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QuantumNinja posted:That was my initial inclination, but I was hesitant to have my players game it (one of my players in particular loves the minmaxing, even in systems where it's so secondary it's laughable). I'll probably do that, thanks! Well the way Atomic Robo works it's impossible to really "game" that particular part of the system because in practical terms no character can have more than 7 total stress boxes period regardless of how they shuffle their skills, the only difference is how they're divided (minimum of 2 in a track, maximum of 5). To be honest it would actually have been simpler for them to just straight up say "you get 7 boxes to divide up among your stress tracks" instead of the whole tying it to skills in your modes thing.
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Jul 6, 2014 16:12
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That "divide 7 amongst your tracks" also falls into the fixed stress box category. It does allow for some distinction between characters in terms of which kinds of attacks they're most resilient to.
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Jul 6, 2014 16:18
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Re: the Shooting/Athletics thing I'm a little confused about what type of scenarios you're going to be doing where a lot of shooting is taking place but not much athletics. Is this like an early Western where people stand in the street and blaze away at each other?
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Jul 6, 2014 17:34
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Kaja Rainbow posted:Here's the deal. Current skill balance in vanilla FATE Core is that Fight can both attack and defend with or without weapon. Shoot can attack at range but not defend. And Athletics can defend and create advantages but not attack. I think I honestly prefer it when the PCs are bad at actually fighting, because it forces them to get creative. My group is fresh off of D&D only-type games, so it's like pulling teeth still getting them to try and warp the narrative. Like, one guy took Shoot, and has a lot of illusion type powers, but I think he's kind of lost without a Spell Description block to tell him what's up. I think I need to re-iterate again next session that having the Shoot skill, for example, implies that you have access to some kind of appropriate ranged weapon. I think he couldn't come up with one, though (teenage inventor type character), so he used the two shots from a shotgun he found in the hellscape they're currently exploring, and spent the rest of a fight relying on his +0 Fight. Only one party member really seems to get what's going on with FATE yet, so they were kind of MVPing creating weather anomalies and detonating environmental aspects while the other two didn't really use a lot of their powers, opting instead to just kind of brawl with the crap monster mobs while the big bad racked up psych Advantages on a nearby rooftop with his monologue. I was trying to provide an example through their villain, but I'm kind of afraid it's just coming off as me pulling reasons to kick their rear end out of nowhere, like, "His monologue trails off as you cut his last monster down into a pile of stinking sludge. 'If you want something done, you do it yourself,' he grumbles, and begins to form a massive ball of flame in the air above him. You can interfere with Shoot... *compares dice*, a bolt of your lightning strikes right into him, but he is 'Overwhelmed with Hateful Glee', *spends a Fate Token*, and is 'Utterly convinced he will win', *uses free invoke*. The shock pushes him back a little, but he jumps up and touchdown spikes the massive fireball into the roof of the cafe. Your building is now 'On Fire.'" They got out fine, I just feel semi-bad about putting the bad guy's powers into play when only one of the PCs seems to be on the ball about it.
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Jul 6, 2014 17:46
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Ask them what they do. Fate characters are durable but there's no reason not to DROP weapons for them if they don't have anything, or ask them leading questions ("What weapon do you always keep on you?" etc).
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Jul 6, 2014 19:17
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Golden Bee posted:Ask them what they do. Fate characters are durable but there's no reason not to DROP weapons for them if they don't have anything, or ask them leading questions ("What weapon do you always keep on you?" etc). Yeah, seconding this advice. When in doubt, take a page from Dungeon World and ask your players "What do you do" and make them say something beyond "I attack". Some players will take to it more easily than others, when I was introducing my IRL group to a more RP heavy game as a break from D&D 4e I just had to accept that "I leap across the room swinging my sword" is at least better than "I roll my attack".
