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some loving LIAR posted:I'm running a game of Pathfinder over email. The PCs have just improvidently gulped down the Potions of Jump (+20 to Acrobatics for jumping for 5 minutes) that an NPC provided to them to help them get across a wide chasm in the current dungeon. The only issue I'd have as a player is that there's little/no opportunity to get creative with solutions to the problem. But, you know your players better than I/we do, and PbP/E is a different animal. just tossing some ideas off the top of my head: -Give the players (especially speedy ones) sidetracks. Do they keep running, or go after something shiny? -Anyway to turn this into "roller derby"? The players are booking it, but so are a group of hostiles. -The players are already high on jump juice. Give them a chance to use it. Watch some Gummi Bears episodes for inspiration. -Expand the roller derby idea, and put them on a trampoline course. Maybe do some Tomb of Horrors gravity flipping.
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Aug 23, 2012 21:40
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P.S. STILL COMPLETELY DEVOID OF MERIT
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Kind of alluded to by the other responses, but the heart of RPGs is in giving players choices and letting them be creative. Skill checks are a means, not an end themselves. One interesting dilemma could be for you to let one or two of the party members surge ahead due to their high CON scores or whatever but have them forced to make a choice between leaping without their friends or waiting for them, risking the chance that no one makes it over.
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Aug 23, 2012 22:27
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I'm starting to stitch together a system to run a game based on The MAXX. I want the game to be lethal to the point of ridiculousness so I'm basing the rules on HOL. The idea is that anything that has a chance of killing you will be rolled against, so that the character can die in the "real world" as easily as they can die in the fantasy outback. The problem is that HOL is a joke system and doesn't really have character creation. I want creation to be simple as describing the character and determining their power animal. Any suggestions?
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Aug 24, 2012 12:12
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According the Wiki, the Buttery Wholesomeness expansion for HoL pretty much does exactly what you're looking to do.
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Aug 24, 2012 14:09
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Bit late, but if the runners are still a concern, an interesting way to deal with it is to provide a small range of different routes to distance checkpoints, with each route having a challenge/opportunity based on each player's abilities. Each route consisting of 2-3 challenges in theme, with at least the first being immediately obvious. So down the shortest route there might be slippery flooring(failing costs 1 move action, success gains 10ft), an obstacle consisting of giant rollers secured with a rope(climbing over or jumping over successfully doesn't cost movement, while they can be unleashed to flatten the next challenge, and if they're feeling macho, ridden all the way down that stretch) and a pack of dogs chained to a post(just risking several attacks or 30ft of movement to go around). The players figure out how to get the maximum speed out of the routes they pick, and whether to all use the same path(which means obstacles are destroyed with ease, but they may have trouble taking advantage of the speed gains), or to each take their own route. For the casters, making appropriate challenges requires some knowledge of their spell array though.
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Aug 31, 2012 08:20
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Anyone have any ideas for a "Embodied Spirit of Greed, Enslavement, and Civil War"? With a criteria that it is not one that enslaves others (no Dominate abilities at all), but one that is, itself, enslaved? Drawing a blank as how to encapsulate BEING enslaved without having a separate "Master" spirit, which would not fit the situation.
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Aug 31, 2012 12:28
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Iunnrais posted:Anyone have any ideas for a "Embodied Spirit of Greed, Enslavement, and Civil War"? With a criteria that it is not one that enslaves others (no Dominate abilities at all), but one that is, itself, enslaved? Drawing a blank as how to encapsulate BEING enslaved without having a separate "Master" spirit, which would not fit the situation. Strict binding to a set of rules, with a mandated avenue for expanding these rules even further?
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Aug 31, 2012 12:47
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Iunnrais posted:Anyone have any ideas for a "Embodied Spirit of Greed, Enslavement, and Civil War"? With a criteria that it is not one that enslaves others (no Dominate abilities at all), but one that is, itself, enslaved? Drawing a blank as how to encapsulate BEING enslaved without having a separate "Master" spirit, which would not fit the situation. Sounds like a boss fight? Give it a second set of actions that represent its control by... whatever, and have them happen no matter what gets inflicted on the main body.
