Strike! The game of Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Strike! The game of Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Ratpick posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 03:43

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:44

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Exposed rules always seemed cool but I felt like there was so much melee stuff in the game that's also really cool you'd cut out (I'm aware you can fiddle with the scale a bit but it ended up feeling weird to me).

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 13:37

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Yeah; from my admittedly brief experience playing as team monster in Strike, Marks were a major jarring change from 4e. In 4e defenders are generally a part of battlefield control, whereas I pretty quickly realised marks are largely just autodamage you can't really avoid in Strike!.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 13:07

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Gharbad the Weak posted:

Well, yeah, marks are autodamage. Which is a kind of control (soft control, like the Archer at-wills). However, between feats and defender powers like "I don't think so!" you can ramp that up to hard control. It's just less position based, which is why we probably never saw a ranged defender class in 4e. I mean, it's possible to make a ranged defender in 4e, but you have to do things like hybrids and careful feat and power selections.

Edit: Don't forget character classes, too. Necromancers built for close range encounters can have a guy be constantly harried and distracted, especially if you add that movement increasing feat that lets you use squares of movement on reaction to chase them down. Duelists, martial artists and kraken-shapeshifters all have ways to control the area around them. Heck, a melee magician can be REALLY hard to get away from. All classes have a level of control built in, and defender marks just turns the screws harder.

I don't know; I don't really think "Do anything and also take 12 damage" is meaningfully a control effect, except by the tombstone mez effect.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 20:13

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Poison Mushroom posted:

My immediate first thought? "Encourages bad habits". The MMO City of Heroes had a class that had a similar feature on their glass-cannon class (coincidentally also named Blasters), but they removed it because it rewarded poor play and reinforced bad habits. Like, ideally, you want a class to be feasible in any role, but I can't exactly see "Berserker Leader" or "Berserker Defender" working out very well. The idea of power-at-a-price is a good core to build off of, but ideally, you probably want to do it in a way that has less chance of going catastrophically wrong.

(Alternatively, just make very sure there's several failsafes that keep the player from getting Taken Out because of one unlucky turn. "The Buffer Points Class" would also be a decent thing to build around, if you wanted to go that direction.)

One of the ways you can do this was located in the scrapper tree, actually; you have increasing protection as you lose health. So, after you're hit first, you gain resist 1, then when you're on 5 or less resist 2, etc. Maybe with a global resist against high spikes to prevent things bypassing your defences all in one.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 17:38

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Countblanc posted:

People already can make/sell stuff, albeit unofficially. I guess I'm a bit of a weird example since I've been involved in Strike's development for years, but I published an unofficial, independent Class a few months back.

I must've missed that; what was the class?

# ¿ Apr 6, 2016 23:22

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

I've given the book a read through and many of the new classes look fantastic. I'm particularly excited for Bard; having an interesting pure support would be great.

I must ask how Ogre's intended to work though; I found the concept of it a little confusing. You share the character with another player, but you have your own health and sheet?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2016 21:55

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Countblanc posted:

It's more simple than you think; mostly everything is tracked separately both in and out of combat, you just share a token in combat. There's a few rules oddities,and I'm sure a few others we haven't found yet, but yeah. Even if you play the character as a straight two-headed ogre instead of two heroes who join together in combat you'll still function separately out of combat in terms of skills, tricks, etc

So, a monster attacks the ogre; he picks one of the two entities in that space to hit?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2016 22:25

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Is there any particular reason you share a square, then? It feels like it could just be a Buddies thing with two classes that combo with each other.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2016 22:56

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Harrow posted:

I know some tabletop players/GMs are uncomfortable with the idea that the fictional reality can change based on something unrelated--like, "Wait, I failed my knowledge check and that somehow makes <bad thing> true?" But personally, I love that method--I'd rather think of rolls as more than just player character actions, but also determine circumstances, luck, and just general narrative flow.

Personally I hugely prefer it since often the only explanation for why __ didn't happen is "the whim of circumstance", at least without making the explanation be "you just hosed up inexplicably". It's much nicer to be told "you get halfway up the rock-face when you realise it's crawling with blood-sucking bugs" than "you just forgot how to climb and fall off lol". Like, yeah, people sometimes gently caress up stuff like climbing, running, etc, but there's a reason you don't usually see that kind of failure feature in movies outside of comedies.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2018 07:40

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:44

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Congratulations to you and your daughter!

# ¿ Sep 12, 2018 20:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Strike! The game of Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure