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All right, I know that Jimbozig is working on a new Rogue class and I'm not involved in the playtesting thereof but it got me thinking about some stuff. So there's one thing I've noticed that a lot of RPGs handle poorly or not at all and that's in-combat stealth. If you want to be sneaky out of a fight it's like, okay, roll your sneak skill, beat a number, basic stuff. But as soon as you get into combat things start going to poo poo. D&D4E eventually hammered out some combat stealth rules that function, but they're kind of awkwardly worded and clunky. D&D Next's stealth rules are somehow even more obtuse. And that's not counting games like Shadowrun where you can have all the active camouflage cybersuits you want but once a firefight breaks out then they're just a fancy set of duds. And it's weird and sometimes a little annoying because it seems like virtually every person who plays a sneaky character in an RPG really wants to be able to leverage that in combat. They want to be Batman swooping out of the shadows, they want to be a ninja pulling off stealth-kills in a more interesting sense than "flank a guy, get a bonus" or dealing with an extremely tedious checklist of "is it too light and/or too dark to backstab someone y/n" conditionals to be able to do that cool thing in their head. That got me thinking about how to structure a class whose big central gimmick is stealth. In most stealth-oriented games the tempo largely boils down to large patches of waiting patiently punctuated by short, sharp bursts of payoff, and the thing is that in a game like Strike!...or pretty much any tabletop RPG, really...you don't want long patches of waiting patiently because that kills the flow of the game, at least for that player. Back in 4E's heyday they made an Assassin class whose gimmick was building up Shrouds 1/round which they could save up to a maximum of 4, and could spend at any point to add extra damage dice to their attacks. This was ostensibly supposed to give players the feeling of being a calculating killer waiting for the opportune moment to strike before unleashing a deadly blow, but in practice the Shroud mechanic was a ball and chain around the Assassin's ankle. The Assassin is forced to either live with sub-par damage compared to other Striker classes while building up his one huge strike or simply spend Shrouds in 1's and 2's to try and achieve parity with Rogues whose Sneak Attack was much easier to pull off consistently and reliably, but even if you did somehow patiently build up all four of your Shrouds by the time you managed that there was a pretty good chance that the fight would be all over but the crying at that point, which meant that your super-awesome attack you built up over four turns was going to be used on a half-dead monster whose threat has already passed (and that's if your friends didn't kill your chosen target before you got to use it because Shrouds were affixed to the target in question and the OAssassin is just kind of a mess coming and going). But 4E also has another thing that I think might work better for this sort of concept, not a class but in the Monster Manual. The Lurker is a category of monster along with things like Soldiers and Brutes, and its gimmick is that it's a monster that works using an on/off cycle. Every other round a Lurker goes into a sort of "charging" mode where it doesn't attack much if at all but becomes much harder to hit or damage...it could turn invisible, burrow beneath the ground, harden its body into a stone statue, whatever...and then when it leaves that mode it gets huge bonuses to its attacks but becomes briefly vulnerable. Mathematically Lurkers generally didn't do much more damage over two turns of lurking and then striking than a normal enemy would do simply attacking twice over two rounds, but they were an interesting component of 4E's "puzzle monster" setup, forcing characters to decide whether it was worth ignoring a lurker in its charging phase in favor of trying to bring down other monsters, knowing that the next round the Lurker was going to lay a serious chunk of spike damage down on someone. So what if you flipped that around and instead of a monster doing that sort of thing it's a PC, one that operates on a dual cycle of "stealthed" and "popping out to murder someone?" You have less downtime than something like the OAssassin and like the Lurker you can tune higher instances of individual spike damage against damage-over-time so that players still get the satisfaction of doing woah mega-damage without leaving the other classes, especially those geared towards damage-dealing, feeling like they're being outshone. Do you (Jimbozig and everyone else in the thread too) think there's any merit to a class like this in Strike!?