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Jul 6, 2014 22:07
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Golden Bee posted:Ask them what they do. Fate characters are durable but there's no reason not to DROP weapons for them if they don't have anything, or ask them leading questions ("What weapon do you always keep on you?" etc). Yeah, dropping weapons is what I ended up doing. The other guy uses a soccer ball for his Shoot, but he's in kind of the similar "used to D&D" boat, so instead of thinking of ways to use a soccer ball as a ranged weapon, he was using his Fight +1 and a scavenged knife. It all worked out okay, at least. I'm just reluctant to tell people how to play their characters in the middle of a session, like, "this magical stunt seriously gives you carte blanch to create illusions using Craft. The possibilities are literally endless." JDCorley posted:Re: the Shooting/Athletics thing Going back to this, I think it's not a big deal if people have poor Athletic skills in a gunfight. It just means that they have to spend a lot of time maintaining cover-type advantages and lining up insane trick shots so that when they finally pop out of shelter, they can make it count. Consider the applications of things like Stealth and Deception to mess with the enemy once they are no longer certain of your current position.
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Jul 7, 2014 05:08
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Kaja Rainbow posted:That "divide 7 amongst your tracks" also falls into the fixed stress box category. It does allow for some distinction between characters in terms of which kinds of attacks they're most resilient to. It's kind of irritating because virtually nobody I've seen who's cracked open Atomic Robo and started making characters for the first time has gotten how stress tracks work right away without having it explained beforehand. It's a minor issue but it's a very clunky, poorly explained part of the game that could have been handled much easier simply by saying "you have 7 boxes and two tracks, minimum of 2 in each, go."
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Jul 7, 2014 05:51
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Kai Tave posted:It's kind of irritating because virtually nobody I've seen who's cracked open Atomic Robo and started making characters for the first time has gotten how stress tracks work right away without having it explained beforehand. It's a minor issue but it's a very clunky, poorly explained part of the game that could have been handled much easier simply by saying "you have 7 boxes and two tracks, minimum of 2 in each, go." It's especially weird because it's the only time MODE values matter. You don't get more stress for having a +3 final Physique, only base. Leads to some very weird minmaxing in the end where every character needs one of four skills in his Good mode, then in his Fair mode.
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Jul 7, 2014 06:23
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It's mitigated by the fact that if you use the default modes (Action, Banter, Science, etc.) that you'll probably wind up with max stress boxes in some configuration by default...broadening the "stress granting skills" to include Athletics and Provoke makes it increasingly likely that someone isn't going to wind up extra-fragile simply by accident. Yet and still it's an extra layer of unnecessary complexity that serves no real beneficial purpose. All I can figure is the thought process went "FATE = have to tie extra stress to skills somehow" and they went forward from there instead of simply saying "wait, why are we doing this again?"
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Jul 7, 2014 06:32
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I was running into the question of "can you make a fate character with low athletics?" and then remembered it's in genre. In action movies, everyone who matters is able to dodge a hail of gunfire. Therefore, it's in genre that everyone from the ingenue to the kid sidekick to the old professor has at least +1, often +2 in athletics.
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Jul 7, 2014 07:10
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The option also exists, if you absolutely have to make a character with as low an Athletics as possible but don't want to be the slow kid in dodgeball every time a fight breaks out, to use a skill substitution stunt to allow you to defend with another skill in some fashion.
