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Oh, Shadowrun! Right! We were supposed to steal a disk and leave no evidence behind. We left no evidence behind because we left no building behind. It was the GM's fault for letting us have C12.
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Jun 10, 2014 03:46
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Reene posted:In my current D&D game I play a Paladin and I really really wanted to ride a dragon for Reasons. I expressed this desire to my GM, so he saddled me with a half horse, half red (yes, red) dragon abomination courtesy of the rich Evil family in her backstory. He likes to steal and hoard treasure but he has 3 intelligence so it's like having an extremely grabby toddler that also breathes fire. That sounds perfectly acceptable! I mean, extremely grabby, sets everything on fire? It's like having another PC around.
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Jun 10, 2014 04:01
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Reene posted:Ah, Shadowrun... It's punk rock, so that's more like a critical hit than a glitch.
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Jun 10, 2014 04:04
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Halloween Jack posted:Oh, Shadowrun! Right! every_shadowrun_game_ever.txt
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Jun 10, 2014 04:26
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Over the years I've come to determine that the best way to play Shadowrun is to start every job like it's Mission Impossible and end every job like it's Saints Row.
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Jun 10, 2014 04:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:every_shadowrun_game_ever.txt I'll have you know we only ended three one-shots that way. In the fourth we got wiped out by artillery.
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Jun 10, 2014 05:29
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm poo poo at basketball, so go ahead. But if you start a game about alien-battling rugby players, I want in on the ground floor. I'm aiming for some sort of high-flying scifi b-ball. Gonna call the campaign Jams of FATE.
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Jun 10, 2014 05:39
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Shadowrun is the game where players always come up with great plans that go hilariously wrong due to bad luck or forgetting about one obvious thing.
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Jun 10, 2014 05:42
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Evil Mastermind posted:every_shadowrun_game_ever.txt Hey, I'll have you know we haven't destroyed the building we're supposed to leave no evidence of our heist at. Yet. We haven't yet because we still need to murder all the corp security trying to stop us first.
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Jun 10, 2014 05:46
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Arivia posted:One guess, and their name does not start with O or Q. Please don't Heckdump my
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Jun 10, 2014 06:31
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The best way to do any wetwork job in Shadowrun is to get a gas grenade loaded with K-10, pop it in a crowded room, and run.
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Jun 10, 2014 09:51
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SALT CURES HAM posted:The best way to do any wetwork job in Shadowrun is to get a gas grenade loaded with K-10, pop it in a crowded room, and run. Ahh, K10, I had a group (of goons of course) decide the best way to stop the BBEG from gaining power was to go to his mayoral fundraiser and slip him K10 in the middle of a room filled with press and the richest people in the city.
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Jun 10, 2014 11:25
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Saguaro PI posted:Hey, I'll have you know we haven't destroyed the building we're supposed to leave no evidence of our heist at. No building, no evidence. 
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Jun 10, 2014 14:06
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DriveThruRPG is celebrating their 10 year annivesary, and as part of the sales and whatnot they put up a page that legs you [uel="http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/dtrpg_anniversary.php"]see what the top 10 products were for the past 10 years[/url]. It's interesting that there's no Pathfinder products there, but there is a ton of Exalted.
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Jun 10, 2014 17:54
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I'm glad Arcana Evolved is on there. Still my favorite d20 product and one of my favorite ever systems.
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Jun 10, 2014 19:49
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I'm glad Arcana Evolved is on there. Still my favorite d20 product and one of my favorite ever systems. Monte claimed he toned down spellcasters' power. How'd he do this? Well, there's less save-or-dies. On the other hand, every caster was an unholy combination of a Wizard and Sorcerer, able to flexibly change their spells and cast each one repeatedly. (Think of Next's spellcasting, but with a lot more spells.) And if you run out of spells of one level, you can always cannibalize spells of lower or higher level. Oh, and let's leave in the save-or-suck spells; turning people into fragile glass is okay, as long as they're not actually dead. Oh, let's also boost spell save DCs with high-stat characters, feats, and plenty of other ways to boost save DCs while largely leaving PCs' saving throws intact. Yeah, so you can basically spam save-or-lose spells all day long with those factors in place. But Wait! There's More! Let's also add in spell templates that are basically freebie add-ons which do stuff like Stun enemies 1 round per 20 damage applied (no save), or add in a 2-4 round stun on a secondary save, or you know what else sounds like a good idea? How about a template that forces those big dumb monsters to use their Intelligence instead of (Dex/Con/Wis) on the saving throw, that sounds great. OOH! How about a spell template that lets you Quicken spells spontaneously by just costing 2 spells of that level? Yeah, that's powerful, so let's give it a daily limit. Is 4x/day too much? Naaah. While we're at it, how about templates which pierce spell resistance or unravel magical defenses? Yeah! While we're at it, why not make a perfect caster race that can also fly and work as permanent aerial artillery? Yeah, that's AWESOME! ...oh, uh what do the mundanes get? Well, look at this d12 hit die on my Not-Fighter! Look at this Monk I've somehow managed to make less powerful! Remember, he can punch stuff all day! Look at this neat Totem Warrior; I hope you like sperging out while calculating all of your animal's stats and adjusting for size and oh god please make it stop Anyway, I spent so much drat time prepping for that game only to have the party's two casters tear it all apart without breaking a sweat, I switched us all to WFRP2e and then Star Wars Saga Edition and only barely poked around the edges of 3.x again. But yeah, great setting. Neat races. Racial templates were a neat idea that used 3.x's class structure to advantage. It's just more Monte "Caster Supremacy" "The Moon" Cook making even-more-superwizards all over again.
