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"If you move diagonally, X, if you move laterally, Y" seems like exactly what the Rogue needs to differentiate itself from other classes.
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Jan 6, 2016 21:49
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It knows what it did.
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Jan 9, 2016 21:39
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I always figured that if anyone was immune to the negative aspect of the Exposed rules they should also not be allowed to benefit from the Exposed rules by dealing extra damage, but at that point you start wondering what the point of the rules is.
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Jan 14, 2016 23:57
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Speaking of high risk and high reward classes, I was thinking of making some sort of "Berserker" class whose moves aren't very impressive normally but become stronger and trickier when they are below a certain HP threshold and deal damage to themselves to remove debuffs/gain buffs. Like a move that only deals medium damage normally but when the user is below 4 HP it also drains health or stabbing your own leg to increase your movement/take off a snare. Have you looked at the Blood Mage build for the Magician?
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Jan 21, 2016 21:50
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Always read the first die, or something?
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Feb 17, 2016 03:05
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Oh yeah, those should be Refined. I think you just treat the Bard as a Leader and Evoker as Controller but that needs to actually be written somewhere.
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Jul 24, 2016 20:06
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megane posted:(Incidentally, if I'm reading this correctly, the Level 9 version of Conjure Elements doesn't work unless you have taken the Broad Mastery Feat, since you'll only have two Basic Elements mastered and they'll be opposed.) Yeah it does, you just summon two of the same. Cloud, Wall, and Daemon are the elements I'm least certain about leaving in their current state, though - they might have to last only one turn or something.
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Jul 25, 2016 02:26
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gourdcaptain posted:(their damage is just awful even if the effects are rather versatile and good) Were they doubling up on elements at all? I'm pretty sure someone who just casts lots of Fire+Fire or Earth+Earth or something ought to be doing Blaster-caliber damage, albeit with more awkward AoE shapes.
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Aug 1, 2016 06:21
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gourdcaptain posted:It was blaster-tier, but pretty low for that considering some of the powers did nothing extra on a crit and others did no base damage (and to be fair, I remember them mostly going for forced movement-related stuff for their effects to get grappling enemies off people). I was probably exaggerating a bit. Arc Evocation tends to lend to hilarity, though, given it's... interesting results on a 1 or 2. Hmm, fair point. I think I'm going to try giving it standard crit damage (by just manually having its crits be worth +2 or +3 damage inherently, same as with other classes) and see if that works out. I'll keep Spray's crits a bit low just to retain its identity or whatever. If anyone's interested, the most current version of the Evoker should generally be visible here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JC3ZZCfSfIfiYVqA50saZ5YnNDWXwc-JJREHIbWE36g/pub I think it'll periodically update with whatever minor changes I make, but am not sure.
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Aug 1, 2016 20:13
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gourdcaptain posted:My Evoker player looked at the new copy and is wondering how the High Magicks feat works because you can't ever summon three non-basic elements at once? He's right, it's screwed up right now. I wrote it before changing the rules such that your third and fourth elements always had to be basics for simplicity/alpha strike inhibition reasons. I'll just have it read "expend" rather than "conjure". Incidentally I wouldn't get too attached to that feat because while I like it I'm not sure whether Jim's down for explicit power-borrowing in that vein.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:33
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I think that by a strict reading of the rules getting your summon dominated wouldn't do anything because summons, themselves, don't do things - they just get ordered to move, and you make attacks through them. Certainly at the instant that a creature is summoned it'll make its attack regardless of being dominated because "...and it makes the following attack:" is written in the text of an action the Summoner is taking. It does seem like something should happen if someone dominates your creature, like maybe you can't elect to attack through it and they CAN elect to attack through it on their own turn?
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Aug 21, 2016 18:23
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gourdcaptain posted:Evoker's Ray Evocation: "Draw a line from the center of your square to the center of the target’s. Make an Elemental Attack on each square the line passes through until you hit a creature or reach an obstacle." By "hit", does this mean that if you miss you keep on going? Yeah, if you can line bad guys up, you can give your attack a kind of insurance; miss the first guy and you'll have a chance at the next. Note also that any Terrain your Elements make will appear in every square you attack, so you can draw a line of steam clouds or oil slicks or whatever across the field.