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Jan 10, 2016 06:52
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Right, the very first conclusion I came to is that you can't just have a class with dead turns, a stealth class shouldnt be spending half their time doing nothing but going "I turn invisible, next player." What I'd initially thought was that going into stealth mode would, as you say, have active components like panicking and/or debuffing enemies, not really doing damage per se even though hit points are and should be abstract. My next thought is that you shouldn't be able to keep your stealth going for more than one turn to help prevent someone from just sort of staying hunkered down for whatever reason until whoops, fight's over. You decloak at the start of your next turn whether you want to or not and have to wait until the turn after to recloak again (possibly barring certain encounter abilities which let you do so earlier maybe), the hope for which is that it pushes the player towards a rhythm of vanishing from sight followed by sudden stealth ambushes before vanishing again instead of just dinking around while invisible, and it adds a tactical element where you know that you're going to have these brief periods of vulnerability so you need to plan accordingly.
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Jan 10, 2016 17:38
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I'm not sure I'd necessarily want to impose additional vulnerability beyond "you are briefly no longer concealed and have to risk taking your lumps like everyone else," but you've got some good ideas there wrt tokens and the like, that's an angle I hadn't considered.
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Jan 10, 2016 19:21
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Countblanc posted:Remember that the Role system exists; Having a defender with Disadvantage to hit them half the time with no drawback could get pretty silly, and then remember you could have multiple defenders all marking the same thing. I know the idea is for the class to represent an assassin and thus we sort of fill on the blanks mentally with them being a Striker, but the potential is there. A Tortoise form Shapechanger could hunker down like that, but they aren't getting the benefit of also spiking damage that makes up for the down turns. Actually the very first thing I thought about when I was considering whether a class like this could work is "does this make being a Defender too good?" And the answer is, I don't know. It might, but as you point out there could be drawbacks to leveraging this sort of class' defensive bonuses while ignoring its offense. With Strike characters only ever having 10 HP my concern with lowering that amount any is that it might unduly raise the chances of that character getting caught in a vicious cycle of reappearing and then getting absolutely pasted to the point where they constantly need healing (or worse, get one-shotted more than is fun). Buddies does it, but Buddies also gives you a 5 HP pet to take some hits for you so it kind of evens out.
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Jan 10, 2016 20:22
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Scyther posted:Have you considered if this whole concept would work better as a role? I hadn't actually. I agree with Countblanc on both counts. I think there's definite room in there for alternate roles and a charge up role could be a fun one, and Lurker is in fact a role of sorts in 4E albeit one that's reserved for monsters, but on the other hand I think there's something to be said for the appeal of having a Sneaky Class all on its own. So this is more than just a pointless exercise in theory I'll actually try to draw up some kind of outline in a few days, see if I can't get any of my ideas down on paper. Thanks for the advice everyone.
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Jan 10, 2016 23:08
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Poison Mushroom posted:I have an unreliable work schedule. Hello unreliable work schedule buddy, if you do this I would be interested. In other news, making a new Strike! class isn't easy. That's not to say I expected it would be, but it's a tricky act to try and make something that's distinct enough to stand on its own while also bearing in mind the ways the various roles can influence the same class.
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Jan 15, 2016 03:20
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I admit I'm curious to know what sort of design space you're planning to explore as far as new classes go, the ones in the main book seem to cover a fairly robust spread of the highlights of 4E mechanics and playstyle-wise with the Psion being something that covers more of an interrupt/reaction-based class, so what else is there that you feel you didn't adequately cover on the first pass?
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May 18, 2016 07:46
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Countblanc posted:I'll never reveal the wu-tang secret. Sure sure, I wasn't expecting full-on spoilers or anything, it's just one of the first things I thought of when I made myself really sit down and crack into Strike! on a "what is this doing and why" level. It's easy to see in some cases...over here is the stance-based class, over there is the Avenger, thataway is the guy that summons things...and in other cases some of the design space has been shunted into roles, like the Defender. Obviously you don't have to stick with "like this one thing in 4E but" either.
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May 18, 2016 09:10
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As someone who's tried (not very successfully) to explore the idea of a Lurker for Strike!, in 4E parlance a Lurker isn't really about being sneaky necessarily. Some Lurkers are, but others are like Gargoyles whose Lurker schtick is turning into durable stone skin forms while they build up for devastating pounce attacks, or the Bulette whose Lurker behavior is based on burrowing underground before popping out and landsharking someone. In other words, a Lurker's behavior/design space doesn't really require stealth per se, it's more of an on/off pattern of high defense (in some fashion) but low damage followed by high burst damage but a window of vulnerability. The Rogue does have some of that, but I think there's still some potentially interesting design space to explore with the idea of a class that alternates between two distinct modes in combat.