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Jun 10, 2014 20:09
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I think I really understood how much caster supremacy was a thing about the time we were flooding that city. Every plan we came up with that succeeded was based entirely around leveraging allied clerics or our one mage. Every major villain was a mage, because they had the power to actually affect the setting more. We were all important, but my job as Marshal was pretty much 'stand in front of the wizard with your higher HP and armor and help come up with plans to leverage his actual power to accomplish all our goals'. There was just nothing we martials could do about that vampire infestation. I mean, it was one of the most fun campaigns I ever played in, thanks to the mage not being a douche and all of us being involved in coming up with plans and having fun ideas, but at the end of the day, almost none of the cool stuff we got up to would've been possible if we didn't have a wizard around and that's terrible.
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Jun 10, 2014 20:29
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Why not have a setting or ruleset where all the PCs are magic, even if latently, and that's set in stone? Heck, pull a Double Cross and replace "Renegade Virus" with "Spark of Magic" or something. Everybody gets magic, everybody gets to affect the setting, nobody complains about "too anime sword-fightingness" because the swordfighter is magic too, duh.
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Jun 10, 2014 20:39
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Davin Valkri posted:Why not have a setting or ruleset where all the PCs are magic, even if latently, and that's set in stone? Heck, pull a Double Cross and replace "Renegade Virus" with "Spark of Magic" or something. Everybody gets magic, everybody gets to affect the setting, nobody complains about "too anime sword-fightingness" because the swordfighter is magic too, duh. So, Earthdawn. Seriously, Earthdawn does exactly that.
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Jun 10, 2014 20:41
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Davin Valkri posted:Why not have a setting or ruleset where all the PCs are magic, even if latently, and that's set in stone? Heck, pull a Double Cross and replace "Renegade Virus" with "Spark of Magic" or something. Everybody gets magic, everybody gets to affect the setting, nobody complains about "too anime sword-fightingness" because the swordfighter is magic too, duh. This was one of my goals with Theros-as-13th Age - everyone gets equal ability to be a hero. The gods grant their blessings and curses to martial warriors and to scholars, and both can bring forth the true power of the heroic spirit.
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Jun 10, 2014 20:43
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Night10194 posted:I think I really understood how much caster supremacy was a thing about the time we were flooding that city. Every plan we came up with that succeeded was based entirely around leveraging allied clerics or our one mage. Every major villain was a mage, because they had the power to actually affect the setting more. We were all important, but my job as Marshal was pretty much 'stand in front of the wizard with your higher HP and armor and help come up with plans to leverage his actual power to accomplish all our goals'. There was just nothing we martials could do about that vampire infestation. There were a few breaking points for me, but the big one was this... After I spent 2 hours (literally, 2 hours with Heroforge) statting up a Chorrim general, I was going to give him a belt which radiated Antimagic explicitly to keep him from getting ganked right out the gate by the party's Magister and Greenbond. I realized, then and there, that this was a fundamental bone-deep rot in the system's core engine. FYI, other innovations of Arcana Evolved. (1) A "middle" save between Good and Bad that was functionally still pretty bad, with spell DC inflation. (2) "Ceremonial" feats which made it so Weapon Specialization was explicitly something magical. (3) A really neat-sounding Ritual Warrior, kind of a progenitor of the Bo9S classes, but whose maneuvers were pretty much all terrible. Fake Edit: Earthdawn is pretty awesome, but in earlier editions, Caster Supremacy was still a definite "thing." ED was my go-to RPG back when AD&D 2e got boring and D&D 3e wasn't out yet. And for a while after that, honestly.
