July Contest: 4th Of The Edition

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > July Contest: 4th Of The Edition

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Okay, so this entry is basically feature-complete for the purposes of this contest, so I'm just going to go ahead and submit it before I spend another hour reformatting the powers :stare:

The math has been a bit of a challenge to balance since the hack we've done has massively changed the attack/defence dynamic, but hopefully the test encounter included should be an appropriate level of challenge.

This is Captain Hats' XCOM-inspired entry; due to time constraints I jumped in to lend a hand getting the last features in place and putting some polish on this mofo. Please enjoy EREBUS, a tactical squad-based 4e hack with a hard-on for Greek mythology! (use the download link, it's a LOT easier to read as an actual PDF.) If there's any issues getting the file off Mediafire, I can PM it to you.

Zeerust fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jul 31, 2014

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 22:00

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 07:04

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

SageNytell posted:

I'm now getting errors trying to access Erebus, 'the file is invalid or has been deleted'.

Sucks because I was shooting the link to my group, and I only downloaded it to my home computer.

Oh, dang! That's weird. Try this link. I did delete and re-upload to make a couple minor corrections last night, but I'm certain I edited the hyperlink! This one definitely works, though. If there's any other issues I can e-mail it straight to anyone who wants to PM me.

And yeah, it would be amazing to get an external playtest! :aaa:

E: Oh my god, SteakPunk :allears:

Zeerust fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Jul 31, 2014

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 18:17

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Covok posted:

Frankosity: Erebus

Just FYI, this entry was a collaboration between Captain Hats and myself.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 07:33

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Error 404 posted:

Erebus
I really like how the new rules mesh with the 4E rules. You can easily slot some or all of this into a standard 4E game (Shotgun Barbarian, Assault guy with sword and shield, Hybrid Wizard) and I like the idea of pushing cover mechanics via lower defenses a lot.

I can definitely see room for more development though, like expanding on cover. Is it like X-COM where you have half cover, and full cover? Is cover completely indestructible or can someone hammer through it to eventually kill you? if it is destructible what kind of HP or defenses are required there?

And a suggestion: As-is you've got each player playing one of these soldiers, but I could easily see this being expanded to where each player has control of a "squad" just like X-COM, where the GM is the aliens and you could have each player running a 3-4 man squad moving through the area. Perhaps a simple alternate ruleset is worth looking into?

I can't wait to try this thing.

Thanks for the feedback! This is still very much a work-in-progress - we're currently going over our goals for 0.2 as I speak, so any comments are majorly appreciated.

To clarify, cover works as in core 4th at the moment, so it's the standard light/heavy cover system. Cover destruction/degradation is definitely on our minds though. Rather than cover having HP and defences, right now I'm writing it as a simple system where certain explosive effects and weapons will destroy/downgrade cover in their AoE - see the Assault's frag grenade maneuever.

Having it occur organically from crossfire will be a little more interesting to implement, since I'd personally want to stay away from tracking HP/Defences for scenery but I also always loved Plasma weapons in XCOM just destroying in their line of fire :black101:

The squad idea is an interesting one, and early in development me and Hats briefly discussed the idea of a Redshirt system, or the Sergeant having some kind of squad feature. We decided it was way too fiddly for a single class feature set, but the alternate ruleset idea is an interesting one!

# ¿ Aug 2, 2014 00:43

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Yeah, all that's in the doc is what's different from core 4e. Your basic movespeed is 6, all Defences start at 10, et cetera. Apologies if that wasn't clear! :shobon:

# ¿ Aug 11, 2014 15:47

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

You can do, though the playtest I ran last night used the base HP, and in my current revision enemies have a higher to-hit. There were a couple close calls though! The 'HP per level' parameter is basically a holdout for when we actually get to designing a level framework.

Whoops :doh:

it should probably be a +2 attack vs. Fortitude.

V E: REF should work just as well, actually. V

Zeerust fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Aug 12, 2014

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 06:08

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Hey, for those interested in the continuing development of Erebus, Version 0.15 is complete. Changes include:

- Overhaul of PC features and powers. There were a bunch of features we weren't 100% happy with and hopefully characters are a bit more diverse and interesting now.

- Item Powers! We've cut out Daily Powers and replaced it with single-use items that have Daily-scale effects for the most part. Explosives, medical aids and ammo types!

- Monsters, more and improved! I've tweaked the monster math to hopefully make fights flow better, and there's 3 more monsters to use in a secondary encounter.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2014 20:19

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 07:04

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Hot drat! Kind of wish I'd saved the 'gently caress YES' banner for that, but I was sure Steakpunk would be claiming that top slot!

I'm really chuffed to see Erebus got such good feedback. My contribution was basically 10 days of frantic number-crunching and hoping that everything flowed right in practice. The good Captain has a DTRPG account so he'll be claiming the voucher. We've already got some pretty heavy stuff bookmarked...

# ¿ Aug 31, 2014 11:07

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > July Contest: 4th Of The Edition