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Aug 27, 2016 05:11
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Yeah, I don't see any problem with the power having an explicit out of combat effect, since it clearly ALSO has a balanced in-combat effect. If anything, I'd like to see more license for stuff like that to get added on, or even for players to do it themselves ("If I hit someone with X in a fight it means I've got a drop of their blood for sympathetic magic later!")
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Sep 23, 2016 02:04
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"You get Advantage and a free Assess action as if taken by the victim" would probably be a more clearly combat-limited way to do it, certainly.
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Sep 23, 2016 04:33
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As I recall, some version of Strike made it clear that one of your skills should be the one your character actually fights with, like "Melee" for a warrior or "Demolitions" for a grenadier or something. That said, it's definitely possible to bite off more than your skills can chew if you go really wild with flavoring stuff, and I think it's more sensible to require people to pick trained skills representing their combat prowess rather than let people treat their combat prowess as an extra trained skill.This heads off "Well all my combat powers represent reality manipulation and matter transmutation so out of combat I expect to be able to transform anything into anything else" as well as much less extreme versions of the same problem that might crop up at an actual game table. Especially for supernatural characters, I think it's pretty important to work out what the scope of a single skill, in general, is, such that skills representing powers aren't more or less broad, or more or less context dependent, than skills representing regular old skills. Like, when I put a blaster magician representing a hermetic wizard together, I gave them "Blasting" "Binding" and "Weather-working" as three separate out-of-combat skills, because of course in combat they could blow people up with fire, debuff them with various magician powers, conjure mist or difficult terrain, etc. It didn't seem right to just slap down one "Magic" skill. Similarly if I was playing some kind of Solid Snake omnicapable soldier I might have separate CQC, Firearms, and Demolitions skills rather than one called "Combat". Oh, and if I had some at-will, unrolled combat power that I'd logically be able to use to consistent advantage out of combat without it having a 33% fail rate, like teleportation or invisibility, I'd make it a skill trick.
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Sep 23, 2016 22:10
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Combat skills are flavorful!
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Sep 24, 2016 00:54
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Full Auto Mayhem isn't really more flavorful than Assault Rifle, just more specific (and goofier - frankly, I'd rather see Assault Rifle on my friend's character sheet). Although, on the subject, it's probably a weakness of the game that once you have Guns there's no reason to get Rifles. I think I saw some kind of "more specific skill wins ties" rule in Chuubo's or something but I don't think it works for Strike since it's not like skill vs. skill rolloffs are common.
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Sep 24, 2016 05:16
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Sir Kodiak posted:I'm not sure how you're using the word "flavorful" where giving a skill the combination of a psychological and practical context doesn't qualify. Well, someone who has "Assault Rifles" rather than "Spray and Pray" is clearly not dependent on a specific context or technique to use an assault rifle and instead has broad and practiced competence. I know which one I'd expect to see on a soldier. But what I said before is that you shouldn't have a single skill to cover your class and role. My preference is that if your class/role imply you have a broad library of distinct capabilities, you'd reflect that with your skills, such that your sheet reads "Necrotic blasts" "Corpse animation" "Fear auras", not "Necromancy". Same reason I'd give James Bond Pistols, Stealth, and Seduction rather than "Spy". Tuxedo Catfish posted:It does have that rule, though -- see "specialists vs. generalists" on page 10. Oh, so it does. I decided that I must have been remembering wrong since, like I said, you don't actually get a lot of opposed checks in Strike so the actual benefits to "AK-47" versus "automatic weapons" would be preeeetttty rarely seen, right?.
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Sep 24, 2016 06:26
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Even if the GM never asks you to roll your Brawl skill to defeat an enemy outside the context of a turn-based encounter, I'm pretty sure you can still learn it to recognize other people's fighting styles, call on your fellow street fighters for advice and favors, etc. I just don't see the problem with having a combat skill or two on your sheet.
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Sep 25, 2016 23:11
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eth0.n posted:The problem isn't being able to have them. It's being essentially forced to have them or else your character doesn't make much sense. I suppose a character that only knows how to fight competently in "interesting" fights, and is, I guess, too bored to bother with non-interesting fights could make some kind of sense, but it seems like a strange default, and not one most players would want. A diplomat is forced to have Charm (or Negotiation or something) or else he doesn't make much sense as a character. The misleading thing here is the word "forced"; no one made you play a talky guy, you chose to! The same is true of someone who fights a lot. There are definitely Strike characters who don't need explicit combat skills to make sense, and I'm not talking exclusively of Bards and Warlords. Maybe your character fights in a bumbling, comedic way such that they mostly dispatch their enemies by accident, or are useless without the direction of their fellow PCs, or something.