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Jun 10, 2014 20:48
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Lurks With Wolves posted:So, Earthdawn. Seriously, Earthdawn does exactly that. So does Torg; every character from Aysle (the fantasy reality) knows at least one spell. It's random what spell you know, though, so it might not be useful for adventuring.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:07
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dwarf74 posted:You know, funny story, because I was kind of naive about RPGs at the time, I thought the Warmain (Monte's Not-Fighter) was kind of overpowered given their d12 hit die and because they were basically just a Fighter+1. Oh, how silly I learned that was. Davin Valkri posted:Why not have a setting or ruleset where all the PCs are magic, even if latently, and that's set in stone? Heck, pull a Double Cross and replace "Renegade Virus" with "Spark of Magic" or something. Everybody gets magic, everybody gets to affect the setting, nobody complains about "too anime sword-fightingness" because the swordfighter is magic too, duh.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:18
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dwarf74 posted:Goddamn that was a great setting, but it was also the system that convinced me that caster supremacy was a real thing and soured me on 3.x and its derivatives for once and for all. Huh...I have run a lot of AE and AU games and have yet to see many of those problems. The separation of Simple, Complex, and Exotic spells with the feat requirements for those spells, and the lack of penalty free on demand healing unless you have either a Greenbond or Wood Witch present made it a lot more interesting. Stat boosting was a lot more difficult so you didn't have as insane numbers too. I agree that Oathbound (the not Monk) are horrible and there is no reason to play one. They are easily the worst thing in the game. I've only ever seen one person play a Magister, most of the players like the half-casters, and only two Sprytes. And calculating animal's stat is that strenuous? Really? Out of the characters played by fifteen different players I have seen: Verrik Magister Verik Wood Witch Verrik Akashic/Mage Balde Spryte Champion of Death Human Champion of Dark Spryte Winter Witch Human Hawk Totem Warrior Giant Runethane Giant Unfettered Quickling Faen Warmain Quickling Faen Unfettered Sibeccai Mageblade Human Warmain Human Sea Witch Human Wolf Totem Warrior Dracha Akashic Human Oathbound (who quickly changed to Mojh Runethane/Mageblade) Litorian Warmain Litorian Ritual Warrior Loresong Faen Iron Witch Human Champion of Freedom Giant Shark Totem Warrior Human Akashic/Runethane Human Ritual Warrior Sibeccai Warmain Nobody has ever played a Greenbond for some reason.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:19
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Huh...I have run a lot of AE and AU games and have yet to see many of those problems. The separation of Simple, Complex, and Exotic spells with the feat requirements for those spells, and the lack of penalty free on demand healing unless you have either a Greenbond or Wood Witch present made it a lot more interesting. Stat boosting was a lot more difficult so you didn't have as insane numbers too. It did nothing to power down Magisters, who have access to Complex spells at every level, and bonus access to many Exotic spells with one of the powerful Template feats. Greenbonds likewise have easy access to Complex spells with those powerful Template feats. They are almost as dangerous as Magisters, played well. As for healing ... if you don't have a Greenbond (we did), it just means the mundanes got beat up more and could restore less of it. It does the opposite of what it should. Healing the melee guys isn't a cheat or a workaround; it's a necessary function to their survival since they otherwise have no self-healing.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:30
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I guess I just have non-powergamers as players.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:48
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Does any system that isn't derived from D&D have to worry about caster supremacy? It feels like every time this issue comes up its in regards to something D&D.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:49
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The 3e healing resource economy didn't change in UA that way, yeah. Here's how it works: A party of four characters has a set amount of "hit point resources" - an aggregate of both actual hit points from hit dice and healing resources available to the party. For simplification, let's focus on innate, class-based resources rather than equipment, except in the most basic terms of "classes with access to higher armor will also lose hit points marginally slower on average over time" - the fighter's hit point resource value is both its actual HP and its armor. Let's say we have a party of Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue. At a glance, who has the largest amount of hit points to lose in the session? The Cleric. It has the same armor as the fighter, a slightly smaller natural hit die, but access to more natural healing. This progresses through essentially every level of Cleric. Technically speaking, fighters don't even come second: the Wizard can summon poo poo with hit points. But let's be nice and assume fighter comes second. Who stands to lose resources the fastest? The person on the "front line", i.e. the fighter. He stands to lose more hit points and thus make sure that the rest of the party loses hit points slower as well - his (theoretically) higher defense (theoretically) absorbs more damage than theirs can. His large amount of hit points serves as a buffer to prevent sudden death situations. Except the Cleric has at least as good defenses as the Fighter and may have better defenses through innate abilities, and crucially is able to recover his own hit points - he has a vastly deeper well of hit point resources to draw on in defense, actual HP and potential HP from recovery spells. The fighter has high armor and high hit points, but no method of naturally regenerating those hit points. Every hit point the fighter loses is a resource that another character loses access to. This is the crucial point; For the