for Intercorp: The Theseus, which brings up some interesting questions. Intercorp posted:Theseus  The Theseus is a really weird mech that is kinda like the Kobold, but not really. It has the same basic intent behind it: Throw blocks everywhere and then do horrible things with those blocks, but in practically every other way, it's nothing like its HORUS cousin. The massive size of the Theseus is offset by a lack of armor, and while it has a bunch of HP, it has very low Evasion, the Fragile Trait, merely average speed, and a decent base Repair Cap. Interestingly for its size, it has a high Save Target, and Sensors 5 goes a surprisingly long way when you're Size 3, covering a frankly massive bubble on the battlefield. Its E-Defense is horrid, too, but its SP is staggeringly high, as is its base Heat Cap. It can take a lot of damage, which is good, because it's going to. Investing in something that gives you armor might be a good idea here. That said, it excels in making hard cover, blocking LoS all over the place, and every shard can be destroyed at will in case they get in the way of allies. But that's not all: Whenever a crystal is destroyed, they explode in a Burst 1. Every ally in range of the Burst gets 5 Overshield, and all enemies take at least 3 Energy damage, 5 if they fail a Hull Save. The Core System is where the Theseus truly begins to shine, though. While normally, it needs a Quick Action to leave hard cover behind, it does so 1/round whenever it's hit by an attack. You don't need to take damage, just be hit. Once its Core Power is activated, that becomes an infinite number of times per round, and you also get to immediately toss Shards all over the drat place. On round 1 with a Theseus in the Wing, you're going to litter the battlefield with crystals. By round 3, the battlefield has gradually become a labyrinth that is all but impossible to navigate without teleporting or flying. A labyrinth that at any time could explode, creating a colossal chain reaction capable of wiping the entire battlefield in a wash of violent surges of energy. For a Frame with one weapon mount, practically no defenses, and being a giant target, the Theseus is terrifying. And this is before you start filling it with License gear. Play a Theseus if they remind you of the babe.   License I Shrapnel Spiker: This thing doesn't do a lot of damage, but that isn't why it exists. It's not the one doing damage, the shards are. The fact that it can obliterate buildings and other forms of cover is a bonus, plus it makes the area Difficult Terrain, too, helping the Theseus choke off the battlefield. Resonance Shard Charges: These charges are basically a lesser version of the Shards themselves, granting Overshield to allies and damaging enemies. They have less reliable effects, but the Mines can potentially do a lot more than the shards can. And since the Mines are Blast instead of Burst, allies can trigger them intentionally by stepping on them, and still getting the effects of the Overshield in turn. Roundly, these are actually some of the most reliable grenades in the game, but as with most of these explosive charge systems, the mines are the real star of the show. License II Static Conductor Coils: For something with such a huge base Heat Cap, the Theseus doesn't really inflict a lot of Heat on itself, so this system is very safe to use. The fact that you're Immobilized might seem unappealing, but keep in mind that the Theseus is Size 3 and can do quite a lot when it's just sitting in one place, being a giant immovable object in the middle of the battlefield, threatening the grand majority of it with this Burst 3 of 2 AP Energy damage, and 5 Sensors. You can turn it off as a Protocol, even, so it won't interfere with future turns if you have to pack up and move. And hell, if you don't feel like doing that you can get a friendly Black Witch to nudge you and then you're out of it then, too. It's basically entirely risk free battlefield control, and that's exactly what the Theseus is FOR. Take it. Integrated Latticework: The Theseus really needs this for its own Survival. Absolutely take this. While the +2 HP is nice, the real reason you want this is that it can prevent you from taking Structure, or at least mitigate the overflow into the next Structure point. License III Helios Prism Array: You know that gif of Elmo standing, arms raised, back to a raging inferno? This is that, but as a System. The Helios Prism Array first blinds all enemies until the end of their next turn, then it just stares BLASTING. Nothing is safe. The two actions it gives you likely have enough range to hit the entire battlefield, and both of them inflict Burn instead of damage. Mechs, buildings, and people alike will just start melting once the Theseus just starts shooting lasers in every direction, and then you factor in the shards, and things just get even more dangerous. Once the Theseus has set itself up, and dug itself in, it's incredibly hard to stop the destruction... Not to mention that every single attack made on it to try and stop it just make the situation even more dangerous. Hoplon Class NHP: Oh boy if you want to have some real ridiculousness: Slap this on an Emperor, have a Pollux in the wing, and just watch the hilarity you can pile on. Granted, it has a hard limit of 10 Overshield, but screw it. The sad thing is that the Emperor has so much of its SP taken up by incredible Systems, so you'll have to make some tough decisions if you go that route. As it is, it's still just as juicy on the Theseus, as this NHP will boost the Shard-granted Overshield to the maximum in one go. With that, and a long hiatus, we are finished with Intercorp. We have one more Corpo-State to get to, and I feel like most of us will find it more generally agreeable than the others. Next time (Though no promises as to when): Grimm & Sons. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 17:28 on May 4, 2025 |
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May 4, 2025 17:26
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The Theseus has a bunch of French fries coming out of its head and you can’t convince me otherwise.