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May 19, 2016 02:45
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The only good way I can think of to attempt to replicate some kind of cyberpunk RPG gear porn thing in Strike! without it being a huge mess is making a lot of it stuff like "this gear gives you some kind of funky utility power or the equivalent of a trick that's only good for one use/X uses." Things like a list of 100 different guns with slightly different stats, 10 of which are good, wouldn't actually be any better than 4E's less prodigious but still pretty dumb big lists of weapons where everyone ignored 90% of them because most of them weren't really that useful or good, plus the math in Strike! is actually properly bounded and stuff so fiddly modifiers don't really have much of a place. I suppose you could try making some cyberpunk-specific kits but again, if you're willing to reskin things a lot of the bases are already covered. edit; also here's a thought, handle hacking using the chase rules.
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Jul 8, 2016 07:20
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ProfessorCirno posted:Minor cyberware (cyber eyes let me see things better!) could just be backgrounds/skills. Major ones (Muscle replacement makes me stronger then anything else!) could just be a Trick. There's that feat that gives you weird movement capabilities as well that could be a good template for how to handle augs.
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Jul 8, 2016 22:32
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Countblanc posted:I've been working on Feats for the upcoming thing this week, does anyone have any particular gaps in the current feat lineup that you think needs addressed? I don't need specifics, just general things like "there's not enough feats that modify ranged attacks" or "maybe something that encourages improvised attacks/movement". My favorite feat bar none is Superhuman. I like it because it breaks a lot of the bad habits that 3.X and 4E feats fell into, it gives you several cool abilities that are simultaneously flavorful (I can teleport, I have Wizard Sight) but also applicable in tactical combat situations, and also aren't bogged down in paragraphs of minutiae about phasing through various thicknesses of materials and the list of things infravision can and can't sense. You just get to do cool, useful things, no checks required or hoops to jump through. I don't know if this is really helpful because Superhuman in and of itself is already a pretty broad feat that can be reskinned/repurposed in a number of ways, so it's questionable whether another feat like it is needed to cover any sort of gap but it's absolutely the one feat out of all the ones in the game that I would pretty much always consider taking regardless of what my character is, so if you have any ideas for more Superhuman-esque feats then please include them.
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Jul 15, 2016 09:04
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The Engineer's ability Armor Up is a bit confusing at least initially. For one thing you might want to qualify whether an ally can spend both their Move and Roll actions to double-up on the Resist bonus (I'm pretty sure the intent is they can only gain up to Resist 1, but it never hurts to explicitly spell stuff out), but the bit that I had some trouble wrapping my head around on a first read is the whole "this effect lasts until it is used 3 times or until the start of your turn, whichever happens first." At first I was reading "this effect" as "the ability for allies to use this" and thinking it was strange that everyone would lose their bonuses after the third person used it...but then it turned around in my head and I realized what you almost certainly meant was something like "this Resist bonus lasts until it prevents 3 damage or until the start of your turn."
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Jul 25, 2016 00:34
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Making the ability prevent a solid 3 damage during the round before poofing out would make more sense but I guess it would just be a generic "you get 3 temporary hit points". Well giving "Resist 1, works 3 times before vanishing" means that if a big enemy hits you for, I dunno, 5 damage let's say that Armor Up will only drop it to 4, whereas giving you 3 temp HP would turn that big hit from 5 to 2 damage. In other words it actually works the way that armor works in Overwatch (which I gather is the inspiration for this particular power) in that it works better against numerous weaker attacks than it does at mitigating single big attacks.
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Jul 25, 2016 00:51
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As someone who enjoys both Torbjorn and Winston I'm not sure how I should feel about that gif. Someone's either doing something really right or really wrong. I really like the Engineer overall, I was actually thinking if there was a way to do something similar using the Buddies but a purpose-built class is even better, and I like how there are enough options to slant it towards all the various roles. Another thing I noticed, both in the Engineer and several other classes that do this, are abilities which say something like "if you have Advantage then roll 3 dice and take the best results." I can't actually remember off the top of my head how the main Strike! book handles stuff like this but given that using 2d6 instead of 1d6 is one of the more common custom rules people use it might be worth it to change those to read something like "if you have Advantage then roll another additional die and take the best results," something along those lines. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 25, 2016 |
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Jul 25, 2016 01:09
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Something like Zarya would make for an interesting Defender-esque (or maybe Leader-esque) role the way that the Lurker is meant to be an alternate, more complex take on the Striker, where you have the ability to proactively and reactively give your teammates damage resistance and every time you prevent them (or yourself) from taking damage you gain charge which can then be spent boosting your next attack or something.