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Aug 31, 2012 14:43
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More of a Boss-Rush than a Boss-Fight. It will go: Tarrasque -> Spirit -> Umbral. There may be little to no time to rest in between the Tarrasque and Spirit fights (5 minute, max, but maybe not that much). To that end, I'm also hoping to make it SEEM far more impressive than it actually is. It shouldn't be super challenging, but it should be thematically imposing. One reason for dismissing dominate out of hand (well, that and the fact that another category of their foes [the fae] use dominate effects extensively, and its getting old). As for rules... hm. What sort of rules? Because "Move foreward, basic attack, etc" doesn't make for a fun fight. Note that, for other abilities, I'm thinking of attacks that drain money from the party's pockets and forge it into weapons or just plain fuel attacks. And when the thing is bloodied, I want it to split into two creatures which try to flank the party, and then attack its twin from range, including the party in the attack. (Thus making the fight simultaneously easier and more interesting)
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Aug 31, 2012 16:38
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A couple of ideas: Chain it to the ground. Restrict its movement to a small area, but maybe let its chains attract and "ground" ranged attacks, reducing their effectiveness, to encourage the melee types to get close to it. Might be best used for just one of the entities when it splits. Give it a few modes, and let the players decide which mode it's in each round. The modes might be different selections of powers, or just static bonusses (deals and takes more damage in offence mode, deals less damage but is hard to hit in defence mode, dazes on hit but is slowed in control mode, etc.).
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Aug 31, 2012 17:38
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Iunnrais posted:Anyone have any ideas for a "Embodied Spirit of Greed, Enslavement, and Civil War"? With a criteria that it is not one that enslaves others (no Dominate abilities at all), but one that is, itself, enslaved? Drawing a blank as how to encapsulate BEING enslaved without having a separate "Master" spirit, which would not fit the situation. What, exactly, IS enslaving it?
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Aug 31, 2012 20:07
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Iunnrais posted:Anyone have any ideas for a "Embodied Spirit of Greed, Enslavement, and Civil War"? With a criteria that it is not one that enslaves others (no Dominate abilities at all), but one that is, itself, enslaved? Drawing a blank as how to encapsulate BEING enslaved without having a separate "Master" spirit, which would not fit the situation. There is no apparent master, but it follows a set of strict and arbitrary rules highly detrimental to its own good. There is no logical reason for it to do so, but - if it can communicate with the players - it is driven by the idea that it HAS to, period. Internalized enslavement and such.
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Aug 31, 2012 20:52
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Maybe the master spirit has been dead for so long that its name and legacy, aside from this guy, are forgotten? The spirit could still be trying to fulfill its obligations despite having no master to define them anymore, causing its insanity?
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Aug 31, 2012 21:05
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That was what I was getting as well, and all I can think of is "Insane Computer". But, at minimum, I'd write up a "battle program" for the monster, that it MUST follow, and try to work in a flaw or flaws your players can exploit. Something like it must attack whatever most recently attacked it, maybe in a specific manner. Maybe instead of a single monster (and building off the "insane computer" idea), the "monster" instead a physical thing, but it has a group of thralls that are "self enslaved" in a sort of hive mind, and are convinced they must follow a bizarre and self contradictory set of rules. This could die into the civil war bit by routinely having the thralls in fight over enforcement and interpretation of the rules.