fighter to function at peak functionality, another character must expend resources. He is a net drain on overall party recovery and buffing. So does the fighter have a benefit that can't be replicated by another class to justify the expense? Nope. Clerics can meatshield just fine, and can survive things fighters will not. Summoned monsters and other magic can intercept enemies directly rather than by indirectly buffing the fighter, who actually has no innate capability to actually intercept or meaningfully stop monsters in their tracks. So let's take our new party with these findings: Cleric, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue. Now there is no net resource drain, since one cleric can function in the role of the fighter while not demanding the second cleric's attention, freeing up resources to be used offensively or to help solve the adventure. But there's still a potential net resource drain on the party because there's a Rogue in it, who cannot regenerate hit point resources and in fact will lose them quickly... but has the potential net benefit of massive damage output. So early on, the Rogue pays for himself. Eventually, however, party offense will rather focus on bypassing the enemy's hit point economy entirely (and party defenses will focus on defending against same, hence why fighter hit point resources eventually stop meaning poo poo). At that point, finding traps and so on is much better left to a spellcaster who can do those things while also providing party resources. A cleric or a wizard can do this. So now our resource-optimized party with the widest range of capability and no character who is a net resource drain for another character is Cleric, Cleric, Wizard, Cleric (or Wizard). The fighter should have gone into economics, and the game designers should have too.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:49
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I guess I just have non-powergamers as players. Neither actually tried to wreck the game. But by 12th level it was happening anyway. And stuff like Electrical Spell is kind of low-lying fruit; it's one of those immediately obvious sorts of things, at least it seems like it to me. Runic Spell is a bit weirder, but I never had a Runethane for any length of time and nobody else picked up the template. Still a hell of a way to one-shot near-mindless enemies, though. I think AE's non-casters and part-casters are pretty balanced among each other, by and large. It's the full casters, as always, that screw it up. It doesn't look like you had a heck of a lot of full casters, so maybe that was the difference?
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Jun 10, 2014 21:52
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DocBubonic posted:Does any system that isn't derived from D&D have to worry about caster supremacy? It feels like every time this issue comes up its in regards to something D&D. Psykers are pretty ridiculously powerful in the higher tier 40kRPGs, though the Librarian from Deathwatch remains the nadir of caster supremacy there, and they're balanced out some by the very real chance that they're going to cause disaster by using their powers. It isn't a very high chance, in practice, but the small chance your PC just plain dies (or causes some other major problem, or destroys all their gear, or whatnot) tends to keep my players from going too nuts with Psy, at least.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:52
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Night10194 posted:Psykers are pretty ridiculously powerful in the higher tier 40kRPGs, though the Librarian from Deathwatch remains the nadir of caster supremacy there, and they're balanced out some by the very real chance that they're going to cause disaster by using their powers. It isn't a very high chance, in practice, but the small chance your PC just plain dies (or causes some other major problem, or destroys all their gear, or whatnot) tends to keep my players from going too nuts with Psy, at least. In fairness, caster supremacy is the least of Deathwatch's balance problems. But yeah, trying to abuse your overpoweredness becomes a lot less palatable when there's a non-zero chance of "you open a rift to hell, turn into a bloodthirster, CHAOS REIGNS"
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Jun 10, 2014 21:55
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Night10194 posted:I think I really understood how much caster supremacy was a thing about the time we were flooding that city. Every plan we came up with that succeeded was based entirely around leveraging allied clerics or our one mage. Every major villain was a mage, because they had the power to actually affect the setting more. Someone posted this to grognards.txt a while back but someone actually started a thread on Paizo's forums asking if anyone used martial characters as major villains and the overwhelming response was "No, why would I? Martial characters can't do anything useful." I feel like pointing out here that in Reign the ability to detect and counterspell magic are explicitly mundane skills that anyone can learn, which means that a not!Conan who's studied how to ward off hexes and the evil eye can simply bat aside some evil wizard's spell before chopping their head off, and that while magic is definitely useful in the sense that not just anyone can turn a bonfire's worth of smoke into an instant siege fortification or replace someone's missing limb with a glass-and-sandstone prosthetic, magic is generally less useful when it comes to affecting the same sorts of lasting, long-term changes on the world that someone with a silver tongue and a keen eye for economics can.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:59
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dwarf74 posted:I'm not really sure I do, either. At least, not as such. The one guy wanted to play a Mojh Magister, which more or less led to ... what you have. The greenbond guy did see how easy it was for his Druid to pick up Fireball, so kinda sorta there. My players thought the half-casters had more interesting secondary abilities which is why they went for them. If they wanted to play a mage or a cleric they would've wanted to play D&D. I think caster supremacy is more in the mindset of the players though. The magister has died three times while the Giant Unfettered hasn't died once in the current game.