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Jul 7, 2014 07:44
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JDCorley posted:Re: the Shooting/Athletics thing Probably none. I'm just expecting everyone to take it to a reasonable level simply because it's the primary defence stat. I know thats how it's going to go, and I'd quite like the option to be a sloth to be viable, if nothing else. I guess the most likely situation that is going to come up is that, say, a hacker is tapping away behind cover and the badguy knows he's there, but I'll probably just make it situational: A simple "You're behind the wall and can't be hit" or "It's a hard shot but he's not actively taking action not to defend himself other than cowering, so lets make it a static challenge of <appropriate>". Maybe the shooter can blast away at the wall and try and punch through it, which is fun and dramatic and gives the target a chance to scurry away. Yeah, gently caress it, I'm overthinking it. I can earball it easily enough like the above without needing to rewrite rules over it. ShineDog fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 11:23
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Just be glad we're not back in dresden where combat was broken down to skills for fists, melee, guns, and athletics for throwing weapons. It turned your gun guy into the mage equivalent in terms of damage and "Kill him first, he's helpless in melee"
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Jul 7, 2014 14:24
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Kai Tave posted:The option also exists, if you absolutely have to make a character with as low an Athletics as possible but don't want to be the slow kid in dodgeball every time a fight breaks out, to use a skill substitution stunt to allow you to defend with another skill in some fashion. "Not in the Face!" Character may use Rapport to defend against attacks because they are too charming to die.
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Jul 7, 2014 14:44
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I might expand the defences a little bit, situationally. Running across the open and getting shot at? Defend with Athletics as normal. In cover, poking your head out and taking potshots? Maybe you could roll Notice instead, because you noticed someone aiming at you and ducked back behind the wall. They don't have the "suppressive fire" defense with shoot that was in Spirit or Bulldogs, right? Thematically I liked that, although I guess it makes sense more being used to create an obstacle for the enemy.
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Jul 7, 2014 15:09
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The dual problems of "some skills are more useful in terms of breadth of actions they can affect" and "in a genre game, like a kung fu epic or something, there are certain things that pretty much everyone should be assumed to be able to do" are why I've been getting steadily more interested in FAE.
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Jul 7, 2014 22:38
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ProfessorProf posted:The dual problems of "some skills are more useful in terms of breadth of actions they can affect" and "in a genre game, like a kung fu epic or something, there are certain things that pretty much everyone should be assumed to be able to do" are why I've been getting steadily more interested in FAE. Lately I've been wanting to run FAE Tianxia. I mean, Approaches are basically kung-fu styles already. Or you could borrow from Qin and make the approaches be Metal, Water, Fire, Wood, and Earth.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:27
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I've been mulling over trying out FAE for whatever I run next. Once you streamline rules to the level of core, it's just so tempting to keep chopping bits off, see how far you can go.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:29
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ProfessorProf posted:The dual problems of "some skills are more useful in terms of breadth of actions they can affect" and "in a genre game, like a kung fu epic or something, there are certain things that pretty much everyone should be assumed to be able to do" are why I've been getting steadily more interested in FAE. To be fair, that's a problem with any generic game. I think BESM's actually the only RPG that ever had different skill costs for different genres. Too bad the list was so granular. And, you know, the system was broken.
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Jul 8, 2014 05:00
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FAE suffers from the opposite problem of "I roll literally the one loving thing I always roll for everything."
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Jul 8, 2014 06:55
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Theres always the "profession as skill" system, which kind of broadens skills out a bit, as mentioned in the toolkit. I'd like to see it elaborated on a bit, but as described you might take "gangster" as one of your skills, and maybe you can roll that for intimidating people, making dodgy deals, driving cars fast from the police, and hitting people with a baseball bat. That gives people much broader utility, but it might be tricky to see where to draw the line (I could add a huge number of other things to gangster other than what I mentioned) or how much leeway to pick multiple professions. I'd like to see more on modes. There's some detail on that in the toolkit but it seems a little clumsy and undercooked. I understand it's expanded on significantly in Atomic Robo. Is there an SRD for that?
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Jul 8, 2014 10:36
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ProfessorCirno posted:FAE suffers from the opposite problem of "I roll literally the one loving thing I always roll for everything." You solve this by adding complications to how they solve something. You can also adjust the difficulty when using an unsuitable approach. I forcefully break down the door. Okay, the noise alerts everyone in the area to your break in. Probably should have let the sneaky guy pick the lock.