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May 5, 2025 01:58
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That's clearly Tiberium. Kane approves.
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May 5, 2025 02:05
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Nestor, Pollux and Theseus are basically Meatwad, Master Shake and Frylock as mechs I approve
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May 5, 2025 02:19
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Looking at the Lancer abilities gives me flashbacks to playing 4E and having 5000 abilities that, due to not being defined by any standardized "tags" in their functioning, tend to rarely interact interestingly, if at all, across "classes." And also because you need to peel the actual mechanics out of a paragraph every time, it makes it difficult to internalize exactly what everything does when you want something more complex than "point at man, make explode." Maybe it all comes together better in play but it just looks like word mush at a quick glance. Also abilities with ten times as much flavour text as mechanics text on their little "card" is a deeply cursed decision. Magic the Gathering got it right when a card was generally short, concise, purely mechanics generally in as standardized, short terms as possible, and a max of one line of flavour text taking up 1/10th of the space.
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May 5, 2025 11:30
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The Theseus design is wildly disappointing, holy poo poo lol.
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May 5, 2025 14:30
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BROLY IS NOT GOD BROLY IS THE DEVIL
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May 5, 2025 15:56
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JcDent posted:The Theseus design is wildly disappointing, holy poo poo lol. Maybe you could replace parts of it one at a time with parts you prefer. Should still be the same mech afterwards.
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May 5, 2025 17:35
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EclecticTastes posted:Maybe you could replace parts of it one at a time with parts you prefer. Should still be the same mech afterwards. 
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May 6, 2025 06:30
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For those who haven't been keeping up, where's Interpoint from, anyway?
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May 6, 2025 18:55
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Asterite34 posted:Nestor, Pollux and Theseus are basically Meatwad, Master Shake and Frylock as mechs instructions unclear https://bsky.app/profile/xuanyiruna.bsky.social/post/3lojuqagq4224
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May 6, 2025 22:59
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JcDent posted:The Theseus design is wildly disappointing, holy poo poo lol. Lancers tend to *heavily* customize and personalize their mechs, and frames rarely look exactly like what they come as by default. If you had four Theseus frames in a wing, they would probably all look radically different. So… Just make your own design. Torches Upon Stars posted:For those who haven't been keeping up, where's Interpoint from, anyway? Intercorptm isn’t really from anywhere specifically, in setting. They’re just a failing corpostate that found an ancient alien space station that still works and suddenly they’re hotshots that can keep up with the other corpostates by being impossible to actually attack (because that space station is capable of instant transmission). They’re also decentralized to a radical degree, and so even if they couldn’t teleport around everywhere, their splinter mini-corpostates are like weeds, impossible to get rid of fully. If you mean like, IRL, COMP/CON has them in its suggested LCPs, which is how I found it. They have an Itch.io page. Runa posted:instructions unclear “Thank you, Big Shake…”
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May 7, 2025 01:59
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