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Hey, that's a good OP. Strike! is a good game. One thing though: I don't know if I'm just terrible at tactics or whether my players are just really lucky, but the combats I run tend to be extremely one-sided affairs, with my players just plowing through the opposition. I've sort of started experimenting with alternate combat layouts (so that instead of having the PCs start on one side of the battlefield and the enemies on the other I'd have something like the PCs being attacked from two or more sides at once) and have also been thinking of ways to use terrain in a way to make fights more interesting (for an example, bridges and other bottlenecks which the enemy Defenders can defend while Blasters and Crowd Control monsters use the bottlenecks to hit as many PCs at the same time, lots of cover for enemy Snipers, Strikers and Sneaks to make use of, etc.), and I also only just noticed that apparently with 5 players (which I have) I'm supposed to bump the damage on Encounter powers and get myself an Action Point to use for each encounter... but I think I could still use some help? I'm not even afraid of making things really difficult for my players: they've built themselves a group of veritable combat monsters, so giving them a bit more of a challenge won't screw with them too badly.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:21
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spectralent posted:If you're using the recommended number of monsters, remember that this is explicitly an easy fight. Throw some more dudes in or make them elites or whatever. Looks like I've been doing it wrong! I was under the impression that number of monsters=number of PCs should be a fight that the PCs could win but not without having to make a minor concession or getting a few conditions for their Strikes! Well, time to bump up the difficulty a bit! Also, I still need to write myself a cheat sheet for all the stuff I need to keep track of during combat. I keep forgetting that some conditions affect the PCs' rolls in combat (mostly the first round) and I'm really bad at keeping track of conditions and their durations for my players and monsters. I've been thinking of a system, but I'd also welcome any suggestions: Basically, on a piece of scratch paper or in a corner of the battlemat write down the names of all characters involved in the combat in initiative order. Then, write down any conditions that are currently in effect for that character in superscript on the upper left corner of their name (this is because, reading from left to right, you'll remember to see which conditions are currently affecting the character). Then write all the effects that they may save against or which end at the end of their turn in subscript on the lower right corner of their name. For an example, assume Joe the Fighter is currently suffering from Ongoing 2 Damage (save ends): ongoing 2 Joe ongoing 2 (save ends) So, this way, when it's Joe's turn you not only remember to tell them that "Hey Joe, you take 2 ongoing damage this turn" and at the end of their turn you remember to give them a save. That's as good as I can think of, but if someone else has a more elegant solution to what is, in the end, a book-keeping issue, I'd be happy to hear it.
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Jan 5, 2016 12:02
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We actually ran into the "Does this make sense in the fiction?" situation last session with regards to Mobs. The Mob, a moshpit full of kobold punks who were just there to have a good time and party had Grabbed the group's Necromancer (in the fiction they'd decided to get the Necromancer to join their moshpit) and the Necromancer decided to use Terrifying Visage on the Mob. Because of one of the Mob's traits when they moved away from the Necromancer they'd drag the Necromancer with them, which lead to a brief exchange where I was like "Wait, does that even make sense?" and we, as a group, decided that the mental image of what was happening in the fiction was simply too hilarious to not have it happen. So, basically, the Necromancer spooked the entire moshpit full of kobolds with Terrifying Visage and the Mob decided to run away, but because they weren't paying attention they accidentally dragged the Necromancer along with them.
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Jan 5, 2016 13:29
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So, at last night's session one of my friends was going through the contents of my dice bag and found my d14 with the days of the week written on it as well. We joked that if the players ever went into an area with a temporal anomaly we'd first roll the die to see what day it was when they entered and upon them returning roll it again to see which day of the week it was now. Maybe roll 1d6-1d6 to find out how many weeks have passed since entry and in which direction. This got me thinking of time travel in general and of Ettin's Retrocausality RPG, and upon reading it again after getting home after the session I realized that the time travel mechanics presented in the game would map out to Strike! nearly perfectly. I could definitely see first running a normal chase or team conflict in Strike!, making index cards for the events of the conflict in a round-by-round order, and then just doing Retrocausality style time combat after it to alter the results of the conflict with time travel shenanigans. I started writing down some stuff based on it, mostly just ideas on how to implement time travel into Strike!, and it's amazing how well this stuff works:
Ratpick fucked around with this message at 11:11 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 11:08
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Gerdalti posted:What about using this site to generate cards? This is a great resource! I was just thinking, would it be possible to agree on unified symbols for the cards in accordance with the type of action? That is, using one type of symbol for Attacks, one for Move actions, one for Role actions, one for Free actions and so on? That'd free up some space for rules text and, also, maybe look kind of neat? Another thing I started thinking about last night, the coolest thing would be if there was an online monster database for Strike! where people could post their homebrew monsters. I know I could definitely share the stupid big dog Cerberus I've cooked up and I'm sure others have also made some interesting monsters that they could share with others. Edit: I took a stab at making power cards for the Magician's first-level at-will and encounter powers. They're color-coded like powers in the rulebook, so green means at-will, purple means encounter, and the symbol at the top-right corner is representative of the type of action needed. Might take a stab at one of the Roles to figure out a way to write up role powers. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8J-AFEOoRsaTHk3ZDZVTFZwdVk/view?usp=sharing One issue I noticed immediately after starting work on the Role powers: there needs to be some way to distinguish between Interrupts and Reactions. At this point I'll just make it a subtitle before the effects of the card, but for the sake of consistency I might write down the usage and action information on the cards anyway instead of just relying on symbols. I took another pass at them using the layout you used and I think it's much better now. The only problem was with getting all the Effect lines from Offensive Amalgam to fit in, and I know some of the Martial Artist's Stances will probably cause similar problems if the text is copypasted with all the commentary included. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 12:13
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Countblanc posted:Well, I did it. I finished The Psion. Crimeny! It looks like it'll be a couple days before it appears on DriveThruRPG (I hope I did everything right, I've never done it before), but here's the free trial version I have available for anyone interested in getting a peek. Without having seen one in practice, I already like the Psion. It does a thing like the Rogue where it makes use of a type of action (in this case the Reaction/Interrupt) which is rarely used in Strike!. I also love the fact that I can immediately see a bunch of synergies with different roles. The only role that's sort of awkward with this class is the Blaster, because on my first glance I didn't see a lot of powers that would even work for a Blaster, but I might be completely wrong about this. The class itself reminds me a lot of the Occultist from 13 True Ways, but that's a good thing.
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Jan 31, 2016 01:48
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So, last session my players stole a car from the time police only to summarily crash it in dinosaur times. Now they're stranded in a weird prehistorical time and need to find a way to fix their time car's power source. With crystals, of course. We decided to go with the Chrono Trigger version of prehistory, so it's a weird world where dinosaur-riding lizardmen are caught in a constant war with prehistorical humans who have pretty much every brand of mammalian megafauna on their side. Anyway, it looks like I'm going to be needing a lot of dinosaurs and prehistorical animals as monsters for next session, in addition to the more traditional humanoid opponents. What would be some good ways to reskin the sample monsters as prehistorical animals? I was already thinking that the T-Rex (because of course there's going to be a T-Rex) could be an Elite or Champion Horror upgraded to 2x2 size, so they'd basically have a lot of fear-based attacks because, uh, they have a terrifying roar or something? Then of course using the Striker as normal for raptors and such, and maybe a larger Brawler for an ankylosaurus/pretty much any dinosaur that can do sweeping tail attacks. All other suggestions would be appreciated!
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Feb 24, 2016 15:27
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Jimbozig posted:pachycephalosaurus = charger These are all great ideas, thanks! I probably won't get to use all of them during the session, but at least I've got a lot of good stuff to work with. One specific question: how would you model the pterosaurs' ability to grab and drop people? Maybe a more specific version of the Crush attack that grapplers have that only works when they're flying?
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Feb 25, 2016 20:35
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The highlight of today's session was the players deciding to burn down a forest (because one of the characters had gotten the Arson skill last session) which resulted in the group having to flee a burning forest. One of the players suggested we model this as a chase, and it actually ended very appropriately with the group fudging a Risk: they had just run to the edge of the forest only to realize that there was a huge chasm with a waterfall and undoubtedly sharp rocks at the bottom, and the group fudged their roll to try and jump over the chasm, falling into the rapids. We wrapped up the session with the players waking up in a cave inhabited by fishmen who were about to sacrifice them to their god, a prehistorical psychic lungfish (basically an aboleth). So, I want to stat up the aboleth as a Titan, and I was thinking that instead of having it change forms during the combat it'd have a different array of attacks on each initiative count: on 7 it basically works as a Summoner, summoning fishmen and sacrificing them to deal massive damage, on 5 it uses lots of psychic-themed attacks like drawing people in, dazing them and (as an Encounter attack) dominating them, and finally on 3 it'd lash out with its tentacles, grabbing and crushing the PCs. Does this sound like a good combat encounter?
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Mar 5, 2016 17:55
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Scyther posted:If anyone has any stories from play of how you used the Team Conflict rules or the Chase rules, I'd really like to read them. I mean I understand pretty well how they mechanically work, I'm just interested to see how people have been using them in play. I haven't actually used Team Conflict rules (they're a bit too abstract for my tastes and I just really like tactical combat), but we've gotten a lot of use out of the Chase rules with my players. Mostly with their characters running away from things, like the cops. One of my recent posts details us using the Chase rules to model the characters running away from a forest which was on fire (so, basically the forest fire was the Chaser and the players were the Runners). The rules are good fun and we pretty much use them without fail at least once a session. I do need to set up a Chase with the players as the Chasers for once. Today's session is going to feature a big bad steampunk villain called Count Professor, so in the tradition of pulp villains he's going to try to make a run for it at some point.
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Mar 19, 2016 11:58
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Here's a question for all you Discworld fans: what Class/Role combo would best represent a tribe of Feegles? Obviously they'd have the Gang feat from the Boss kit. I'm thinking Brawler Rogue with either Striker or Blaster.
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Mar 24, 2016 13:58
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ZeeToo posted:Feegles, well-known for their habit of swarming up their foes' legs to bite them in the junk? This is a great idea, but this is for a level 1 one-shot I'm planning for a convention so it's a bit too feat-intensive. Having said that, the Gang feat from the Boss kit would alleviate that problem with just Shapechanger/Striker.
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Mar 25, 2016 08:31
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One important difference between Strike! and 4e is that 4e actually had a lot of monster powers with one attack for damage and a separate attack (if the first one hit) for the effect. That won't work as-written in Strike!, and you should adjust monsters as such. So, if a monster had a bite attack that deals damage and has a separate attack for ongoing damage, simply make the ongoing damage the effect of the attack in Strike!.