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Sep 26, 2016 00:18
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Sir Kodiak posted:That could work for some games, but for many, such as the Shadowrun game I'm prepping, it would not be tonally appropriate to have a character that just baby's day outs their way through all their fights. It's not a good answer for a universal system. Yeah, most Strike characters are likely to be combatants, so most Strike characters will have combat skills, though not literally 100% of them. Certainly in a Shadowrun game I'd be raising my eyebrow dubiously if every last party member didn't at least have the equivalent of "Pistols" written down somewhere. But, like... if you're playing a Shadowrun game, it's probably because you want to be a Shadowrunner, which is to say someone who can handle themselves in a fight. So it's no more an imposition that note that your Shadowrunner knows how to kill someone than it is to note that the party face is charismatic.
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Sep 26, 2016 02:18
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Sir Kodiak posted:I absolutely agree that a Shadowrun PC's build should reflect that they know how to kill someone. That's why there will be one or more sheets of paper with combat powers written on them from their class and role. What I disagree with is that there's a need for the builds to describe all that twice. There's a need because the only thing that carries between tactical combat and the rest of play is stuff like Exhausted and Cursed. If your Street Samurai has Demand Attention and Exploit Weakness and so on, but doesn't have "Katanas" written down under their Skills section, then in a very real sense the don't know how to kill someone. They're faking their way through somehow. And, of course, lacking a Katanas skill also means your character won't be able to recognize katanas or katana-makers, size up their opponents' sword styles, duck into back-alley dueling clubs... I could see some kind of "every combat power listed on your sheet also counts as a Skill Trick" houserule, but, like, I really don't think having a "Fighting the way I fight in actual fights" skill is any kind of imposition, especially given the fact that you roll Skills to do more than straightforwardly practice them on whatever's in front of you.
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Sep 26, 2016 02:58
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Sir Kodiak posted:I'm okay with a street samurai who doesn't know about recognizing katanas or katana-makers, sizing up their opponents' sword styles, or the traditions of back-alley dueling clubs. And if a character does care about those things, then the player should feel free to take relevant skills. That way, if the player selects 'katanas,' then that's an interesting choice that tells me something about what the player wants to see in the game, which is valuable to me as a GM, rather than it just being obligatory. Fights and non-fights weren't as separate from each other in 4E as they are in Strike, though. If you want to kill someone for some reason in 4E you use your powers on them, because a 4E character's powers don't vanish when you're not fighting. For instance, eladrin can actually warp from one rooftop to another every five minutes. The game didn't really support or even conceive of the possibility of resolving a fight without rolling initiative. In Strike, you might well resolve a fight by just rolling a skill to kill someone. In fact, there are even example skill tricks like "never lose a fight to a rookie". The book says to only break out the tactical combat rules if you want a fight with some character or characters to be particularly detailed, and neither regular skill checks or the full-on team conflict system is weighty enough for your tastes. So, by default, in absence of house rules, you need combat skills to be trained in combat. Otherwise you're... untrained in combat, and presumably succeeding by some other means, which is more appropriate to some games than others.
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Sep 26, 2016 04:03
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Sir Kodiak posted:The way I see it, if a stand-up fight isn't interesting enough to use tactical combat, then it's bad storytelling. A balanced fight should be a scary thought - holy poo poo, these people actually have a shot at killing me! - not just something you flit past. And if we're safe to assume you'll kill these guys, or be killed by them, there's no reason to make skill checks. I imagine you'd probably use combat skills either for unbalanced/easy fights or in formal contests. Like if you were fighting royal guards at level 1, and now you're level 7 and there are some royal guards in the way, I ask you to roll Swords and if you succeed you blow past while if you fail you blow past but are Winded. Now, you might appreciate getting to blam a bunch of old enemies using your vastly expanded combat prowess rather than just brush them off, and indeed I'd probably run a fight like that at least once just to get to see everyone in action, but every single time?
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Sep 26, 2016 04:33
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One thing you could do is, you could use everyone's class/role as a guide for what skill tasks they can treat as untrained rather than restricted. So like, if I'm a (literal) Necromancer, even if I don't have a Reanimation skill trained, I can make an untrained roll to try to reanimate the dead and even maybe learn the skill on a 6. On the other hand, my friend the Duelist can't even try, but can try for some outlandish physical stunt that wouldn't make sense for my character.
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Sep 26, 2016 05:09
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Sir Kodiak posted:This, to me, would be better handled by the "Tactical Combat" skill I joked about. Because it is completely uninteresting whether you're rolling 'Swords' or 'Assault Rifles' for this. It's also completely uninteresting whether you roll Survival or Cartography to navigate a wilderness, or Bluff versus Diplomacy to get into an exclusive nightclub, or whatever else. It's still of straightforward and obvious utility. (And my intuition doesn't match yours w/r/t the swashbuckler vs. barbarian, either)
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Sep 30, 2016 22:28
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Yes, but if you wanted you could also come up with different twists or usage conditions to represent the difference between rushing and stabbing a bunch of people and mowing them down with an automatic weapon. You wouldn't have to, just like you could go with "you get lost" as the fail state for any number of means of traveling around, but I don't see the problem.
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Oct 1, 2016 00:43
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If you were really interested in turning the wilderness into a nitty-gritty encounter you'd use the extended challenge or chase system, right? There's always an extent of "eh, leave it to the..." when you go for a straight 1d6 skill roll. And, of course, that's still a higher level of investment than just hand-waving success or failure because the alternative wouldn't fit the game. You know, "Stamina" doesn't even strike me as a legit skill. I think it's more of a fallback.
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Oct 1, 2016 01:56
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A "swords" skill isn't a vague proxy any more than a "books" skill is. It legitimately lets your character be good at swords, and if you don't have it, there's something missing from your character's use of a sword, as reflected in any skill rolls made for swords. I get you don't like it, but I don't think you've gotten around the fact that there's no other way to represent combat skill without breaking out full-on battlemap combat, and you're explicitly not supposed to break out full-on battlemap combat for every single physical altercation. That's just not one of the game's assumptions. It's the reason the skill system is described before the combat system.
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Oct 1, 2016 03:27
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It seems really really obvious to the point of tautological that 1) some fights that occur in a game's story don't merit the full thirty minutes' grid combat to resolve and 2) there are situations whose ability to be resolved through combat isn't identical to their ability to be resolved through nonviolent means. It's like you've decided to stake money on there being no one who's exactly five foot ten in the state of Idaho. In principle that's a winnable bet, but...
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Oct 1, 2016 05:55
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Sir Kodiak posted:You can find you a 5'10" Idahoan in 30 seconds on Google: they list college basketball players' heights online. Whereas we've been talking about this for a week and nobody's come up with a good story from their game about how great it was that everyone had 'Katanas.' People have, though. I told you how I set up and used my character's skills in precisely a Shadowrun game and other people have mentioned how either having or not having combat skills in games has worked out fine for them. In general it's really obvious how being trained or untrained in combat skills would logically work out in a Strike game - if you have one, you convincingly read as someone who knows how to fight, and if you don't, you don't. This informs how your character approaches violence in the course of freeform play and how it looks when your character participates in the turn-based combat subgame. Whenever you're shown a situation in which a character would obviously roll a combat skill you try to duck it using exactly the means the corebook forbids: stretching other skills so they fit. Even if "Stamina" was a legitimate skill (and I don't think it is, it's super broad and largely passive), you wouldn't roll it to beat a bunch of people up. Maybe you'd roll it to endure torture or hold your breath pull double time on some kind of work shift, but incapacitating people with violence? Unfortunately, this is what you're left with if you absolutely refuse to ever let a skill describing combat appear on your sheet: you have to beat people up using your Acrobatics or your Intimidation or your Sleight of Hand or something, even though you don't get to make medicinal poultices with Cooking or seduce people with Bureaucracy. It's way more work and way more of a distraction to decide that skills cover everything but combat rather than just covering everything, as they plainly do given the optional nature of the team conflicy/chase/combat subsystems and the existence of example skills like "master at arms" "close combat" and "sharpshooting". And, you know, funnily enough, way more backgrounds don't have explicit combat skills than do. Like, an example knight has Master at Arms and an example elf has Archery, but an example cop doesn't have Pistol. I found this a little surprising when I went to check, since I remembered "pick a skill representing how you fight" being more of a thing in earlier drafts of the game, but the takeaway here is that plenty of characters are expected to use the Unskilled chart to resolve fights quickly rather than that they all use their Streetwise or their Acute Senses or something. Again: the actual combat system is explicitly optional. You break it out if you don't want to just make some skill rolls to resolve a fight. Strike isn't 4e; a 4e character can just decide to use their Twin Strike on an innkeeper who's giving them lip, but a Strike character can't. Fortunately, they don't need to, because in principle skills can be used to resolve any narrative uncertainty without the use of any of the game's more detailed and tactical subsystems. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 15:01
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Jimbozig posted:LAST CHANCE TO GET IN FEEDBACK ON THE ERRATA “On the target’s next turn, they must spend a Move Action to make their best effort to move as far away from you as possible with that one action, or else take 3 damage.” Does that mean that a monster can spend a Move Action to shift 1 square away from you and be okay? After all, that's as far as their shift can take them. Or, do they have to use the move action that will carry them the farthest regardless of the danger of using it?
