- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
Yesterday in strike.
I (Lewellyn, secret elf prince) with a single hit point remaining, and both of my allies already down, ran up the back of a dying dragon (slow poison) and punched out my arc boss evil twin, in a molten crater outside of the walls of a burning city.
It was a pretty good game of strike.
Speaking as one of the downed allies, it was the most metal thing I've ever seen in an RPG. We quite often tend to go down to the wire in this game- it's not the only time it's been just one of us left on their feet- but it makes it really dramatic and neat.
I also adore the skills system, over 8 levels we've collected a very eclectic set of skills including "Matrix dodge", "diving out of the way of cannonballs" and "RULES OF NATURE" (used for running up a giant's back and stabbing it in the neck). It's been a hell of a lot of fun.
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2016 14:22
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2024 02:21
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
Goblins hiding under tables like turtle shells. Enemies that can be ranged right back. A big mean ogre using an anchor like a grappling hook with reach and push/pull attacks. Swarms. Battles where the party have to race to get somewhere, so standing around and making the monsters come to them isn't going to work.
That was just a few ideas off the top of my head.
As another player in this game, Gort's DMing in terms of interesting battles definitely isn't lacking, and as the leader/wizard I've found my powers to be very changable and not have the same problem the archer does. It's not a thing that's like.. prevented us from enjoying the system- hell, I've already posted about how much I've loved it- it's just a bit of a shame when Shinedog has all these powers and he flips through them on his go but they all have massive drawbacks like party damage, except Pin Down and Area Denial. And speaking as a rather squishy wizard, I very much do not want to take the sort of damage he can dish out!
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2016 02:11
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
It was a Warhammer setting and I ended it literally covered in the blood of the Emperor's griffin. My wizard's top skills-
Cowboy
Diving out of the way of cannonballs
Inspire!
THIS ISN'T EVEN MY FINAL FORM
I've raved about the skill system before but the way it sort of becomes a little chronicle of the campaign is really great. Had a lot of fun with Strike, looking forward to dipping back in again when the next books are out, definitely going to pick those up!
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2016 22:07
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
I was the Magician in that game! I'll let Gort answer the bulk of questions, but I'll mention that I probably didn't do myself any favours in the damage department by really leaning into the Leader role and picking a bunch of defensive powers. Generally I'd be throwing out 3 damage auto-hits while keeping everyone else up with heals, which did indeed help a lot, I guess it's just that picking up the archer so he can do 10-20 damage is great, but it's more abstract to see that as a thing that I did, y'know?
My majors were the dome one, the one that grants advantage against one monster for a whole fight, and the one that takes out an enemy that fails a save- sorry I don't remember the spell names, since I renamed them all to fit my stupid theme, a fun notion which I cannot recommend nearly enough- so essentially I'd be going like 3 damage, 3 damage, YOU'RE DEAD, 3 damage, which seemed a little inconsistent.
I don't think it was a massive problem or anything, it's just that when the archer puts out like.. 16 in a hit, it feels kinda shoddy to follow it up with 3 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2016 12:10
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
The wizard in my game took superhuman with the option of swapping places with people. On one occasion she jumped off a building and swapped with an enemy on the way down, killing them, and another time she jumped between two ships that were about to collide then swapped with an enemy, killing them.
We allowed it because it was cool and she wasn't doing it all the time, but it might be worth writing something in to codify it - as it is the swapped enemy doesn't even get a saving throw and the swapper doesn't need an attack roll.
In fairness, I got thrown off that building the first time, thus making it much cooler, thank you.
But yeah, I coulda cheesed that power quite a lot if I wanted to be a jerk.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2016 16:29
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
Heya thread! Me and a friend made a couple of 3D printable tokens for our Strike game, and threw the files on Thingiverse if anyone wants to grab 'em. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3131252
There's Action Points, Strikes, and Miss tokens. They're not fancy or anything but they're kinda cool to have all the same!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2018 22:07
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
That champion got chumped, so I guess I was worried about nothing.
He really did hurt though! Definitely wouldn't call it a chumpage, not from my perspective as one of your players anyway- we only made it look kinda good because he couldn't burst attack the whole party at once, which I will go ahead and pretend was a tactical move on our part rather than dumb luck. The two people he was hitting repeatedly were in serious trouble, I was only fine because I got up in his face really early before he started flinging out those immobilizes, and even then he did do his level best to pull me off a roof. It was a pretty drat threatening fight!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2018 16:48
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
I don't have a problem with 2d6 in moriatti's game but i haven't had any problems with 1d6 in my own games. It's rare we've accrued enough strikes to gently caress up the players' motives, even in sessions with impressively bad luck streaks.
We've reached the strike threshold for A Bad Thing Happening exactly once in recent memory and we're playing 1d6. And frankly it was an entertaining outcome so that was fine.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2019 19:12
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2024 02:21
|
|
- Kojiro
- Aug 11, 2003
-
LET'S GET TO THE TOP!
|
So this post started as a reply to the ongoing action point conversation and turned into an effortpost about everything Strike. There's a ton of criticism but it really is one of the best RPGs I've ever played.
In my long-running Strike campaign I also found that nobody was using complications since they felt that the bonus of an action point didn't line up with the amount of trouble the complication could provide. (EG: We're sneaking into the Renraku corporate facility guarded by cyberbasilisks and Red Samurai - is an action point really worth auto-failing the stealth roll?) That may have been a symptom of how I run my games - I basically have a plan for what'll happen in the session (EG: The players told me last session that they want to break into the Renraku facility, so this session I've got an idea of how the facility's laid out, they'll come across this opposition, there'll probably be a fight against two Strikers and a Charger etc) and the players will broadly follow that plan, with off-the-rails stuff being handled by quickly-thrown-together encounters and ad-libbed skill checks. Maybe in other people's games the players are constantly invoking their complications and getting into situations based on them, but in mine they didn't feel an action point was enough payback for the trouble failing a skill check could cause.
I also found that there was pressure for the players to come up with excuses to give their "awesome points" to whoever needed an action point, not really as a reward for doing something truly awesome.
The result was that players effectively had two action points per session, so I just chucked out the awesome point mechanic and gave everyone two action points per session.
-----
While I'm being critical, I'll give some more random feedback from my campaigns - we've done two from level 1 to 10, one was a Warhammer Fantasy thing, the other was Shadowrun:
* I never found a situation that I felt Team Conflict or Chase could handle better than the basic (awesome) skills system. Both systems feel like a lot of interacting with mechanics, rather than fiction being advanced by light mechanics, which is where the skills system really shines.
* We never really interacted with the Wealth system. There's nothing to buy, with no set costs, so in both campaigns the party was just sort of assumed to have whatever they needed to use their powers and skills. I'm not saying you should make a huge list of equipment to buy with set costs or anything like that, just that characters with different levels of wealth in their backgrounds didn't play any differently in the campaigns I ran.
* I'm not a fan of monster damage increasing as you go up in levels, but player health staying almost static. It means the counterbalance to monster damage increasing is stuff like damage reduction increases (which only some characters will have) and powers that negate hits. The result is that at higher levels hitpoints become a lot less of a buffer between a character being up or down, and more of a binary thing where some characters are one bad round away from floored once their defensive powers are used up.
It might be better to have monster damage, player damage reduction, and hit-negating powers be things that are all static at level 1 and never change.
* Characters get too many feats for how many good feats there are. Characters get five feats each by level 10, and there aren't that many good ones. I saw a lot of characters with toughness and fast reactions, and every archer had melee shooter and fast archer, for example.
I was thinking it might be better if characters only had something like two feats total, but they improved with levels. So at level 1 your battle robot character might have the feat Huge, gaining 3 HP and becoming large. Then at level 3 they could be used as cover by friends. Then at level 5 they gain reach. Then at level 7 they can gain a second feat (which might be off a separate list of "advanced feats" that you can't start with), which improves a step at level 9. That way there'd be less cherry-picking of the best mechanics, and more commitment to the theme of a character.
* I'm a lazy GM, so I'd love more pre-made monsters, and especially traps, particularly ones that can be an encounter on their own, like the garbage compactor from Star Wars.
* I like treasure. It'd be cool to have some pre-made stuff like a flaming sword that gives you a fireball encounter power and an at-will firebolt or something like that. Maybe it could also be a skill, "I'm gonna roll flaming sword to cut through Shelob's webs".
-----
Hopefully that doesn't just read like a giant wave of negativity. Strike might be the best RPG I've ever played, and there are things from it I've stolen to use in other RPGs I run. Like the Zeitgeist campaign I'm running in 4e D&D, I threw out their sea combat rules and I just use the skill system from Strike instead. And stuff like combining the to-hit and damage roll into a single throw of a D6 is straight-up brilliant. There are also nice bits like being able to combine any Role or Class in a character instead of being pigeonholed into one particular class if you want that playstyle.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2020 14:11
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2016 14:22
