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jivjov posted:Care to elaborate? I mean, obviously the specifics are up for debate, but the general concept of "tailor an event to challenge even the beefiest of soak-monsters" and "have story consequences for being a murderhobo" seem pretty good to me. Sorry. Those despair suggestions are garbage. Also I think ship boarding by one guy against a murderbot is possibly the most favorable situation you can hand murderbot. You need more than one dude or (as you saw), he's going to get crit to hell and back. It won't necessarily be on the absolute first crit out of the gate (that was amazingly unlucky), but if there's only one dude, then he's going to get stacked on and popped pretty quickly.
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Nov 21, 2014 02:10
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Yeah. Sending in one dude basically doesn't work in most RPGs. I remember them suggesting it in D&D4E and then you'd realize that the numbers just work against the one monster. He's making one attack for every four or five coming his way, he's going to fail the save eventually, and as soon as he's locked down he's going to just get creamed. Introduce some intrigue. Introduce problems that a vibroaxe just CANNOT fix. Any fight without adding drama/plot is just people jacking off dice all over the table, so integrate some story in these fights that must be done while the fight is going on, because if it's just a numbers contest, murderbot is clearly going to be the victor.
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Nov 21, 2014 02:31
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Swags posted:Introduce some intrigue. Introduce problems that a vibroaxe just CANNOT fix. Any fight without adding drama/plot is just people jacking off dice all over the table, so integrate some story in these fights that must be done while the fight is going on, because if it's just a numbers contest, murderbot is clearly going to be the victor. This is the key. You haven't given us much in the last few weeks of you complaining about murderdroid, but it sounds like your campaign just features a lot of combat and the party hunting poo poo down... what's the overarching plot? Where's it going? There are always plenty of options to spice things up and change gears, you just need to explore them. EDIT: Also, we need more games running in TGR, dammit!
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Nov 21, 2014 05:18
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Once the holiday season is over, I plan on starting a new PbP. I work at a grocery store, so I don't want to be trying to run a game while working insane Turkey hours.
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Nov 21, 2014 05:26
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Maybe you could take out the melee murderbot by having the bounty hunters try to blow up his ship, then use mechanical tricks to seal him in his escape pod. Or the party fights a Force user who has enough ranks in Move to pick up the droid and move him back a couple of range bands. Or a Toydarian assassin exploits his ability to hover over difficult terrain when retreating.
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Nov 21, 2014 07:15
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Or a Slicer programs a mouse droid to sneak up on him, jack into his circuit board, and give him a bunch of Willpower checks to avoid being hacked. If he gets hacked, the slicer turns him against his own crew (you give him control of this, you simply make it clear that his command programming has been erased and the entire crew has been marked as a threat) and they have to figure out a way to either take out the slicer before murderdroid kills them all, escape him, disable him, or somehow override the hack and reprogram his memory banks. Set it on a mostly deserted space station and physically separate the players into different rooms so they don't know where he is or what he's doing, and turn it into a game of cat and mouse through this abandoned station which also has booby traps in it for both the party and the murderdroid, and to top it off throw in some mynock swarms and trapped puzzle rooms to spice it up... he'd be like the droid Predator, hunting them down. EDIT: I actually had a friend sorta do this once in a Shadowrun game... our Decker/Rigger got hit with Black ICE that actually fried his brain, so the ICE made him start hallucinating and seeing the team as Corp security via surveillance cams and poo poo. I had him sit in another room at the computer and I had my own laptop in front of me with the rest of the players. I would type out and send him instructions on what he was seeing and what his options were via Skype, and he would just sit and talk into his mic and I had an earpiece in my ear. His actual Decking interface was an IRC channel in which he'd type out commands and crap and I'd have dummy logins for each ICE or security firewall that he'd go up against, so he'd be busy doing his thing on the side while the team was actually doing the run. Thing is, I did this regularly for him whenever the team did a run and he was remotely jacking in, so the entire time he OOCly really thought he was helping out even though his drones and the security turrets were shooting up his own team. In the end one of them figured out what was happening and ended up running outside, kicking open the door to the van, and shooting him in the back of the head, but still... it was a hilarious session and the players all enjoyed it and thought it was a great twist. Doesn't work as well with Star Wars and a droid, but you could figure something out. Fuzz fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Nov 21, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2014 07:56
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Or ask him in real life to tone it down instead of being a passive aggressive shitbag, I mean christ, "Make him roll a bunch then just take away his character! That'll show him!"
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Nov 21, 2014 12:10
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Yeah, a lot of these suggestions seem to boil down to "punish the player for daring to make a certain type of character". He's a droid, he's meant to be min-maxed. Just make sure there are other challenges besides melee combat for the other players, and let the droid be the group's bodyguard.
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Nov 21, 2014 17:15
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The fun thing about letting the party set the "what happens when Despair comes up" is that they're more likely to choose things that affect the party as a whole because endangering (not necessarily hurting) everyone IS worse than having the droid pop a sprocket or whatever. If Despair doesn't come up, hooray -- the player of IG-88 gets to do what he built the character to do! If Despair comes up, hooray -- dangerous hijinx ensue!
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Nov 21, 2014 19:06
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I was trying to go less for 'punish the player for making a specialized character' and more 'quit just throwing his specialization at him and then complaining when he's hyper-specialized to deal with it'. I really disagree with overtly, or covertly, punishing him for playing the guy, but if the DM's constantly just throwing problems at him that are solved with axeaxeaxeaxeaxe then the only real options are to throw other problems his way or ask the guy to tone it down and play something else.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:28
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I also vaguely recall you saying that the problem isn't that he eats combat stuff and the non-combat characters feel bad, it's that he eats combat stuff and there are other combat characters who seem useless. In that case, you just need to setup combats that plays to the other characters' strengths. For instance, have an all-ranged battle (other enemies are on a catwalk above the party, or there are enemies flanking the party on two sides so that he can charge one group while the other shoots at the party, or the party's on one landspeeder while getting shot at from another landspeeder, etc. etc.). Or throw in a clearly-marked mini-boss for the droid alongside a pack of other ranged combatants that hassle the party - the party gets dumped into a pit with a young Rancor by an angry Hutt or bounty hunter, or lured into a slot canyon with the same, and the party has to lay down covering fire and/or fight off the boss enemy and/or his mooks while the droid gets to have a brutal melee fight with the Rancor (who ignores certain types of crits because it's a Rancor). All of this could have an overlay that the non-combat characters are hacking a system to stop the actual bad guy's ship from taking off, meaning the non-combat folks and the combat folks are cooperating to stop the bad guy from escaping while the droid holds off the rancor. One way I've seen this type of combat run effectively is to have the DM quasi-split the party. You're all in the same room, you're all fighting at the same time, but you say - let's turn to one player first. Droid-man, you and I talk our way through the fight. Everyone can pitch in with stories about what your dice rolls mean, but it'll go more fluidly if you and I go back and forth about how you fight the rancor. Then you turn to everyone else and say - while he was fighting the rancor, lets talk about your fight with the bounty hunter manning an E-Web blaster & his army of mooks. Do the same thing, but get the droid player to help you describe what the despairs and threats are doing. You can retell the story of what they see the droid player doing in their peripheral vision, but they're clearly focusing on their part of the fight. Give them a roughly equivalent number of rounds before the droid player can rejoin them and help out. (NOTE: This doesn't have to be the same number of rounds as the droid fight. Tell your party that rounds are an approximation for fluid time and you're deciding what the narratively appropriate time for the droid to finish fighting the rancor is) This works well if the party can see clear benefits from the other people in their group but still feel like they're contributing. So if the droid dispatches the rancor particularly spectacularly, that demoralizes the mooks and they take black dice on their shots at the party. But because the droid gets so involved in finishing off the rancor, he can't get over there to slice off their faces, or something like that. Or if the hackers debilitate the escape craft the big bad turns and fights with more focus/force against the party, giving him a bonus to his attacks, but he's scared and furious and on edge because he doesn't have an out, making him more vulnerable so they have an advantage shooting at him and he can't escape. Etc., etc.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:00
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Or go "hey your character is actually a bit too strong for me to handle, could we remake the character and maybe tone down the deathbotness of it?"
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Nov 21, 2014 21:18
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I'm not a fan of that. A player made a character he enjoys within the system. Let him play Terminator, just find ways to challenge him and the party. Try some environmental hazards as well. Let's say that they are fighting on an asteroid made of iron. An errant shot fries a nearby power generator and magnetized the portion that the PCs are in. So now murderbot has to pass a strength check and spend strain to use maneuvers. You can also hit the other party members with this so its not singled out to hit him. Of course, conversation is key. Talk to your players and see if they are having fun. If so then I'd explain that you want to try some new things to make combat more interesting.
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Nov 21, 2014 21:30
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As the murderbot is so effective, he becomes well known and an enterprising engineer builds a mod kit for bipedal droids that turns them into clones of your murderbot (statwise). Now there are hundreds if not thousands of murder bots and next time you meet a potential enemy he will have three murderbots identical to the one in your group.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:42
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Blamestorm posted:As the murderbot is so effective, he becomes well known and an enterprising engineer builds a mod kit for bipedal droids that turns them into clones of your murderbot (statwise). Now there are hundreds if not thousands of murder bots and next time you meet a potential enemy he will have three murderbots identical to the one in your group. Ah, the HK-52 scenario. Yeah, this could lead to a fun adventure that could culminate in a number of ways. Sadly one of the many story lines that weren't finished in KOTOR 2.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:17
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I'm going to be running this (AoR, specifically) for the first time next Sunday, and I'm probably running Onslaught at Arda I. I snuck a peek at the adventure book in the FLGS and liked the first ~30 pages enough to consider buying it, but does anyone have any strong feelings either way on Onslaught before I buy do that, and are there any not-so-obvious pitfalls to avoid when running AoR?
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Nov 29, 2014 12:25
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We've been enjoying Onslaught (me especially since it's the first time I'm not GMing in 4 years). Don't be afraid to prod you're players on if they get stuck on the freeform investigation sections, and be prepared to go off the rails when one of your players wants to do something insane. For instance, my guys (and me) built our characters as an ex pirate gang known for deep space boarding and seizure of ships who then joined the rebellion. So when the Star Destroyers showed up above Arda, we then had the bright idea to seize it. It didn't go well, but the GM adjusted the story appropriately and rolled with it.
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Nov 29, 2014 16:40
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Has anyone here tried to use this system with another setting? I'm not too interested in Star Wars, and I was wondering how adaptable the system was.
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Nov 29, 2014 17:07
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Azran posted:Has anyone here tried to use this system with another setting? I'm not too interested in Star Wars, and I was wondering how adaptable the system was. I've not personally tried it, but there's really nothing to the rule set that would make it hard to adapt the system. Might have to rename/tweak some of the skills, not all game are gonna need Astronavigation, for example.
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Nov 29, 2014 17:24
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Mustache Ride posted:We've been enjoying Onslaught (me especially since it's the first time I'm not GMing in 4 years). Cool, thanks. I'll grab a copy and run it - I already had a couple of idea for things to add/change from skimming through act 1, and for what to do if this turns into a campaign. Should be fun. Wish I were playing rather than running this, but oh, well. 
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Nov 29, 2014 17:39
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jivjov posted:I've not personally tried it, but there's really nothing to the rule set that would make it hard to adapt the system. Might have to rename/tweak some of the skills, not all game are gonna need Astronavigation, for example. Yes, I was mostly wondering about magic. Something like Biotics in mass effect can easily use the same Force mechanics, but Psykers from WH40K? That is harder.
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Nov 29, 2014 17:45
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Azran posted:Yes, I was mostly wondering about magic. Something like Biotics in mass effect can easily use the same Force mechanics, but Psykers from WH40K? That is harder.
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Nov 29, 2014 17:53
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Azran posted:Yes, I was mostly wondering about magic. Something like Biotics in mass effect can easily use the same Force mechanics, but Psykers from WH40K? That is harder. Ah I wasn't even thinking about force powers. Nobody in my IRL group uses them (yet).
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Nov 29, 2014 17:58
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Azran posted:Has anyone here tried to use this system with another setting? I'm not too interested in Star Wars, and I was wondering how adaptable the system was. I know there's at least one guy in the SWRPG subreddit that's trying to do a Mass Effect conversion, but I have no idea how far along he is. Guys: I only have the Enter the Unknown (the best one, in my opinion), Dangerous Covenants, and Suns of Fortune. I've been out of the SW loop for a while. Are there any other supplements, and how good are they?
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Nov 29, 2014 18:04
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ImpactVector posted:I bet you could do it if you made some kind of unholy mashup of EotE and WHFRP3. I don't really have a good handle on the WH magic rules yet, but the dice systems are almost exactly the same. You could probably add the insanity and mutation cards from WH to EotE fairly easily. Or you could try lifting the magic system wholesale. I think this would be the most satisfying answer, since WFRP3E has miscast cards that you could trigger on a Despair roll (Chaos sign in WFRP3E). The big difference in the dice system is that Warhammer gives different new dice to replace your straight ability dice, depending on whether you are performing the action conservatively or aggressively. Expertise (from training) is a separate die type from the stance. Lifting magic wholesale would require fiddling with any game elements that didn't make the jump (Warhammer separates fatigue and stress while Star Wars just has strain, for example). Honestly, there were a couple things from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay that I would have kept for Star Wars -- the party sheets, to account for different groupings of squabbling fugitives or Rebel teams or Jedi, and the progress tracker to, well, show progress (including progress on things that the players don't know about, but can still see inching toward events).