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Oct 4, 2016 05:40
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"It takes 3 damage if it doesn't end its turn at least 3 (or whatever number) squares away" is probably the simplest way to do it.
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Oct 4, 2016 18:41
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Your main problem is that PC damage increases with level but that PC hitpoints do not. I've never tried it myself, but I'm guessing that pvp is fine from like, levels 1-4 but is insane laughable rocket tag at level 10.
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Oct 18, 2016 19:14
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gourdcaptain posted:B) An Evoker. Player loves the class, I haven't found it overpowered except for Gravity making me want to tear my own hair out in frustration. Thankfully, the player's pretty good at keeping on top of their powerset and making quick decisions (the Blitzer Archer Striker in that group actually tends to be the slowest, so it's a player thing.) Anyone else having problems with Gravity? It could always make it cost an attack action to rise from prone or force you to crawl even if you're standing or something.
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Dec 22, 2016 04:32
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I take Toughness in like every one-shot or playtest because it's pretty much free real estate.
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Jan 5, 2017 22:59
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kupo d'etat
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Feb 27, 2017 23:22
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Hey Evoker fans, apropos of nothing and quite probably way longer than it would've done the one party testing it any good, I'm probably changing the Gravity element to this: E: The target stops Flying and falls Prone, taking 1 damage if it was already Prone. It can’t start Flying and must use an Attack Action to rise from Prone (save ends both; the target can’t attempt this save while Prone).
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Mar 1, 2017 06:52
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Hey Jimbozig, a Strike player came to me with this question so I'm passing it on to you. Control Boost: When you roll a 3 to 6 on an attack, you may choose to either Slow the target until the end of its next turn, or to slide the target 3 squares. Effect: Conjure a spirit in a square adjacent to the target. It lasts until the end of your next turn. Any enemy that enters a square adjacent to the spirit or the spirit’s square takes 3 damage. Since you generally get to choose which of simultaneous effects resolve first, does this mean a Controller/Summoner can plop the little interfering spirit down, then slide the victim into or near the spirit, such that the victim either takes 3 damage or maybe has to do the whole "save to avoid the forced movement but fall prone in your last safe square instead" dance? My snap ruling is that since the control boost says "when you roll a 3 to 6", not "when you hit", and since the actual application and resolution of an attack only follows the roll (since for instance if you roll a 3 you have to decide whether to inflict D or E), the control boost actually precedes the impact of the attack itself and the victim would get slid before they took any damage and/or had a spirit fission off their body. However, I thought I'd post the question here to see if you thought different, or if this merited some kind of general ruling, or if it merited some kind of minor rewording of that one Summoner at-will. Edit: Oh yeah, and I'm to ask if the berserker (battle trance) is supposed to receive an at-will damage upgrade at level 5, since it doesn't seem to at the moment. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:07 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 01:54
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Jimbozig posted:Yeah, that interaction is probably a bit strong. The fix is probably to just make it clear in the power that the spirit doesn't become active until the attack is done resolving. Cool. Although, apparently the general question is in the FAQ: -The Controller's Role Boost can trigger conditional damage on Effects of some attacks instantly like the Summoner's "Trooper" or the Mammoth Shapechanger’s "Stompy," because you can choose the order of effects in a favorable way. Normally you would have to coordinate attacks with a teammate for a similar effect. Is this intended? -Yes, this is fine. This would seem to rule in favor of the 5 damage at-will, which, IiiiIiii dunnnnoooo. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:58 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 18:53
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