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Mar 30, 2016 15:45
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CaPensiPraxis posted:It's worth noting that the players in your game are fairly more powerful than regular pcs under houserules. In my experience even regular PCs run by the RAW can be really powerful. I'm actually having a lot of trouble imposing any kind of a challenge on my players because their group just works so well together. I'm also afraid of throwing any Goons/Stooges into the battle because the group's Blitzer Archer Striker with Fast Archer and that one feat that gives a lot of movement (on top of the extra movement from Mobility Boost) can usually reliably kill an entire battlefield's worth of Stooges in a single turn with some lucky rolls. Granted, in my case I'm also bad at tactics, but I'm working on rectifying this. Next session (to be the last for now because one of my friends wants to try his hand at running Strike! for a change) I'm going to be throwing lots of civilians onto the battlefield with the special rule that each civilian killed by the PCs gives their team a Strike. Using the rules for interposing cover the enemies (some of whom are shapeshifters who can hide provided there's a crowd of civilians around them) can use the civilians as cover, and the battle will have a general Miss Trigger where a miss against an enemy who had cover from a civilian results in that civilian being hit and dying instead. I'm going to make my players work really hard for that Advantage, since they're so good at getting it either through flanking or the Warlord and Necromancer giving it around with their at-wills.
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Mar 31, 2016 14:00
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You're using the easily reskinnable sample monsters, right? Yeah, they hit like a ton of bricks at higher levels, but you could pretty easily trade the traits that give them extra damage for more variety in their abilities and maybe giving them better effects on their attacks. It'd require going into the monster creation rules a bit more in-depth though.
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Mar 31, 2016 20:58
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Apologies for the double post, but I feel this deserves a separate post: having nothing better to do, I've been messing around with AnyDice making functions and other stuff like that to figure out, once and for all, who is the best at dealing damage in Strike! For the sake of this analysis I decided to, at first, focus on four classes. All are Strikers, all are level 1, and I have not taken into consideration any feats. I also picked four characters whose abilities are easy to quantify purely in terms of damage. The analysis does not take into account stuff like a Duelist with Find an Opening being able to spend focus to deal more damage, the Archer having attacks that might deal damage as part of their effect, and so on. The characters are: Duelist - Their special trick towards dealing damage, in this case, is being able to treat 2's as 5's when attacking the target of their duel. I'm making the assumption here that this effect is applied before Advantage and Disadvantage are taken into account, so a Duelist who rolls a 2 and 3 with Advantage would count it as a 5 and with Disadvantage would count it as a 3, because any other reading of the rules would result in some cases where Advantage would end up hurting the Duelist and Disadvantage being potentially useful to the Duelist. Archer - I'm assuming either a Sniper or a Blitzer here, their trick being able to increase the result of the roll by one if the attack is a hit. For the sake of this analysis the only real effect of this on the probabilities is increasing the chance of getting a critical hit by some. Rogue - The new class, I'm assuming a Backstabber Rogue here: deals a whopping 4 points of extra damage on a 6, meaning that a critical hit from them will deal a total of 10 damage. Martial Artist - At first I was willing to leave it at the first three, but then I started wondering about the potential damage output of a Martial Artist using Scorpion Style to deal ongoing damage. The information from this part of the analysis can easily be applied to Necromancers using Deadly Poison (with the caveat that when they first hit an enemy in combat it'll deal one less damage) as well as Shapechangers using Form of the Viper. First, though, we must establish a baseline: a Striker of whatever class making a Basic Attack with no dice-manipulating tricks or special effects: Strikers deal an average of 2.67 damage on an attack, with Advantage being pretty much exactly worth +1 damage and Disadvantage conversely being worth -1 damage on average. To compare this to the Duelist, thanks to their dice-manipulating trick of being able to turn twos into fives when attacking the target of their duel will be dealing an average of 3 points of damage per attack. Advantage doesn't swing their average damage as much as for the general Striker, changing it by +0.83, but the converse is true of Disadvantage, which accounts for only a -0.83 loss of average damage for the Duelist. Next up we have the Archer. The increased chance of getting a 6 (due to the ability to increase the result of your roll when you hit) adds a pretty significant boost to damage, resulting in an average damage of 3.17. Advantage further bumps this into 4.17 (because you're getting more of those sixes!) while Disadvantage drops it to 1.92 (more than the baseline Striker, but not by much). The Rogue, not surprisingly, excels at raw damage, and due to their significant damage boost when rolling a 6 they have an average damage output of 3.33. Advantage further bumps this to 4.89, but Disadvantage drops the Rogue's damage significantly, all the way down to 1.78 (almost baseline Striker levels!). Finally, there's the Martial Artist using Scorpion Style, and here things get really interesting: taking the total damage output for a single attack in Scorpion Style, with a result of 4 or more meaning at least one instance of ongoing damage and with the possibility of more, the Martial Artist actually comes on top in the calculations, dealing an average of 3.67 damage on an attack, 5.17 with Advantage and dropping down to 2.17 with Disadvantage. Here's some frigging analysis on that: Based purely on the numbers it'd be easy to declare ongoing damage the best way of dealing damage, and there's some truth to that: adding ongoing damage to an attack is pretty much a +1 boost to the damage on a result of 4 or better with an extra chance of the damage happening over and over again, provided the enemy doesn't have a trait which allows for saving against effects at the start of their turn. However, the one flaw in this is that ongoing damage doesn't stack with itself, and multiple instances of ongoing damage from the same source are not cumulative. On any turn when the enemy is still suffering from the ongoing damage the Martial Artist will pretty much be dealing damage as an average Striker. In addition to this, the point of damage is to get the enemy to go down, and if an enemy would go down due to ongoing damage they still get one last action before dying at the beginning of their turn. Beyond the fact that ongoing damage is a really good way of increasing average damage output there's a few things we can learn: firstly, while the Duelist lags behind the other classes in terms of pure damage, it is also not hurt quite as much by Disadvantage as the other classes. The Rogue is definitely the one class that relies the most on Advantage for its damage output. Some thoughts: While typing this up I realized a couple of other classes that pretty much have a reliable way to add extra damage to their attacks: the Bombardier has Kaboom (1 damage to any enemy starting their turn in the zone, pretty much a sure-fire way of adding +1 damage to an attack) and Toxic Bomb (dealing 2 ongoing damage to anyone starting their turn in the zone [making it the at-will with the biggest ongoing damage output], but allows a saving throw against the effect), while the Buddies has Team Attack, which when used against an enemy within the Buddy's reach, adds +1 damage to that enemy. I'd like to write those up at some point as well. Anyway, I hope that was of some use to someone at least. My next project is writing up all the dirty Defender tricks I've come up with which pretty much guarantee you a chance at punishing your enemy on your turn.
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Apr 1, 2016 18:07
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Jimbozig posted:Ratpick, nice analysis there. Very cool. What assumption did you make for ongoing damage? How much did you assume ongoing 1 was worth? I'm not exactly sure about how high I would value ongoing damage: when I saw the numbers after I ran them through AnyDice I was actually surprised how high the damage output seemed on the attack with ongoing damage, but I pretty much immediately realized that I'd be remiss in making the instant assumption that ongoing damage is always the way to go. There's also a bit of a trap in looking at the numbers as is: all the other calculations are based on the average damage output for a character over a single attack made during a single turn, whereas the ongoing damage calculation takes into account damage potentially spilling onto multiple turns. I mean, simply based on the fact that it's damage later and not damage now (and you really want to kill the enemy now before they get to make a final attack before dying) I'd probably be inclined to agree with your idea of ongoing damage being discounted by a third each round. Anyway, as I said up top there's a big flaw in my calculations in that all the other examples only consider a single attack during a single round of combat while ongoing damage is something that can potentially deal damage over multiple rounds, so for any kind of deeper analysis I'd have to run the numbers over multiple turns, which is a bit more involved than I am comfortable with as a liberal arts major with only a passing interest in mathematics. EDIT: Oh, and in case what you meant was "how much DPR is a single point of ongoing damage worth," I let the function handle that for me: I made a simple function where, in addition to the damage, on a roll of 4 to 6 it adds the ongoing damage (1) and then rolls a d2 to check if the damage reoccurs (to simulate the saving throw), only stopping to add ongoing damage once the saving throw succeeds. Based purely on the numbers 1 ongoing seems to be worth about +1 damage, which I think is fair: it will undoubtedly deal the opponent 1 extra damage with the chance of occurring again, but with the caveat that the opponent might be able to take an action before being taken out by it. homullus posted:Don't forget that the Poisoner Rogue's ongoing damage does stack with itself. Anecdotally I would be surprised if it topped the Backstabber, but it's a thing. Actually, I think I might have to run the numbers on the Poisoner Rogue next, just to see how it compares with the others. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 22:14
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Gort posted:Having played Strike to the higher levels (party's level 9 now) I'm not really loving how monster damage increases as level goes up. Player-character hitpoints stay the same, but they gain a couple of new powers that negate attacks, which presumably is supposed to make up for the monster damage escalation. I'm responding to this again, because at the moment I'm too tired and sick to do any more damage math. Related to my previous response to you (i.e. the idea of removing the extra damage traits from monsters and replacing them with traits of a similar cost), here are some ideas on how to make higher level monsters more interesting while keeping their damage output about the same as on lower levels, simply by way of adding traits and not messing around with their powers: Based on the rules for sample monsters, generalists should gain the Extra Damage and Recharge traits at level 6 and above, while specialists should gain those traits at level 10 and above. Recharge is a good trait which allows you to pull off a big and scary attack more than once per combat, so that can probably stay, but if you're like me you might want to replace it with some other trait for Stooges and Goons to ensure that they've got enough tricks for their level. Extra Damage is in and of itself worth 3 points, which gives a lot of options for replacements: For Defenders the Duelist [3] trait is a good one, and makes for an exact trade in terms of points cost. It gives basically the same benefit as Extra Damage (+1 damage) but limited to one target, and comes with resist 1 against effects from that target. It's basically a more specialized version of Extra Damage, because the Duelist monster can't change their target until the original target is taken out. Other good traits for Defender monster include Guard (all allies are guarded while adjacent to the Defender), Sticky (enemies lose all remaining squares of movement when they move next to you), Power Magnet (if you're using damage types or it makes sense in the fiction of your game), and Damaging Aura [3]. Damaging Aura is a really good fit for Defenders, because it punishes players for getting close to the Defender (which is exactly what the Defender wants!) and forces them to try and keep it at range. For Strikers and other melee-oriented enemies I'm particularly fond of the combo of Damage on a Miss (when you miss you still deal 1 damage) and Stronger on a Miss [2] (basically, whenever you miss with an attack you increase the damage of your attacks by 1). Damage on a Miss is a personal favorite of mine, because I tend to have the worst luck with the dice and Striker monsters in particular I have a hard time doing anything useful with because they don't end up doing much damage before my players take them out. Stronger on a Miss I feel does Extra Damage in a better, more dramatic way, because if you telegraph it well to your players through the fiction (or they decide to Assess the situation to find that trait out) they will be able to see it coming and work around it. Other good traits for Strikers are Take Advantage (+1 damage when you attack with Advantage), Flyer [2], Speedy, Super Speedy [2] and Incorporeal [3]. Leaders have the Inspirational Leader trait at the lowest cost [2] variety. Trading out that and Extra Damage would allow you to buy Aggressive Leader [4] which adds 1 to the damage line of all of your allies. Again, that's adding more damage into the encounter, but it's damage that your players have a clear way of getting rid of by focusing on the Leader. The sample Blaster and Crowd Control monsters already get Friendly Blaster, Precision Blaster [2] and Deadly Blaster at certain levels, but if you're willing to do a bit of math you can add and replace those to replace Extra Damage with. You probably shouldn't give the same monster both Damage on a Miss and Effect on a Miss, because your players might feel that it's a bit cheap. That's just a few ideas, but I hope this helps. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Apr 2, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 10:23
