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Hey, would someone here like to see a really bad attempt to cash in on the popularity of Mouse Guard that, to my knowledge, no one knows about (and this is certainly a good thing)? No? Too bad.  Losing Games is a very appropriate name for this company. Okay, a little foreward here so I can cover my bases in case I find any secret fans of this game (I'm pretty sure I won't). I don't really like super-lethal games. I honestly like to be a hero when I TTRPG, and there are exceptions like Shadowrun, the 40k RPGs by FFG, and a few others where I'm fine with high lethality. I'm playing those for a specific reason, for a specific mood, or maybe I just love the lore enough. But there are games out there that take this lethality as a point of pride. Mouse Guard is one of those games, because you're playing MICE. Brave, capable mice, but still, MICE. I've never really enjoyed Mouse Guard for a couple of reasons, the lethality being one of them, but also because magic. I love magic in TTRPGs. I love having it, it being an option, because I've always been a caster junkie and likely always will be. Still, I also like the idea of small things in a big world, using what is found from humans or other bigger races as weapons and tools that would be invaluable for a smol but not so much for a human. It helps that I was coming off a Hollow Knight kick and was looking for a game that might help me run something in that setting. So, a year or two ago, Itch.io had a social justice bundle that had an amazing amount of games in it, a few of which were simple TTRPGs, and I found this thing. Mausritter. I gave it a cursory look over and got excited, hey, this has MAGIC in it, that might be cool! But for reasons unknown (and a falling out with a friend that left this Hollow Knight idea by the wayside), I completely forgot about it. Recently, I've restarted that idea, and I decided to give Mausritter an actual looksee in order to determine if it was what I was looking for. What I found offended every sense of game dev logic I had, in almost every way, in almost every mechanic. In about 40 or so pages of the small corebook, it managed to make me wonder how the authors dress themselves in the morning without aid. Mausritter is BAD. It is not just bad because of its lethality, and my personal preferences in games. It is BAD on the level of deserving to be, at the very least, a friend of FATAL. Maybe only in that tangential way that Mausritter is not a member of the inner circle, but really just an acquaintance that has their own circle of friends and sometimes just kinda hangs out around FATAL, but it's still there and FATAL thinks about inviting them to parties when they need to flesh out their guest list. Next post, actually going into the game. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Jun 4, 2021 |
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Jun 4, 2021 13:41
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Note: This post has been edited to remove a lot of cringy bullshit. The posters after this aren't crazy, this post was pretty terrible in the first draft.By popular demand posted:Yes please, we do appreciate miserable failures at imitation. There is so much good poo poo in that bundle. It was totally worth every cent of what I paid! Much of it is simple visual novel games, but there's a lot of gems in there too. And... Sadly, a lot of trash. Like Mausritter. E: Not that visual novels can't be good, they just really aren't my jam. I prefer reading LPs about them than playing them. taichara posted:Mausritter's an adaptation of Into The Odd (with some flavourings from Knave and the like for rules bits) where you play fantasy mice. The FATAL callouts up above are, to put it mildly, incredibly baffling to me and the rest of the post isn't much less so. I hope it stands up, then. Maybe I'm just angry over how murderous this game is, but it does have ISSUES, and I seek to prove that. Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, seeing someone get this mad over OSR Mouse Guard is…weird. I'm not really MAD. This is for comedic effect, which is a lot of the point of F&F, isn't it? It is to me. Now, this F&F will probably not take too long. It's a small game, and it doesn't have a lot to offer. But what it does have to offer is that almost every inch of the crunch is so badly thought out that... Well, I'll get into that. I don't want to blow my rage-load already. I don't anticipate this game taking many posts, it should be short and sweet. Actually, not sweet. It's more bittersweet, like one of those flavors that you initially like and then the aftertaste hits you and you go "whoa what the hell just happened". 1. The usual TTRPG crap.  Hmm this sounds familiar Right off the bat we're going to see a couple things about Mausritter. First, that it has basically copied the setting of Mouse Guard, changed names as to be less obvious, and added magic, which as we will see is very poorly implemented. Second, the art in Mausritter is adorable and fun. It's the best part of the game, and I really actually do adore it. It ranges from "cute and cozy" to "ugly cute". Isaac Williams is the writer, illustrator, and designer of this game, and I think he has some skill in the illustrating part, but I feel Mausritter's writing is a little too derivative, and the game design definitely needs work. It's not as terrible a game as I initially thought, but it's still definitely not GOOD. If this is Isaac's first game, which I assume it is, it's not a bad first attempt, I think. Notably, there's some stuff before this page, but it's all just tables about what things cost and what random knick-knacks NPCs might be carrying, and the table of contents. Despite criticism, I still think it's an odd choice for the first thing in your book, before even a table of contents, to be RnG tables. But this game does love tables, most of which are inoffensive random rolling tables in case a GM can't be arsed to come up with things themselves. I find these handy, but I always feel guilty as a GM about actually using roll tables. I'm going to peruse them later and see if I can find anything patently ridiculous. 2. Character Creation Character creation is VERY simple, but also where I started to raise an eyebrow. Yes, already. I'm already getting kind of antsy about a few things, but so far it doesn't look too bad, actually. The numbers here in any TTRPG often depend on numbers LATER to make sense, and we'll see very little sense is made very soon.  Short and simple as hell, which I like, but... Well. Okay, so let's break this down from start to finish. First, you determine attributes, and this is... Not great, but that's admittedly an opinion. 3d6 roll in order is probably one of the grognardiest ways to make a character's stats I can think of. Did you want to play a fighter? Too bad, Str is your dump stat! But hey, at least this game gives you permission to switch two of them around. Of course, a GM can easily change this to where you roll your stats, then place them, but I'm not making this F&F because the game can be changed into something good. I'm displaying how bad the game is in how it's SUPPOSED to be played. If a game tells me "you roll for these things but you can pick if you want to" then in my mind, the rolling is the default way it was meant to be experienced. Keep in mind here that your stats can range from 2 to 12. This is actually pretty important for how lethal the game gets later. HP is a straight d6 roll, you don't add anything to it, which seems to be a bad idea to me. When things are this random, it tends to mean bad things for player characters. But in this case, I'll forgive it because it doesn't matter what you roll, your character is very likely going to die regardless of what you do. 1 is the min, 6 is the max. And actually, HP in this system is interesting, which sorta describes a lot of Mausritter's mechanics: Interesting and different, but executed poorly. You roll a d6 for your character's starting pips, giving you 1-6 monies to begin this game with. This... Is not nearly sufficient for what you need pips for. It is, in fact, so pathetic it may as well not even exist. To illuminate, here's a price table for light sources, which as any TTRPG player can tell you, are essential for survival.  You can't even afford a single torch. Thankfully, the game gives you some torches, but you still have a number of pips you can't really do anything with at character creation, hence why it may as well not exist. Your background gives you two starting items, most of which don't have immediately apparent uses and you don't get to pick, as the game states: You take your starting HP, your starting pips, and you compare them to a table to see what your background is. There's a running theme here: You have no choice and you have to randomly roll everything that makes up your character. Not a great choice. Again, the game says you can pick, but that doesn't seem to be the INTENTION here. The game at least lets you choose your starting weapon, and if you're smart, you'll dual-wield light weapons. Again, I can't be bothered to reveal why yet, but trust me on that you should. Also, the game has a bit of self-awareness here in that Isaac realized that you could get utterly hosed in character creation, and decides to make up for it for giving you some extra items, which of course you have to roll for. This is not sufficient as a "sorry you rolled so bad", because the items just don't make up for having your highest stat at 7. Now, for the details, let me post the rest of this particular page.  Whatup its your boy tables Birthsigns, like in real life, do nothing but offer vague suggestions of what you should act like but don't. Unlike in real life, they're not vague enough that they could apply to literally anyone. As for the physical features table, I don't know why it makes me laugh that having dreadlocks is as likely as being physically deformed, or what that means about me as a person, but I'm sure it's not great. Why are dreadlocks even an option? Why specifically dreadlocks? Is Isaac a dreadlock kind of guy? Can he pull them off? I don't know and I don't want to go digging for a photo of the man, because that feels creepy to me. Anyway, as to the backgrounds, you can see them there. Some are better than others. Notably, the first one is probably the best for loadout of items, but it's also absolutely terrible for reasons we'll explore later. Most of them have useless knick-knacks that only have narrative effects, which can still be useful, but let me ask you if you'd rather have a rat to carry things for you, or a single bottle of perfume. I assume you would prefer the extra inventory space, really. Also: Vagabond gets an item called "Treasure map, dubious" which is equally giggle worthy. 3. Inventory and the Beginning of Madness  I'm not sure if it's adorable or cringeworthy that we're calling hands paws, but gently caress it I think it's cute. It's not totally clear because of how the example is set up, but you have ten inventory slots. Main paw, off-paw, two body slots, and six pack slots. However, a little note is that you have an item in here called a Pip Purse, which mentions you can hold up to 250 pips in your pockets, which is a hidden item slot used only for money, apparently. And that's what you'll use it for, because no other item that matters actually fits in your pockets. Also notable here is how Encumbrance works: Technically, you have infinite item slots, because mechanically the only thing keeping you, a mouse, from carrying an entire horse is that you can't run and make all saves with disadvantage. Which is okay because you're reasonably unlikely to be succeeding at any saves in the first place. Back on track, there are conditions, they take up item slots. I like this idea, because it makes sense that you could carry less if you're starving or injured, and conditions are all very temporary anyway, as they just go away when you fulfill the condition at the bottom of the condition card. All items have uses or durability, and the idea for how it works is nice and simple: weapons and other gear have a 50% chance to get damaged when used, and torches and other light sources slowly get used up as you go along. There's a question of how more narrative time is going to treat that, but the game does have a mechanic for how to treat turns while exploring, so I guess that question is answered later in the book. And here's a few quibbles about weapons. Light weapons, dual-wielded, are the only good option. You don't add anything to damage, they're just straight rolls. You might do 1 damage with a giant hammer, you might do 10, and there's no bell curve at all. I hate it when there's no bell curve to damage. It's a big reason I really dislike Dungeon World. Nothing is more unsatisfying than hitting a monster and doing 1 damage three turns in a row. If you use two light weapons, you at least get double the chance to do decent damage. "But Mecha, you brilliant example of humankind," no one would ever say, "Light armor takes your off-hand, so if you if you want to wear that, you can't dual-wield," someone might actually say. Well, that doesn't matter at all because armor is all but useless anyway. You may as well save your item slots for something actually worth having. One damage mitigation is NOTHING in this game. Nothing. Look at those weapons: You might take 10 damage from a single blow. Or 8, or 6. You have, at most, 6 HP. Taking 1 damage away is like holding up a shield against a pile-driver: You're going to die, you're just going to die with a broken shield as well. Also, putting aside the weirdness of dual-wielding only being possible with heavy armor, why do both light and heavy armor only defend against 1 damage? Shouldn't heavy armor defend against more? It costs approximately 2.5x more than light armor, yet it does NOTHING better. Why? This was the first time in this game I realized something was very, very wrong with Mausritter. E: It was pointed out that Heavy Armor lets you dual-wield weapons, which is a distinct advantage since I pointed out dual-wielding is the best option. This is technically true (the best kind of true), but the issue I'm bringing up here is that armor is terrible. Depending on what magic items you might want to wear, it can actually be better for you to go without armor entirely and just give yourself two magic items in your body slots. Only 1 damage mitigation is honestly unhelpful, and the Combat section in the next post will show why. Sadly, this is really only setting up for my complaints about the game's mechanics, because this is where the game actually shines. All the basic stuff about this game is good, I like it, and despite quibbles about not making any decisions for yourself, it all comes out as solid and interesting. Again, like I said before, Mausritter has a lot of fun, interesting ideas that it just doesn't execute very well. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jun 4, 2021 |
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Jun 4, 2021 15:17
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Wow, okay. I'm legitimately sorry that I've offended everyone here. I still think this game is very bad, and I intend to prove it with my next post, but I want to know what I can do to actually be better about this?Leraika posted:I think it's really lovely to compare a game that is not as disgusting as FATAL to FATAL just because it has a lot of tables/random rolls in it Noted. I will stop doing that. It is, and I should have known that. My issue here is the total lack of control over what your character is, which I find very offensive as a player and a GM, but it's certainly not a game trying to be as offensive as FATAL is in every way.
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Jun 4, 2021 15:38
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Leraika posted:It's impossible to separate your hyperbole/comedy from your legitimate complaints, and the complaints that feel like you're the most serious about are the ones that the text itself refutes (you got me to download Mausritter to check, so good job???) - like, you don't have to roll for random features or star sign or anything, the game straight up says you can choose. The light/heavy armor thing is paying less for the option that takes up a hand slot (shield/light armor) or more for the option that leaves both hands free. Etc. Etc. I specifically stated that a GM can let you choose, but I'm taking straight up how the game expects you to play it, which is rolling randomly. The Light/Heavy armor thing is a good point, but my problem with them is that they're just not useful at all, and why will become clear when we get into how combat works. On the whole, I'll try being less vitriolic about the game then, but there's one aspect that I'll show off that legitimately BAFFLES me as to how anyone thought it was a good idea, and it's a very major thing, unfortunately. 90s Cringe Rock posted:I think you should have a read of the original Into the Odd afterwards, or the free sample of Electric Bastionland (which has the rules and some character types, just not the whole set and the world sections). Maybe I will, but I'm not sure how that will effect how much I like or dislike Mausritter. If this game is just Into the Odd but with mice, then I also dislike Into the Odd, it's not going to change my opinion even if the original work is considered very good. If Into the Odd is much better than Mausritter, I might like it, but I still will not enjoy Mausritter.
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Jun 4, 2021 15:49
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Tibalt posted:Yeah, before this kind of escalates, I want to provide some context. FATAL isn't just a bad game, it's a vile game, filled with disgusting content and utterly lacking any merit. It's like comparing a novel to The Turner Diaries - it's going to spark an intense response, especially if people feel that the comparison is facile. Yes, I'm tuning down the vitriol as far as I can in this post. mellonbread posted:To be fair, "rabid, seething hatred of anything D&D that isn't 4th" is kind of the Forums brand at this point. So making GBS threads on a game for having random stats is entirely in line with that. I don't mind random stats. I do mind the game expecting you to roll down the line, apply in order, and then tell you that you should roll for everything else as well, even if it does give permission to do otherwise. Mausritter DOES say "and then you can switch two of them". So that's still nice. After the humbling by the thread, I'll try to continue with a little more gentleness towards the game, and try to be less comedic because I'm really not that great at it. 4. Basic Mechanics  Simple and concise. I like simple, I also like complex. Mausritter tries to be a little more complicated than necessary, and doesn't really give all the information it needs to give, but I think the basic mechanics are where it does a pretty good job, actually. The notes about role-playing and best practices are good advice for people new to TTRPGs, and simple games like Mausritter are certainly great for introducing new players to the hobby. But, on the whole, I think it utterly fails in this for a couple of reasons, which will be explored in the Combat section. So, saves are just skill rolls, mostly in this case only used when someone fucks up or does something brave and dangerous. Ironically, I like when a TTRPG doesn't make you roll a lot, it makes it a lot easier on the GM. As the text says, you roll a d20, compare it to the relevant stat, and if it's at or under your stat, you succeed. The issue is... Well, we'll get to that. Advantages reads a lot like 5e DnD, which I enjoy, I have no issue here, and it drastically increases the odds of success. But before I go any further: Real talk. I like DnD. I really do. I play it all the time, and 5e is probably my favorite edition. But one thing I've never enjoyed about DnD is how easy it is to fail at things, and Mausritter, as an OSR game, has the same issue. This may not matter to most people, but it does to me: I don't like seeing my players frustrated from constantly failing at things they're supposed to be good at. When the highest a stat can be at character creation in Mausritter is 12, that's a 60% chance of success. Which seem like good odds, but it's only two die results over 50%. And that's going to matter very much now that I've gotten to: 5. Combat  Combat is dangerous business for mice. It sure is. Honestly, it can be said that combat is probably the least preferable option in any situation, and it very much should be an absolute last resort in Mausritter. I'm going to mostly ignore the first paragraph, with the caveat of mentioning you need an action to pull something out of your pack if it's not in your hands, because what I feel needs to be addressed is what comes next: Attacks always hit. You don't miss. Enemies don't miss. No one ever misses, or dodges, or blocks. Attacks always hit. Please let that sink in for a moment, before we continue. HP works more like ablative armor than as meat points, which I love. I really don't like it when HP = literal health, because it makes for very awkward situations when I have to describe how a player was wounded without it being a fatal wound despite them being stabbed with a spear. As seen in the combat example later, HP is often expressed by saying that it was a near miss, or you blocked it, or something similar. But once you run out of HP, you start taking damage to Str. Okay, that's cool. I like Forbidden Lands and Knives in the Dark/Wicked Ones, using stats as health isn't a new concept to me. The issue is then you have to make a Str save. The info it doesn't give, mentioned earlier, is whether you use your maximum for this, or the new total after being hurt. I'd assume the latter, but if I were generous and assumed the former, you still have a 40% chance to immediately pass out if you have the maximum possible Str. When you're incapacitated, there's six exploration turns before you die without aid, which is a really long time! Each exploration turn is 10 minutes. This is kinda crazy, especially considering that in 5e DnD, it might well be three turns if you fail a 50% chance roll 3 times in a row, which is very mathematically feasible. So why am I saying this is a bad choice, while still talking about how generous the game is about death compared to other games? Because you, at most, have 6 HP. If I were to play 2e DnD or 5e DnD, it's possible that an enemy can get lucky and one-shot my character into unconsciousness, if not death. But those games don't have automatically hitting attacks. The enemy has to pass two barriers to one shot me in those occasions: First they have to hit, THEN they have to do enough damage to kill. In 5e in particular, they have to hit and probably need to crit in order to kill a level one character first starting off. In Mausritter, they can just get lucky once to knock out a character. Just once. All they need to do is at least 7 damage. If you're fighting an equal number of equally skilled opponents, and two or more of them focus on one character, they don't even need that much. They just need to hit at least twice with a light weapon, and if they get average results that character is now incapacitated and dying. And the armor the character was wearing didn't really matter, it blocks one damage per attack, and possibly breaks after three attacks, and that's just not enough to really help when the damage being thrown at you varies between "totally ignored" and "instantly knocks you out". If Light Armor resisted 2 damage, and Heavy Armor 4, that would be much more reasonable, especially considering that armor breaks. I also would have made Light armor the double-body slot armor, and Heavy Armor the one with the shield, but I'm not the developer of this game. What really bugs me here is that this is assuming the maximum of both HP and Str, which a character is unlikely to have, as it assumes rolling three sixes in a row at the very least. I sometimes like lethal games. This is a little TOO lethal. And one might ask, but probably not, "Why, Mecha, you beautiful starlet, why does this matter? A lot of people like lethal games!" And that's true, but I'm looking at this as a good beginner TTRPG. My first experience with DnD was in 2e, where my character almost died immediately. But I saw it as fair because the situation was fair. A new player might not see it that way, or might understand it was fair and still be totally turned off forever from TTRPGs. But let's assume that the people playing this are all TTRPG veterans, sure. It still doesn't feel good, at least to me, to immediately be knocked out of a fight and then be useless until someone helps me, and even then I'm going to be hurt and at a severe disadvantage until it's safe enough to rest up. So, uh, avoid combat by all means necessary. If you can get the drop on your opponents in Mausritter, then you are almost certain to win unless the fight is against an overwhelming opponent like a cat (which are treated like dragons in this game, a thing I really like the idea of). Still, this can truly come down to personal preference, I understand that. I think this is needlessly cruel towards players, but this is the jam of many TTRPG players. I can respect that. But the next part I'm going into really made me think about this game as something truly bad. 6. Advancement: Or Why You Will Never Get Stronger  Where do I begin? Let's start at the beginning. Without looking at the table after this, we'll take a look at how you gain XP. Okay, so you get 1 per pip value you bring back from the adventure. This is neat, it reminds me of old, old school DnD where money was converted into EXP. Probably the intention. You also get 1 XP for every 10 pips you spend on the community. There's no base-building mechanic here that I can see, you're just selflessly sharing and that gives you XP. So the questions here are, how much money do you get per-adventure, and how much does it take to level up? To get to level 2, you need 1000 XP, 3000 for level 3, 6000 for level 4, and +5000 for every level after that. There's tables near the back of the book that show off how much treasure you're likely to get... And it's not a bad haul. You can really get a lot of pips. leveling up is not that hard, and it's possible with either a lot of luck or a generous GM, you can level up on your second or third adventure. The issue is the danger involved: Traps and critters stand in your way, and many of them are bigger, stronger, or have advantages over mice. Working together, like in Mouse Guard, is really the only way to survive. But working together is hard when one of you hit the dirt as soon as a fight started. Some critters even have the ability to just eat a mouse whole, which isn't instant death but it may as well be, because an enemy that big is hard to kill, and harder to kill with one less ally who is constantly taking Str damage(Ignores HP apparently). Hell, most of the critters are just super dangerous: a centipede, on a a critical hit (what happens if you fail that Str save to not pass out), does d12 poison damage. After you've already taken a chunk of Str damage out of you to have gotten a critical in the first place. So how long is a character going to survive? As long as they keep getting lucky. Luck runs out eventually. This game doesn't seem to be about skill, really, it's about luck, and how nice the GM is. If you get into a fight at all, if you don't have the advantage of getting in the first shots, it's pretty likely someone is going to die, which means other mice are probably going to die. This matches up pretty well with OSR, but there's a reason why the hobby is much more popular nowadays than when this was common. It might be many people's jam, but it's many more peoples' nightmare. And... Well, what do you get out of leveling up? If it takes all this effort, if you really need all this to become stronger, how much stronger do you get? It must be WORTH it, right?  No. Not really. You can potentially double or more your HP, but you may end up with +1, which... Is not sufficient. More than doubling your HP will make it so that reaching level 3 is much, much more likely, but playing the game the way it should be played, you might be so far behind everyone else that you may as well still be level 1. The average of 2d6 is 7, so if you had, say, 1 HP, this is fantastically good. If you were at six, you may as well have rolled under. Of course, this is average. A player might well roll more than that. Or less. There's no real telling. Still, it's not SUPER unreasonable, and unlike DnD, there's no CR, no monster level, no expected progression... Which is a bad thing in itself, really, because as unreliable as CR is, it still gives an IDEA of what a player should be facing. Throwing a critter too strong at the Mausritters could result in a party wipe very easily. The stats are also somewhat questionable. If you have a max of 12 in a stat, you have a 60% chance if it rising by 1, which is an extra 5% to succeed on a save. That's not nothing. It's not GREAT, either. I'd say it's in between. Grothing? Nothood? Mathematically, it works out. You are BETTER at the thing, which is good, but you're not so much better that survival is any more easy. And that's assuming you get what you want. This reminds me of Fire Emblem, where stat growths are weighted depending on what the character needs, but there's no guarantee they will get what they need. Now, or ever. I've seen enough Fire Emblem LPs where a Str-based character almost never got any Str increases the whole game. It feels the same here, what's your guarantee? At least with character creation, the book tells you that you can pick if you want to. But there's no such option here. So there you have it, leveling up gives you a chance to maybe increase your HP by more than 1, maybe, and maybe increase one of your stats by 1, and it might not be a stat you want to increase. You might get nothing. You might get everything. Character advancement doesn't feel like actual advancement, it feels like getting a mishapen "you tried" sticker, while the guy next to you gets to be swole enough to tank a cat at level 2. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jun 4, 2021 |
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Jun 4, 2021 16:59
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Angry Salami posted:...wait, how does a mouse have dreadlocks? You have to be either a really cool mouse, or a super uncool mouse. SkyeAuroline posted:e: the tone is a lot better this time around and I understand your mechanical complaints better than the first post. Might suggest rewriting the first post(s) to a similar tone for consistency and clarity. A little restricted on quality response thanks to work right now though. I'll give that a shot before I do the final post, which SHOULD be a lot shorter. Should. E: Yea, I edited the poo poo out of that post. I tried to be a lot less mean about it, which I think I succeeded on. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jun 4, 2021 |
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Jun 4, 2021 17:10
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Everyone posted:Divis Mal is a much less sympathetic version of Magneto from the X-Men. His big thing is that Novas shouldn't be ruled by humans (or subject to human laws) but neither should humans be ruled by Novas. Essentially he wants a kind of benevolent Nova/Human Apartheid so that Novas can achieve self-perfection. I'm not sure what it says about a setting that China solves everything with nukes, but when it comes down to Chinese nukes being the only solution to a problem...
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Jun 4, 2021 17:36
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 Because when I think of a mouse, I think of grit. I have a quibble with the writing here, because if you clear a condition, you remove it, so the instructions here are redundant in a way that it makes it feel there's more detail to this that doesn't actually exist. With the context, I assume you can only remove the conditions one at a time from a stack you have in the Grit space, but that's only an assumption. I wish this was slightly more clear, but it's not a brain bending mystery at least. Another note I'd like to make is that it's extraordinarily easy for a mouse to bounce back from severe trauma in Mausritter, which is nice, the problem is actually surviving to that point. Here's the really boring mechanics that are necessary for all the parts that aren't super exciting about a session:  I mentioned that the art in this book is cute. It really is. Just look at them! Nothing unreasonable here, though it does seem odd that for how lethal this game is, all it takes is a night's rest and suddenly all your entrails are back inside your body. It takes a week to fully recover, but you can recover from some pretty gnarly damage in just one long rest. Foraging is either a little bit too good, or way too weak, depending: Each ration has three uses, like any other item, but this doesn't really specify whether foraging gets you uses, or an entire ration item. I assume the latter, but again, I'd like a little more clarity here. There's quite a few of these things in the book where Isaac assumed something would be obvious, but it's just not quite there yet. 7. Magic  Pictured: A mouse finding something that will I feel like a broken record, but Magic is something else in Mausritter that seems like a neat idea but is poorly executed. The way it works is that magic is cast by invoking stone tablets that contain friendly spirits. When you cast a spell, you decide what power you want to cast it at. This gives you a number of dice, up to 3d6, and for every 4, 5, or 6, you expend one dot on the tablet. So you actually want to, like with saves, roll low on this one. A 1, 2, or 3 means you cast the spell for free, so the less power you cast a spell with, the more likely you'll be able to use it more than three times. Every spell has an effect the dice have on it, though, and more dice is always good... So it's a trade off. Notable: You cannot fail at casting a spell. It might fail to affect a target because they resist it, but you never fail to cast a spell. What is supposed to be the limiting factor is that for every 6 you get on the casting roll, you take that many d6s and take the resulting amount in WIL damage. Then you make a WIL save. If you fail, you go Mad, which is a condition that gives disadvantage on WIL saves until you take a long rest. WIL is used more or less only for Charisma-type things outside of this context, and some critter abilities or spell effects, so... There's no reason not to cast spells. Even when you're Mad. You won't die from it, what's the game going to do, make you go DOUBLE Mad? You go mad at 0 WIL, so... Yes, but why do you care? Just keep casting spells at 0 WIL. This isn't especially a well-balanced thing, and it's imbalanced in the opposite direction from what everything else in the game is geared towards: That everything is dangerous and has consequences. What's especially confusing about this to me is the fact that there's nothing in here that states that dealing with spirits is mindbending or wrong, so why would a mouse go Mad in the first place? I'm not sure, there's no lore or fluff as to why. They just do. Anyway, to sandwich criticism between two compliments, the tablets can be recharged by coaxing the spirit back into it, which can only be done by doing something specific to each spell. Each one is dangerous, stupid, and certainly the most perilous part about using magic in this game. For example, to recharge a Magic Missile tablet, a mouse needs to fall 30' (!), survive (!!!), and touch the tablet within one turn. There's no lore about why this works, but I assume it's symbolic of returning the kinetic force to the tablet so the spirit is attracted to it once more. I love this. This is amazing. I wish magic was handled a bit better in this game, but this really puts a cherry on top of a hideously deformed but still delicious cake. The only mechanics left, really, are Hirelings, construction, and Warbands, the latter being mass combat. Hirelings are actually more complex than Warbands, which is notable because TTRPG mass combat rules tend to fall apart under their own weight very quickly. The construction is super simple and mostly abstracted, but it is notable that I was wrong: There are base building mechanics, they're just incredibly simple. I honestly have little to complain about in either case. I'll post the entire page for posterity and talk about it a little more.  I think I contracted diabetes looking at this art. Look, mouse bar. MOUSE BAR. I can't. Hirelings get you... Hirelings. You either pay them or make a WIL save to encourage them to join up for free. After that, you have to pay them once per day, and the more specialized they are, the more you have to pay for them. Each Hireling is weaker than PCs in general (only roll 2d6 and add them instead of 3d6 and add the two highest dice), and they have less inventory slots, with only two packs. You also get more hirelings for your buck the less skilled they are in general. If Hirelings get put into danger, too much stress, or not paid, they have to make a WIL save, or they flee. Loyal or especially well-paid Hirelings, like the more skilled ones, get that save at advantage. Hirelings can level up just like PCs can, and it works more or less the same way, but as shown, they gain XP slightly differently, and you can level them up pretty fast if the whole part pitches in to lavish them with expensive gifts and money. Workplace relationships are never a good idea IRL, but in Mausritter, it is a path to power. Warbands are how you're supposed to fight really big critters like cats or owls, and some other ones. If you don't have a warband against enemies like these, they just don't take damage, and they get d12 damage on every attack no matter the weapon. The same goes for a warband attacking normal enemies. Now, the stats of a warband seem a little low. They have 10 in all stats, which is pretty nice, but it feels like they should have a little higher Str, and their damage is d6 unless you equip them all with light weapons like you should. ... In which it'd still d6 but you have a better chance of doing more damage. To equip a warband, you buy the equipment at its listed price x20, because you need at least 20 mice in one warband. There's not much to say here, they fight just like individuals do, the only difference is that Str damage can rout them rather than knock them out. Construction: You pay mice or do it yourself, it costs money, you make rooms. Three tunnelers can dig a 6" cube of dirt in one day, double that for any harder material. The costs are pretty low, except in the cost of a Grand Room, which skyrockets the price from 500 for a standard room to 2000. Yikes! There's not much else to talk about here, just rules for making hexcrawls and magic weapons, and the latter is exceedingly simple. magic items have neat, unique abilities, and the GM is encouraged to make their own, but there are a few examples. Very few, and all of them are weapons, sadly. So in essence, there's Mausritter. Not as bad as I initially believed after a deeper dive, but the game certainly isn't great. It's just a little bit too lethal, a little bit too unfair, and while there's ways to mitigate that, I think it's far more likely for a mouse to end up dead before they can level up if only because the game is very luck based, and what parts you can control (when and where you end up in a fight) aren't things you can control forever. All it takes is one or two unlucky turns to wipe a party, when in most lethal TTRPGs, one or two unlucky turns is a bad disadvantage, but not what's going to end a campaign. There are many good ideas here, and some I'd love to just hack out of Mausritter and into other games, but I think the game can be pretty easily turned into something much better, if one takes the time to hash out the issues with it. I have my own ideas on how to do that, but that's a story for another time and endless forum debates. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jun 4, 2021 |
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Jun 4, 2021 18:41
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Magnusth posted:Mausritter seems... fine? I mean, it's OSR, not really my speed, but it seems fine? hell, if anything, this review has made me wanna try out mausritter and get my cute mice massacred. And that's your opinion, but the sheer lethality of the game is a turn-off for me, especially since the lethality is often totally unfair. Like, compare it to Shadowrun: A pretty drat lethal game... But a PC death is almost always the fault of the player. It's pretty darn unlikely that some random ganger will walk up to your troll, shoot them in the back of the head, and there's your dead troll out of nowhere. There's usually something you can do or should have done that would have made things go differently. Personally, my final opinion is that Mausritter is not a BAD game, but it's not a GOOD one, and it could use some work to be GOOD. GimpInBlack posted:This is incorrect, FYI. You die if untended after six Exploration Turns. An Exploration Turn is about 10 minutes, ballpark, while combat takes place in Rounds of less than a minute, and an entire combat generally takes place over the course of a single turn. My bad. It's even MORE generous, then, than I first thought. Though that's not going to stop an enemy from finishing off the downed, helpless PC, or the PC being badly disadvantaged after that point for a while. DalaranJ posted:It is pretty funny to see Mecha_Face take the piss out of Into The Odd without having known it exists or that MausRitter cribs over half of it's rules from Into The Odd. I was as surprised as you were amused! I wish I knew more about Into the Odd so I could do this, but doing just this one took a lot out of me, especially with the terrible reaction my review initially (and fairly) got. I didn't expect it, and what kept me going was ironically SOMEONE CALLING ME MAD ON THE INTERNET. I'm not mad! I'm just angry!
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Jun 4, 2021 18:48
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OtspIII posted:This may have been a mistake on the part of the reviewer, but in ItO the PCs auto-win initiative (and can use that to auto-run-away, unless they're cornered). If that's not true here, that's an enormous increase to the game's difficulty. This post was really interesting overall, and it's great info for really showing how hard Mausritter really is. But I wanted to focus on this part: Yes, that's not true here. Unless you have good reason to have the drop on the enemy, everyone has to roll Dex Saves to go before the opponents, otherwise they act after the enemies go. ChaseSP posted:Making cute mouse game super lethal is pretty loving weird. Mouse Guard, which Mausritter very unsubtly took a lot of cues from (Mausritter, IIRC, literally translates to Mouse Knight), is also very lethal. But Mouse Guard is portrayed as being so in its art and is very honest about how hard it is to do anything without teamwork. Mausritter, on the other hand, is much more lethal than Mouse Guard and doesn't seem to realize how unfair it really is. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 4, 2021 |
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Jun 4, 2021 18:59
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Pvt.Scott posted:The time window here before you die is far more lenient than you think. You have 6 exploration turns before dying, which should be ~60 minutes, unless this game deviates from old D&D rules for exploration. If I remember from Into the Odd correctly, you’re expected to break from combat pretty early and drag your wounded to safety, as you are never prevented from running away. As far as I can tell, there's no rule allowing one to run away without penalties, though come to think of it, a lot of Mausritter's vagaries make sense if you consider that Isaac Williams may have assumed that someone had played ItO before Mausritter. Pvt.Scott posted:E2: Mausritter would be a big flop with my current rpg group. They all started on 5e and find the idea of even rolling your attributes to be beyond the pale. I got stared at like a crazy man when I explained that Elf used to be a character class. I wish I could have been a fly on that wall. The looks they gave you must have been hilarious. Still, I think "4d6 drop lowest" is a very reasonable stat rolling system for DnD, especially in 5e.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:50
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Pips are indeed just the mouse currency. There's no real explanation of what they actually are in the game, they're just money. And dungeon diving seems to more or less be the idea, though dungeons are usually less ancient ruins and more a rat gang's hideout, the abandoned lair of an owl, or looking around dark tunnels for an easier way to get home. As for playing Mausritter, I honestly just think I'd rather play ItO and make everything cute mice than play Mausritter, but again, personal preference about lethality in games. Or, heck, Mausritter would be a lot more fair if it used the ItO rule about PCs always going first, period... But then it feels like PCs would destroy everything that wasn't a warband-level threat.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:03
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I was thinking of doing a write-up, but-  Well, sure, but my last write-up started pretty badly- Fine, but I stand by that Mausritter was a pretty bad game.  This is my second write-up, and I'm here to talk about a game that was recently released. At the end of last year, even. We're here to talk about :  Fabula Ultima, The TTJRPG, is trying to do exactly what its name suggests. It is a game about recreating the feeling of a JRPG at a gaming table, with friends. It's a game about brave heroes fighting evil for the fate of the world. A game about epic showdowns and heroic sacrifices. A game about defeat meaning redemption and the odd friends one makes along the way. But most importantly, it's a game about nostalgia. It wants to not just emulate a JRPG's mechanics, but the mood, the feel, of playing one. Albeit playing one with friends, not just by yourself. The author, Emanuele Galletto, began work on this game in 2017, but felt like he couldn't make it work very easily. He kept it up, giving it the name Fabula Ultima as a working title. I'm not sure how good the latin is, but apparently it means "Last Fable" or "Ultimate Story" as a joking reference to, of course, Final Fantasy. Then in 2018, he grew very ill. In his own words, "the name Fabula Ultima took on a bit of an ominous ring". Though he got better, thankfully, the working title stuck. So why am I making this write-up? Well, my last write-up, I wanted to do a game I felt was terrible. This time, I want to do a game I feel needs more recognition. I spent 17.90 on this book at DriveThruRPG and I feel it was worth it. Hopefully, I can convince you that it's worth it as well. Now, I'm aware that trying to emulate JRPGs in a tabletop sense is not exactly a new concept. It's been tried before with games like Anima, but I always felt other attempts fell short. I'll be perfectly honest here: Fabula Ultima is a good game. Not a perfect game. If I were to give it a brutally honest 1-10 rating, it'd sit at about 7.5. It has some major flaws that I'll poke at in this write-up, but overall it's a very solid game that does a good job of little details that make mechanics and flavor alike feel JRPGish.  So, let's get started. Chapter One: Introduction So, we'll start with the basics, the things we've read hundreds upon hundreds of times. It goes through the usual: Explaining what a TTRPG is, how the roles of GM and Player shakes out in general... It does emphasize that the role of the GM is NOT to be an adversary, and that making a story is the real point of Fabula Ultima. There's also a little note here that I'm not entirely sure if it's true or not: The Game posted:In Japan, this activity is also known as a "table talk role-playing game" (TTRPG) because it relies so heavily on the conversation at the table. Maybe it's just because I'm old-school internet, but whenever someone makes claims about Japanese culture without having some solid credentials, I give it side-eye on principle. It's still a lovely sentiment either way, and I think it pretty well describes what a game like this is supposed to be about. Speaking of which, there's a section titled: "But What Is This Game About", which tries to talk about how Fabula Ultima tries to differentiate itself in mood from most TTRPGs. First, Heroic and Fantastic Action. The game isn't trying to be simulationist at all. It's supposed to be weird, supposed to encourage players to do crazy things that should never work, and wants to be generally light-hearted. Second, it wants its heroes to be heroic and its villains to be tragic, or at least have a point. Villains that are evil for the sake of being evil haven't really been a common thing for decades, and Fabula Ultima wants none of that. Heroes can be complicated. They might not be the best people, but the game expects them to be truly good at heart. But let's be honest, if one of your PCs isn't an edgelord that says "Whatever..." whenever they have to deny having emotions like a 13-year-old trying to sound cool, are you REALLY playing a JRPG? The game then claims battles are challenging. This has not been my experience in my test campaign so far, but my players haven't fought anything but mooks yet, so we'll see! I have thoughts on this, but we'll get to that when we get to how battles work approximately 10 years from now, which is not coincidentally the usual total playtime of cutscenes in JRPGs. Finally, the game says that it has no canonical or default world, and that making one should be the work of both the GMs and players working together to create a fun world. It mentions the Eight Pillars, which are on the next page. I'll list them off:
I think the Eight Pillars are nice, but they feel a little redundant? Most of them just seem like things that are in any TTRPG campaign, and this is supposed to be makes Fabula Ultima not like the other TTRPGs. There's something here that feels different, sure, but I guess the fact that anime and JRPGs are a massive influence on the TTRPG scene in general does put a hamper on the concept. It doesn't feel unique, but that doesn't feel like the fault of the game itself. The next few pages have three suggestions for worlds that are clearly inspired by favorite JRPGs. Honestly I say clearly but I don't recognize personally any examples of the second one.  Did I mention the art in this book is really good? I think it does a better job sometimes of describing how the game should feel than the text. It's cozy, and often cute. This image took way too long to edit, by the by. All the images are two page spreads and the pdf doesn't have the pages spread in the right order for them, so I had to manually- This is F&F. Not Complain About Editing. Ahem. High Fantasy usually involves truly fantastical locations, fights in active volcanos, and a world chock full of ancient ruins. While the game claims there's no default setting, this honestly kind of seems like this is what the game is going for in general. Based on Dragon Quest and early Final Fantasy, mostly, for me it invokes a feeling of childhood. Almost everything is magical and every location in particular is steeped in that magic. Antagonists are larger than life, have great armies, and are usually shadowed mirrors of the heroes: Either once-heroes that failed to live up to that title, or maybe just evil overlords who want to plunge the world in darkness and transform into dark gods. Natural Fantasy isn't one I really recognize as a JRPG genre. It reads more like Nausicaa or other Studio Ghibli movies. In this suggested world type, civilization is made up of small, dispersed villages that live in harmony with nature and the elemental forces that rule the world. Games set in this 'genre' generally are smaller scale ones about communities, the love and grudges shared in such small, isolated places, and the heroes are often younger and their goals matching. Antagonists tend to be less evil and more great forces of nature. Things that cannot be talked down because they aren't beings of reason, but beings of destruction that must be turned aside or appeased. Techno Fantasy is very, very much like Final Fantasy 7 and other such JRPGs. These worlds tend to be darker and grittier, but within reason. The world is often filled with magitech or just plain tech, and around the shameless exploitation of natural resources and how it effects the environment and the people. The protagonists are generally fighting for justice more than against the forces of darkness. Mercenaries, revolutionaries, and maybe other aries but hopefully not Airy because gently caress Airy, she sucks. The world focuses on the divide between rich and poor, and the antagonists are usually people in power. While these people are exploitative and despicable, the people will often see them as heroes and role models, and the protagonists have to struggle with that they're alone in their fight even if they can prove the horrible things the villains have done and this is getting too real god drat. This post is getting pretty long, but the rest of Chapter One is just explaining what you need to play, and further defining the role of the players and GMs, so this is as good a place to pause as any. I will say that the game requires a number of different dice: d6s, d8s, d10s, d12s, and d20s. The parts talking about GMs is just short bursts of the usual GM advice, so I'll skip it, but the Player side of things does mention Group Types, something that will be touched on later. For now, it's a good sign that this game intends to put its Gil where its mouth is when it claims that player cooperation is very encouraged by the system. Next time, we'll start into our journey of actually taking a look into the mechanics of this game! But not character creation. That's after all the rules. Yes. All of them except the GM section of the book that players are going to read anyway. So, Character Creation is about at the midpoint of a 362 page pdf and it's one of the things I'm not super happy about with this game. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Mar 3, 2023 |
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Mar 3, 2023 02:54
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DNA Cowboys posted:Legend of Mana, Jade Cocoon, and Monster Hunter Stories seem like close fits. How the heck did I forget Legend of Mana and Jade Cocoon? Shame on me.
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Mar 3, 2023 11:24
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Halloween Jack posted:But the real question is: in this game, are kobolds little lizard guys or little dog guys? They're neither. They actually more resemble FFXIV's version of spriggans, really. And man, I would love to have a Phantasy Star campaign. That would kick rear end.
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Mar 3, 2023 23:29
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 Chapter 2: Game Rules Yes, this game does rule, but maybe we shouldn't be so upfront about that, Emanuele. It's not a good look. The Game posted:This is probably the most important chapter in the book and one that should be read with great attention, regardless of if you are the Game Master or a Player. I feel like this is a lie, honestly. This rulebook suffers from an issue so many do: It's kind of all over the place and not everything really flows together in a natural, easy to explain kind of way. I can't really blame the author for this, though. I've made a few homebrew TTRPG systems myself, and I've really struggled with this at times. Sometimes, it really is just best to put something in a place where it doesn't make sense simply because it doesn't fit anywhere else. Sometimes, a rule WOULD be best in a specific place, but that section is getting too long and unwieldy, so you end up just having to bite the bullet and put it elsewhere. I've found what's REALLY important is to put things in bite-sized chunks, explain the very basics, and then expand on those basics later. Personal thoughts on organizing rulesets aside, we'll jump in with the first page of Chapter 2. It talks about changing the rules to fit the situation, and that the game intentionally has rules that overlap or seem redundant. Not everything has to be used, learning when and where to actually use what rules is a big part of GMing. I find this to be pretty sound. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I've been GMing games for over 20 years now, and I have to agree. Sometimes: gently caress the rules, they're not fun. Either way, this is a lot of words to describe Rule Zero, which they never actually mention by name. The real meat begins on the second page of chapter two, where it begins to define Scenes. Now, one might assume this is basic TTRPG stuff and we should already know it. And it is, but it has a little bit of a twist. This game favors a hard and fast approach to making a scene, and I'll let the book speak for itself here, and add my two cents after:  The first thing of note is that the game wants the GM to just shut up. Don't give paragraphs of description. No essays. Give the players enough Next are Conflict Scenes. These are for when the PCs clash with NPCs! But it's not just for fights. Everything from having a tense, faux-polite high-society conversation to negotiating for hostages, and even, yes, fights, are Conflict Scenes. While the usual Scenes tend to be a little abstract, the game says that Conflict Scenes really zoom in on the actions of the PCs and how everything counts now. However, the book declines to really get into it yet, and advises reading the rules for Checks first. ... So why not put this after Checks? Why can't explaining Scenes come after explaining Checks? Maybe this is just a personal gripe, but it rubs me the wrong way. The author wanted to assure us we're not jumping around like this, and we've done it within less than 1 and a half pages since saying that. Well anyway, Interlude Scenes! These are for slower-paced scenes. Usually traveling, or long periods of downtime where very little happens. In these, the players all decide on what in general they're doing in this time period, instead of focusing on minutia. Some of the best role-playing comes out when it's just the PCs doing nothing but hanging out, but well, more often than not it's just boring. These are also useful for pursue long-term objectives, like PROJECTS which are, again, later in the book. I'm not as annoyed by this one, though. It's not one of the most basic systems in the game we're refusing to explain in favor of *checks notes* how to set up segments of play. Then there are Game Master Scenes, which are basically just cutscenes, JRPG style! The book is careful to mention, and I think it's good it does, that GM Scenes specifically require that no PCs are present where the scene takes place. Uninterruptable monologues are bullshit, as are the villain just grabbing the MacGuffin without any chance of the PCs interfering for... Reasons. Usually, GM Scenes are there to set up or support tension, showing what other characters, particularly Villains, are doing. I really like doing this in my own campaigns, though I tend to do so sparingly. Fabula Ultima wants this to be a regular thing without taking agency away from Players, and I support and appreciate this. The game now explains multiple scenes make up a session, which ends when everyone is done playing. At the end of this you'll distribute EXP (more on that later but from me this time not the book). And it says a typical session is about four hours, which seems about right. Despite being a game about emulating a JRPG, it compares this to an episode of a TV show: The protagonists come into a situation, fix it/make it worse, and thus influencing the metaplot. I feel like comparing it to exploring a Dungeon or a side quest might have been more pertinent. Multiple sessions make up a campaign, we all know this kind of thing so far. Apparently, the game is expecting a campaign to be about 20-50 We'll jump into some important rules of the game now, and these are ACTUALLY important. These are the hard and fast rules I feel every TTRPG needs to discuss as soon as possible. These are the small nitpicky rules that will save a lot of time to memorize over time. Instead of diving into it myself, since I don't think I have much to say here, I'll let the game speak again.  That third one seems iffy, but I promise that there isn't really much division in the game's system, and multiplication is usually something that happens once and the result kept for a while before having to be checked on again, like how much a Skill is actually giving you at your current level. We're now touching on Anatomy of a Character because of course we are and character creation is nowhere near this page.  No, this is stuff the game feels we have to know right now despite that we still don't know how to DO anything in the game. Where is character creation? I wasn't joking before. It's halfway through the book. I'm actually kind of tempted to skip this section and come back to it later when we get to the character creation rules, but no. That wouldn't be in the spirit of an F&F. We're doing this thing.So each character has a total of three Traits. Traits are actually a lot like Aspects in Fate. A short phrase (though generally shorter than in Fate) that explains who your character is. The three Traits are:
Then there are bonds, which are a tad more complex. Bonds between PCs are something that always feel a little hard to define at character creation. Players have never used these characters before, how do they possibly relate to each other? The game tries to simplify this by making a concrete list of the available Bonds. There are six, pulled from three sets of two conflicting themes:
After that, we talk about LEVELS, CLASSES, and SKILLS. Level is an abstraction of power (the coward's way out! TELL EVERYONE YOU'RE A LEVEL 10 SAMURAI! Do it in character!) You start at level 5, and every level is in a one of the game's 15(!) classes. That sounds horrible, but it's actually not as dense as it sounds. Every class gets a one-time bonus the first time you put a level in that class, and a skill point you can put in one of the class's five skills. Some skills can be taken multiple times for more effect, but be careful: When you've put 10 levels into a class, it is considered Mastered. Among some other effects, you can never put another level in that class, so choose wisely! As a side note, this also means that in Fabula Ultima, multi-classing is not only encouraged, it's mandatory. But! What's this? MECHANICS? CORE MECHANICS? Be still oh my heart, we've finally reached that point! Let's talk about ATTRIBUTES.  this cool picture of dice is not just here because i feel i spoke too much without images it's relevant i swear There are four Attributes in this game:
Why? Why is this here? This is even more mystifying than my previous gripes! It'd be one thing if the game decided how to use your attributes to figure out your max HP or how much stuff you can carry, but instead it just decides to tell you these things exist and then COMPLETELY FORGET ABOUT THEM for a long while! How long? Until character creation, and we already explained why that's a problem. Seriously, I'm not exaggerating. The game does not explain how to create characters until halfway through the book!  I swear. This is a good game. I mean it. But this is one of the three huge gripes I have about it that made me dock points from its score. Well, we're almost at 15000 characters, and this is my breaking point. I refuse to explain mechanics that the game itself refuses to explain. Next time: How the main mechanic of the game works. No. Seriously. We're finally there, guys. I mean it. And you will also get my frustration at why this was not the first thing the game explained when we get there, too.  In closing, have this picture of a pocket watch. It is entirely irrelevant, but it's pretty and I'd like to end this on some semblance of a high note. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Mar 8, 2023 |
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Mar 8, 2023 00:43
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Tsilkani posted:Putting the whole rules chapter before character creation is the right thing to do, because it means when you start reading all the abilities in the character creation section you know what they'll do, rather than being 'okay, so I get two florps every action scene... is that good?' I'm not at all denying that. My gripe is that I feel, personally, that you should explain the basics of the system. How stats work, how to use stats, how to figure out your substats. Then you go into character creation, and after that, THEN start really getting into how the game works. The nitty-gritty. Even if that were what the game was going for, it's doing it poorly: It's introducing mechanics, not explaining them at all, and jumping to something new and then not explaining THAT, and then it tells you how stats work but not what they actually do mechanically. When I approach these things critically, I'm approaching this from the angle of someone new to TTRPGs, and this is their first game or close to it. It comes off to me as unnecessarily confusing and overwhelming. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Mar 8, 2023 |
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Mar 8, 2023 01:06
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Tsilkani posted:You literally stopped right before it tells you how the stats work mechanically, two pages later, as the core mechanic. The book is introducing all the basic terminology, then the core mechanic, and then working out from there. By the time you get to character creation, you will know what it means when it says a class ability works with the combat system like this, or it modifies the inventory system like this, or it unlocks this class of ritual spells, because you'll have already read those parts of the rules. Yes, I stopped before it explained how the stats work mechanically, after the book introduced several things that rely on stats to fully understand. The issue is not that character creation comes after the rules, the complaint is that not only does character creation come after ALL the rules, but also that the rules are out of order. We should have gotten attributes and checks first. Not scenes. And we certainly should not have gotten Traits and Bonds when their only effects are how they influence Checks, before we got to learn about Checks. And then, we learn about things that won’t actually be fully explained until during character creation, so why was that even there? On the matter of whether character creation should come after all the rules or not, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I don’t like that idea, and I already explained how I like the compromise of giving the basics, so I’m not going to repeat myself when this is clearly a difference of opinion.
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Mar 8, 2023 01:34
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PurpleXVI posted:I think it's important to put the basic mechanics before character creation, definitely, so players know whether, say, a +1 is meaningful or not in terms of their chargen options, but I also feel like frontloading the entire pile of mechanical complexity can sometimes be a bit much. That's what I'm trying to say, yea. I do find it weird the mechanics aren't sticking for you. I find the main mechanic to be pretty simple and easy to remember, and the Traits and Bonds are basically just Fate Aspects in execution. But I find everyone has their mechanic kryptonite, maybe this is yours? Angrymog posted:Mecha_Face, probably a good idea to have a header image in each post to help people know what game you're posting about rather than having to spot the word Fabula halfway through. Will do! I'll edit that in in a moment.
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Mar 8, 2023 23:32
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PurpleXVI posted:No, I perfectly well understand those, I just find it hard to really care about them. They seem to require a good deal of bandwidth to wrangle for comparatively little mechanical reward. Honestly, only Traits are really worth it, IMO. Invoking Bonds just has too little oomph to it. But Invoking a Trait can be really handy.
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Mar 9, 2023 00:39
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When we last left off, we were about to talk about the basic mechanic of the game, after discussing things we need the basic mechanic of the game to understand. So let's talk about the basic mechanic of the game. CHECKS. Checks are just what it says on the tin: When you roll dice to figure out what happens. There's two times you make checks: When required by the game rules, or when asked by the Game Master. These are what you'd all expect. If you attack something, you need to roll for that. Cast a spell? Actually, yes. Casters need to roll too. Any action that does not call for a roll always succeed, period. If you're using a Skill (we'll get there) and it does not mention a roll anywhere in its description, you don't have to roll for it. This is part of a growing trend in TTRPGs that would like THOSE GMs to know that, no, your party does not need to roll to breathe or to figure out that a door needs to be opened by pulling it instead of pushing it. Yes, I have had a GM do that in a campaign I was in. No, I did not stay long. The players are not supposed to ask for Checks, they're supposed to do stuff and let the GM tell them what to roll, if anything. The game is specific on this, which I sort of agree with. It encourages role-playing over trying to play the game purely as a game, but at the same time, I'm never a fan of telling a PC they can't do something. And there's times when you just have to tell the GM what you're wanting to do in game terms. Your PC could give an NPC side-eye, but does that mean you want to roll Sense Motive, or is that just flavor? It can be hard to tell as a GM at times, saying "I'd like to roll on this lady to see if she's about to kill me" just helps everyone. That aside, let's actually dig in, here. So to perform a check, we take two attributes that are the most suited to what we want to do. If you want to swing a big axe at an enemy, that's MIG+MIG. Want to thoroughly check a room over? Probably DEX+INS. Trying to intimidate a guard into letting you into the ball uninvited? MIG+WLP. Once you've figured out the right combination for the job, you roll the dice assigned to both chosen attributes, and add the numbers facing up to get your result. Sometimes, you'll add or subtract a modifier here, but this game is pretty tight on when PCs get those. Generally, you'll want to get a result that matches or exceeds the Difficulty Level, or DL. There's also High Roll, or HR, which is generally a lot better at its job than the other meaning of HR. This means you note the highest of the two die results as well, which is used for a good number of things. So let's say you swing that big axe. You're an absolute unit, and your MIG is d10. So you'll roll 2d10, and you get a 6 and a 9 (nice). Your result is 15, and your HR is 9. I'll go ahead and spoil that HR is often used for damage, which I think is pretty great. The roll covers accuracy and damage, which a lot of games keep entire separate. I love big, crunchy games, but most of my usual group prefers it simple with as few rolls as they can get away with. I like the simplicity of it, I admit. Before we go on, the game has something important to say:  Some really good advice that's pretty common for modern TTRPG groups. So let's move on and explain Crits and Fumbles. The game handles this somewhat controversial concept well. Like in Eclipse Phase, if you roll doubles, you crit. Except unlike in Eclipse Phase, the doubles have to be 6 or above. So if you roll 5 and 5, that's sadly not a crit. Critical Successes are very useful, but they generally don't do anymore damage than usual. Instead, a Crit is an automatic success (Even if it doesn't beat the DL for a roll). You also get to apply an Opportunity, the real feature of a crit. An Opportunity is a situational bonus you get to apply for yourself or an ally when you crit. While the game provides a good list of these, the players are allowed to come up with their own effect as long as the GM is okay with what they want to do. Keeping in mind that the PC crits, I'd say the PC should be able to get away with a lot. Here's the Opportunities the game itself suggests:
The game next runs us through the whole step-by step process of making a Check, but it's not really anything that bears repeating save that the GM should be clear before the player rolls what the consequences will be if they fail. Not something I think I've seen in any TTRPG before, usually you find out what happens after you make the roll. Anyone have any examples of another game doing this? I'm curious! We have a table on the next page, along with an explanation of what Difficulty Levels are. If you know what a DC or TN is, you know what a DL is. It's supposed to abstract several concepts into a single number, so situational modifiers or penalties isn't something this game usually does. It's certainly possible. The game allows for it, but generally we're supposed to assume the DL already has whether it's dark or the weather is poor, or if the character knows something that'll help baked in. The table it has is for examples on DLs, based on the number, the difficulty of that number to reach, and who is likely to accomplish it. Determining the Difficulty Level for a Check posted:
Aside from the optional rule, there is a way to influence Checks for the Players. You can spend Fabula Points to Invoke a Trait or Bond. If you Invoke a Trait, it allows you to re-roll one or both of the dice in the Check, and take either result. Invoking a Bond allows you to add the Strength of that Bond to the roll. You can Invoke a Trait as many times per Check as you have Fabula Points, but you can Invoke a Bond once per Check. The Player does have to justify how one of their Traits or Bonds will help, of course. You can't Invoke a Trait if you Fumbled, but strangely, it does not mention that you can't Invoke a Bond when you Fumble. Invoking Traits and Invoking Bonds are in two different sections on two different pages, but it does not actually make this clear. While what's written implies that you can Invoke a Bond on a Fumble, the result you'd get from Invoking a Bond would probably never be enough to clear even the easiest Check, since the maximum amount you can get from a Bond is +3. It seems to me that Invoking a Bond is very situational, and only worth doing if you can guarantee a success by adding a small bonus. Invoking a Trait, on the other hand, is very useful. Abilities or mechanics that allow rerolls are almost always a great thing to have around, and are almost always very powerful. The fact that you can choose to just reroll one of the dice instead of both of them makes it even more flexible. We also have a fun optional rule here: Invoking To Fail. Using this, PCs can invoke Traits or Bonds to intentionally fail Checks to get a Fabula Point for each failed check. Have I mentioned I love rules that reward role-playing? Because I do. We're going through a section on different kinds of Checks. Accuracy Checks and Magic Checks are basically the same thing, and doesn't seem like they needed to be actually categorized this way. As I stated before, Accuracy Checks involve rolling a Check and noting the HR for damage, but it's notable that weapons have a damage value that is added to the HR to get the final damage result. An Accuracy Check's DL is the target's Defense, the DL for a Magic Check depends. If you're trying to cast an Offensive Spell, the DL is your target's M. Defense. Otherwise, it's assumed to succeed, though the game mentions Rituals here. More On That Later™. We also have Opposed Checks! Usually used to figure out who wins when you're in a Conflict Scene, but not in combat. The PC and NPC (or PC and PC if you're into that dirty PvP poo poo) roll the appropriate attributes, and compare results. The highest wins. If you tie, repeat the Check until someone wins. Fumbles and Crits still act as normal, including generating Opportunities. If both characters Fumble or Crit, it's considered a tie. I would actually suggest that PCs always beat NPCs on a tie to keep things moving, but a tie can also create that sweet, sweet tension! So if the opposing party is a Villain, maybe make the PCs sweat a little more. Open Checks have no DL. Instead, the result just tells the Player how well they actually did. Usually, this is used when PCs try to figure out how much they know about something, either by investigation, or by memory. 7 is the lowest result that offers any success at all, otherwise, the PCs just don't know. Rolling to know things is always tricky, so keep in mind that PCs live in this world, the Players don't. The PCs will probably know a lot of things by default. When in doubt, consult a PC's Traits and Bonds. If they're trying to research a country or villain, the PC from that country or who has a Bond of Hatred for the Villain probably already know a thing or two about them. The game mentions here we CAN use situational modifiers, usually a +2 or -2. But again, GMs are supposed to consider this in the DL already. We're generally only using this when the DL is set by the game itself, like attacking an enemy or during an Opposed Check. We also have Group Checks, and the way these are handled is kind of interesting. First, the Party nominates a Group Leader for the Check. This is the PC who will be the final decider of success. Once the attributes involved are figured out, everyone except the Group Leader rolls against 10. For every PC that beats this DL, the Group Leader gets a +1 to their roll. Once all that has been sorted out, if any of the PCs have Bonds towards the leader, you add the Strength of the highest Bond the party has. Then the Party Leader rolls with the bonus created from all this, and bam, you have your result. There's very little reason to not make any Check the party can help with a Group Check, either, but the GM has final say on whether one is possible or not. You can't have the Orator in the party the leader of a Group Check to convince the local lord to give you a loan if the socially awkward Arcanist is the one asking, after all. To wrap all this about Checks up, have a handy table and optional rule!  DEX+INS is kind of a work-horse combination. Also this optional rule seems like a bad idea in general. Too much OoC-argument-causing potential in my book. Sounds fun in theory, but in practice all I hear is a Player constantly trying to argue that their highest attribute is always relevant. Players are probably going to argue that anyway without it being encouraged. CLOCKS. Have you played any Forged in the Dark games? If so, you know what Clocks are and you don't need this section. If you haven't, and don't, a Clock is an abstraction of long-term goals, problems, or progress of other factions. As you do things, Clocks fill or empty, and when they are finished either way, something happens. These usually feature 4-12 slices, but more or less is possible for quickly-developing or extra-long term situations. Some good examples of Clock use are:
So how do you fill or empty a Clock? Generally, if a Clock's completion is GOOD, a successful Check fills it by one. A Check that succeeds by 3 or more gets an extra slice, and 6 or more 2 extra slices. If the Check is a crit, fill it by 2 slices by default! If a Clock's completion is BAD, a failed Check fills it by one, with the vice versa of all aforementioned effects as well. Some Clocks, however, fill even if the PCs do nothing, so the situation is literally a race against the Clock, with PC actions possibly keeping it from filling further, or reducing it. An example the book gives is a Sorceress casting a spell to open a rift to the demon realm. It fills up every turn, so the PCs have to divide attention between fighting the sorceress, or doing things to hinder her ritual and thus keeping the Clock from filling up. GM fiat can also apply here. If an event happens that seems like it should effect the Clock, it does so, or if the PCs make choices that totally negate a Clock, well, bye-bye Clock. For example, if the Clock is about the Villain trying to get the MacGuffin before the PCs, the PCs smashing the MacGuffin kind of precludes that ever happening. Clocks can also be useful for a Conflict Scene. If you're involved in a chase on foot, or have to win a duel, a Clock can be a handy replacement for a combat that would otherwise just be two people rolling against each other's Defense over and over. Not exciting. A Clock fixes that issue by turning the duel into a handful of Opposed Tests instead, which would do better for enhancing tension. All in all, Clocks are a good way to remind the Players that things are happening and they can't just faff about all day. Problems need to be solved, and while the game wants to revolve around the Party, sometimes things are going to happen whether they're there or not. Next in the book, we're going over Bonds, which is really a bunch of information we have already gone over, and I feel the placement here is a little silly. It's not that I think Bonds shouldn't be explained in full, but we've already gotten piecemeal how they work, and this page doesn't give us anything new, interesting, or helpful about them. Well, that's not true, it does have a couple new things: First, you can create new bonds in Resting Scenes, which haven't been explained or mentioned at all yet to my knowledge. Via Opportunities or certain Skills, you can sometimes restructure how your character feels about the people, places, and things around them, and add or erase new Bonds. Second, you can only ever have six Bonds total, period. If you get a new Bond, you have to erase an old one like a Pokemon trying to insist that learning Weather Ball when it's a physical sweeper is a good idea. Third, if a character dies or otherwise leaves the story, the Bonds PCs have with them don't just disappear. Sometimes in any story, a character is even more important after death than they were in life. Fourth, don't be afraid to make complex Bonds. You can Admire someone you Hate, or feel Affection towards someone you Mistrust. These kinds of grey areas can make a relationship all the more interesting. That's all for now. Next time, we'll discuss Conflict Scenes in more depth, and learn how to fight for our rights to Party!  Pictured: A Caster once again doing something useful while the Martial watches in awe and envy. This is not normal for this game. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 00:52
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PurpleXVI posted:Playing in a Fabula Ultima game, one issue I have with is the extreme shortage of flat modifiers. 2dX makes a bell curve, but it still feels like results are super-swingy. It kind of is. Damage is less swingy than accuracy, but it's still a system that sorta screws someone who consistently rolls low over. At the same time, Defense and Magic Defense don't tend to be particularly high, so hitting things is actually usually pretty easy. My experience is that PCs tend to succeed more often than not at things they're good at, at least. The game really should have been built more around the idea of flat modifiers being more common, though. Going through the book, it becomes very clear that the game design does not want you to have such things any more than it can help it. I can see both sides of this issue, and while my Players have been more successful than not, I can see that another campaign might actually be having a really bad time, unable to beat any Check due to sheer luck.
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Mar 17, 2023 00:24
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PurpleXVI posted:I honestly got so tired of missing every loving attack roll that I just started blowing IP's on elemental shards and using them as my main source of offense. Man, I really wish I could sympathize with the situation, but I've not experienced anything like a strong of luck that bad. Hopefully, your experience will go better in the future, if you're even still playing that campaign. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Mar 22, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 23:45
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So, let's talk about Conflict Scenes. Conflict Scenes are when this game feels more like a TTRPG. Since there's a big emphasis on the game of being more vague on play and actions, a "zoomed out" experience, these are when the game "zooms in" a lot more, and the order PCs act in is much more important. They're for when the situation calls for a rapid series of events and actions, and while that usually happens in a fight, Conflict Scenes are, as mentioned before, not just for fights. The book gives some examples: Conflict Scenes posted:
The game notes that there's no reason to use a Conflict Scene for every one of these occasions, either. Only "truly dramatic situations", which I think is a tad bit silly in this case, but I half-agree: The duel example used in the last post still would be better as a series of opposed checks, rather than a full on battle. An epic showdown between one PC and their nemesis might be fun to watch for a little while, but eventually the other Players will get bored if the only thing happening is the PC taking a turn, then the nemesis, until one of them falls over. But I've always been a firm believer in the old adage "Don't Split The Party", and not just because it makes more work for the GM, who usually happens to be me. It's also a tactical error in a lot of TTRPGs: Being split up means you're less likely to be able to deal with threats or problems without a full range of abilities and bodies. But more importantly... Well, I'll finish that thought in a moment. First! We get a flowchart on the next page about the general setup of how a Conflict Scene is run, and we'll be talking about this in more detail throughout this post, but this flowchart contains all the information a GM and the Players need to set one up and go through the whole thing, which is good. A bite-sized set of instructions before the more detailed explanations come in. I'll show off the flowchart in an image, and then talk about it myself from there.  The first step is that we decide who is actually involved here. While it's understood that a party will often face a threat together, sometimes, the party is split despite all common sense screaming not to do that, or sometimes someone will be an active hindrance in the coming scene. You don't want your Berserker saying a lot at a high-society party where you're trying to sniff out the hideout of the secret cult in the capitol city, obviously. It's not just that they can't add much, they're really an actual liability there. And in the example the book gives, we see the idea of a trial where two of the PCs are acting as the defense attorneys for a young bandit. One, a Knight, uses his mere presence as a noble to lend credence to the Scholar, who will be doing the talking. But because of the nature of her job and reputation, the Thief is going to avoid being seen, and not for the usual reasons. She already did her part by collecting evidence. Now, back to what I was saying before: More importantly than the tactical error of splitting the party, or the extra work your poor, beleaguered GM has to suffer through (you assholes) is the fact that not everyone is participating in a tense, dramatic scene. While that can be understandable, it still kinda sucks for everyone not playing at the moment. Of course, I'm sure most of us know Players who are fine with just watching on the edge of their seats as this crime drama unfolds in front of them. Of course! I know I do, as a player, I love giving others the spotlight and watching things play out. But ALL of us know the Players who would spend the entire time impatiently tapping their dice, wishing they could roll, and usually both types are in a playing group. While I'd think of this as being immature, that's not really a fair sentiment. Everyone has their own levels and points of engagement, and some people just can't care about a situation they're not involved in. I appreciate that this game is allowing more stridently for the possibility that not everyone needs to shine all the time, but in practice, this kind of thing really requires the right kind of group to fully work out. TL;DR: Don't Split The loving Party. Anyway, next step is to discuss the goals of each participant, and determine what everyone has equipped as well. This step seems slightly redundant, or out of order. If you know which characters are participating, and which ones aren't, you probably know WHY they are or aren't, and thus what they hope to get out of this! Of course, maybe a Player's intention isn't the same as their character's, or maybe the PC themselves are hiding a secret agenda. That'd make this step important, if you don't care about sacrificing the surprise the other Players get from finding out that the Scholar is actually planning on getting the bandit declared guilty! The game would prefer these intentions be made clear up front. Initiative comes next, and it's pretty simple: It's a Group Check. As a reminder, the party chooses who is best at passing this Check, that PC is the Group Leader, everyone else rolls to get a bonus to add to that check, and the Group Leader rolls. In this case, the difficulty is the highest initiative score among the antagonists in the scene. If the Group Check is passed, the party goes first! If they do not pass the Check, the enemies go first. Notably, if someone new comes into a Conflict Scene, either as a surprise Villain or expected reinforcements, they have to adapt to the existing initiative. This is given no detail but will make perfect sense when we talk about :  apropos of nothing, have these sweet Katars to break up all this text Rounds And Turns! Everyone takes a turn in a Round, and a turn involves a single Action, which we'll find a list of in a few pages. I'll go into them then. Once everyone has performed an Action, the Round is over, and if the Conflict isn't, a new Round begins. So who goes in what order? If the Party goes first, they nominate someone to lead them off. Then the GM picks an enemy to Act. Then... Another PC goes. How do you decide this? Well, since the game doesn't actually say, I'd prefer to handle it like Lancer does: The Player who last acted chooses who goes next, and then another enemy gets a turn, etc. If the enemies go first, it's the same but in the opposite alternating order. If one side outnumbers the other, you keep alternating as long as you can, and then all the remnants get their turns. Because of this action economy, as a note from me, it's very important that Bosses and Villains get multiple turns a Round, or they'll be drowned under the weight of PCs beating them to poo poo. In IC terms, neither Turns nor Rounds take a specified amount of time to happen. They just happen and if the sequence of events takes longer from one Round to another, that's cool too! No spells in this game have a duration listed in seconds or minutes, just Turns, Rounds, or Scenes. The cleric/nurse has more to say about this:  This game has a lot of Skills and Spells that will be far more effective if used in the right order, and almost every enemy has Skills that can change what someone might do in a turn. The order of operations is important, and can turn a nightmare of a Boss into a manageable challenge. Which Players act first and what they do can make or break a Conflict, so like she says, make sure you cooperate with each other! There's an optional rule here for Enemy Initiative: And it's just making them take Turns in descending order of Initiative score instead of the GM picking. Supposedly, this will let the GM focus on more important things in the Conflict Scene at the cost of making enemies more predictable. I don't think the GM planning who and what goes when is that much of a drain on attention, personally, but maybe someone else will! Now, we're going into Distances, which is HEAVILY abstracted in this game. How much so? Well, so much so that there's effectively no difference between melee range and ranged... Range. Like in a JRPG (well, most of them), everyone is considered to be in range of everyone. The difference between melee and ranged is in how they interact with Skills and Spells, both PC and NPC. Flying enemies can't be struck by melee enemies unless something MAKES them capable of being attacked, for instance, so having ranged options in a Party is crucial. If no one at least has a simple bow, there's really very little they can do against even the most basic Flying monsters without wasting a lot of resources. Now, if everyone can hit everyone at any time, what about the squishy mages? Where do they come in here? We'll cover that soon, but the basics are that the game sort of expects there to be a designated Tank in the Party. While that's probably not always going to happen, everyone can help the more fragile members of the party stay alive using the Guard Action. Personally, I'd also subvert the game's expectations (and I have in my own Fabula Ultima campaign) and allow PCs to make it harder to target them by using terrain or Spell effects. When we're dealing with a Split Party (we just discussed this why are you doing it), the initiative order still matters, and you will cut between the different sce- Wait, no, this is a horrible idea! Swapping back and forth according to the initiative is a great way to confuse everyone, even yourself! Don't do this! Have both Conflict Scenes follow their own initiative, or handle one and THEN the other! There's a great optional rule at the end of this section for a situation like this, actually: If a Player isn't controlling any character in a Conflict Scene, try out having them influence the Conflict anyway: Once per Round, every that doesn't have a horse in the race can force a re-roll of any die, ally or enemy. This can be done multiple times by different Players, which sounds like deliciously chaotic fun. "Okay, but..." The book says, calling itself out. Okay, but... posted:There are situations in which distances and positions are supposed to play an important role: What if there's a sniper atop a tower? What if a terrible ritual tears open a chasm in the middle of the battlefield? Or you can just give Players a bone for being creative instead of saying "nuh uh". Just a thought.The Book, still doubling down posted:In the end, the most important thing to remember is that conflicts shouldn't be resolved through careful movement and positioning, but through clever use of the character's Skills and Actions. Stepping off my soapbox, let's get into ACTIONS! There are many various Actions, and a list to follow, but the book actually puts here a few things you can do aside from an Action on your Turn that won't actually end your Turn:  You can do these kinds of things at any time on your turn, but within reason. The GM has the right to tell you that you can't do more than one of these things, or if you can't do them at all depending on the circumstances. For all other things, that don't fit into one of the set Actions or in this list: If it requires a Check, it's probably your main Action for the turn. And of course, being cool doesn't take any Action. If a Player wants to describe their PCs lower-case actions with style, that doesn't cost anything. Don't be a jerk and make PCs make Checks when they try to look cool! Instead of writing out the list of Actions, I'll just dive in: Attack: When you want to aggress upon an enemy, you select a target! You must know their position (oh, now that's important) and be able to see them. You also have to be able to reach the target with the weapon you have: As mentioned earlier, flying enemies can't be hit with melee weapon under normal circumstances. To hit, you have to roll the weapon's Attributes, add any bonus you might have from the weapon or your Skills, and add them together, while keeping in mind the higher of the two rolls. If the accuracy result exceeds the defense of the target, it's a hit, and you add your weapon damage to your highest roll, the HR, to determine damage. Many Skills or rare weapons add to damage as well. If you fail, the enemy "managed to anticipate, evade, or negate your offensive". Again, I do enjoy how the game goes out of its way to support the idea that the PCs are heroes, not random schmucks with a 5% chance to look like an utter buffoon. If you roll doubles of 6 or above, you get an Opportunity to inflict on the enemy: Some benefit for yourself or an ally. We've gone through that before, as well as the fact that rolling double 1s is bad and gives the enemy an Opportunity instead. We also get here our first introduction to Affinities, which are what you'd expect out of a JRPG: There are multiple elemental Affinities that enemies can be aligned/misaligned to. Most Affinities are neutral, but there are four more: Vulnerable, which means the enemy takes double damage from this element, Resistant, meaning they take half, Immune, which means they take nothing, and Absorbing, which means they actually get HP back from the attack. Immunity or Absorption of Physical is possible, but extremely rare, and the game really does not want PCs to have either. This is... Fair, because almost all enemies in the game deal Physical damage with their main attacks. As one might expect. There are some Skills or effects that might allow for a Free Attack, which is just what it says on the tin. This usually isn't on the turn of the one making the Free Attack, though. We also discuss Multi and Two Weapon Fighting. Both are pretty easy. Multi (x) means you can attack up to x different creatures in one Attack action with the same Accuracy check. It is checked against all targets' Defense, though, so you might not hit all of them. If you roll a Crit, you auto-hit all of them. Fumble and you auto-miss all of them. If you're using Two Weapon Fighting, you can target two different enemies or the same enemy twice, and you have to roll separately for both weapons. You can also roll them in either order. There are three caveats, though: when you're dual-wielding, if either or both weapons have Multi, they lose it for these attacks, and your HR is always considered 0, so you only do weapon damage. The final one, and most important, is that both weapons have to be from the same category (like guns or swords). There's a Skill that will let you use weapons of two different categories, and if you plan on dual-wielding, you'll probably be getting that. Next, the Equipment Action allows you to store any number of equipped items into your backpack, and vice versa. Armor is a little too cumbersome to do this with, though, at least in a single turn. If you buy the pizzas or are the GM's significant other, they might allow you to switch armor in more than one turn, though! You don't need to worry about what you have equipped already. If you have it equipped, there's no need to waste an Action drawing weapons or anything like that. Guard is a pretty important Action in this game, and a common one for a Tank to take. When you Guard, you gain resistance to all damage types from any source, and you gain +2 to any Opposed Checks taken in the scene (while Guarding, can't save this up). You can guard another character, and if you do, that character can't be targeted by melee attacks until the start of your next turn, or if you die, leave the scene, or are unconscious. This is called Cover, and you can't Cover a creature that is Covering someone else, that would just be silly. Guard can't stack by any means, which is a good thing to mention given that you can conceivably do so in the game's rules. Hinder allows you to perform a Check to inflict one of four status effects on the enemy. The Check depends on how the Player wants to inflict the ailment, more or less how they theme the PC accomplishing it, and is GM fiat. The DL is always 10. If you succeed, you inflict either Dazed, Shaken, Slow, or Weak. The game says it'll explain these later, but I want to explain them now: all status effects inflict -1 die size to an Attribute or multiple Attributes, but these four in particular are only to one. Dazed is -INS, Shaken is -WLP, Slow is -DEX, and Weak is -MIG. These can be very helpful against certain enemies, especially INS or DEX, since not only do they influence the enemy's ability to do stuff like other Attributes, but also decrease their Magic Defense and Defense respectively. Weak and Shaken are slightly less useful: Sometimes that'll really help in a Conflict Scene since it can drop an enemy's accuracy, or prevent a debate opponent from making a decent argument, but HP and MP maximum cannot be lowered in this way, so you're not doubling up on effectiveness as with Dazed or Slow. These status effects cannot be stacked, but they can be stacked with two more status effects: Enraged and Poisoned, which are -DEX and -INS, and -MIG and WLP, respectively. An Enemy can't be Dazed twice, but they can be Dazed and Enraged! That said, die size never falls below d6, so you might not need to do this. Inventory allows you to just pop an item out of your Inventory, for a limited resource intuitively called Inventory Points (IP). There's a small list of items later on, when we discuss IP in much more depth, but this also allows you to just get an item out that might help in the immediate situation in some way. If you have things in both hands, you can still use the Inventory Action, no problem! Objective is an Action you take to fill (or unfill) Clocks that are related to the current situation or objective in the Conflict. There's a bit flowchart here, but there's nothing here that hasn't really been explained before in the Clock section, aside from that particularly simple goals like jumping across a gap can be done in a single successful check instead of making it into a whole thing. I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but this is something important: If you beat the DL for a Check by 3 or more, a Clock (un)fills by 2, not just 1. If you beat it by 6 or more, that's 3 sections filled in. This is something to keep in mind for later and how hilariously broken a specific part of the game is. Spell allows you to cast a spell. What, did you think you would be getting more information about magic yet? Study allows you to do an Open Check that is usually INS+INS, but the book mentions that sometimes other combinations might be more appropriate. Study gives you information based on how well you do:  If you Study something, you can't ask the same question you asked last time. The PC knows what they know, and can't summon up more from the aether if they didn't roll particularly well. You can also use Study to learn a character's Attributes, Skills, Spells, or Affinities, which can be really helpful in a fight. Generally, you only get one piece of information when you do this, though, so it's a lot more limited. We'll get to that much later, though! Skill allows you to use Skills that require an Action to activate. The book mentions that outside of Conflict Scenes, a Skill takes 5-10 seconds to accomplish, which makes sense for some, not so much for some others. Other is just a catchall Action. I'm not really sure I can think of any other things that haven't been mentioned here, and I'm not sure that the writer did either, but having a fallback is a good thing just in case! The GM gets final say on what an Other Action might entail, though the Player can negotiate this fact. Also, Nurse Cleric has something to say:  So don't hold up the game demanding that PCs make plans in character for the sake of immersion in this game, let them discuss above-board and assume they worked out plans earlier off-screen. Or give them that cool Psych moment. That's reasonable! This is my longest post yet, but we're not quite done. First, Teamwork: When a PC does a Check during a Conflict Scene, anyone who hasn't acted yet can help them. This turns the Check into a Group Check, but with a few differences: First, the leader is automatically the one trying to do the Check. Second, all supporters don't have to roll, they automatically succeed. In exchange, this means the supporter has taken their Action for the Round and can't act (except maybe Free Attacks or the like). It seems a little much to ask for a PC's entire Turn just to give a +1 to another PC, but I can see this sometimes being a worthwhile trade-off, if you really need something to work. Particularly when Clocks are involved. And sometimes, a PC just isn't helpful in the current situation and giving up their Turn isn't actually an awful idea since they won't be doing anything useful anyway. An example given is when all enemies are flying, a PC with no ranged weapons might prefer to give someone who DOES a +1 instead of spending precious resources. We also get here that a Conflict Scene can just end because the GM said so, especially if victory is extremely clear. Definitely avoid doing this if it looks like the Players are about to lose, though, as Players have a habit of pulling a win out of their butts (and that is actually a mechanic we'll talk about)! A Conflict ending might start another Conflict, depending on the situation, which is important to note. If you end a fight and get into another one right after, this is a separate scene and that is important because many effects last until the end of a scene. This can mean buffs fall off, but also that status effects on the PCs can as well! Also of note is that Turn-Related effects end automatically if the PC goes unconscious, leaves the scene, dies, or if a Conflict Scene ends before their turn technically begins or ends. And here is a big one: If an effect begins, ends, or recharges at the start or end of a PC's turn, that automatically happens if they use Teamwork, so this can be exploited: Imagine if the mage in your party has a nasty effect on them that makes them explode for extra damage if an enemy hits them before the end of their next Turn. If the Thief tries to nab an item off an enemy before anyone else goes, the Mage can help out with that, giving the Thief a +1 and denying enemies the extra damage. This game encourages tactical thinking like this in many ways (except positioning [except when it does]). The game gives a bunch of sample Clocks here-Skip. OPTIONAL CONFLICT RULES! We already discussed one, but the others are neat. The first one on this page is about Surprise Rounds, which work just how you'd think: Whichever party gets the Surprise Round gets a free Round to work with! This can really break encounters in either side's favor, so a GM should be careful before allowing this. It's no fun for anyone if the monsters immediately splatter the party's Healer without a single chance to prevent that from happening. Even the crappiest rolls don't justify that lack of agency. The third (the second is the one we already talked about) is Battle Superiority, and hoo boy, this can ALSO break battles, but in new and interesting ways. If you've played MegaTen games, particularly SMT games after 3 or Persona games, you already get the drift here. If you don't: This special rule gives ALL characters in a Conflict a special pool of Superiority Points. You gain them in four ways: Hitting Vulnerabilities, an enemy hitting an Immunity or Absorption, getting a Crit, or an enemy getting a Fumble. Each one of these nets 1 point, and you can only have 5 at a time. Enemies can get points in the same way! What do these allow you to do? Well, if a Player wants to spend one, they can do so on their Turn. It gives them a Free Action. Just allows them to outright Act again immediately! This is a very powerful ability, especially if you know enemy weaknesses! These Points exist as a tug of war: Whenever the Party gains a point, the enemy LOSES one, and vice versa. If the enemy has a positive number of points, you have to steal their points before you start gaining them. Battle Superiority really emphasizes a tactical approach to fighting in which spending a Turn in the most efficient way gives big advantages to the side that character is on, and cleverly used can really just destroy an enemy with little trouble, but also offers the enemy to do the same to the Players. Still, it's slightly more advantageous to Players, since they usually don't have Vulnerabilities. If my explanation is a little confusing, this is what the Battle Superiority "gauge" looks like:  That's it for this post! Next time, we'll get into the nitty-gritty of some of the game's mechanics, a deeper dive into the details of how the game works (and kind of where I think Character Creation should be instead). Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 00:01
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Have you seen the film. 'Society'? We're apparently living in it.
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Mar 29, 2023 22:20
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joylessdivision posted:So I'm working on my 1e Masquerade review presently and I had a moment where I paused and said "Do I make this incredibly dumb visual joke or do I play this straight?" Remember where you are: Never apologize for the dumb poo poo.
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Mar 29, 2023 23:42
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Here we are, back again, and now with more crunch! Well, this game never really gets that crunchy, but we'll get to more specifics. We actually have some concepts I find neat in this section of the book, but we're not even halfway through the game rules chapter. I'm not really sure how long it'll be this way, but I would like to point out that the Fabula Ultima Patreon has some neat playtest material available for anyone to download, even if they aren't donating. Worth a look, there's some cool special rules in there. Anyway, so first, let's talk HP and MP. We get the usual "HP are not necessarily meat points" talk here, which entirely depends on how you describe things in your games. Ya know, I really like The Unexpectables, but the way Monty describes everyone taking damage really makes me wonder how any of her PCs walk... Ahem. The game states that a character's max HP is their max HP. We don't get temporary hit points or buffer HP, overhealing someone does nothing but waste resources. If a character is at half or less HP, they enter Crisis, and while generally this is simply a bad thing, some Skills or other effects kick in when a character is in Crisis, making them stronger or tougher, so some Players might want their character hanging by a thread. What happens at 0 HP? We'll touch on that in a moment. First, MP.  And appropriately a wizard! There's... Really not much to say about MP, actually. You have a max MP, you have a current MP, you spend MP on Spells (and some Skills), nothing really happens if you're at 0 MP other than not being able to use MP. You can't use any Skill or Spell you don't have the MP to use (if they have an MP cost, in the case of Skills). There's very little to this, actually, so let's get back to what happens when you don't have any HP. First, NPCs are at the mercy of whoever brought them to 0 MP. The Player of that character, including the GM if an NPC beats up another NPC, decides if they killed them, knocked them out, etc. If a Player spares an NPC they've defeated, this is not permission for the GM to say some bullshit like "They immediately cutscene-stab you" or something. The PC won, end of story. A spared enemy is one that will not be an immediate threat, though of course they might get in the way later... That said, some creatures just can't survive 0 HP. Constructs, Elementals, and Undead are just destroyed if they're defeated.  If only they had these medical supplies, they... Probably would still get destroyed because they couldn't benefit from them anyway. Villains, on the other hand, are special. They're always meant to be bigger threats, and reoccurring ones. Players are notorious for coming up with insane ways to defeat a BBEG that their GM didn't think of... But also, sometimes a GM just messes up and doesn't make them strong enough. Oops. Thankfully, they have methods of getting around that! First, a Villain can just Escape. A Villain comes with a number of Ultima Points at creation, the dark counter-part to Fabula Points. While we'll get into the specifics later, for now know that a Villain can spend Ultima Points on almost anything PCs can spend Fabula Points on, but they come with a limited number of them that never refreshes. A Villain cannot get more Ultima Points (usually), but they also get more than PCs start with. That in mind, Villains can spend an Ultima Point to Escape, which means they somehow bullshit their way out of their defeat. This could be the classic scene where they show they were only toying with the heroes, or maybe they set up an escape plan ahead of time. Either way, this option basically allows them to flip the PCs the bird and get away scot free. They can also just... Surrender. In this case, they're treated like any other NPC. Their fate is in the hands of the PCs... Or more importantly, the Players. The book says Villains will only choose this option if it's the only choice they have left, but with the way Ultima Points work, this is probably an exercise in frustration. A good moment is the Well-Intentioned Extremist realizing they can't defeat the ancient evil on their own, so they accept the PCs help. Or maybe repeated defeat breaks their spirit, and the PCs tell the Villain they don't have to be alone anymore. Either way, this could be a good way to gain a powerful new ally, or introduce a new PC (who is appropriately downgraded, of course). Defeat often means friendship in JRPGs, after all. And while I want to gush about how well Villains are crafted as a concept within the conceit of emulating JRPGs, that's best saved for when we talk about Villains in greater detail. When PCs fall to 0 HP, they have two options, though I believe these options are both best saved for when the entire Party is at 0 HP, or at least until the situation is really that desperate. I'll talk about the first last, because personally I believe these are in a weird order. So, first, Surrender. Similarly to a Villain, a Player can throw in the towel. The GM is not allowed to kill PCs that Surrender, but instead, there will be consequences. This could be a consequence for each PC that does this, or for the entire Party, but there are benefits to this! Everyone who Surrenders immediately gains 2 Fabula Points, and in the next scene they appear in, they've healed up to their Crisis score in HP. This won't be enough to get them to full HP, of course: They're still hurting from their experience. As for consequences, here's some the book suggests:  These are assuming only one character is taking the consequences, but it really depends on the circumstances. It won't make sense for someone to be dragged away from the Party when the other PCs will be actively trying to save them, for example. But that's why these are just suggestions. Consequences should always match the situation, after all. The second option is Sacrifice. This option allows the PC who chose it to hit the Win button on the Scene. How is up to them and the GM. But either way, no matter what happens or how, the PC dies. This is not to be taken lightly. There are no resurrection mechanics in Fabula Ultima. If someone dies, they're dead for good. That's it, that's all. This is an extremely powerful option at a great cost, and can only be done if at least two of the three following criteria are met: A Villain is on the scene, the PC's sacrifice would be good for a character they have a Bond towards, and/or they believe their sacrifice would make the world a better place. There is no upper limit on what a Sacrifice can accomplish. The Player can and should go ham. The GM should allow almost anything within reason, but it must be something that solves the CURRENT Scene. No solving the entire campaign here (unless it's the climactic final battle). The Player is about to lose a character they've probably spent a lot of time, care, and love on... So let them make it COUNT. If the Player makes a new character, that new PC will be at the same level and have the same Zenit's worth of equipment, as well. Of course, we can't always have the PCs constantly be on the ropes! The next section of the chapter is about Resting! There's some different rules for whether they're in the wilderness, or settlements, but they aren't exceptionally complicated. When resting in the wilderness, they need access to one of the following!
When PCs rest, they recover all HP and MP, and all status effects, and resting requires at least four hours of not doing anything strenuous. Nurse Cleric says:  Unless of course you're at the end of the campaign and the final boss is waiting to destroy the world until they finish all the side-quests. Resting allows PCs to reassess how they feel about what's happened, the places they've been, and the people they've met or have already known. It's a good opportunity for role-playing as the Party has a quiet moment to discuss their feelings, plan for the future, or ruminate on the past. They can also do one of the following when they're resting: create a new Bond, add a new emotion to an existing Bond, or erase an emotion from a Bond and replace it with a new one. The Player (or maybe even the PC) should tell everyone why and how their views have changed. Notable though: All this resting stuff only applies to PCs. NPCs do whatever the GM wants them to do, including healing to full between Scenes. That's the privilege of GMs, baby! Let's talk damage. Damage comes in 9 "Elements": Physical, Air, Bolt, Dark, Earth, Fire, Ice, Light, and Poison. While PCs generally have no direct connection to these Elements without some effect granting it to them (usually from equipment), most creatures in the game otherwise do. The species of a creature might affect this. For example, all Undead are Vulnerable to Light damage. But even then, two different Undead might Resist or even be Immune to or Absorb different elements! A Fire Wraith would Absorb Fire, while a Drowned is Immune to Ice damage. These are all called Affinities. Learning and exploiting them is a big part of the battle system, just like in most JRPGs, especially if you're using the Battle Superiority rule. Otherwise, some effects grant Extra Damage, like hitting a Vulnerable Affinity, which outright doubles damage done. This can never be applied to Skills or Spells that do no damage, so no Locate City Bombs here, no matter how funny it is. If any Effect says it changes the damage of an Attack, Skill, or Spell, it replaces the previous damage. So if the Spiritist casts Soul Weapon on the Dark Knight's greatsword, it's now Light element. While that's still going, an Air Djinn targets them with a similar enchantment for Air to give themselves an advantage, and that replaces the Light element. You can never stack damage types. Here we also have a table on Improvising Damage, just in case there's something that happens from the environment like a rock slide, or a trap in a dungeon:  These kinds of things can never kill a PC unless they pick the Sacrifice option instead of Surrender. Generally, Environmental damage is a great way to separate the Party via Surrender: Instead of being crushed by the bridge, the squishy Entropist is now on the other side of it than the Party, and finding her way back to them might be a bit rough... Now we hit the Status Effects! We talked about them a bit before, and I went over most of the big stuff, but there's some nitty gritty we should approach now. First, your die size can never be reduced below d6. That's the lowest it goes for all characters, so inflicting Dazed on a dumb Ogre is probably not in the best interests of the Party. Recovering from status effects can come from Spells, Skills, Items, or Resting, but otherwise they will stick around until they're taken care of. This is a pretty nasty thing, too. While only one of your dice being lowered isn't too huge a deal, taking multiple Status Effects is. The difference of going between 2d8 and 2d6 is a mean result of -2. This is a pretty nasty penalty in a game where bonuses are rare and the dice can be pretty swingy. While I've mostly said I haven't seen bad luck that much so far, my last session was a big problem when it seemed all the PCs could not for the life of them roll above a 4, and they almost got taken out by a bunch of MUDMEN. Imagine being taken out by MUDMEN! Don't be like them, respect your Status Effects. You can become Immune to Status Effects via certain effects, but this is rare and exceptionally valuable. If the Party gets the equivalent of a Ribbon, it should be one of the most amazing things they've ever received, and they should only get one. You don't have to wait for an enemy to inflict Status Effects! Go ahead and throw Status Effects at your players for things they can definitely control but chose not to. Being Poisoned might be from being drunk. Alcohol is a poison, after all. Maybe they didn't pack well enough for a trip up a mountain, and PCs get Slow and Weak from the cold and lack of potable water. These are good ways to use the environment to screw with the PCs without just making them take damage: punishing a lack of good sense with damage is boring. It's more memorable if they take on enemies they'd normally destroy, and barely come out on top because they're fighting in waist deep swamp-water! Notable that some effects inflict Sleep, Petrified, Paralysis, etc. These are not considered Status Effects by the game, they're generally treated in special ways, by restricting how the PCs are allowed to act instead of lowering Attributes.  loving with Marlboros without Esuna available is among one of the worst plans you can have. So, Fabula Points! We've mentioned them a lot, talked about them a lot, how do they actually work? I'm probably going to repeat myself a bit here, so be patient while I struggle with the high concept of writing a TTRPG review. Fabula Points start at 3 in character creation. After that, you need to earn them! There's four ways, and a fifth way if the GM wants to use the intentional failing optional rule.
The book shortly lists that you can use Fabula Points to Invoke Bonds and Traits, but it also adds two options here: A Player can alter the story, adding, removing, or changing something to the benefit of the Party, and some Skills are so powerful they need a Fabula Point to fuel them. Of course, Altering the Story is a very powerful effect, and there's a bunch of caveats to it as you might expect: First off, if something has already been established, you need the GM's permission to change or add to it. It's just basic courtesy. Second, if it would affect the backstory, or current situation of another PC, you need that Player's permission. Third, you can't use this to contradict something that you or someone else has already established. Fourth, you can't use this to make mechanical changes to the game like changing a Skill's effect or hurting enemies. And finally, if you introduce a new NPC this way, the GM controls that NPC. This is a very powerful effect, otherwise, perhaps worth more than the Fabula Point you spent to do it. Entire cities could come into being, or maybe that family heirloom sword the Weaponmaster has been carrying around is the long-lost Sword of the Final Kings and it only needs to be reforged to find its former glory. Who knows? The sky is the limit, and Altering the Story can make the table's experience that much more interesting... Or it could be a point of contention. A proper discussion at the table is always important. Communication is key. I could go on here, but the next part is about Villains, and I want to spend a bit more time on those. Until then, enjoy some more cute art: 
Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 30, 2023 00:19
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I gave this game a lot of crap so far, but overall, I think the concepts and mechanics are actually pretty good. They're quick, easy to learn, and rather concise, which is a very good thing. I like big crunchy games a lot, really. I started with 2e DnD, I loved Exalted. I tried and actually enjoyed Eclipse Phase. But there's a growing trend to simplify TTRPG games and make them more accessible, which I also love. This hobby needs all the new blood it can get. But on that note, a lot of this game has been good, but flawed. However, the first thing about this game I really enjoy are Villains. It's not the mechanics so much, as they're not really that special. They're good, but what it really is is that that they match the flavor of this game, its modus operandi. Fabula Ultima wants to be a JRPG so bad, and in this case, it really works. We've spent a lot of time talking about Villains in Fabula Ultima, or mentioning them at least. But we've never actually described what a Villain is, and how they're different from a normal enemy or boss. The idea is that a Villain with a capital V is different from villains in that a Villain is supposed to be a reoccurring threat, and a memorable one at that. The bandit boss might be a hard fight, but he's not particularly memorable. But Cyrus, the bandit king, is. Julia, a sorceress who will stop at nothing to perform a ritual that might destroy the world... Because she seeks to save it. Gorgimire, the evil extra-dimensional entity who will bend reality to its will. And all of these Villains could be in the same campaign. Villains motivate the story as much as the PCs do. While the game claims that nothing major is supposed to happen without the PCs being present, Villains can ignore that rule (usually through GM Scenes). Whatever the Villains are, whoever they are, they are almost always connected to the PCs somehow. Their inclusion in the game isn't just as some random monster that must be confronted to save the world. Would Melfice have been at all a memorable Villain, if it weren't for his hateful connection with Ryudo? Would we have given two shits about Sephiroth if nearly every party member didn't have some connection to him? Heck, even Kefka's introduction in FFVI came entirely from how he related to Terra. To show this, Villains in Fabula Ultima almost always have bonds to the PCs, and vice versa, and they also often have opposing themes. To use a previous example, Terra's desperation to do something, ANYTHING good, opposed to Kefka's straw-nihilism fueled evil. The GM can use Villains wherever they see fit, but the Villains should be memorable. They should not be a one-off boss. Even if the party only fights a Villain once, it should be a fight led up to with much ado, and the fight should matter a lot. Luca Blight had three fights... But they were all technically in the same scene, and the entire game led up to the confrontation with him and spent a lot of time emphasizing how evil and wickedly powerful he was. Not to mention fighting his henchmen through the entire game. Now, let's get into the mechanics of the Villains. First, Ultima Points. We discussed these a little last post, but here's a small crash course along with new information. A Villain gains a number of Ultima Points at character creation. This is based on their narrative importance: Minor, which would include Cyrus, Major, which would be Julia, and Supreme, where Gorgimire sits. In that order, they get 5, 10, and 15. They can use them for three options: Escape, Invoke Trait, and Recovery. Escape I mentioned before, it allows them to flip the PCs the bird and just walk out. They can just leave, and possibly leave behind some henchmen or a Boss to fight in their place. They don't even have to be in a fight with the PCs, Sephiroth can just throw pieces of JENOVA at you and walk away laughing while you fight JENOVA's... Ear lobes or something. Invoke Traits let them do the same thing PCs can do with Fabula Points, they can reroll dice for more favorable results. And Recovery is something a lot of major bosses in JRPGs can do, particularly the MegaTen Franchise: Just remove all status effects and recover 50 MP. All this comes at a cost, though. While PCs can recover Fabula Points through various means, a Villain will only have what they have. Once it's out, it's out, and there's nothing they can do about it. Or is there?  "You think you've won? You think you've beaten me?! THE INSOLENCE!" Escalation. At any time during play, the GM can transform a Villain into a new character. It may be showing off their final form, or just that the Villain has slipped deeper into their madness, going from tragic to truly heinous. Instead of the Villain becoming a new ally, they reject redemption, and throw themselves headlong into the darkness. Beware the cornered wolf, and all that. When this happens, the Villain moves up in narrative importance, and thus become more powerful. They reset their Ultima Points to the new maximum of the Villainous power they now hold the next time they appear before the PCs. They're treated also as an entirely new character, and will have more powerful abilities. There is a caveat here that a Supreme Villain cannot grow more powerful, but it can attain a new form. Further, if a Villain hits 0 HP and has no Ultima Points left, they may immediately Escalate while still on the Scene, recharging their Ultima Points immediately. However, because PCs get a Fabula Point every time a Villain appears, the Escalated Villain being a new character means that they will also offer another Fabula Point here if they have already. So Escalating in front of PCs can also make the PCs regain an advantage. Of course, a Villain that can escalate every time they're defeated quickly grows tiresome, especially since Villains can just run away a lot before that point as well. How do you keep this from being annoying, rather than threatening? It's a delicate balance, the game admits, and Nurse Cleric has some advice:  Finally, while we're not getting into how to actually make a Villain yet, we do have an important topic for discussion: Villains and Fabula Points. Obviously, when a Villain appears in a Scene, every PC gets 1 Fabula Point, even if they're not present on the Scene. But what about the edge cases? Well, for one, if a Villain has a disguise or an alter-ego they use to peaceably interact with the PCs, or to poison the King's will against the PCs, or in any other occasion where they are not obviously the Villain, there are no Fabula Points given out when they appear. If the deception is revealed, then they will whenever they appear from then on. If multiple Villains are on a Scene, PCs gain a Fabula Point for each one, to a maximum of 3 per Scene. Clever Players might orchestrate plots to force multiple Villains into a Scene somehow. If a Villain's presence extends for multiple Scenes without them actually leaving (like spotting them multiple times through the same dungeon), the PCs only get the 1 Fabula Point when they first appear. GMs should consider throwing out a GM Scene and having a cutscene focused on the Villain if the PCs are running low on Fabula Points with no good opportunity to refuel. It's just good sense. So, before we move on, I'll use my previously given examples as good examples of how Villains work in this game. Cyrus, the Bandit King, wishes to use his charisma to unite all the bandit gangs of the continent under his banner. If he does, he will become a force to be reckoned with even in the Fourfold Queendoms, and the PCs must stop this. This looming threat is actually only a Minor Villain in the grand scheme of things, so while he's dangerous, he only has 5 Ultima Points. The PCs don't encounter Cyrus directly, but they do fight his henchmen a lot, and the constant threat of his plan makes the Players focus on the ticking Clock towards his goal, building the hype. When they finally fight through all of Cyrus's forces and face him, he spends all of his Ultima Points in the fight to either Recover or Invoke his Traits, making a rough encounter that really tests the endurance of the early-campaign PCs. He doesn't Escalate, but he doesn't Escape either, fighting to the bitter end for the sake of his pride. Julia is a seemingly cold and ruthless wizard who has used her magic to cause chaos, and takes what she wants without hesitation. She is worrying the Queen of the land with how many magical artifacts she has amassed, and while the PCs have encountered Julia before, she showed little interest in them. The Queen tasks the Party with pursuing Julia. The Major Villain takes up a good bit of the campaign as the wizard proves to not only quite powerful, easily able to wipe the floor with a weaker band of heroes, but she also continuously summons monstrosities to deal with the PCs while she focuses on "More important things". She spends a lot of her 10 Ultima Points on the Escape option, forcing the party to fight her summoned eldritch horrors instead of her. Eventually, her first defeat results in her fleeing, and the Players can pat themselves on the back for managing to surpass a great Villain. The truth is, however, she was only caught off guard, and she Escalates to show that she is actually taking the PCs seriously. The next time they meet, she shows her TRUE power as a Wizard. With an impressive 15 Ultima Points and a new array of spells and abilities, she proves a terrifying opponent, and they only finally defeat her by the skin of her teeth. Stunned, she tells the PCs a dark secret, the reason for her villainy, and joins the Party as a new PC, controlled by someone who wanted to enter as a badass wizard. Gorgimire is the Supreme villain. Julia was amassing all her power to use it to keep Gorgimire out of their world, because she did not believe the dark, eldritch being could be defeated. But she was running out of options, and the PCs might gives her hope. Gorgimire is nothing to be trifled with, however, and it shows this by breaking reality ever so slightly. Just a small touch of its power, yet still enough to change their world forever. The PCs struggle to adjust to their world, ruined, and to gather some magical implements that might allow them to weaken the horror... Its staggering 15 Ultima Points make fighting it a properly daunting idea! After all, the PCs barely beat Julia, and she was only mortal! Of course, Gorgimire cannot grow stronger than what it already is, but the GM has a nasty trick planned: Gorgimire is faced by the Party, and they manage to seemingly wound it... Only for Gorgimire to Escalate! It can't gain more than 15 Ultima Points, or become stronger, but it CAN change out its abilities and spells for something new entirely, as it focuses its reality-bending power into a form more suited for fighting the PCs! Now facing the final form of the final boss with a renewed 15 Ultima Points, they have their work cut out for them... Cue the operatic music with ominous choir! I said it before, and I'll say it again here: Villains are something Fabula Ultima does right. It wants to be a JRPG, and I think it really, actually manages to give that feel with this part of the game. It translates so well into the mood. Tragic Villains that want to be something great. Dark heroes who will stop at nothing to save the world even if they have to break a few eggs. Evil Gods that simply want to wreck everything, and rebuild the world in their own image. And most importantly... The Villain who seeks redemption, and finds themselves allied with those that they assumed would hate them. Villains have always been a huge focus of JRPGs in general. They drive the story as much as the main characters do. Their actions, their agency, matters just as much. They are, in a way, main characters in their own right, not just the antagonist the Player has to defeat to save the world. They shouldn't be killed by a mere lucky series of rolls, or a ridiculous plan to one-shot them that somehow manages to work. They will survive to fight another day, to keep the narrative flowing, but in a way that doesn't punish the Players for being clever. They still made the Villain waste a resource they can't get back, after all, and that's one more point that can't be used to gently caress with them later. Moving on from Villains, let's talk Inventory!  So, Fabula Ultima has a pretty abstract idea of how inventory and items work. You keep track of what weapons, armor, and accessory you have on you, but instead of worrying about everything else, the game assumes each PC has whatever they need to properly perform their role in the party. But for everything else, there's IP. Each PC has 6 IP to start with, and they can use them to pull a consumable out of their pack to immediately use (it can't be held for later, it has to be used now). These are pretty important, as not every Party will have a healer, or have a healer PRESENTLY with them. Magic Tents are also an invaluable (but expensive) item that can completely negate the worry to find a safe place in the wild. Elemental Shards are very effective, as well, and a good way for martial-focused characters to deal a hefty amount of damage to enemies by targeting their weaknesses (20 damage if it hits a Vulnerability, and it's ranged!), but also great if your mage doesn't have the proper Elements to deal with a new enemy. IP are precious resources, and you can't restore them normally by camping. Rest will not restore IP, and characters can't give IP of theirs to another character, either. Instead, they can restock when in a civilized area at the cost of 10 Zenit per IP. A merciful GM might also provide IP points to desperately low PCs when they find treasure or supplies, or give a free use of a consumable when they find a Tonic or Remedy in a chest. There is another use for IP, though, aside from the consumables. As I said, everyone is assumed to be carrying what makes sense for their role already. A Thief doesn't need to use IP to make a set of lockpicks, and the Sharpshooter doesn't need to keep track of arrows, bolts, or bullets. But sometimes, the situation calls for some weird stuff. Ball-bearings are very useful for making a tripping hazard, but is the Thief really carrying those? They sure are, for the cost of 2 IP! These work differently from consumables. Their cost isn't set, but instead are "generally" 2-4 IP, at the GM's discretion for how useful the item is or how unlikely it is they'd have that item. While it's pretty normal for the Tinkerer to have mechanical tools, explaining why the Arcanist does is a drat sight harder to justify, and costs more IP because of it. Also unlike consumables, these items are not immediately used up when created, and can be used multiple times as they're effectively added to the PC's inventory. However, the GM should never be allowed to sell these items for more than five times their IP cost, or they will quickly find the PCs filthy rich as they exploit such an obvious loophole. There are much more direct ways of breaking this game anyway. The game does want to note here that these items will never have any direct mechanical benefit. They might allow the PC to DO something, but not to get a +1. So, what are we missing here that helps identify this game as a JRPG? A world map! Which this game needs, and is made in character creation. Not just by the GM, but by all the Players as well. They build a world together, and establish the main regions and cities. There's still plenty to see and do out there, though, and this only covers the broad strokes of the world, not all the specifics. So, Fabula Ultima is at least partially a hex-crawl, which is a kind of game I adore. When they're traveling around, the basic unit of movement is the Travel Day: the average distance covered during a single day of travel. Go figure. For a journey, we follow the following steps:  Of course, sometimes things take longer than expected. Poor conditions or a particularly involved stop might extend the length of a journey, or sometimes a stroke of good luck provides a faster route, so the GM has the final say on how many travel days a journey will take. If you find yourself having fractions of a travel day, just round up to the nearest whole. The danger for an area increases based on the amount of monsters there are, and the area. Similarly to Dragon Quest games, the 'encounter rate' will be higher in mountains than it will be in grasslands, and on guarded roads it'll be unlikely they'll run into any danger. But again, the threat of an area isn't just determined by environment. While a Prairie might be mostly safe, if the area is being patrolled by hostile forces, the threat level is elevated several stages. There's another table here, showing the threat level and the die rolled to see if there's an encounter in a day, though it doesn't actually mention the effect enemy patrols or high monster-concentration should have, the book just tells us that should affect things. Likely common sense is required.  Sometimes, a danger can be resolved through a series of checks or a clock, but a Conflict Scene might be more appropriate in a lot of situations! While a fight is pretty dangerous, sometimes you have to cross dangerous terrain instead, or face a blizzard in your path. The PCs might be faced with an even more dire situation: Someone dropped the MacGuffin and they need to recover it immediately. We get yet another table here showing the damage that a danger might deal if it's not a straight up monster,. Previous tables like it have showed the damage escalates depending on level. At level 5+, a minor danger like hidden ditches dug by groundhogs might deal 10 damage from a sprained ankle. But the Massive danger of a thunderstorm could hit characters with 40 damage when they get struck by lightning, which is... A lot of HP to lose! Every 20 levels, the damage generally goes up by +10 for Minor and Heavy damage, but Massive damage instead increases by +20 every 20 levels, which is... Yikes. These could conceivably one-shot some PCs and then some. Some dangers, like Miyazaki-land, might deal status effects like Poisoned instead of dealing direct damage. Discoveries, on the other hand, are a good thing. When the PCs find a Discovery, it should be unique and useful because they don't (or shouldn't, depending on how your dice go) happen that often. Sometimes a Discovery can be dangerous, with a reward well worth it, but mostly they should be things like finding a hidden village, a chance encounter with a friendly group of adventurers, or maybe even a clue to future adventures. Of course, as the PCs travel and discover new things, the GM should update the map with new landmarks, so PCs can revisit something interesting. Same goes for if the PCs hears rumors about a nearby dungeon in town. Players can also add things to the map by spending Fabula Points; the map doesn't just stop being a collaborative effort once the game starts. Next time, we'll get into dungeons, a relatively short topic, and magic, which is less so. To send us off, have this map! 
Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 22:39
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Jen X posted:I feel like the villain mechanics are trying to mechanically formalize something that's very jrpg, but it's something that, imo, sucks horribly in jrpgs. I agree whole-heartedly with this. Sometimes, the Villain should win anyway, because it raises the stakes, but the Players should get plenty of wins. Forcing the Villain to run away should feel good. At the same time, the GM has to weigh these options carefully. I'm approaching this from the idea that I know which Villains I want to Escalate at all, because a Villain could technically Escalate infinite times. From that angle, it's a question of if you want to spend a limited pool of resources on letting them get away scot free, or doing very well in battle. Once thing the game isn't really saying is that the Villain needs these Ultima points for a number of things, and they'll probably burn through them quickly. Also I never liked Sephiroth as a villain. He's boring and trite. Kefka may have been trite, but he was never boring. Kefka is actually a good example of what you're saying, too, pretty much every time in FFVI that Kefka would have spent an Ultima Point was when you kicked his rear end and he ran away screaming. Everyone posted:Leaving a good bit of it as players' choice seems important too. "Um, yeah, last session was like, the 15th time that Steve the Bandit Lord has pantsed us and run away. We're all kind of sick of it now, so no deal on further Ultima for him. We're ending this now." And this too. I didn't mention it in my post, but I strongly believe the Players should communicate with their GM when something is getting old. Or when it even has the potential of getting old. And Villains, while I love how they're done, have the potential to get real old. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Apr 11, 2023 |
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Apr 11, 2023 22:41
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Robindaybird posted:This. I think the best option is a mix of the three. You meet the Villain: They kick your rear end. You meet them a second time, you kick their rear end. You meet them a third time, and they've realized they can use you kicking their rear end to actually succeed. Or just using a mix based on how well the Players were actually doing. The benefit of playing a TTRPG over a JRPG is that you don't make a cutscene that has to happen no matter what, you can tune the Villain response to how well the PCs are performing in a fight. The Villain no-selling them makes a lot of sense when their rolls are garbage or they're making mistakes. Them forcing the Villain to flee makes more sense if their dice are hot and they have their poo poo together. And most of the time it'll be somewhere in the middle. Cooked Auto posted:AC is kinda weird as it's an odd cash-in just to sate fans, and it also solidifies a bunch of fan lore in the process. The one I remember reading about somewhere was that it established Cloud as a lonely brooding guy, because that's what the fans remembered him as, but the games had nothing of the sort when it came to his personality. I'm so glad the Remake goes back to Cloud's original persona as an adorable dork who keeps TRYING to seem like a lonely brooding guy but fails miserably and becomes even more of an adorable dork.
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Apr 12, 2023 22:36
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We're getting into Dungeons here, and most of this stuff is really just explaining the concept of a dungeon, which... If you've played a JRPG or a TTRPG (and if you hadn't how the heck did you learn about this thread), you know what a dungeon is. But in case you somehow stumbled in here from who-knows-where on the internet and have no idea, a dungeon is a very common device used in RPGs in general. It has connotations of being a labyrinthine ruin filled with monsters, traps, and treasure. It's not always a ruin or a literal dungeon; A mazelike forest could be a dungeon, or an active factory a Villain is using to further one of their plans. What a dungeon COULD be is almost limitless, but they're parts of a game focused on careful exploration, combat, and proper usage of skills, usually with the promise of reward or to further a story. Generally, dungeons feature a number of "rooms" or areas that have challenges in the form of enemies, puzzles, and/or traps, with a "Boss" encounter at the end: Either a single, very powerful monster, or a group of monsters that are very dangerous together. Fabula Ultima focuses on the narrative side of a dungeon. Usually, it's not the dungeon that's important, it's why the PCs are there in the first place, and what they can find there. JRPGs tend to use dungeons as transitions a lot; providing the barrier between one area on the world map and the next. However, it's still true that some dungeons can be very important, as they have important story-beats, either for world-building purposes or to find clues to a Villain's plan. The wording in the book seems to imply that it is certainly the former case that should be more common, as important dungeons should be fewer in number so they're more impactful. When exploring dungeons, Fabula Ultima suggests three different methods. The first is "Dungeon scenes" (scenes isn't capitalized int the book here, so), in which the dungeon is handled in a series of vignettes rather than an inch-by-inch exploration. This is supposed to be how default gameplay in Fabula Ultima works in general, so it's not treating dungeons as anything special. The Players decide what they want to do, the GM reacts, Checks are done, and sometimes you zoom in for Conflict Scenes. I can think of a couple of JRPGs that did this, but the one that most stands out to me is Rivera: The Promised Land, where dungeons were just a series of rooms that had one or two things you could interact with, and you had a limited number of points used to interact with things. Either way, this dungeon method is for the majority of dungeons. This isn't stated in the book, just something I inferred from the above attitudes on how to approach this. The second is "Detailed exploration". This is how dungeons usually work in JRPGs and TTRPGs, where the dungeon is focused on in detail, and usually can take up an entire session. If not multiple sessions. Combing through every nook and cranny is expected, and monsters may be moving around while PCs explore, causing fights to happen... Sometimes even in rooms they've already explored! The book specifically notes that this method should be saved for dungeons that have story importance, and the GM shouldn't bother if they're not sure the Players will be interested in it enough to pick through. The final method is "Interlude", where it's treated as an Interlude Scene. This is not in anyone's best interest, in my opinion. If you aren't going to give a dungeon any attention at all, why is it even here? The book says to use this approach if it's nearing the end of a session and if the dungeon isn't important, but again, why even have it here if it's not at all important? And if you're at the end of a session, you can just... Save it for the next session. There is a clarification that typically this would be a minor location discovered while on a Journey, but... Then make it a minor location. It's not a dungeon. It's just a short "oh you found a cave, there was a bear inside" kind of thing. There is one cool idea Fabula Ultima has for dungeons that isn't in many other TTRPGs: Danger Clocks. They're Clocks that track a unique threat to the dungeon and its imminent danger to the party. Of course, it doesn't mean that every dungeon has a Danger Clock, or even one that hasn't been seen before, but these can be a good way to keep things moving along when running a Dungeon in "Dungeon scenes" mode. The amount of slices the Clock has depends on the urgency of the threat:  Another two good examples were from a campaign I was running: While exploring a large, mazelike shanty town, I ran it as "Dungeon scenes". As they entered, the Players faced the threat of a Clock titled "Lost". The more they explored the Slums, the more the Clock would fill, until they wound up hopelessly lost in the depressing labyrinth. Later, when they found an old tunnel used by smugglers, we zoomed in to a "Detailed Exploration". The party encountered a party of Definitely-Not-Skaven and decided to use some IP to produce a harmless but loud bomb. This scared the monsters off, avoiding a fight, but started a Clock titled "Hunted!". The tunnel is home to something very big, very mean, and now very angry at all the noise... When the Clock filled up, they faced a Boss that was stalking them, and they wished they'd fought the rats instead! For now, that's all Dungeons have in the book. Later, there'll be advice for GMs on how to prepare Dungeons, but that's later on. Instead, let's go into MAGIC. Magic isn't as complex in Fabula Ultima as it is in, say, Mage. It's pretty JRPGish: Spend MP to make damage happen, or heal allies. But there's still some complication to it, which we'll get pretty in depth on. But first, we have an explanation on the two different major categories of magic: Spells and Rituals. Spells are what I mentioned before. They're brief, codified spells not unlike what you'd find on a spell-list in Dragon Quest. They're purely offensive, defensive, or supportive, and can't be used outside of the context of their intended function to damage, buff, or heal. Probably. Players gonna Play, after all. They're quick, easy, and always ready if you have the MP. Casting one is only one action, so even the most powerful of them can come out in a flash. Rituals are a whole different story. You're probably familiar with the concept: This is the "Sky's The Limit" magic. This is what you use when you want to really make things happen, or shake up the situation. The GM has final say on what a ritual can and can't do, and the PCs are limited to Rituals of a Discipline they can cast (more on this in just a second), but they are very powerful. At a cost. They use a lot of MP, and take at least several minutes to complete. If a Ritual is interrupted... Oh well. Start over. We'll talk a bit more about both of these, but first, Disciplines! There are six Disciplines, which are sort of like Schools. But well, not. They're more like a division of magic, again, like it would be shown in a JRPG. Instead of thinking of them as like Schools in D&D, a closer comparison is the difference between Arcane and Divine magic. These magics all have a unique purpose in each world of Fabula Ultima, and while a character can certainly get more than one, they mix about as well as oil and water. The six Disciplines are: Arcanism: "Stay away from the Summoner!" Arcanism is a Discipline where the user can project a large portion of their soul outside their bodies, and use it to call upon godlike beings called the Arcana. These beings then provide benefits, and when dismissed, blow poo poo up hard. Arcanism is unlike any other discipline in that it doesn't have spells, but instead its own unique mechanic. Which kind of sucks, but we'll get into why when we get to the Classes. Suffice to say it doesn't jive particularly well with RAW, RAI, or really provide much of a benefit on its own merits. On the other hand, Arcanism RITUALS are quite nice, and a well-rounded Arcanist is capable of providing some of the most powerful and varied Ritual effects. Chimerism: "Me Gau! Your friend!" Chimerists get their power from the souls of monsters, studying their power and traveling to get more chances to examine it. Chimerism allows for a weird collection of incredible niche, but still effective, abilities. Chimerism Rituals tend to involve Monsters in some way, like temporarily enhancing oneself with the senses of a Monster, scrying through a monster's eyes, or even transforming wholesale into a monster for a time. (Also fun fact I can't vouch for but is interesting: Apparently, in the original translation, Gau doesn't do caveman speech. His speech patterns are awkwardly polite and precise, like someone who ACADEMICALLY knows how to speak a language, but has little to no practice using it in actual conversation.) Elementalism: "Did you like that, Lady Valkyrie? Hahaha!" Elementalists BLOW STUFF UP. They control the souls of the elements of creation: Earth, Fire, Air, Water (HEART no wait not heart that's another discipline), and use it to manifest pain. Elementalism is the most offensive of the Disciplines, and while it has some spells that aren't purely to cause damage, damage is certainly its focus, and it excels at hitting Vulnerabilities in particular. Elementalist Rituals can involve some really big booms, but mostly they're about manipulating the Elements in a wider fashion, like summoning rain or molding rock like clay. Entropism: "If Earth's history is likened to a clock, the hour hands point to 13. A time that cannot exist. No, a time that MUST not exist." Entropism accesses the power of space and time itself, and uses it in ways that defy logic. Or in a less flowery way, Entropists specialize in just loving with people and it's really annoying. In a good way. Entropism Rituals tend to do the actual manipulation of space and time, forcing good/bad luck onto people, or in general just being kind of a dick. Ritualism: "Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality." Ritualism has no spells, but focuses entirely on magic itself. Manipulating, binding, identifying, and powering places, people, and things. Magitech often goes hand-in-hand with Ritualism, as science and magic can be brought together with this Discipline. Ritual wise, Ritualism is both the most and least restrictive: As long as the effect directly applies to Magic as a concept, you can pretty much do it, and it offers a lot of utility if you're willing to put in the time. Spiritism: "Mankind is the life of Etheirys. Each of us a drop of blood flowing through its veins, bearing sustenance." Every other Discipline works with Souls in some way, as in Fabula Ultima, Souls are the source of all magic. The Souls of the Elements, the Souls of Monsters... But Spiritism deals with the Souls of living things in general. Their emotions, their wills, their life, Spiritists provide both healing and harm in equal measure, and in some settings, people rightly fear them. Spiritism Rituals can put entire towns to sleep, sweep healing power over an entire battlefield, or reap Souls from the still living. Now for a general round-up on how spells work and how they're shown in the book. I think it's best described via image, because there's a reason images are used when trying to explain visual elements:  To do this whole casting a spell thing, you must be free to move your body. You don't have to have hands free, just your arms. You must be able to speak and pronounce the invocation, whatever that is for your character. You must have enough MP, including enough MP for the additional effects if you're using any. And unless you're casting a spell with the Self or Special targets, you have to be able to get line of sight on them. Which includes being able to see them at all. There's one other caveat: It is impossible in Fabula Ultima to subtly cast magic. When you cast, everyone around you will know someone is casting magic and who, because they can see the power swirling around you or whatever. You also need to make a Casting Check. What the roll is depends on the Discipline, but most of them use INS+WLP, while Chimerism spells get a choice between INS+WLP or MIG+WLP. The target's Magic Defense is the DL. If you succeed, the spell takes place, if you don't... It doesn't, but the MP is still spent. You can Crit or Fumble a spell like any other Check as well. If you're targeting multiple enemies with the same spell, you only need to make the Casting Check once among them, and they all take the same amount of damage as well. If a spell is not an Offensive spell (as before, marked by the lightning symbol), it doesn't require a casting check. You just succeed. Further, if the duration is Scene, you can end the effect at any time, rather than just on unconsciousness, leaving the Scene, or the Scene ending. If a spell leaves a lingering effect on a target, and you cast that spell again, the effects never stack. Instead you replace one effect with the other. For example, if you cast a Spell to give the Fury literal fists of fire, and then you use the same spell for a bolt effect instead, the bolt element overrides the fire element instead of making fists that are both on fire and have lightning. Sad, but true. In the same vein, if the same target is targeted by two different spells that have the same effect, they still don't stack. Nurse Cleric teams up with an Arcana to deliver some fun advice for how to describe magic!  Now, as for Rituals, generally you need to get a skill from a Class to perform Rituals of that Class's Discipline of magic, but this is practically always a level well-spent. Rituals are powerful and wide-reaching, and can have almost any effect you want. However, there are some stated limits to what Rituals can do:
 And to cast one, all you need are to figure out the Potency and Area of a Ritual, using Potency to get the base cost, and using Area to multiply by that amount for how much MP this'll cost you. How long the Ritual takes only matters narratively, there isn't a set time for them (unless you're trying to cast a Ritual in a Conflict Scene, more on that later. The Ritual is cast with a Casting Check, with the DL being listed on the Potency table. Succeed, and you get what you want. Fail, and... Bad poo poo happens. The GM decides what, but it's going to definitely be related to the Ritual's intended effect. You can do this Check as a Group, even if the characters helping don't have any Ritual Skill themselves, but they don't get to contribute MP. That's on the Group Leader, and the MP costs for these Rituals can be steep. That's the price you pay for power! But you can cut the MP costs in have if you have a rare or especially powerful ingredient, such as the liver of a dragon, or breaking a priceless artifact while performing the Ritual, but this can only be done once for each Ritual. No quartering the cost for you! The game has some sample Rituals here: Summoning a big globe of flame to destroy the engine of an airship is Elementalism, Major Potency, and Small area for a total of 80 MP and DL 13. If the Ritual fails, you trigger a firestorm instead and damage a LOT more than the engine. Or the Airship. Another one is Altering the flow of time to briefly restore the functions of a damaged device. This would be Entropism, Medium Potency, and Individual Area for 30 MP and DL 10. If it fails, the other mechanisms will crumble to dust from sudden aging, making the situation a lot worse. Now, when you're doing the voodoo that you do in a Conflict, you still determine the Ritual's Discipline, Potency, Area, MP cost, and DL as normal... But then instead of making the Check immediately, you create a Clock. The number of slices is determined by Potency: Minor has 4, Medium and Major have 6, and Extreme 8. Once the Clock is made, anyone can interact with it via the Objective action. The GM determines what attributes can be used for the Check, and of course it fills as normal as described before. Once the Clock is filled, the Caster can then spend an action to do the Casting Check, with the same aforementioned results as before as well. That's it for magic. Next time, we'll talk about inventories, money, and breaking the game with three simple steps. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Apr 13, 2023 |
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Apr 12, 2023 23:49
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Down With People posted:What if he just shoots Hovat? The book says that it's not over because there'll be someone else to fill his role, but I think that's shoddy design and I don't think it's true. I don't think cults of personality have a lot of staying power without the personality. Besides, if it's clear the PCs are willing to kill someone about this, are there really gonna be that many people who are eager to paint a target on their back? I've gotta disagree. There's a lot of examples of Cults who had a singular, charismatic leader surviving the death of that leader. By that point, generally everyone in the cult is obedient not to the leader, but to the Cult itself. Often, they fall apart when the leader dies, but actually, yea, a lot of the time someone else steps up to the plate and keeps it going. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure and persecution complexes.
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Apr 12, 2023 23:51
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Back we are again, and back to a topic of grave import: ECONOMY. Any adventurer needs to buy and sell, and any adventurer has money burning a hole in their pocket. What are you to do with it all? Well... If you're thinking about buying items, not super much given the abstraction of the inventory. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In Fabula Ultima, the basic unit of money is the Zenit, which is definitely a reference to Zenny/Zenni from Capcom-based games like Breath of Fire or Mega Man Legends. This is a game that likes to simplify, simplify, and it has that philosophy here too: While between nations or cities, the size and shape of a coin might vary, the Zenit is accepted anywhere at an equivalent rate of exchange no matter where you go. 5z pays for a decent meal, 10z can get a room at a basic inn, and 100z buys you a bronze shield. So how much are you supposed to get per adventure? Starting out at level 5, and going up to level 10, you're expected to get around 1000 Zenit per adventure for a party of four, so about 250 per PC. That said, if your encounters are properly challenging, expect Players to burn through their characters' IP, and at 10z per IP to replenish it, that's not exactly just pocket change. The average character, assuming no class choices that give more max IP, will have 6. That's 60 Zenit out of the 250 you get, and believe me, using all of it before you finish a dungeon or any other adventure is not at all uncommon. It should also be noted that later in the book, the GM's section says that this 1000z should be split up into useful items and gear, or IP replenishment, not just raw coin. It doesn't give guidelines on this except that from level 5-10, no item they get should be worth more than 500z. With IP expenditures and the fact that PCs will get items, they shouldn't really expect to take home much in the way of spending power unless they'd like to sell the items they get. This is... Fine. While a Zenit goes a long way, it feels like the PCs are usually broke, but swimming in valuable items to sell or equip. Speaking of equipment, let's talk item storage. Not everything can be just represented by IP. You keep things in a backpack, and the game doesn't care about tracking encumbrance or anything like that. It's assumed you have room for whatever a PC is stuffing in there, as long as it's not completely wild. The GM has final say and the ability to say that, no, you cannot stuff an entire live Chocobo in your backpack. That's mean. Don't do that to Chocobos. The backpack is also where stuff you make out of IP goes if they're not one-use. So what else can you carry? Well, you have four equipment slots: Armor, Main hand, Off-hand, and Accessory. Your main hand can hold a one-handed weapon, or a two-handed weapon, though the latter uses your off-hand as well. Your off-hand can hold a one handed item or a shield. Having something in both hands doesn't keep you from casting magic or using items, either. You might not be able to swing your greatsword with one hand, but you can HOLD it in one hand while pulling out an Elixir for your wounded buddy. If something is in your backpack, and you need it in conflict, you will need to spend an action getting it out. And, obviously, as so many JRPGs badger you about, any item, weapon, or armor that you do not have equipped do nothing. Okay? Don't forget to equip items, you dingus! Consumables using IP are always considered ready to use at a moment's notice, but if you make any other kind of item with IP, it's considered to be waiting in your backpack. Getting items is a matter of buying them in town, at least for basic equipment. However, there are special equipment and other items called Rare Items. Rare Items are the equivalent of magic items in other games, and while they can be bought in some of the biggest towns in shops that will ask for a good bit of money, they're usually found in dungeons, as rewards for quests, or beating up more powerful monsters. Rare Items run the gamut between "Just a knife but it does Dark damage instead of Physical" to "You will use this spear until the end of the campaign", and there are pretty well laid-out rules for creating them later in the book. The way I've seen it is that your PCs should eventually replace all their basic stuff with Rare Items, and get enough of the latter to have choices. Nurse Cleric has something to say about getting Rare Items:  I want to be clear, Nurse Cleric is not a title. Nurse is a title, and her name is Cleric. Yes, I just made this up, but I still want to be clear. We'll get to them later, but Fuel Knuckles kick rear end. They are easily, IMO, the best Brawling weapon in the game. Not because they're very powerful (though they are), but they're loving rad as hell. Anyway, provided you can find someone willing to buy an item, you'll sell it for about half its original price. Of course, if you're trying to sell lovely kobold weapons, no one is going to buy those unless they're desperate, and if they're desperate they probably don't have any money to give you for them. The GM is of course allowed to throw in a ruling that an item is worth as much as its listed value to someone, or less, and bartering is a good idea instead out just outright paying shop prices. Don't you wish you could do THAT in JRPGS? There's also a mention of Artifacts here, and Artifacts aren't really the equivalent of the items of the same name in D&D. Artifacts are some real poo poo. They're the kind of items that can completely change the course of a battlefield, win or lose a war, or even demolish entire nations. Obviously, PCs should never be allowed to buy or sell them, it would be like walking into a Wal-Mart and saying "hey I would like to return this nuke I totally bought from here". You won't get anything for it and it's more than likely the authorities will be coming by to ask some questions, probably after shooting you 13 times in the back.  This is not a nuke, nor is it likely to shoot you in the back, but it is cute. And relevant, because next we have services and transports! Generally, the prices listed for these will vary based on availability or the setting. Transports in particular can be hard to find in some places, easy in others. If you're playing in a FF7-esque magitech heavy world, you'd probably have a hard time finding a horse and cart, but a car would be pretty easy to come across. If you DO buy a cart, though, the horse is included in the cost, and you don't need to keep track of fodder, be it food or gasoline. Mounts also have no stats and will not do any fighting for you, but if you want an adorable Not!Carbuncle, you can gain one using a skill from the Wayfarer class.  I thought about explaining the difference between vehicle types like the book does, but I figured ya'll could... Probably figure it out. Now, back to equipment. Not everyone can use all equipment. While the Basic Equipment (in a moment) will be available to everyone to attain at character creation, and usually to buy in any town, it doesn't mean everyone can equip them. Items marked with a red, four-pointed star are Martial Items, and those are restricted to five different classes:
Accessories are always magical items and usually give some kind of unique benefit to the character that will be helpful, but not overwhelming. They're always Rare items. As an example, here's a pretty commonly received Accessory for martial characters:  Keep in mind that Rare items shouldn't be considered something you can't buy in a store. The GM should be careful as to what's available, and maybe the doomed hometown doesn't have anything other than basic swords, but surely the capital city of Fantasy Newfoundland has them. Here's how to read armor and shield entries in the equipment list:  Notably, a Defense or Magic Defense of 12 is very high at character creation, and basic enemies will have a hard time hitting someone so equipped. Notably, you almost never get a bonus to Initiative, but there are a lot of things that give penalties to initiative. If possible, you should always have the lightly armored characters with high DEX+INS be the group leader for Initiative Checks so you don't end up in situations where monsters are always going first. I'm sure the guy in heavy armor using a sword'n'board thinks they're the main character, but they're not winning any speed contests with their -4 Initiative.  Here's how weapons read on the tables. You do not need to keep track of ammunition for ranged weapons, mind, that's not how this game rolls. If you have a gun, you have bullets for it, no questions asked. Also, Unarmed Strike is on the Basic Equipment Table, but it's not something you buy. If you have nothing in one of your hands, they count as Unarmed Strike. Unarmed Strike kind of sucks; if you want to play a punchy martial-arts type character, invest in Brawling weapons. I won't post the entire weapons and armor tables, but I have some thoughts on them. First, some of the choices are just straight up superior. For example, DEX+INS is used for a good number of Checks. So much so that as a GM, I've more commonly just assigned some common actions that would fall under them to other Attributes. Tracking an enemy would be DEX+WLP, for example, rather than DEX+INS. But the commonality of such checks means that weapons that use DEX+INS are quite powerful merely because they allow a character to use those Attributes to their highest potential in and out of combat. That said, any weapon that lets you use a doubled-up Attribute, like bows (DEX+DEX) or Heavy Weapons (MIG+MIG) are generally going to be the real damage dealers in any given Party, simply because rolling 2d10 is going to usually have better results than 1d8+1d10. Also, ANY item which has an accuracy bonus is going to be really helpful, so... Basically just swords and daggers. And since you can dual-wield most swords and daggers, they're also great for that. Not being able to use your HR for off-hand weapon damage when dual-wielding doesn't seem as bad when you look at it as that you're basically just adding consistent +4 (for daggers) or +6 (for one-handed swords) to your damage. That's pretty drat substantial and a good argument for dual-wielding over using shields (though shields are in no way a bad choice. It's a pretty good trade-off). There are also 10 Categories of weapons, which doesn't really matter. As far as I know, no Skill or other Effect gives bonuses specifically to one category or another, though I might be wrong on that. Just in case, though, the 10 Categories are Arcane, Bow, Brawling, Dagger, Firearm, Flail, Heavy, Spear, Sword, and Thrown. Notably, Bows include Crossbows, which use DEX+INS, not DEX+DEX. The Arcane category includes Staves and Tomes, the former of which uses WLP+WLP and the latter uses INS+INS. As mentioned before, weapons that use the same Attribute twice are generally superior... Though this only really applies early game. If you build your character a certain way in character creation, you can get two Attributes at d10 right away (DEX and INS, right?) and at level 20, you get to improve an Attribute by one die size, so at that point you can handle a DEX+MIG weapon as proficiently as you can a MIG+MIG or DEX+DEX weapon. Assuming those are the attributes you improve, which they might not be if you're playing a character that's heavily magic-focused. As for armor, there's really not much to say about them, save that lighter armors tend to have better Magic Defense, and Heavier armors tend to have better Defense. But since your die size determines those as well, you could easily play an absolute tank starting with a Defense and Magic Defense of 12. The only real thing of note is that aside from cost (and the limitations of your starting funds), there's no reason for everyone to not tromp around in the heaviest armors they can possibly equip. Just have at least one PC be the designated Initiative roller in light or no armor, and you're golden. You can't actually afford the best armor and shield at character creation AND a weapon, either, so your 12/12 tank up there might just have to make due with punching until the Party gets some cash or the GM takes pity on them and just lets them have a weapon.  Have some pretty weapons before we move on to our next topic: Projects. Projects are the mundane/magitech version of Rituals. The Tinkerer class is necessary to start a project, but everyone can contribute to them when they're already underway. You can make a lot with projects, and with some magical backing, you can end up with some wild things indeed. Instead of posting the flow-chart, I'll explain how they work. First, you figure out what you want to do. Describe what the invention is, what you want it to do, what it might require, and the specific benefits (mechanical or narrative) you want it to provide. The GM tells you whether or not it's feasible to do what you want with what you have. If the project is complex enough, it might need to be split up into several smaller inventions that have to be developed on their own. Second, consult the Area, Potency, and Uses tables to figure out the invention's cost in materials. This must be paid upfront. No announcing a project, and then gathering what you need for it, you have to pay to play. If the potency is Medium or higher, the GM will also assign a special or unique ingredient for the process. This doesn't need to be delivered upfront, unlike the Zenit, you can go get it later. You just can't finish the Project without it. Players should not be able to walk their PCs' happy asses into the nearest town and buy this stuff, either. It should be interesting and rare, something they'll need to go on an adventure to acquire! Fourth, you can give the finished product a flaw. Talk it over with the GM, and if they find it's bad enough that it could actually have an effect on using the invention, it'll reduce the cost of the project by 25%. Players can also volunteer unique or special materials they might already possess, separate from the one that might be required, to drop the cost by an amount equal to the worth of the materials. This isn't considered part of the initial cost, but as something that can be thrown in later. Fifth, you must make a Clock with a number of slices equal to 100(x)/1, with 100 being 100z. For those of you not willing to do math right now (I don't blame you), that's 1 slice for every 100 Zenit the project costs overall, after discounts from flaws or special materials. Finally, at the end of each day spent working on a Project, you get 1 slice of the clock, called Progress, for PC who worked on it. You get an extra +1 from any PC with at least one level in Tinkerer, as well. When the clock is filled in entirely, the Project is over! Congratulations, you now have a magic broach/magitech motorcycle/loving airship. Yes. You read that right. A loving airship. Before we get too much into that, let's see the table for Area, Potency, and Uses.  As you can see, it's basically the same table as with Rituals, but with the added criteria of being either single-use or being infinite use. Notably, containing a demon permanently only costs 4000 Zenit. No wonder there's so many Sealed Evil In A Can in JRPGs, it's dirt cheap to seal away the ancient evil compared to the cost of life and resource from trying to kill them! Now, obviously, PCs are going to want to craft Rare Items, particularly ones that give them Resistances or Immunities. How do you quantify that? We got you, fam.  If an invention has different mixed types of effects, like giving resistance to an element, and doing damage on use, it should be split into multiple Projects as stated before. Oh, and...    Don't. loving. Do it. So if you want your invention to heal or deal damage, it uses basically the same rules as environmental damage explained in the last post. A Minor amount is 10 for every 20 or so levels, Heavy damage adds 20 to that, and Heavy deals 40 at level 5+, and 20 more every 20 levels after. I specifically mentioned, and the game specifically uses the language "you get +1 Progress for every PC that participates in the Project" but you can hire NPC helpers who give +1 Progress. You have to pay them half of the Project's total cost per person. This is a terrible idea. Do not do this. It's a lot of money for basically no real reward. And you will not need to do this. Believe me, it's not worth it compared to what you can do to this system. Nurse Cleric posted:If the character wants to create multiple copies of an invention, each is a separate Project. Turning inventions into easy-to-produce items will inevitably break the game. For Tinkerers who want to customize equipment, look at the Heroic Skill Upgrade (page 217). While this is very good advice, ma'am, I do not think you comprehend what is going on here. Let's take a step back for a moment. Just come over here, let's have a chat. Okay, so, I think we can all agree that crafting systems in TTRPGs come in two varieties: Terrible and Useless, or Terrible and Exploitable. The game does not make it very clear when multiple Projects are necessary, for one thing, so that's entirely GM fiat. But see, there's an issue with this crafting system, as there is in any TTRPG. And this one is actually immediately obvious if you give it any amount of thought. This is a "what were they thinking" magnitude of silly mechanics. It's simple! I like that! It's also busted as gently caress, and it will let you crack this game like a fresh egg into the frying pan of the Player's evil ingenuity. Don't believe me? I will demonstrate. From here, we will assume RAW, not RAI. We will ignore that a sane GM would never allow such chicanery without at LEAST some objections. Okay, let's start with a loving airship.  So, this is a huge project. This is the biggest, most expensive of all the sample projects in the game. It needs 60 Progress to complete. That is 60 days of work if it's just one person working on this... Well, no it's not, actually. And you probably already noticed why. Da Rules posted:Much like how spellcasters gain access to Ritual magic, characters with the Tinkerer Class may start Projects ... +1 Extra Progress for every Player Character with one or more levels in the Tinkerer Class who worked on the Project today. Uh... posted:+1 Extra Progress for every Player Character with one or more levels in the Tinkerer Class O-Okay, well, generally a party is 4 people, right? Assuming every single one of them has at least one level in Tinkerer, that's still 15 days, plenty of time to rehearse Toccata and Fugue in D Minor before the Villain realizes the PCs are up to something. We can just- Wait hold on what posted:
THERE IS NO MERCY HERE FOOL posted:If you happen to gather precious materials during your adventures, you may use them to pay for the costs of a Project. F... Five days... Tinkerer Class Skills posted:Visionary: When you work on a Project, up to 100 x the level of this Skill zenit of material costs are automatically paid; additionally, you generate an additional +1 of Progress for every level you have in this Skill. If multiple characters with this Skill work on the same Project, the effects will be cumulative.  The Villain posted:WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY BUILT A loving CRUISE LINER AIRSHIP IN ONE GOD drat DAY?! WITH WHAT?! ... IT ONLY COST THEM 1500 ZENIT?! WHAT THE gently caress THEY CAN MAKE THAT IN ONE AND A HALF ADVENTURES! ... Goodnight everybody! Join us next time as we go into Group Dynamics, and holy poo poo character creation thank god Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 00:51
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Maxwell Lord posted:That honestly just feels in genre. The silly and broken crafting rules that let you destroy a game if you know what you're doing? That's about right, yea. Usually in JRPGs though, you have to do some real thunk to break the game. Figure out what enemy drops this extremely rare material that you need to craft the best weapon for the MC in disc one, or maybe you need to interact with a side quest that gives you stuff you're not supposed to have yet, etc. Fabula Ultima's crafting system breaks itself in the pages it's described in. It's almost uncanny how this happens. There's no splatbooks involved, no weird courses of logic, no munchkin behavior or saying "well the book doesn't say I CAN'T do this". Everything you need to break the game is right there, and totally RAW. Maybe it was intentional. Another thing I should point out is that a lot of what I'm putting in these posts are just my own personal commentary. The book actually doesn't have very much information on each page, and the language is fairly concise and very easy to digest. These rules on Projects are just 4 pages, not counting the examples! The only part of the equation that's not baked in to the main rules themselves is Visionary, and since Tinkerers are required to start Projects, obviously a player will look over the skills. I haven't really gotten to this point yet, and we'll get into how Classes work very soon, but I'll just say that by RAW, you could build an airship that carries 50 people in 1 day for dirt cheap within two sessions of starting the game. 3-4 if you're still short on cash. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 10:28
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mellonbread posted:imgur is banning all NSFW content in one month. Like tumblr, this rules change is going to be enforced by bots and brain dead moderators, meaning a lot of non-explicit images are going to get removed. I’m pretty sure I’m safe, but I’m not 100% on that. I have an account, but it’s not a paid account. I assume a paid account is necessary to avoid being purged? There’s a project started here to archive EVERYTHING on SA that’s hosted on imgur, at least.
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Apr 21, 2023 14:12
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 I'm trying out postimages.org for this post, let's see how it works. Last we left off, we broke the game. Let's start this time with something a little more serious before we get into how to make a world and character for Fabula Ultima. Gorup Dynamics. Oh, I mean, Group Dynamics. Sorry, the bookmark for this page is misspelled in the original document. It's not a big deal, but it's something that makes me smile whenever I see it. In the off chance you're reading this, Emanuele, don't fix this. It's pretty great. So, what are group dynamics? It's basically a set of rules on how to behave as human beings. I wish we didn't have to have something like this in most TTRPG books, but sadly, we do. Fabula Ultima is a game about heroism, optimism, and fighting back against the tragic and dark nature of the world, not delving into such things and emphasizing them. But people are... People, so we're going to lay some ground rules here. First, mutual trust and respect. If you don't respect the people you play with, or vice versa, find a new group, full stop. This is where normally we'd say communicate, and that's good advice, but without the foundation of respect, no conversation will change anyone's mind. It's perfectly normal for people to get heated and emotional in dramatic moments. It's fine to get spooked by another Player's actions in-game, but be excellent to each other. There's no excuse not to. Second, this game and its fiction must not replace human interaction. This isn't talking about staying inside all day and doing nothing but playing Fabula Ultima with your friends. If that floats all your boats, do just that. No, this is about not letting IC actions dictate OoC ones, and vice versa. It's a game. We get into our games, we get invested in characters, and sometimes we might not like the people we're playing with right this moment. Maybe Dean pissed Rachel off when the former's character stabbed a guard that was just doing their job instead of knocking them out. But that doesn't mean Rachel should attempt to get even IRL. Never use the game as a tool for making a point or getting back at someone, and never use it as an excuse, either. If everyone is getting fired up about something, and it's not an issue of people respecting and caring about each other, take a breather. Take five. Relax, and come back to this with a more calm and open mind. Third, a familiar, common concept: Lines and Veils. While this concept may have been coined in Sex and Sorcery, that doesn't mean they can't apply to less sensual (or not, it'd be pretty weird for most of our tables I presume) things. They're good safety tools. Are there better? Arguably. But it's still a good setup, if nothing else. For those who don't know, when you're beginning a game (or after a session that made someone uncomfortable, or even in the middle, if it's that bad), everyone should be asked where their Lines are. When someone draws a line, they're saying they don't want a story element in the game at all. Period. Not even discussed. For example, if someone's line is slavery, there will be no slaves. On screen, off-screen, or even mentioning that a country you'll never go to practices slavery. If someone puts a veil over a topic, instead they're okay with the concept EXISTING, but not being explicitly described. In the last example, if someone puts a veil on slavery, they're fine with slavery being a thing in the world. It can influence character decisions, be something that is involved with backstories, but there won't be any explicit slavery on-screen. If you're playing with people you've never met before, Lines and Veils are a really useful way of defining what is and isn't okay (and what's sorta okay) before you ever start running a game with them. But it's also useful even with people you know very well. Being close to someone doesn't mean you should violate their boundaries, or vice versa. This is important: When using Lines and Veils, or any other safety system, it is no one's business why someone draws a line or puts a veil on a topic. It doesn't need to be explained and the person who doesn't want something in the game doesn't owe anyone an explanation. If it's a total deal-breaker for a group, well, that's why this is done before a game begins. Better to shake hands and find a new player than to try to force someone to do what they're not comfortable with for your own sake. There are plenty of players out there, trying to make a point about someone's boundaries is a lovely thing to do all around. This section is at the end of the rules, instead of the beginning of character creation. I didn't like that at first, but after thinking about it, it makes total sense. These aren't suggestions. These aren't just good ideas. These are part of the rules, and probably the most important ones saved for last. That all said, let's move on to- Wait hold on we're not done okay PvP: Don't. But if you do... Don't. Okay, though if you end up in a situation where two PCs are bumping heads and there's no sensical method in the story to make them put up and shut up, first let the Players try to resolve it. If they can't, the GM needs to moderate. Decide this with an Opposed Check. Do not roll ANYTHING until everyone understands the stakes and what will happen of someone wins this roll or loses this roll. There can be no argument about the results once it's done. The dice have spoken, and Dread Arrengee must be propitiated for the good of Secrets: Sometimes, it's dramatically appropriate for PCs to keep secrets from one another. Listen, that's cool. Having secrets is a good thing for the story. But while as cool as someone might think it'd be if they temporarily switched sides because they're in love with the Villain, that has a great track record of obliterating trust at the table, and that in turn kills the table. Be open and frank about your secrets. If someone can't keep OoC knowledge OoC, they don't need to be playing TTRPGs. This is a collaborative game, as any TTRPG, and while I don't agree with the book on this point 100%, being a lone wolf OoC is just as bad as being one IC. Lone wolves aren't cool. They're cringe. And I use that word completely unironically. Deal. Leaving the Group: Sometimes, a character's arc is finished, and you don't know what to do with them anymore. You can always retire the character! A new character with the same level and XP can be made for this, and though the book doesn't say, I'd say allow them an amount of Zenit to spend equal to what their other character had in item's worth, AND what's on their sheet. Fair is fair, and Rare Items are part of a character as much as their stats and skills! If you want to bring a character back because you changed your mind, or feel it'd be relevant, just build them up to match the rest of the group and come up with a reason why they're coming back IC too. No big deal! We're here to have fun. But if you have multiple PCs, you can only play one at a time! More than that is unfair for the GM, who should be having fun too. Absent Players: No one really likes dealing with this, but it happens. Jodie has an important event coming up. Ren is cramming for finals. Derik just isn't feeling it today. It sucks. It happens. The Player should decide what happens next, if everyone agrees that rescheduling isn't something they want to do. Either they'll Join You Later, in which case their character stays safelyt in town with all their items and does whatever behind the scenes, and they'll meet up with the group (hopefully to save the day!). They should describe what they were doing while away from everyone, and how they got back with them when the Player comes in again. The other option is I'll Be In Your Care, where the PC becomes a sort of NPC everyone in the party (EXCEPT the GM) can play as. They cannot spend Fabula Points and will automatically Surrender if they hit 0 HP, but the GM should think twice about applying Surrender penalties to someone who wasn't even around to make decisions. The Party needs to protect them, and the GM should understand this character is not a toy. Regardless, the character cannot gain Fabula Points from a session while the Player is absent, but they DO get EXP (and their own proper share of the loot!)  As an apology for the walls of text, have this lovely full-page art!  Chapter Three: Press StartHere we are! We did it! It's time to start this sucker! Let's get into this with Session 0! ... Let's not. We know what Session Zero is. Right? C'mon. Ugh, fine. Session Zero is when everyone gets together for a meeting, to discuss what they want to see in the setting, what they DON'T want to see in the setting, and what the campaign is going to be about. What the themes are! The GM needs to get to know characters, and the Players need to get to know each other if they don't already. There's also when you're going to meet up. The day and time. Best to have a schedule here, and get that pain out of the way first. If you can't all make it at one time, maybe one of you needs to find another group. Again, best to learn that now. It's also when you decide what optional rules you want! The GM does NOT have final say in this situation. If the GM wants to include an optional rule that makes things harder for the Players, and they don't want that rule, tough poo poo. You're outvoted. The basics aside, though, Session Zero in Fabula Ultima is a little special: The GM doesn't make the world alone, no, the Players are involved too! Here's how- Schmuck the Player, holding everyone up posted:Wait! I changed my mind! I want to change this! Anyway, you'll now need a World Sheet and a Map Sheet. Character sheets for the World and Map, you say?! What is this madness?! They have a world sheet here, and there are two map sheets inside it. There's also a couple fanmade ones over on updootland. The Players and GM all work together to make a world. How the Eight Pillars apply to it, what it looks like, where major cities or landmarks are, but special attention to these three things:  seriously that culture sounds rad as gently caress So we have a flowchart here, and I'm worried that I'm not stuffing enough images here, and it means I don't have to type as much, so, gently caress it.   This is the 50th image in this writeup, not counting the Header. I really should have thought about this milestone harder. Is your table an entire group of Flat-Earthers? Well, since you decided to escape your fantasy land to another fantasy land, this game has your back! You can totally make this world flat! Once you've decided whether your world is round, a torus, or specs of memory floating in an infinite void (does anyone else agree a game in the Loop Hero setting would be really cool), grab a map sheet that works for you... Or make your own! Of course, it should be a collaborative effort, and if you don't mind playing a game in order to play your game, The Quiet Year is a phenomenal way to set up a campaign. I've done it for a Pokerole game and an Exalted game, and the players loved it. So did I. Go buy The Quiet Year. Now. Ahem. You need to decide what a Travel Day is, too. If you're using a hex-grid on your map, how many miles/kilometers a hex contains is important. After that, decide the roles for magic and technology. They're almost always at odds, in JRPGs, and maybe you want that. Maybe you don't. But deciding the general tech level of the setting is important anyway. Now we got NATIONS. Where's the Empire? What's this over here with this giant tree? Hey, do we want a desert nation in here? Everyone needs to contribute at least one nation to this, and everyone should talk about how these nations feel about each other. There's no need to go whole hog, but some details about their culture and the people (and monsters) who live there can go a long way to making the world feel more alive. Are there some historical events? Hell yes, there are, and all of them involved a guy named Urist. Come up with some of these. They need to be important enough that they really changed the world. Everyone knows about them unless they're under a rock. Everyone could name them and shudder at the remembrance. But then we get some known unknowns. Every world, even ours, has mysteries. What do people in the world wonder about? What prophecies are there (that are always 100% true) and myths in the world (that were actually performed by super advanced and long dead cultures)? Finally... What in the world wants to destroy it? You're playing a JRPG in TTRPG form, there's gonna be a couple, and they probably have tragic backstories they'll be happy to monologue at you about. A common theme through all these steps is that every Player has a voice, and needs to use it. This is a game where you all make a story together, so everyone needs to... Do that. But if someone at the table can't decide, or has a hard time being put on the spot, this game has a bunch of tables to roll randomly on for them, or to pick and choose from. Hell, pick ALL of them, the book wants to say that all these things can coexist on the same world. Especially:   Now, you make a GROUP. The Group is an important concept but not really. It's what brings your characters together, and how the Players want to end up exploring the world, but some of them are just bad ideas. Being Brought Together By Fate is cool, it's pretty standard JRPG (hell RPGs period) stuff, but Guardians? It says one of the PCs is a Chosen One, and the other Players are their bodyguards. This is a dumb idea. I like FFX. I really do. But it is not really possible to make a TTRPG Campaign around unless you have some Players who can really handle this concept. Making a PC the Chosen One is a recipe for disaster. Heroes Of The Resistance and Revolutionaries seem to be the same thing: Underdogs of a desperate fight against a greater evil. It doesn't even try to make a distinction between Imperialism and sadistic demonic forces of hell, which is good because there isn't any anyway. Seekers is interesting, in that it presents a somewhat darker scenario: You're a group of people all looking for something that may be the world's last hope. All of these have clarifying questions to ask, to help flesh out the world yet more, and the situation the PCs are in. They're all fairly basic: Brought Together By Fate includes exactly the questions you'd think it does: What emotional or familial connections exist between your characters (Who is secretly who's sister), Have your characters met in the past and are there rivalries from those times, and What do you all have in common for beliefs, enemies, or past experiences? ... This sounds less like a JRPG and more like Stephen King's IT (specifically the one starring Tim Curry, didn't really like the newer one on account of not having Tim Curry). Once you've got your group set up, here we are. Character Creation. For all the build up to it, Character Creation is actually very simple. You can probably bang out a character in ten minutes if you know what you're looking for already. If you're new to the game, you can probably make one in half an hour to an hour. So how do you do this? We have another flowchart, but in the legendary words of The Closer, gently caress That. Let's do this the hard way. First, Identity! I talked about this before, but think of it as like the Core/High Aspect in Fate. This is a short sentence that describes your character, except none of the examples are sentences, they're sentence fragments. An Identity is specifically who they are as related to what they DO, their position in the world. Some examples:  don't halfass this be a no-eye samurai this game doesn't have penalties for being blind Identity is extremely important, because everything about your character builds off of it. If you're a Royal Knight, that will decide a lot of things. You're probably honorable, you probably have several levels in Guardian, your Bonds likely involve Loyalty somewhere, even if it's to someone who isn't alive anymore. It also can be Invoked to reroll dice in Checks, which is way better than Invoking Bonds. Identity might change over the course of a game, because... People change. They develop and transform (sometimes literally) into a new person, with a new outlook on life. Next is your Theme. The suggested themes I posted before are also here. These are a strong emotion or moral that guides them. Like Identity, it can be Invoked for rerolls, and like Identity, it can change over time. Finally, your character's Origin is literally where they're from. This is a big part of why Nations were already built: you probably have a good idea of where you want your character to be from. Just like the last two, this can be Invoked for rerolls. Next, you start with five levels. Time to put them places. You need to pick 2 or 3 classes, you can't put all your levels in one Class, or have them all spread over five different classes. There are fifteen classes, so there's something for everyone, and there's already been playtest materials for at least 6 more! Just check with your GM before you start putting levels in classes that aren't even ready for full-release yet! The 15 Classes are:
Next, your Attributes. DEX, INS, MIG, and WLP. There are three methods here: Jack of All Trades, which gives you d8s across the board, Average, which gives a d10, 2 d8s, and a d6, and Specialized, which gives 2 d10s, and 2d6s.  Looks like she's picked Average! Now, we calculate HP and MP. They both use the same formula, but for different stats: HP is equal to your total character level, plus MIG times 5, + any HP from Classes. MP is the same thing, but WLP instead of MIG. Your Crisis score is equal to half your HP, rounded down. Important for some effects and Skills. If for any reason MIG or WLP get their dice size reduced, this does not effect max or current HP or MP! Your IP is also in this step, and it's probably six. I think only two Classes increase this. Second to last are your other derived stats. Defense is your DEX die size, Magic Defense is your INS die size, but they both might be modified by armor. Initiative is 0, and is almost certainly modified by your armor. Very little increases Initiative, but a lot decreases it. So like I said, keep a party member around in light or no armor for Initiative Checks! Finally, spend money. You can buy anything from the basic equipment tables. You can buy anything you want from there, but keep in mind that your Class might actually not have access to some Martial Equipment. 500 Zenit doesn't go a long way, if you want to afford the best basic armor and shield, you will only have 50 Zenit left over... Which can't buy any of the weapons on the table. Splurging on a really good weapon will likewise mean you can't afford any good armor. Neither is a bad choice, mind you, they're just tradeoffs. If you want to buy any Rare Items or Transports, talk it over with the rest of the party so they can cover your useless rear end with a motorcycle but no armor or weapons. Whatever you have left over is added to a roll of 2d6*10 for your starting Zenit (which you can then immediately spend on the armor or weapons you didn't get). Everyone starts with 3 Fabula Points, and bam! You have a character! Well, don't forget to assign them a name, description, and pronouns! Next time, we'll go into classes. Expect me to have a lot to say about the first one, and none of it is good. The others are all great though!