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Aug 31, 2012 21:19
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Guesticles posted:What, exactly, IS enslaving it? The answer... is complicated. You see, the spirit is literally a spirit-- like "team spirit" or "in high spirits" instead of like "ghost". More specifically, it is a Zeitgeist. WARNING! COMPLICATED PLOT! WARNING! COMPLICATED PLOT! Basically, the players, via some time travel, created a "splinter timeline". In this timeline, the leaders of a local civilization decided to listen to the advice of a scheming devil and decided to start engaging in fearmongering against a nearby tribe of kobolds. They would actually instigate riots amongst the kobolds, and drive them towards the civilization, causing a raid, which would bring about panic in the population. In response, military efforts were expanded. To pay for it, the kobolds would then be sold into slavery. The devil is playing both sides here though, and is infiltrating the kobolds into society as slaves so that they can get close enough to various worship ceremonies in order to redirect that worship from the intended god, to a servitor of the devil, who will use it to summon an avatar of the god in the form of a tarrasque, which the devil will then have the players kill, weakening the god, enabling the devil to either kill the god personally, or manipulate someone else into doing it. The players were involved in this timeline, and alerted the civilization about what the kobolds were doing. Instead of being sensible and stopping the slave trade, this end up sparking a civil war. The players DID manage to stop the Tarrasque from being summoned. And then they exited the shard-timeline, returning to the normal timeline before any of these events happened. Seeing the events starting to kick off again, the players decided to head the devil off at the pass, and find the servitor who would try to summon the tarrasque. When they found him, it turns out that the servitor was perfectly able to grab the worship energy from the shard timeline without even needing to do anything in this one. Via some negotiation about other, unrelated plot points, the devil's servitor sweettalked his way into getting the party to go away to do something else, and the tarrasque was summoned in the prime. Now, the players need to forge a weapon out of a shard timeline. (See above Re: Umbral) Step one will be killing the tarrasque (all part of the devil's plan). Step two will be forging the weapon... but to do that, first they'll need to subdue the ENTIRE PLANE. And the spirit of that plane is into slavery, greed, and civil war. This will be represented by a creature, because you can do that in 4th edition. The spirit is enslaved because the kobolds were enslaved, and the civilization was sort of enslaved by their greed because they'd rather go to civil war than give up their newfound wealth. This post has been brought to you by Epic level gaming. It's not just bigger numbers! END COMPLICATED PLOT EXPLANATION SECTION I like the idea of the spirit being chained down, and even letting the players choose its action types... this would simulate and recreate the idea of being able to control it... but really it's fighting against you despite that "control". I just need to figure out some details.
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Aug 31, 2012 21:55
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Iunnrais posted:The answer... is complicated. That is complicated. Basically its enslaved to it own urges, because the civilization it represents is? In physical appearance, since it represents this civilization, it should have several features that harken to landmarks and notable events. I'd have the monster chained, say to an iron ring in the floor, where the chains loop through and are then held by the monster. For the civil war aspect, I'd go with maybe less domination attacks but more "Inter-party strife" things. If you wanted to add some RP to it, characters are hit with some sort of attack that, as a secondary, makes their next attack target a party member instead. They can get a +3 or something against the secondary if they say something nice about a party member. Since greed/lust for power seems to be a theme for the civilization its representing, maybe it will attempt to grab up magical items and gold in the fact of all other logic, and invite the players to take advantage of that by say tossing some shinies into a place that the monster doesn't want to go. or maybe just out of reach and really drive the monster bonkers.
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Aug 31, 2012 22:32
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I've been running a Savage Worlds superheroes game for a group and they've been enjoying it so far, but I feel that I still don't know how to balance encounters. In general, the party ends up defeating the opponent effortlessly. I'm (probably far too) generous about healing outside of combat, so I doubt there'd be an issue if characters got injured or knocked out fairly often. Does anyone know a good way to create encounters reasonably at the players' level?
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Aug 31, 2012 22:55
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Honestly, no. I don't know how to make combat any more dramatic or tough in Savage Worlds aside from just ignoring damage or spending Benny after Benny just to let a target or two stay on the field. Kinda looking for a secret or something - the game I'm running in the system needs a dramatic fight, and I don't quite know how I could pull that off.
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Sep 1, 2012 18:29
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TheSoundNinja posted:Kinda looking for a secret or something - the game I'm running in the system needs a dramatic fight, and I don't quite know how I could pull that off.
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Sep 1, 2012 23:52
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The White Dragon posted:That depends on your group dynamic. You roleplayers or rollplayers? The former will probably enjoy a "rap battle" rather than a real battle. The latter, I'm sure someone here will be glad to help you make a min-maxed encounter of nightmarish difficulty. Definitely make it both, simultaneously.
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Sep 1, 2012 23:54
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TheSoundNinja posted:Kinda looking for a secret or something - the game I'm running in the system needs a dramatic fight, and I don't quite know how I could pull that off. Can you give us a little background? People in this thread are pretty good about idea generation.