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Jul 8, 2014 20:15
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I have been working on a Fate hack which is a li'l bit Core, a li'l bit FAE, a li'l bit stealing-mechanics-from-other-systems-and-adapting-them, and a li'l bit not very finished and in need of excessive playtesting regardless. Some of the language is clumsy, some is a bit overwrought, some is missing entirely - but I thought I'd show it and get a little feedback (if any) from you guys. Feel free to ask questions or whatever.
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Jul 10, 2014 05:02
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ShineDog posted:Theres always the "profession as skill" system, which kind of broadens skills out a bit, as mentioned in the toolkit. I'd like to see it elaborated on a bit, but as described you might take "gangster" as one of your skills, and maybe you can roll that for intimidating people, making dodgy deals, driving cars fast from the police, and hitting people with a baseball bat. Jadepunk, which I believe was worked on by the same guy who did Atomic Robo, does something like this. It uses an FAE approach-esque system but the approaches are broad professions like Soldier and Engineer (or something, I'm too lazy to open the pdf, but you get the idea).
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Jul 10, 2014 05:15
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Inspired by the discussion a couple of pages back I now want to play a Fate character with "Constantly on Fire" as their Trouble.
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Jul 10, 2014 07:58
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Fuego Fish posted:I have been working on a Fate hack which is a li'l bit Core, a li'l bit FAE, a li'l bit stealing-mechanics-from-other-systems-and-adapting-them, and a li'l bit not very finished and in need of excessive playtesting regardless. How many Themes should a setting have? It looks like 3 based on the examples. Do characters start with one Reputation, one Origin, and up to three Traits? Are Proficiencies just stunts?
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Jul 10, 2014 16:02
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Evil Mastermind posted:How many Themes should a setting have? It looks like 3 based on the examples. Three seems like a good number, honestly, but I think it can vary depending on how many setting elements need to be exploited in aspect form. For some it might just be one "theme" with the rest of the setting's foibles enacted through the storyline and so on. Yes, it's one Reputation, one Origin, and the number of traits is determined by the GM beforehand. I'd say for me, it'd be 2 to start with and maybe an additional one later. I haven't finished writing them up yet, but you can kind of think of proficiencies as like... stunt packages, I guess. Or additional rulesets. So something like "I have an adorable animal sidekick" is a proficiency, because it's essentially a card-carrying member of the group at that point, rather than just something you bought. So instead of a skill called "I have an adorable animal sidekick" (which would otherwise hurt your capacity to do more useful things) or a poorly-worded stunt, you take the Sidekick proficiency and stat the little bugger up so it can run off and lift keys from belts for you, or whatever the general clichés are for animal sidekicks. I made "you are hella good at fightin'" a proficiency because I had magic (of sorts) as a proficiency, and it didn't seem right to go "hey wizards you get all this cool poo poo wow, and fighters you get... some extra refresh I guess" because that's D&D level design. So if you wanna be the fighty type, you take the fighty proficiency, which doesn't unfairly raise your fighting skill, but does mean you hit harder and have a better time doing compels on advantages.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:36
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Physical Copy of Atomic Robo arrived! Now I really want the MJ12 book for more stuff on how Factions work and examples thereof.
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Jul 10, 2014 19:01
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unseenlibrarian posted:Physical Copy of Atomic Robo arrived! Now I really want the MJ12 book for more stuff on how Factions work and examples thereof. I'm just working on the setting material, all the rules stuff is left up to our Fate guru Mike Olson. I actually have NO IDEA what he's rules-itizing, but I'll emphasize the desire to formalize faction creation. It feels like this would be a good book would for it since we're already giving so much info on M12 itself and then providing you guys your first real glimpses at the other weird organizations that populate Robo's world. I mean, if we're gonna give you all those examples with the explicit idea of inspiring you to come up with your own, then we may as well give you the rules to do that. For now I will leave you guys with a super exclusive (if light) preview because reading about Fate on this forum is what got me interested in it. And that got us the Robo RPG. Majestic is broken down into the following branches: The Advanced Defence Force - the Jacks and Janes of all trades, scientist-soldier types. Most closely maps to your average Tesladyne agent. The Enhanced Research Department - the eggheads Jeff Goldblum was talking about in Jurassic Park, i.e. "didn't bother to think if they should." The Sub-Dimensional Unit - superluminal computation, communication, and travel. Occasionally to other realities, all of them Vampiric. See also Jeff Goldblum's quote from Jurassic Park. The First Earth Battalion - covert ops and highly overt exploratory teams. Jenkins was an exceptional example of the latter. The Paranormal Sensory Initiative - psychotronic intelligence and countermeasures. The Office of Operations and Procurement - the folks without whom all of Majestic would collapse. Think Radar from MASH or George the spreadsheet wizard from FCBD. We also give a brief-ish history of each of the following factions... Daedalus - where Majestic is concerned with Tesla, Daedalus is concerned with Helsingard. Department Zero - Soviet mad science. - DELPHI - the most well-known D-Zero cell, largely concerned with psionics. Most Perfect Science Division - shove DARPA into Tesladyne and shove that into the People's Liberation Army. Big Science Incorporated - Japanese think tank and home of the world's premiere anti-Biomega research group, Science Team Super 5.
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Jul 10, 2014 23:00
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I just really want a Science Team Super Five book.  Serious though, looking forward to that expansion. Mitama fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 23:06
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TurninTrix posted:I just really want a Science Team Super Five book.
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Jul 11, 2014 00:46
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Hyperactive posted:Jenkins was an exceptional example of the latter. Has Jenkins ever killed a goat?
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Jul 11, 2014 02:25
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Tulul posted:Has Jenkins ever killed a goat?
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Jul 11, 2014 02:39
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Hyperactive posted:Daedalus - where Majestic is concerned with Tesla, Daedalus is concerned with Helsingard. And make sure Mike does the faction creation rules so I can stat up the Banzai Institute.
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Jul 11, 2014 04:23
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If anyone here is waiting for Inverse World Accelerated, while Gnome does the layout I went ahead and threw my notes up here until the actual book is done.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:52
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Evil Mastermind posted:And make sure Mike does the faction creation rules so I can stat up the Banzai Institute. But the point is: they're comin' at ya. Somehow.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:06
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Quick Atomic Robo Question. Could AR do a lower powered more horror type game like Fringe or the X-Files by dialing down the characters and situations, or do the modes lead to too much character power to really pull that off?
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Jul 12, 2014 05:08
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Anyone who's read Jadepunk: besides Roles=skills, what's different from Tianxa?
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Jul 12, 2014 07:29
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I haven't really delved into Jadepunk as much as TurninTrix has (who should totally post about it here, hint hint). Setting-wise where Tianxia is pretty much straight up mythic wuxia Jadepunk is more cultural fusion/industrial revolution, with martial arts and swordsmen along with gunslingers and engineers and airships. It's got a bit of that Legend of Korra vibe going on. Mechanically the big difference is that where Tianxia's martial arts are fairly simple and basic, functioning like regular stunts for the most part, Jadepunk uses a system for creating what it calls "Assets" which are like mega-stunts, representing gadgets, allies, martial arts techniques, stuff like that. Each type of Asset (technique, ally, or equipment) has a short list of specific features you can take for it, rules for its creation, they each have to have a flaw but can have more than one to offset the cost of additional features, how they either have their own aspects or tie into one of your own, etc. It honestly strikes me as the sort of thing that someone big on FATE might look at and go "man this seems way too fiddly and complicated, I'm not doing this" and while I don't think it's brain-bendingly hard to wrap your head around it does seem like it could be offputting to someone used to simpler FATE iterations. I don't think there's anything in there that's actually detrimental to gameplay the way, say, Kerberos Club FATE's wonky dice-rolling stuff was, it all seems in line numerically and gameplay-wise with regular FATE stuff, it's just got an added layer of chargen added on top of things.
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Jul 12, 2014 07:48
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