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Countblanc posted:Your posts are all incredibly informative Ratpick, please keep making them. Also, if you could compile a link to what you consider your Greatest Hits I'd love to link them in the OP. Thanks! I still really want to try to crunch my damage math for higher-level characters, and I've also got that Defender post I promised in the works. Also, since my last post barely scraped the surface of designing interesting monsters with a lower damage output I'd also like to revisit that as well. In the meantime, I ran some damage calculations for the Poisoner Rogue and the Buddies: Firstly the Poisoner Rogue using Worsening Wound appears to come ahead of all the other characters purely in terms of numbers. A few things to remember here: the Poisoner Rogue deals ongoing equal to their base damage (2) on every attack roll of 5 to 6 when they choose to use Worsening Wound. Their average damage without Advantage or Disadvantage is 4.00. With Advantage it goes up to 5.89 and with Disadvantage it goes all the way down to 2.11. The Buddies, using Team Attack and with both focusing on the same opponent, can get 1 extra damage on the enemy as part of the effect. This comes up to 3.17 average damage (0.5 higher than a baseline Striker), with 4.42 with Advantage and 1.92 with Disadvantage. Analysis: Okay, so the Poisoner Rogue comes on top of the damage calculation. I was personally surprised that the Poisoner's average damage output is so much higher than the Backstabber's, but there's a few reasons for this: the Backstabber's extra damage only occurs on a 6 whereas a Poisoner gets their ongoing damage on every roll of 5 and 6, so they have a better chance of getting their extra damage in than the Backstabber. Secondly, once the Backstabber gets their ongoing damage in, the enemy will already take 2 damage at the beginning of their turn and there's a 50% chance of the enemy failing their saving throw and taking 2 more ongoing, bringing their damage output to an equal level as a Backstabber with a roll of 6. The most important drawback of ongoing damage still applies to Poisoner Rogues, that being that if an enemy were to survive your attack if not for the ongoing damage, they still get to take a single action before being taken out. However, the rest of the drawbacks of ongoing damage do not apply to Poisoner Rogues: their ongoing damage stacks with itself even though it's all coming from the same feature. This means that we can assume a reliable 4.00 damage per round from them. The Buddies doesn't reveal much of interest: 1 extra damage as part of an effect translates to a 0.5 boost in average damage, because there's exactly a 50/50 chance of getting that effect in. Anyway, I said I wanted to somehow be able to quantify a Martial Artist with Scorpion Stance's damage in terms of multiple turns on account of the fact that their ongoing damage does not stack with itself, but just trying to run the numbers with help from pen and paper makes it clear that it's a bit too complex for me. Firstly, there's a 50% chance, on any attack, that the Martial Artist will get the ongoing damage in. If they get the ongoing damage in there's another 50% chance of the damage reoccurring. This is what accounts for the +1 increase in average damage on an attack, but it does not account for the fact that the damage does not stack with itself. The problem here is that there are simply too many variables for me to keep track off to make any kind of in-depth analysis on that short of having someone who actually knows mathematics to help me. Suffice to say this much: the Poisoner Rogue comes up on top in terms of pure damage output in comparison to the other Strikers. However, its damage being ongoing damage means that it might leave the enemy alive to still make attacks before they succumb to the damage, and because ultimately the point of damage is to take out the enemy to stop them from making attacks the Poisoner Rogue's particular approach is a bit lacking in this regard. If you want to take out an enemy quickly with pure damage without giving them a chance to return the favor the Backstabber Rogue excels provided they have some way of gaining advantage. I'm a bit disappointed in how boring the Buddies turned out to be in terms of the damage calculation, but that shouldn't have really come as a surprise. Suffice to say that unlike these other characters who are focused purely on damage the Buddies has a number of effects they can put on their attacks. However, my personal take on this is that the Buddies class might be better suited to roles other than pure damage. However, as I stated when I made my first post, I have not taken into account any damage that might arise from, say, the Duelist using Find an Opening to spend focus for damage or an enemy triggering one of the damaging effects that the Archer has on their at-wills. Even though these two classes might not shine as much as the other three in terms of pure damage output, they have more tricks up their sleeve. Revisiting the Duelist I said in my original post that accounting for the Duelist's Find an Opening in terms of damage is hard, but I was actually wrong. The real problem is that there's not a simple way to predict how much Focus a given Duelist will have in a given round of a combat. Assuming for a minute though that you have the Focus, how much damage is a single point of Focus spent on Find an Opening worth? Well, the use of Focus has to be declared before the attack and the attack actually has to hit, but as a Duelist attacking the target of your Duel you treat 2's as 5's, meaning that your chance of getting a hit are 5/6. That's a 5/6 chance of getting 1 point of extra damage per point of focus spent, which translates to 5/6 extra damage, or 0.83, per point of Focus spent. A single point of focus spent in this way already brings the Duelist ahead of the Archer, Backstabber Rogue and Martial Artist, and with two points spent they'll already exceed the Poisoner Rogue in sheer damage output on a single attack. However, once we look at what this translates to with Advantage the Duelist will still only be dealing "just" 4.81 points of damage on average with Advantage, assuming they're spending 1 point of Focus. However, mirroring our original findings on the Duelist, they're still dealing a respectable 2.86 on average with Disadvantage, which is actually more than the baseline Striker with a normal attack! Here's all that in AnyDice: http://anydice.com/program/80c8 The real problem is getting that Focus: while you will reliably start a turn with 1 point of Focus, Focus does not carry over in between targets. There are ways of getting more Focus through the use of Demand Attention and the like. In general, though, an average enemy won't be alive for more than a couple of turns in a given combat, meaning that hoarding in excess of 2 Focus might never become relevant. Elites and Champions are a completely different kettle of fish, but the real question is whether it's better to have your Focus somewhere else. The Duelist is actually not all that bad as a Striker: sure, the Rogue might be able to deal a big mess of damage on a high roll, but the Duelist can deal that damage reliably and are not all that bothered by Disadvantage. This is all subject to change when these characters hit level 5, because that's when things get really interesting:
Ratpick fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 09:57
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Hey Jim, could you help me and my friends out with something? My friend is currently thinking of making a Shapechanger for his next character and we keep tripping up on the wording of one-form shifter. My reading is that once you use Rally to regain the Transformation power, the next time you use that Transformation power you gain one of the extra bonuses on top of your form's other bonuses, but we keep tripping up on the phrase "instead of transforming again," which could be read as the extra bonus coming instead of the Transformation power happening. Like, I'm pretty sure our first reading of it is right, but we'd just like an official word on it. Thanks in advance. 
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Apr 12, 2016 20:20
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Jimbozig posted:It means that when you use the regained transformation power again, you get the bonus along with whatever other effects the power gives. Gotcha, thanks!
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Apr 13, 2016 04:44
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Jimbozig posted:Edit: while I'm here, I'll tease a thing - who here likes Monster Hunter, or at least the idea of Monster Hunter? I haven't played a single Monster Hunter game, but from what I hear it's basically about killing big and bad monsters in order to make equipment from their carcasses so that you can take on bigger and badder monsters? Yeah, I like it.
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May 7, 2016 06:20
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Comrade Gorbash posted:A quick rules question. My reading of The Archer's Blitzer class feature and the Fast Archer feat is that I can't benefit from both at the same time. Am I reading this correctly? Pretty much, yeah. Although, as one of my players (who also has Melee Shooter) has discovered, there is a work-around. The thing is, Fast Archer only refunds your attack action if you used it to just make a ranged basic attack. What said player liked to do, when our campaign was still going, was to start the turn by using a move action to get his speed (14 because of mobility boost and everything else) in squares of movement, move next to an enemy, make a ranged basic attack, kill said enemy (because he was always rolling high on his attacks), get his attack action refunded, rinse and repeat until he ran out of squares of movement (he'd usually eliminate an entire combat's worth of Stooges this way). After all that was done and he'd spent all his squares of movement he'd spend his now-refunded attack action to use Blitzer. So, yeah, there's a way to use Blitzer with Fast Archer, but at least by our reading it hinges on Blitzing being the last thing you do on your turn, because if you use your attack action on Blitzing it doesn't get refunded. Also, do note that further attacks don't benefit from role boosts: at first we thought the above trick was crazy, but once we noticed that clause it actually made it seem kinda okay. He still destroyed most of my Stooges during the first round of combat, but I was kinda okay with that because the mental image was pretty awesome.
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May 8, 2016 07:32
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How would you guys do a combat on a life-sized chessboard? Thing is, for my convention one-shot I'm going to run a dungeon crawl that has ALL the cliches of a D&D dungeon crawler, including a gimmicky combat against animated chess-pieces on a life-sized board. What I'm currently thinking is this: the PCs roll initiative as normal and act in order as normal, BUT after each PC has acted the GM gets to activate one of the chess pieces and take a turn. So, the GM doesn't actually roll initiative, instead getting to make a single move between each of the PCs' turns. All the chess pieces move as they would in a regular game of chess and get to make an attack at the end of their movement if they would be in position to capture the character. Also, they can always push (or slide) the PC they attacked one square regardless of roll so that they can actually move into the square they captured. Of course, this is going to be a bit more difficult than a regular combat simply in terms of number of enemies, but that's somewhat alleviated by the fact that the GM only gets to activate one piece per every PC that acts. I was thinking that Pawns would be Stooges, Rooks, Bishops, and Knights would be Goons, and the King and the Queen would be regular monsters. Killing the King is the end goal of the battle, but the King would have some protection: a castled King would count as Guarded, while other pieces would grant intervening cover as normal. I think it still needs some work and I really need to come up with some thematic abilities for the pieces (Knights, of course, are leapers that can jump over characters and other pieces as part of their movement), so any ideas would be welcome.
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May 9, 2016 08:56
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paradoxGentleman posted:Are there any eurogoons who also want to try their hands at playtesting these new classes? Because I'd be down if there were. I'm down, provided it's on a weekend.