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Nov 29, 2014 18:16
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Swags posted:I know there's at least one guy in the SWRPG subreddit that's trying to do a Mass Effect conversion, but I have no idea how far along he is. Read the OP  Far Horizons has a lot of neat rules and great background content, imo.
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Nov 29, 2014 18:29
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Do we know if Stay On Target is really out on the 1st of December? FFG, release dates etc. but since Forbidden Planet have dropped SWRPG it'd be a trek to pick it up from a local store rather than Amazon.
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Nov 29, 2014 18:43
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alg posted:Read the OP Why the gently caress would I read the op of a thread I'm caught up on? Eat a dick.
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Nov 29, 2014 18:56
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Talkie Toaster posted:Do we know if Stay On Target is really out on the 1st of December? FFG, release dates etc. but since Forbidden Planet have dropped SWRPG it'd be a trek to pick it up from a local store rather than Amazon. Making the big assumption that you live in or around London -Leisure Games should get a copy, just call them and check. It's only up the northern line, and they also do some delivery
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Nov 30, 2014 14:28
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There's also Orcs Nest in central, which can order it in if they don't have it and isn't in Finchley Central.
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Nov 30, 2014 17:13
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Did FFG say it was coming out on the 1st of December?
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Nov 30, 2014 17:45
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Lemon Curdistan posted:There's also Orcs Nest in central, which can order it in if they don't have it and isn't in Finchley Central. Gotta support my local, man. Plus I figured if they knew Forbidden Planet, they knew orcs nest.
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Dec 1, 2014 04:46
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So I'm gonna start a new PbP before too much longer...trying to decide which of the 3 systems to target it toward. I've been reading a the X-Wing series again, so Age of Rebellion is looking promising, but I also want to see what people can do with the errata'd Force and Destiny rules.
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Dec 1, 2014 04:51
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jivjov posted:So I'm gonna start a new PbP before too much longer...trying to decide which of the 3 systems to target it toward. I've been reading a the X-Wing series again, so Age of Rebellion is looking promising, but I also want to see what people can do with the errata'd Force and Destiny rules. Maybe do both? basically what I'm saying is that you
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Dec 1, 2014 08:04
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Beardless posted:Maybe do both? basically what I'm saying is that you Yeah, I can get behind that. I'll work up a recruitment post in the next couple days.
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Dec 1, 2014 08:08
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Looks like I'm gonna need to download the latest version of the character builder. I assume that it's going to be a very pilot-heavy game?
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Dec 1, 2014 08:36
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Beardless posted:Looks liek I'm gonna need to download the latest version of the character builder. I assume that it's going to be a very pilot-heavy game? The backstory I'm crafting up in my head is basically once the Wraiths get recommissioned as an Intelligence unit, the Intelligence division sent over a handful of middling operatives that showed an aptitude for piloting. Basically a peace offering so Starfighter Command wasn't just getting cheated out of having some Intelligence/Commando trained pilots. So basically, I'm not gonna dump the party into fighter engagements off the bat (mostly because I need to brush up on starfighter combat), but it'll be more commando focused with some vehicle appropriation and maybe one or two dudes in fighters flying cover or strafing targets to support the ground team.
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Dec 1, 2014 08:39
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jivjov posted:The backstory I'm crafting up in my head is basically once the Wraiths get recommissioned as an Intelligence unit, the Intelligence division sent over a handful of middling operatives that showed an aptitude for piloting. Basically a peace offering so Starfighter Command wasn't just getting cheated out of having some Intelligence/Commando trained pilots. Ahh. I was thinking something more along the lines of a straight fighter squadron, but that sounds cool too. Another idea would be a bunch of grizzled old vets in wishbones. Edit: Maybe it could be a mixed unit, half would be transfers from Intelligence who would mainly do the infiltration stuff but could fly a snubfighter in a pinch, and half would be dedicated pilots fresh from the academy flying cover/distraction or what have you. Beardless fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 08:44
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Beardless posted:Ahh. I was thinking something more along the lines of a straight fighter squadron, but that sounds cool too. Another idea would be a bunch of grizzled old vets in wishbones. Like I'd make anyone pilot a wishbone.
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Dec 1, 2014 08:47
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jivjov posted:Like I'd make anyone pilot a wishbone. Y wings are the coolest. They're just as fast as a B wing, they handle better, they've got better shields, and they have a turret. What now?
Beardless fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 08:50
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