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Sep 2, 2012 05:59
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Does anybody have some pointers for good/fun investigative gaming? I'm currently GMing a 4e game (with all of us being first-timers) and right now the characters are at the stage where they want to find out who is pulling the strings behind their last few (mis)adventures. Now I basically want to plant a few clues for them to find that will lead to the culprit. The primary thing I'm unsure about is whether I should plant those clues in a linear fashion or not. I.e. should one clue just lead to the next, progressively becoming more relevant until they lead to a confrontation or should I make them be mostly unrelated to each other so that the players can find them in any order and then piece the picture together themselves? The latter option seems more interesting to me, as it feels more organic, allows me to easily insert some background information about the character they're chasing and has the potential for a nice aha-effect when everything clicks together. On the other hand it seems like it might be pretty easy to screw up if the clues are too vague or too specific. Also, I'm a bit lost when it comes to presenting these clues in an interesting fashion. Most of the stuff I came up with basically boils down to "follow a lead to location x, there you find a few enemies/traps and/or a letter/diary/book containing some information". So any input in that direction would be greatly appreciated as well. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Sep 4, 2012 |
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Sep 4, 2012 16:23
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Perestroika posted:Does anybody have some pointers for good/fun investigative gaming? Here's a thread I made about investigative gaming. It has some good advice, I think: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3453937
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Sep 4, 2012 16:45
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Perestroika posted:Does anybody have some pointers for good/fun investigative gaming? I'm currently GMing a 4e game (with all of us being first-timers) and right now the characters are at the stage where they want to find out who is pulling the strings behind their last few (mis)adventures. Now I basically want to plant a few clues for them to find that will lead to the culprit. If you want to do this sort of gaming, I recommend buying a GUMSHOE game (your choice which one, but they are gearing up to do a new edition of Esoterrorists, so maybe not that one). They are chock full of advice and models. The main takeaways are: 1) the players automatically find all the clues needed to solve the mystery ("core" clues). In 4e terms, you'd want to spread them out so it's not all the party's Perception dude ("[PC trained in Athletics] notices that the wall would require either magic or a very, very high level of athletic skill to climb"). Note that they can still fail to solve the mystery! They just can't fail to find the clues they need to solve it. Hide some information in some people that need Diplomacy or need to be Intimidated; if they miss that, you can always just tell them "something tells you that Dirk had something else to say". 2) there are extra clues that provide additional background or confirmation; these require skill checks. If they miss them, no big deal. If it's something you really want them to find but it's not necessary for solving the mystery, just have them find it. Spread these out over the party's trained skills also. The Perception person gets to find all the traps the rest of the time. 3) clues should narrow the range of suspects without narrowing it down to one person ("the courier was very short"). They can also narrow down the variables that they could then use to narrow down the suspects ("the ritual requires it to be raining, and it only rained for an hour that day -- who was known to be in the area then?") 4) start with an incident and work backwards, thinking about what types of evidence could be left -- a memo, a witness, a process (like a 4e ritual), a rare magic item, an unusual poison, a strange accent, a prophecy. In many games it's just a crime they're investigating. In terms of GUMSHOE games, Night's Black Agents is more about uncovering string-pulling conspiracies; it sounds as though you're aiming for something more like that. 5) A scribbled map or a diary page can be really great.
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Sep 4, 2012 16:56
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Perestroika posted:Does anybody have some pointers for good/fun investigative gaming? homullus and Megaman's Jockstrap offer great advice. Expanding on that. Here's my first question for you: Are your players aware there is a mystery to be solved, or are you simply building them up for the big reveal? (Second question, is this Madness at Gardmore Abbey?)
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Sep 4, 2012 17:27
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Guesticles posted:homullus and Megaman's Jockstrap offer great advice. Expanding on that. Well it's not much of a mystery yet, but they're aware all right. During their last dungeon delve they found a letter intimating that there's somebody pulling the strings. They brought it to the local mayor who put them up to this, as his own city guard likely has a mole or three. Right now they're on a sidetrack related to one PC's background but I expect that within a session or two they'll be ready to "formally" start the search by meeting a contact from the criminal underground. That's when I plan to give them the first leads and introduce some more possible suspects. And no, it's not Gardmore Abbey. Also thanks to homullus and Megaman, that's exactly the kind of information I'm looking for!
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Sep 4, 2012 19:11
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I did a search of the TG forums and couldn't find a whole lot about this, so I figured I'd ask here: There's enough interest among my friends to possibly start a Fallout campaign. Are there any Fallout PnP games that would be worth looking into? A quick googling seems to bring up at least 3 different versions. Regardless of who's running it, we're all relatively rules-lite (e.g., we never bothered with grapple or the other finer-detailed rules in D&D regardless of edition, and would houserule poo poo based on what made sense and what everyone at the table agreed on). I have no idea how feasible rules-lite is in the SPECIAL system (especially if you're doing a d100 system) or if either of those factors even have any bearing on that, but yeah. Help a brother out? 