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Aug 3, 2016 11:03
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paradoxGentleman posted:Ratpick, gnapo, I was thinking Sunday evening for the playtest, possibly at 8 PM from my timezone, that is GMT +2. Does that work for you? Wait, I don't get how timezones work. I'm on GMT +3, so that'd be 9 PM my time? That's a bit lateish for me, but I could manage it provided we don't run for too long. How many hours did you have in mind? Any particular classes you'd like to have us pick, or can we just pick whatever from the new expansion classes?
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Aug 4, 2016 10:53
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paradoxGentleman posted:Yes that will be 9 Pm from your point of view. I was thinking of making 3 encounters, at levels 3, 5 and 7. You can pick any new class you want, but if both of you could write your macros ahead of time that would be great. Okay, that sounds doable. I'd actually really like to test out both a new class and the new Lurker role. I'm currently drawn towards the Freelancer, because I like the idea of a beginner class (even though I don't consider myself a beginner).
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Aug 4, 2016 18:59
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I did have one very specific question about the Freelancer that came to mind yesterday as I was reading it: the Healing Potion Encounter Power does not state what kind of action it is. Is it an Attack Action? e: I mean most of the powers don't state their action type but it can be pretty easily inferred from the fact that they have Damage, Effect and Range lines that they're Attack Actions.
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Aug 5, 2016 06:53
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paradoxGentleman posted:Eurogoons interested in the playtest but without PMs, please join the game by clicking here: https://app.roll20.net/join/1570364/NtU3fw Joined. Will sort out my character and macros before the game tomorrow! poo poo, does Roll20 still do that thing where you need to join the game before it'll let the GM assign you a character sheet? If so I'll borrow my friend's computer.
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Aug 6, 2016 09:42
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One last-minute question about the Freelancer: there's no mention of their at-will damage increasing at level 5, which seems like an omission to me. Am I right in assuming that their at-will damage should increase as with most of the other classes?
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Aug 7, 2016 18:01
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I only got to take part in the first (level 3) combat encounter of last night's playtest because I was unexpectedly exhausted and had to wake up early today. I ended up coupling my Freelancer with Striker instead of Lurker, mainly because another player showed up with a Lurker, so I ended up with a character pretty much as simple as can be. Based on my first impressions of the Class, the Freelancer does succeed in striking a good balance between being a single class for beginners and actually having some choices to make: contrary to the fears that another player had expressed to Countblanc about constantly falling on Granny's Ol' Blade, I only ended up using it once. The other powers I used were Cape Flourish, Molotov Cocktail and Flintlock. While my choices in character creation were basically locked in (save for feats and role powers) each of the powers had just enough punch while being very simple. Also, I just happened to roll a 6 on my very first attack of the evening, and the ensuing extra damage and effect on top felt just as good as expected. The class got me thinking about one thing though: I like the fact that it's a very simple class where you don't have to make any choices at level 1 and as such should be suitable for beginners. However, I don't necessarily think that this simplicity should carry over to higher levels. I do think there's something in the class as an effective teaching tool, a sort of a tutorial class, but it would be interesting if it was built in such a way that at higher levels you would get more options to choose from instead of having all of your choices locked. That way, once the player has become more confident and has started to understand the mechanics of the game better they could also start making choices better suited to their playstyle. I would still keep the actual powers of the class simple: I quite liked the design on the Freelancer's powers, as they are simple yet pack a lot of punch in their effects. While the other characters of the group definitely had more complicated tricks up their sleeve, I didn't feel overshadowed because I could simply hit/shoot enemies and be confident in either being able to deal damage or giving them a nasty debuff, or if using Molotov Cocktail knowing I had a chance at doing a little bit of splash damage.
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Aug 8, 2016 08:44
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Countblanc posted:Thank you for all of your feedback, but I wanted to comment specifically on why I didn't do this. The original goal of the Freelancer was to make a class which taught the basics of the game's combat to someone just sitting down to play in a game as, well, a guest star; A friend who wanted to see the game, a significant other who wanted to come to game night one evening, etc. It isn't really a "beginner character", that's more something like a Duelist/Striker, you're explicitly not meant to stick with the Freelancer unless you really love its kit I guess for long term. The only reason it even gains levels is because someone is just as likely to show up to play on day 1 of a level 1 campaign as they are halfway through a level 7 one, and the class needed its kit to grow for the latter. That makes a lot of sense, yeah, and it should've been plainly obvious to me from the get-go simply based on the description and the class feature. I kind of stupidly read it as a beginner class that's supposed to start simple and provide a blank slate for the player to build upon as they advance. I've only really started looking at the other stuff in the document properly now and I must say that the Dancer is starting to grow on me even though my eyes first glazed over when I saw the step charts. I also really like the Ogre, but I must admit I haven't read it properly; I just love the concept.