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Jul 25, 2016 01:32
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If Micro-Machines obviates one of the turret's downsides (that of being a stationary emplacement) too much then the immediate suggestion that springs to mind is reducing the size of its Field when that option is taken, making it more dependent on coordinating with allies it's attached to or jumping it from creature to creature.
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Jul 25, 2016 02:50
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Sir Kodiak posted:I don't really get the micro-machines option. A mobile persistent buffing aura you attack through is a neat idea. A stationary turret is a neat idea (that I wish the class leaned into harder by having the choice of placement be a bigger deal). They don't seem like the same idea. I like Micro-Machines because I like that it gives the Engineer some flexible build options, however it might be trying to do a few too many things at the moment being a thing you can attach to allies for buffs, enemies for debuffs, and you also attack through it. Personally I think that if you simply kept it as a way to anchor turrets to allies and buff them while attacking through it, stripping out the ability to attach it to enemies, that it would still be a worthwhile option.
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Jul 25, 2016 03:04
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Sir Kodiak posted:My comment assumes that, as other people have said, it should really be a bigger deal to have your turret out of position. If you're making something inspired by The Engineer or Torbjörn, turret placement is an important part of the tactical thinking of the player. And so the design of the class should reflect that you will make and then have to live with the placement, at least not without a decent bit of inconvenience. If you can strap it to somebody, that obviates that whole aspect of things. Similarly, there's an interesting design space for a character that controls a persistent mobile aura and there's a lot more you could do with it if it's not part of a class that's also supporting a stationary turret. I'm not playtesting so much as theorycrafting but I think that it would be a reasonable tradeoff to have something like Micro-Machines but reduce the turret's Field compared to a regular stationary turret, possibly as low as 5x5 compared to the regular 9x9, at which point the tradeoff becomes one where you can either cover a large chunk of the battlefield outright but that area is anchored to a stationary object or you can have a mobile zone but with a reduced area and at the whim of another person...yes, I'm sure players will be cooperating, but you still can't (or shouldn't) take over someone else's character because you think optimal turret coverage would be better here than there. I'll be honest, babysitting a turret is maybe the least interesting way to play Torbjorn and there's a reason why in Overwatch you are strongly encouraged to not do so, and I don't really have a ton of interest in it here either. I'm not sure how you're supposed to play up the importance of placement without dragging the class more towards a feast-or-famine outcome. Did you gently caress up your turret placement? Hope you enjoy wasted turns. I don't really see how it's going to make the Engineer more enjoyable to play if you can wind up inconveniencing yourself significantly before the fight even starts imo.