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Sep 5, 2012 23:13
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Son of Thunderbeast posted:I did a search of the TG forums and couldn't find a whole lot about this, so I figured I'd ask here: http://falloutpnp.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page That's your main resource for the Fallout PnP, but like you noticed, it's not exactly rules-lite. I've played a few sessions using it and combat can be fairly complicated and can be super lethal. I've never used the J. E. Sawyer version though, I don't know if it's dramatically different or simpler at all. Both were designed pre-Fallout 3 as well so some things might seem odd if FO3 and NV are your main examples of the franchise. Pretty much people tend to either use this system or GURPS when they run Fallout games, but the only thing stopping you from using a simpler system is whether you want to put in the prep work of adapting the setting.
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Sep 6, 2012 05:55
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Guesticles posted:Can you give us a little background? People in this thread are pretty good about idea generation. Well, I have two players in this group, irl couple and old friends of mine. They aren't new to this system like I am - where as I have been messing around with the system since May, they've messed with it since God-Knows-When. Now, I made the mistake of believing that this system was one I could run without spending a month studying the sourcebook (I couldn't get my hands on a non-PDF copy till the end of last month), so while I now have more of the basics down, I'm still not sure how to do much more with combat than just run it. The story so far is that the players in this [based on Skullgirls] 1930s setting are working as PIs, and are trying to solve the Case of the Eclipse "Killer". Technically, with no bodies, he or she hasn't killed anyone yet, but the name just sounds more menacing. I want them to fight the puppeteer of it all - a man who is trying wake up this "God of Hate" that everyone has basically been living on, and this whole Eclipse Killer deal is meant to get him people who he can use as pawns, or sacrifice for power. And I need the fight to feel challenging for a two player Veteran ranked party. One plays an adventuring curious martial artist, the other your classic talk-&-shoot private eye. What would be good Edges to consider? And would you have any suggestions for tactics?
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Sep 8, 2012 06:58
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Okay guys, coming up is my first time GMing without using a module of some kind. We're doing Dresden Files RPG so the players told me what kind of story they want via our City Creation session. The setting is Detroit and the three PCs are: The newly appointed Warden of Detroit, his recently attained apprentice, and the thought-to-be-dead-but-stuck-in-a-weird-limbo old Warden. The player of the old Warden said he probably won't be available for the first session and to go on without him, so I'm focusing on the Warden and his apprentice. Here's what I have so far: The PCs get on a train bound for Detroit, when a man walks by to hand the warden something saying that he dropped it at the station. It's a blank piece of paper, but after [insert magical stuff] the PCs discover it's a note telling them to meet him at Detroit's accorded neutral grounds, an upscale bar. When they arrive in the city they go to their hotel and are told that a message was left for them from a party who also desires a meeting. The meeting at the neutral grounds will be the man from the train station telling them that they need to be careful, because the old Warden's disappearance goes a lot deeper than it seems on the surface, and that there's a huge power vacuum in Detroit that a lot of supernatural nasties are looking to fill. The person who left the hotel message is the leader of the Black Court in Detroit. Because the old Warden's player set his character up as absolutely hating the Black Court I wanted to establish that a bit. The Black Court leader tells the PCs that he was constantly at odds with the old Warden, so he knows he'd be a prime suspect in his disappearance and is looking to prove his innocence with a gesture of good faith. If the PCs decide to negotiate with him, he'll tell them about a cargo ship that specializes in smuggling magical artifacts, and that it delivered an artifact to the old Warden just days before he vanished. There may be some documentation hinting as to what may have happened to him on board. He tells them to investigate it at night, as there aren't as many people coming and going and security is not as tight. If they (as I expect they will) turn down the Black Court, their mystery contact will get in touch again to give them all that same information. This will then give them a day to prepare, setting up spells and maneuvers and the like. However they approach getting in to it, it'll become clear there's something not right about the ship. The people patrolling on deck don't look like the seafaring type, they look more like local gangbangers toting nasty firepower. And for some reason belowdeck is absolutely, completely silent. If the apprentice accepts the compel on his lust for adventure, or just goes on his own, he'll find a sealed door that contains the bodies of the crew, dead for at least a few days. Oh there's also a hellbeast in there too, implying that someone with some magic is behind this. Eventually they find some shipping manifests that show a small box was delivered to the old Warden. His address will turn out to be the hotel room down the hall from the room the new Warden and his apprentice are staying in. Except as far as they know, there's no door there. End session. This is my first attempt at writing a scenario, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know. I really want this to be a fun session for my players to get them into the spirit of things.