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Apr 24, 2023 01:00
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Leraika posted:It actually doesn't surprise me at all, and that's one of the reasons I suggested Ed. “It’s a lympho-lympho-cytey-cyte!” SkeletonHero posted:Can we make the spaceship equivalent of this truck? These are the best kinds of spaceships. Finnicky, lovely, and only the crew of it know how to make it work. Everyone else is amazed it can even run. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 02:08
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 Hello again, everyone! Today, we'll be exploring CLASSES. They're quite simple, but quite fun. There are a few things we should get into before discussing classes, and I'll start it off with a brief recap of how Classes work, along with some new information we haven't actually learned yet, but probably should have been told before we made any characters. Every Class consists of Free Benefits, generally consisting of an HP or MP bonus, and you only get it once when you first take the Class. They also have five skills, each one gained via a level on a 1-1 basis. Some of these skills can be taken multiple times for stacking effect. You must take at least 2 Classes at character creation, or a maximum of 3. The new information: When you take 10 levels in any one Class, you get the skill you chose, as well as a Heroic Skill. A Heroic Skill is a very powerful skill, either chosen from a list later in the book, or worked out between you and the GM. After getting this Heroic Skill, You may never take another level in this Class again. So even if you have multiple PCs at level 150, the highest possible level in the game, none of them will likely be exactly alike. Even with having taken every Class, they would still have different Skills amongst them! It also bears mentioning that when you level up, you get +1 Max HP and MP. It doesn't sound like a lot, but at the rate you're supposed to level up in this game, it'll add up quickly. At the end of the section from last post, I skipped over a list of Classic Characters, which are easy, pre-made builds meant to represent character archetypes commonly seen in JRPGs. There's a lot on this list, but only ONE of them involves the first class, Arcanist, suggesting that the developer at least had some insight into one of the problems with it. I've mentioned this multiple times, so let's get on with it. Instead of immediately ranting about how bad Arcanist is, I will first display it in the format I intend to display every Class from now on. I haven't decided yet if I want to show every spell in the game: There's not a WHOLE lot, each "caster" Class has about two pages of spells, but it might get monotonous. Thoughts on that would be welcome. Some notes: SL stands for Skill Level. If you see something like [SL x 2], that means the skill's effect is multiplied by 2 for every Skill Level you have. If I put a number in parentheses next to a skill's name, that is the maximum number of times the skill may be taken, if it may be taken multiple times. Without further ado:  Questions to ask yourself: Where do your powers come from? Are they a gift from your bloodline? Have you ever communicated with an Arcanum, or are they silent and distant? Do people see you as mysterious, powerful, or otherworldly? Are there many practicing your art, or are you the exception? Arcanist free benefits: Permanently increase your maximum MP by 5. Arcanist Skills: Arcane Circle (4): After you willingly dismiss an Arcanum on your turn during a conflict, if that Arcanum had not been summoned during this same turn and you have an arcane weapon equipped, you may immediately perform the Spell action for free. The spell you cast this way must have a total MP cost of [SL x 5] or lower (you must still pay the spell's MP cost). Arcane Regeneration (2): When you summon an Arcanum, you immediately recover [SL x 5] HP. Bind And Summon: You may bind Arcana to your soul and summon them later. The Game Master will tell you the details of each binding process when you first encounter the Arcanum in question. You may use an action and spend 40 Mind Points to summon an Arcanum you have bound: the details of this process are explained on the next page. If you take this Skill at character creation, you begin play with one Arcanum of your choice already bound to you, chosen from the list on the next pages. Other than that, you may only obtain new Arcana through exploration and story progression. Emergency Arcanum (6): As long as you are in Crisis, the cost for summoning your Arcana is reduced by [SL x 5] MP. Ritual Arcanism: You may perform Rituals of the Arcanism discipline, as long as their effects fall within the domains of one or more Arcana you have bound. Arcanism Rituals use WLP+WLP for the Magic Check. Thoughts: Arcanist's big thing is that they have Arcanum, which are basically summons. It costs 40 MP to summon one, and they (usually) have benefits you get from just having the Arcanum around, called a Merge Effect. But the real show comes from Dismissing an Arcanum. This happens in multiple ways: If you get knocked to 0 HP, the Arcanum is Dismissed. If you leave a Scene with the Arcanum or the Scene ends, they are Dismissed. You may also Dismiss your Arcanum yourself, which doesn't require an action, but it must be done during your turn, either before your action or after. Why would you do this? Most Arcanum have a specially powerful effect when Dismissed, generally a big boom or some other powerful effect, like healing everyone or slowing down time. Not all Arcanum have a Merge or Dismiss effect, but most of them do, and all of them have at least one of the two. Arcanist specializes in delivering powerful effects that cover an entire battlefield, and also out of battle utility. Among some of the Arcanum they have allow for a free teleport, or to just pop a random weapon out of nowhere that does Fire damage. Play an Arcanist if you want to be good at absolutely nothing that another Class can't do better, or if you want to be an active detriment to any character build. You maybe? posted:Wait, you just said they get to do massive damage, or TELEPORT, those are pretty great benefits! Another issue with the class is a nitpick more than anything: Trying to approach this from a newbie's perspective, and it could conceivably be confusing that no Caster can actually cast spells unless they take the specific Skill that allows them to do so. However, every other Caster has Skills that give them fun toys outside of what their spell list includes... Arcanists do not. Every single one of their Skills is based on enhancing their summoning. Nothing else. A newbie could stumble into this class and come out with something utterly worthless because they can't do the one thing all their Skills allow them to do. Granted, this would only create confusion, at worst, up to the first time where the Player tries to summon something, but it's still a problem, because... All their Skills merely enhance their Summoning. This is a game where multiclassing is not a suggestion, or a neat thing you can do, it is required by both RAW and RAI. The entire point is to build a character from the Skill lists of various Classes to make something cool and unique. Arcanist has nothing to offer any other Class, unlike any other Class. All it has is summoning. But wait, you might say, it has SUMMONING, that's enough, right? No. It isn't. Summoning is loving terrible. It costs 40 MP to summon an Arcanum. To put that into perspective, the most MP you can have at character creation is 70. 50 from having d10 WLP, 5 from having five levels to start with, and 15 from having three different Classes that give +5 MP as a Free Benefit. You can summon. Once. As a starting Arcanist, and then you have to use 3 IP to pop out a Tonic for more MP to do it again, and that's a waste of IP because you would be regaining 40 MP from an item that restores 50 MP. And what can you do with that 40 MP? Well, let's look at the first Arcanum on the list:  For 40 MP, you get to have Resistance to fire damage, and your fire damage ignores Resistances. That's pretty neat, except that you need your MP for summoning. You don't have MP to waste casting spells. At best, you Summon, cast a single spell for 10 MP, and then at least you didn't waste half your IP on an item that overheals your MP. There are two Dismiss effects: The first is to create one piece of basic equipment that does fire damage if it's a weapon, and you can use it or give it to someone else. Whoopdeedoo. You're spending MP instead of Zenit to make a basic item that a Tinkerer could also pop out, make better, and for so dirt cheap that it may as well have cost nothing. Technically, it takes a day for a Tinkerer to make something, but if you want basic equipment that does Fire damage instead of Physical, a Tinkerer with only two levels in Visionary can make it for free, whereas the 3 IP you just spent on that Tonic costs 30 Zenit. Good for you. The other Dismiss Effect is not... BAD? I guess? Keep in mind the absolute weakest enemies in the game have at least 40 HP. Unless they're weak to fire, this won't kill any of them. And you have spent 40 MP to do 30 damage. For a comparison, with their most basic Fire spell, even if they somehow had a HR of 0(which is impossible for casters), Elementalists do 15 Fire Damage for 10 MP. For 10 MP. And that's an impossibly low amount of damage for an Elementalist to do, literally. Not proverbially, actually literally. To hit anything in the book, their HR on a Magic Check has to be at least 3 (the lowest Magic Defense of any monster in the book is 6), so at an absolute minimum, the Elementalist did 18 Fire damage in one spell for 10 MP, and they can spend up to 30 MP to attack up to 3 targets. For the same amount of MP as summoning any Arcanum that does damage as a dismiss effect, the Elementalist has done 72 damage. Minimum. You need 3 enemies to be hit to do more damage than the Elementalist's barest-minimum, and that's technically because you're just hitting more things with the same flat 30 damage. Want to be a Caster that summons on the side? No you don't. The amount of MP it takes to summon would be better spent on casting the basic damage spells for each of them. The utility you get from it could be duplicated just by using Arcanism Rituals. The only remotely useful Arcana are the one that lets you teleport, the one that lets you answer a single (truthfully answered) question of the GM (who is free to literal genie the question), and the healing one, and that last one is questionable as to whether it's actually more effective than a Spiritist. See above for why you'd just rather cast spells than summon. Want to be a Martial that summons on the side? No you can't. The amount of MP it takes to summon is more than most Martials will have at all, and the ones that will have enough need MP for a lot of their martial Skills. Why would you summon something that makes you marginally more effective for the cost of not being able to use the Skills that make you better than just some schmuck with a sword? At least not without spending half your IP to do so? Oh, they have a Skill that reduces their MP cost, sure, but... You have to be in Crisis to use it, and a Arcanist is most likely not going to have more than 35-40 HP. Which means in Crisis, one solid hit puts you out of the fight. To effectively exploit this, you'd need your other party members to repeatedly take hits for you until your GM has enough of that nonsense and spams AoEs at you. And to be worse, the effects that Arcanum can provide with their Dismiss effects, like the Teleport or Oracular question, can be duplicated with Rituals. The Ritual rules specifically say you cannot duplicate a Spell or Skill effect, and Arcanum Effects, whether Merge or Dismiss, are explicitly not Spell or Skill effects (as a side note this also means that any effect that lowers the MP cost of Spells or Skills do not work on summoning). The Ritual section even says you can use a Ritual to... Teleport, which negates any argument that this is a cheap, intentionally exploitative interpretation of the rules. Arcanism is a really powerful Ritual spell discipline, but it's also hampered by the fact that you can only perform Rituals related to the domains of Arcanum you have bound... And... Well, the GM is in control of that. To summarize, Arcanist has no synergy with any other Class in a game that is all about synergizing; it has nothing to offer any other Class, and it really has nothing to even offer itself. To make Arcanist decent, it would take a good amount of homebrewing, enough that doing so would be kind of time-consuming and really annoying to balance. The worst thing is, Arcanist is worse than I previously believed, because I got things switched up. On my original read, I thought it was 30 MP to summon, and 40 damage on damaging Dismiss effects. Even that is still worse than an Elementalist casting Explosion, but it was at least capable of contending in damage by ending minor encounters instantly, saving the rest of the Party resources. But... It's the other way around. And that's terrible. TL;DR: Arcanist is trash. Forget it exists unless you're ready to homebrew an entirely new Class. If someone has ideas for how and why I'm wrong, I welcome it. Please just be respectful about it. The rest of the classes, I promise, are well-designed and fun to play. Since I spent so much time bitching about Arcanist, I'll only do one more more Class today, since I'm nearing the end of the time I have tonight: Chimerist.  Questions to ask yourself: Who taught you the art of Chimerism? Is your mentor human or monstrous? Can people and monsters live in harmony, or are they bound to threaten each other? What does your magic look like? Are there many practicing your art, or are you the exception? Free Benefits: Permanently increase your maximum MP by 5. You may perform Rituals whose effects fall under the Ritualism Discipline. Chimerist Skills: Consume (5): After you deal damage to one or more creatures with a Spell, if you have an arcane, dagger, or flail weapon equipped, you recover [SL x 2] MP. Feral Speech: You can communicate with creatures of the beast, monster, and plant species. Pathogenesis: When you deal damage to one or more creatures with one of your Chimerist spells, each of those creatures that share their species with the creature you originally learned that spell from suffers Poisoned. Ritual Chimerism: You may perform Rituals whose effects fall within the Chimerism discipline. When you acquire this Skill, choose INS+WLP or MIG+WLP. From now on, your Chimerism Rituals will use the chosen Attributes for the Magic Check. Spell Mimic (10): When you see a creature belonging to the beast, monster or plant Species cast a spell, you may immediately choose to learn that spell as a Chimerist spell of your own: if you do, record the Species of the creature you learned it from. When you first acquire this Skill, choose INS + WLP or MIG + WLP. From now on, your offensive Chimerist spells will use the chosen Attributes for the Magic Check, regardless of the Attributes used by the creature you learned the spell from. You may have up to [SL + 2] different Chimerist spells memorized this way. If you want to memorize a new Chimerist spell but are already at your limit, you must forget one of your old spells and replace it with the new spell. Thoughts: Pathogenesis is also super good. Poisoning enemies basically for no effort means a lot, especially since a lot of NPC spells also inflict Status Effects... As a reminder, Poisoned can stack with Dazed and Weak, so this can be extra powerful and effectively neuters some Enemies, especially ones that rely on raw MIG or WLP. The fact that a Chimerist is generally going to end up with a good variety of spells from all three species they can effect with Pathogenesis means that it's almost always relevant, too. Chimerism Rituals seem limiting at first, because there's only so much you can do with animal themes. Until you realize that PLANTS are also under the influence of Chimerism, and then the utility becomes more than doubled. Chimerism Rituals generally focus on enhancing the self in some way, but they're also good for creating impromptu stampedes, or covering a fort in gigantic vines. When it comes to Spell Mimic, I want to point out that it's the only "Casting" Skill in the game that gives multiple Spells (well, possible spells) for the price of one level; All other Casters only get Spells on a 1-1 basis. This means a Chimerist can put only 1-2 SL into their Casting skill and still be very effective. That they can forget spells for new ones also means they have a lot of potential to evolve to fit a situation... Fitting for their theme. Finally, despite not getting an HP increasing Free Benefit, Chimerists are equally at home as Martials as they are as pure Casters. Being able to use MIG+WLP for their Chimerism Rituals and Spell Mimic means a lot. One of the biggest Physical damage dealers among my current players is a Chimerist that sports a giant gently caress-off hammer (using the stats for a Greataxe), in fact, and that PC has no Skills from any Martial Class. The only issue here is that one you have chosen which one you use for both, you cannot change them if you'd rather evolve into a pure Caster, or into a Martial Hybrid. You have to pick one, and stick with it. TL;DR: A good Class that can do almost anything well. It has solid Rituals, three really good Skills, and while one might think their Spell list is inherently limited by the GM, in practice they'll fill up their spell list fast. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 01:02
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Kinda blows for the poor Arcanist, I feel like that's a really iconic role of JRPG land. They do start with one, the Bind And Summon Skill mentions this. I like the idea of the Merge effects, so Arcanists get something just from having them around, it makes them feel less like just another caster. It's just a pity that almost all the Merge effects are "something someone else can do but worse". PurpleXVI posted:One issue I had with the classes of Fabula Ultima was that it honestly felt like a decent bit more options were added for the various casters than the martials, since each of them had a spellbook and a handful of abilities., while most of the martials just had the handful of abilities. That's not really an issue in Fabula Ultima, though, since you're not really ever an Elementalist, or a Darkblade. There's no reason you can't do both very well, due to how Classes work and how simple Attributes are. Need a Darkblade that can cast Elementalist spells well? No problem, just create via Jack of All Trades, put your d10 in either MIG or WLP, and your d8s in INS and whatever you didn't pick for your d10. Boom, you have that. Linear Warrior Quadratic Wizard isn't an issue in a system where you can be both, and in fact are encouraged to be.
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Apr 27, 2023 10:21
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PurpleXVI posted:Sure, you can just choose to be half a wizard, but what if I want to be all martials? I just felt a bit let down by it. I suppose that's fair, even if I don't agree. You CAN be all Martial, if you want. Which is to say, you can only take skills from Martial Classes. They're fun, useful, and the Caster/Martial divide in this game is very narrow simply because most spells do a variant of "do x damage and maybe inflict status effect" instead of "literally make clones of yourself" or something. Not to mention Casters usually only get one spell per skill point, so they have to choose between their fun skills that give them interesting abilities, or more spells. In theory, it looks like Casters get more options, but in practice, they don't. Martial Classes in this game are good, and they're well-worth playing without magic. But I'd also challenge the idea of "Martial" in this game, because almost every Martial (I think Guardian is the only one that doesn't) has clearly magical abilities. Does it make you a hybrid if you take one level in Entropist to get Lucky Seven for your Martial, when Rogue has the ability to steal souls? If what you mean is that you want to play a character that has no magical abilities whatsoever, just uses weapons, then the problem isn't with Fabula Ultima, the problem is that Fabula Ultima isn't the game for you (which I believe you've already stated anyway). Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 10:44
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