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Jun 10, 2014 22:05
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Y'know, I have heard that Shadowrun had serious caster supremacy problems, but my 2e/3e group from back in the day never had those problems. We mostly played one-shots or fairly episodic games, so nobody abused summoning, and nobody took power foci or the spells that give you super-initiative.
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Jun 10, 2014 22:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Y'know, I have heard that Shadowrun had serious caster supremacy problems, but my 2e/3e group from back in the day never had those problems. We mostly played one-shots or fairly episodic games, so nobody abused summoning, and nobody took power foci or the spells that give you super-initiative. The exact nature of what's most abusive with regard to magic in Shadowrun varies from edition to edition...in SR5 combat spells seem to have taken a bit of a hit in terms of power while in prior editions a mage with stunbolt/stunball could tear through the opposition...but the two factors that seem to be most common across editions are 1). summoning is ridiculously, ridiculously useful in the way that any ability that lets you summon multiple independent entities with a variety of supernatural powers and resistance to normal weapons can be and 2). spells that let you do things that pretty much nobody else can on the spur of the moment, like reading and/or controlling minds, flawlessly impersonating someone, turning invisible, shapeshifting into a bird, telekinesis, conjuring forcefields, etc. Like D&D, it's not really fireballs and lightning bolts that measure a wizard's power so much as how many ways he can look at a problem and go "nope." (Ironically adepts, the magic ninja warrior counterpart to street samurai, have often had problems being underpowered compared to their mundane counterparts.)
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Jun 10, 2014 22:12
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Caster supremacy isn't about player intent. It's about a system where, if you play a certain type of character, that character just sort of ends up really good. You can be playing entirely to type by playing a summoner in Shadowrun or as a battle-cleric instead of a fighter in D&D 3e and still discover it for yourself. After the discovery is made, what is the player supposed to do? Not play the character they want because the system makes them too good? Is that really much better than not playing a character you want because the system downplays them excessively? People who enjoy seeing what kind of strong combos they can come up with just happen to stumble on these things first.
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Jun 10, 2014 22:13
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:
No quisling faen trollhore? Davin Valkri posted:Why not have a setting or ruleset where all the PCs are magic, even if latently, and that's set in stone? Heck, pull a Double Cross and replace "Renegade Virus" with "Spark of Magic" or something. Everybody gets magic, everybody gets to affect the setting, nobody complains about "too anime sword-fightingness" because the swordfighter is magic too, duh. Glorantha and its canonical rulesets (Heroquest, Runequest) do this. HQ is pretty storygamey, though, so its probably still going to offend players who hate "anime swordfightingness".
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Jun 10, 2014 22:13
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Forums Terrorist posted:In fairness, caster supremacy is the least of Deathwatch's balance problems. But yeah, trying to abuse your overpoweredness becomes a lot less palatable when there's a non-zero chance of "you open a rift to hell, turn into a bloodthirster, CHAOS REIGNS" It's also a thing I notice among my players: They actually enjoy playing the Psyker more. They enjoy the risk of crazy poo poo happening and get excited about the Perils rolls and rolling with what insanity their magic brought out this time, and they've remarked more than once that playing a D&D mage after that feels 'boring'.
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Jun 10, 2014 22:21
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GURPS 3E certainly had Caster Advantage problems - although not Caster Supremacy to the point of D&D. Partly because everyone dies to crossbow bolts in GURPS and the rule was the strongest person loaded everyone's crossbows between fights. Single shot weapons - but lethal ones. So sneakiness was the order of the day, and there casters have a huge advantage.
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Jun 10, 2014 22:23
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I've never actually heard of this setting before; is it worth picking up in spite of the Monte Cooked-ness?
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Jun 10, 2014 22:25
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