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Sep 12, 2012 17:53
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Son of Thunderbeast posted:I did a search of the TG forums and couldn't find a whole lot about this, so I figured I'd ask here: You probably could run Fallout in Apocalypse World, with a little reskinning and hacking.
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Sep 12, 2012 18:12
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Savage Worlds wouldn't be bad for Fallout with a bit of tweaking. I'm thinking of writing up some rules to do it for my table top group.
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Sep 12, 2012 19:45
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I can't think of a single special (pun intended?) thing you would need a game system to model from the Fallout setting. As long as it has rules for shooting and hitting, I think you're set.
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Sep 12, 2012 19:56
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homullus posted:I can't think of a single special (pun intended?) thing you would need a game system to model from the Fallout setting. As long as it has rules for shooting and hitting, I think you're set. Well you'd probably need some sort of system for radiation and rad poisoning and such, unless you just want to make it into a fiat thing.
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Sep 12, 2012 20:01
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Emong posted:Well you'd probably need some sort of system for radiation and rad poisoning and such, unless you just want to make it into a fiat thing. Radiation is kind of a special case. On easy levels of Fallout, there is no need to bother tracking it beyond OMG MUST GET OUT OF THIS ZONE, as Rad-Away is common enough. On hardcore, it's more difficult to stay on top of the radiation since it's coming at you from everywhere, including your food -- but on that level, health is also a challenge, so if you need a health system fine-grained enough for Hardcore Fallout crippled limbs, it's almost certainly going to provide a model for ongoing damage. So basically, either way, you're *really* actually tracking something else when you're tracking radiation in Fallout -- you're tracking puzzle and do-not-enter areas on easy, and just another aspect of health on Hardcore.
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Sep 12, 2012 20:10
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I've got a solution to an issue in my campaign, but wouldn't mind some additional feedback to try to find a better one. Here's the situation: The Wizard, Warrior, and Ardent/Henchman made their way to the top of the tower and are about to fight the final boss, which is an upleveled Iron Cobra (actually two of them). The Ardent is out of healing surges and Ardent surges, so they're up there with no healing besides the potions they brought. The Bard and Cleric split from the rest of the party and took the time to bypass puddles of horrible condensate made from raw poison energy to activate one of the "fire exits" that takes them back to the ground floor. So there are now 7 levels of horrible poison traps standing between them and the rest of the party. I'd normally just make them run the gauntlet again, soaking up poison damage in a mad dash to get back to their allies, but they performed actions that have basically sealed off one of the levels, making progress just about impossible. They flooded areas with poison gas, causing the doors to seal; so they'd need to lift or bust through the doors to proceed, and I don't know that straight up "beating the poo poo out of the doors" has occurred to them. For the solution, I'm thinking about giving the Bard and Cleric the option of skill challenge to alter the magical runes of the circle on the lowest floor so that it will take them further up the tower. It will take time, and during that the rest of the party needs to deal with the iron cobras. I might make them run a few floors first. Can anyone think of a way to subtly suggest "Maybe you can change the runes to alter your teleport destination"? As a cop out, I could just make it a passive perception/insight check to notice 'hey, a few of those runes change between the floors'. I want to make trying to fix this entertaining for my players, but I also want to make them think twice about splitting up next time this sort of thing happens. Preferably without a TPK (I guess a 3/5 PK).
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Sep 17, 2012 19:30
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If you need it to happen, don't bother with skill challenges or spot checks or whatever, because they're not fun anyway and may mean that it STILL doesn't happen. Your actually good options are: 1) just teleport them up there. If you want to cost them resources, have them fall through the floor for 20 feet or so and come out the ceiling of the rest of the party, so they at least take falling damage. Or have a teleportation device literally cost surges or dailies or something. 2) let whatever would happen, happen (i.e. the TPK), and then ask them whether they want to go with the results of their own actions or go back to the beginning of the tower (and be ok with their answer)
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Sep 17, 2012 20:17
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homullus posted:If you need it to happen, don't bother with skill challenges or spot checks or whatever, because they're not fun anyway and may mean that it STILL doesn't happen. Your actually good options are: I might just auto-succeed them on the spot check to notice the differences, but I'd like to give them a chance to come up with that (or another solution) on their own. I think the skill challenge is less optional. The idea is that the better they do on their skill challenge, the quicker they arrive to reinforce their allies. Bad things might also result from their inability to succeed in their challenge. If it was a properly written skill challenge, it look something like "Success: Players are able to teleport to floor 7 (of 8). Failure: all players in or adjacent to the circle take 2d8 poison damage and are subject to the following attack: +13 vs Will. Hit, 5 ongoing poison damage, -2 to save, save ends. Miss, 2 ongoing poison damage, save ends. Players arrive on floor 7 (of 8) after 8 rounds, and leave behind one piece of equipment (chosen at random)." So they arrive succeed or fail, the deciding factors being "How soon" and "in what condition".
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Sep 17, 2012 23:05
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Not... really. 1: Costing people equipment in 4e is BAD. Equipment is how your attacks and defences scale, removing random equipment is loving the PCs badly. 2: I probably wouldn't go with the round cost, either, because unless you're on a timer measured in seconds (or part of the group is in rounds already), it's pretty irrelevant, given that you don't start running things in rounds until the PCs get there and the fight starts anyway. If part of the group IS in rounds already, 8 rounds is a fight that was over 4 rounds ago, one way or the other. 8 rounds is a HUGELY long time in my experience, albeit my group suffers from ridiculous analysis paralysis and very slow dicerolling issues... I'd go with: success, they teleport in and get a surprise round. Failure, they teleport in and are surprised when they arrive severely disoriented leaving the enemies an opening. Assuming they're teleporting into a group of enemies, that is. Alternatively, run until they accrue enough failures, and work out the results from that - failing entirely might give the enemy a full turn (they arrive Stunned), or give the enemy a surprise round and make the PCs dazed, say. Complexity 1 would have them subject to a surprise round, 2 would be an uneventful arrival, 3 woudl allow them to trigger a magical feedback through the circle to disorient the enemies and give them a surprise round etc etc. Mostly though, I'd probably wing it. The crucial thing with SCs is to be fairly free-form and open to whatever the PCs throw. They could decide to rappel up, or fly up, or climb up inside, or knock the tower down, whatever seems best, most interesting, most fun, go with it. Also, will attacks for poison damage are a little odd, I'd go with fort or ref, or a different damage type.
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Sep 17, 2012 23:22
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| # ? May 9, 2024 00:55 |
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thespaceinvader posted:1: Costing people equipment in 4e is BAD. Equipment is how your attacks and defences scale, removing random equipment is loving the PCs badly. They don't 'lose' it, they leave it behind, and can collect it as they exit. And even if they didn't, This upcoming fight is the last thing they do before they collect a metric rear end ton of loot and experience. They'll be able to afford something better, provided they live long enough to spend it. They also have secondary implements and weapons, so the only thing that might get interesting is if they lose their armor, and I'm thinking I might just take that off the table. (I might even just have it take their implements.) They're also both trained in Arcana, so if they do fail, the dice are just out for their blood. The fight with the big bad is also not a "go toe-to-toe" fight. They need to activate a summoning device which basically nullifies the Boss's bullshit dodge and evasion abilities. quote:2: I probably wouldn't go with the round cost, either, because unless you're on a timer measured in seconds (or part of the group is in rounds already), it's pretty irrelevant, given that you don't start running things in rounds until the PCs get there and the fight starts anyway. If part of the group IS in rounds already, 8 rounds is a fight that was over 4 rounds ago, one way or the other. 8 rounds is a HUGELY long time in my experience, albeit my group suffers from ridiculous analysis paralysis and very slow dicerolling issues... The numbers aren't solid, but they're going to have to deal with some delay in getting back to their party members. This is the bard and cleric, neither of them are really heavy hitters. They're support and healing. So the idea is to put some time pressure on them to get back and link up with the other 3/5ths of the party, and bring some much needed healing. (And I'm definitely not rewarding them for getting high and just sort of wandering off with a surprise round.) Edit: by which I mean there was no real character reason for them splitting up and taking different teleports. quote:Also, will attacks for poison damage are a little odd, I'd go with fort or ref, or a different damage type. Its arcane backlash, and whole tower is a giant conduit for poison energy. Everything deals poison damage; its not a good place to be. Guesticles fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Sep 18, 2012 |
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Sep 18, 2012 00:19
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