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Jul 25, 2016 04:03
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MadRhetoric posted:You cannot have the same level of tactile control over turret placement in an elfgame that you do in an arena shooter where every level is designed to have choke points designed around said ability. They're completely different things. This is a good way of putting one of the points I was trying (and probably failing) to articulate, which is that a class that uses stationary defenses is cool, but making it onerous and difficult and inconvenient to reposition those defenses doesn't, in my opinion, seem like good gameplay in either an RPG or in a video game, which is one reason why Torb doesn't work like a TF2 Engie in that you can build up a brand new level 2 turret in about five seconds of quiet time instead of an extended period of vulnerability, and repositioning your turret frequently is one of the keys to better Torbing. edit; and even then this is on a limited selection of predefined maps with predefined chokepoints. I would, I have to confess, be a little disappointed if the Micro-Machines option went away entirely because I do like having classes with some more flexibility to them, it's not like Strike! lacks for extremely focused classes but part of what I liked about 4E is how they (not always successfully, but it was still more hit than miss) incorporated new slants into classes over time so you eventually wound up with Bravura Warlords and Brawler Fighters and sneaky cover-shooter Rogues and the like. I won't be able to really playtest this stuff because god knows I don't really have time to do as much elfgaming as I would like these days, nor do I have a group of my own, so my own opinion here probably doesn't matter as much as someone who really sits down and puts it through its paces, but there you go. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jul 25, 2016 |
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Jul 25, 2016 05:22
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Sir Kodiak posted:Can you clarify what it is about having character flexibility being embedded as options within classes rather than, say, options between classes that specifically appeals to you? It seems like it should be all the same to the player. Well for starters: Countblanc posted:it lets people who want to use the powers but aren't super into the primary gimmick (immobility in this case, cooldowns in the magician's) have access to those toys. Putting another spin on Countblanc's point, I like a lot of the Engineer's toys but maybe I might want to play an Engineer with a different slant on it and that's fine. A lot of people like to talk about how 4E didn't waste time trying to make you awkwardly smash a Fighter and a Wizard together to make a Fightwizard, they just gave you a Swordmage...but the thing is that 4E also gave Fighters the option to go barehanded and chokeslam dragons as opposed to the usual melee fare and let you build a Fighter around that sort of grappling and brawling style instead of making an entirely new Brawler class and that's fine too, because it's fun to play a Brawler Fighter who has access to things like Come And Get It which were made with the regular weapon-users in mind originally. tl;dr maybe "placing a mobile attack aura on a person" could be spun into its own class but I like it just as well as a subdivision of the Engineer the same way I like that Rogues can be sneaky backstabbers or they can be dirty brawlers, or that Magicians can be a riff on Vancian casters or you can say "nah I'm gonna go Blood Mage." In both instances, the standard turret and the micro-machine version, I feel like the fundamental theme of placing an offensive force multiplier onto something which you then have minimal control over is preserved so it doesn't come across to me as a smashup of two unrelated classes stuck together just because.
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Jul 25, 2016 08:30
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Sir Kodiak posted:The phrase "something which you then have minimal control over" seems like a real stretch to cover both a fellow PC that you're cooperating with in a team game and a stationary square on the map. I dunno, I try not to micromanage my fellow players' movements too much so maybe that's just me. Regardless I don't think I'm going to conjure up an argument that sways you here so I'm gonna chalk this one up to agreeing to disagree.
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Jul 25, 2016 09:36
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How about something like "If the target is Taken Out before the start of your next turn, you gain Advantage on your first attack on your next turn and may immediately Assess without spending your role action."
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Sep 23, 2016 03:06
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Tasoth posted:I know. It's streamlined 4e and I think that's great. But I'm pretty sure my group would have a mutiny because they can't play the characters they played as they've built them over the last six or so months. If all you're taking from Strike! is the skill system and maybe something like the chase rules then you don't really need to convert any of the characters by level or anything, just give them an equal number of appropriate skills and that's pretty much it.
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Nov 29, 2016 05:41
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Oh poo poo, somehow I missed what was going on in Jimbozig's life since the last time I checked this thread, best wishes man.Ettin posted:I run a cyberpunk game in Strike! and it works pretty well. So are we gonna get more details about this orrrrr...?
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Feb 15, 2017 08:47
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Obviously Jimbozig has more important priorities than elfgame stuff but I'd legitimately pitch money at a Kickstarter for a Strike Builder program.
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Feb 15, 2017 23:19
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Moriatti posted:I like these solutions. It's not something I'm currently dealing with, but I can see it coming up. I just want to say that this character is wonderful.
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May 11, 2017 07:32
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm a bigger fan of games that ask you to master something and then keep it and continue adding more stuff on top. Sure, but that's basically the multiplayer component, it's frankly amazing that the single-player campaign was as good as it was given how tacked on most single-player modes for multiplayer shooters are. Ignite Memories posted:Running my first game of this in about an hour and a half. I'm nervous, because I've never played before - but I've got the cheat sheets in front of me and a bunch of general plot ideas that aren't so specific they cant twist off. Here goes nothing! Give us an update on how it goes afterwards! Show us any cool monsters or characters that get used.
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Aug 6, 2017 21:49
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Jimbozig posted:I also like edge okay. Player A has the edge. What do I call the person who doesn't have the edge? To distinguish it from situations where neither player has the edge. Threatened? The Underdog.
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Jul 28, 2018 12:11
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