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Aug 9, 2016 07:06
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Again with the really specific questions: The Necromancer's Mark of Death activates when you hit an enemy with an attack and deal damage. I'm mainly interested in how this interacts with the Blaster's abilities, mainly Multitarget Boost (when you forgo turning your attack into a zone) and Consistent Attack. My reading is that these two circumstances don't count as making an attack, so as such neither of them could be used to give your Mark of Death to an enemy. On a related note, the Striker dealing +1 damage on a 2 makes for a strange gray area. I assume a roll of 2 means that everything else that would happen on a miss (i.e. getting a miss token, activating your miss trigger, etc.) happens but you still deal 1 point of damage to the enemy. However, what happens when a Striker rolls a 3 and chooses to apply the Effect of the attack instead of damage? Do they still deal 1 point of damage to the enemy, on top of the Effect? And this leads to Melee Shooter: it says that you deal 1 extra damage on a hit, which once again brings up rolling a 3 on an attack. When a character with Melee Shooter rolls a 3 on an attack and chooses to apply the Effect instead of damage, do they still deal 1 point of damage? The difference in phrasing might be the key here: the Striker's damage boost is a flat +1 to damage on a roll of 2 to 5, whereas the Melee Shooter feat is expressed as 1 extra damage on a hit, which might carry an assumption that it only adds to damage if you're already dealing damage? All of this might have been clarified in the past already, but I wasn't around for the previous thread so I might've missed it.
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Aug 31, 2016 08:00
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Thanks for the clarification to all my questions! I'm actually kind of torn on Melee Shooter: I'm not quite sure if +1 to damage on a hit is too good, but it is extremely boring. Having said that, my group's Blitzer Archer Striker's main complaint was that even though his favored fighting style was running at his opponents to shoot them in the face he was having a hard time getting Advantage on attacks. This fix should alleviate that complaint and I don't think he'll miss the +1 damage (on top of every other source of damage he's got). I haven't seen anyone ever take Reliable, but with the proposed fix I could see it becoming a viable choice. Actually, I could see it becoming really good on Blasters simply by virtue of making it more likely for you to get both the Damage and the Effect on multiple targets (although I'm not sure if this is the intent and would understand if it was limited to just one target for Blasters). Fast Reactions does not seem like a must-have, but I guess that's just me.
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Sep 1, 2016 08:26
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With regards to the Sprinter feat, I'd be inclined to say B. The out of turn movement thing didn't come up that often but when it did it certainly bogged down the game.
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Sep 12, 2016 10:13
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drrockso20 posted:Seems to me a good optional rule would be to give for free a skill version of your combat powers if it makes sense from a fluff perspective for how your character is setup and/or how the GM's setting is setup(like a swordsman should probably have a skill relating to using their sword for stuff outside of Tactical Combat, while it might not make as much sense for a giant robot with a sword to have such a skill cause you'd be less likely to get into such a situation where it wouldn't make more sense to just use Tactical Combat rules instead) This entire discussion is fascinating to me. I know my games tend to be a bit more light-hearted, but the approach I have come to favor is for my players to explain their tactical combat abilities through their skills. For the most part this is simple: most Archers tend to have an Archery skill, most Martial Artists I've seen know Kung-Fu or Swordfighting or something, but since my games tend to be on the lighter side I'd probably let almost any skill qualify provided it made at least some degree of sense (like, depending on the exact tone I was going for I might even allow stuff like really bad jokes and insults to be used to deal damage). Of course I was to run a more serious campaign I'd be up front about it but still require some kind of narrative justification for a character's tactical combat abilities in the form of skills. Like, if a character is playing a Bombardier and wants their abilities to be based on explosives, I'd expect them to pick up a Demolitions skill at the very least.
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Sep 27, 2016 08:25
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homullus posted:When they actually turn into a vehicle, use the rules for vehicles. Actually, here's a thought: make all the characters effectively multiform shapechangers with the multirole shapechanger feat for free and just limit their number of forms to two (one form for robot and another for vehicle), and have them choose one of the normal roles for their robot form and vehicle roles for vehicle form. The problem with this approach is, of course, that there aren't all that many forms to choose from, but you could effectively make every character a hybrid where they have a single transformation power of their choice from the Shapechanger on top of the powers of another class. Of course, when you transform you lose access to all your powers from your normal class. I may be thinking too hard about how to represent transforming toy robots in a tabletop RPG.
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Oct 7, 2016 07:47
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paradoxGentleman posted:There's a recruitment going on for a Strike game, in case you didn't know: X-CRAWL: Umber Hulkamania I posted about the possibility of playing one half of the Ogre in that same thread and got GM approval, so I'd be down! Would you rather be the Brawn or the Brains (or Might or Magic, I can't remember which was the appropriate terminology off the top of my head)? I'm open to both, although I do like playing big dumb martial characters so I'd gravitate towards being the Brawn, but it's not a deal-breaker for me. I don't have PMs unfortunately, so we'd have to find some other way to coordinate our characters. The Ogre doesn't seem any more complex than any of the other classes to be honest, so I'd personally say that it should be okay for a newbie to test it out. The only "complexity" arises from not having full control of your movement and positioning on account of two players controlling the same token, but other than that it seems pretty straightforward. e: Do note that applying as the Ogre would invariably mean that we'd be applying as a pair, so actually getting into the game would hinge on both of us getting into the game. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 10:30
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paradoxGentleman posted:I am sorry if I seem flaky, but while I was looking for alternatives in case the Ogre idea wasn't going to work, I came across the perfect idea for Buddies, in the form of the beautiful Princess Snurk and her faithful pages, Sinusamba and Nasalimbo. No problem at all! I'll still keep looking for someone to play the Ogre with me but failing at that I'll come up with another type of character for the game.
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Oct 13, 2016 10:52
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paradoxGentleman posted:Hey Ratpick! I tried to ask you in the Umber Hulkamania thread, but I think you didn't notice, so I'm asking here hoping you will. You should really get PMs. Yeah, I really need to get PMs. I replied to you in the Game Room thread, but thought I'd let you know here as well for good measure.
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Oct 17, 2016 09:36
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