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Speaking of shadowrun, 2e had firearms use the "exploding dice" thing that happens with edge in Shadowrun. So any die that roll max was added and then rerolled, without limit.
Dungeons and Dragons Megathread
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The Narrator
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Older editions of Shadowrun had that as the norm. It was the only way to hit Target Numbers of 7 or higher when you were rolling D6s.
Shadowrun, like many RPGs (White Wolf games, Savage Worlds and FATE, off the top of my head) would increase your damage based on how good your attack roll was, to allow for the "I can kill shit because I'm a badass" factor.
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
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Ah, good to see it done properly. Although with billions of d6 in damage, you're better off giving a flat number in scientific notation.
Hmm... Going by this, you can neatly model damage falloff as losing two dice each time distance from detonation point doubles. Or have a less-mathy approximation of it by having it lose one damage die every so many feet, which accomplishes the reality after the first two or three range "brackets."
In the particular case of nuclear weapons, their energy yield actually doesn't quite follow this pattern due to some rather exotic effects involving radiation absorption and heat conduction at those scales. Towards the center, it's far worse than the normal blast falloffs. Even with normal blast falloffs, the fireball's heating damage messes with the neat geometric falloff by having an area of thermal damage that falls off differently from
...Huh, I was under the impression that the Repeating Crossbows were lower damage than the regular ones, and recalled the Repeating Heavy as 1d10... Fucking Exotic Weapons being shitty for their cost.
See, the reason why stuff like that is largely absent is because precise attacks are usually modeled by Critical Hits in d20 systems. When they aren't, it's a class feature like Sneak Attack. It's basically never a thing you can just get. Of course, if you have a Called Shot system where you take penalties for added effects or improved damage, then you can just make Critical Hits into post-facto Called Shots, letting you decide that you actually aimed for a major artery with that attack for a -4 to the roll... After you've already gotten a roll 6 higher than needed. Makes criticals into something a little less exciting because they offer nothing unique, but also less... boring. And more able to have builds around it because they get attached to a system that can have builds optimized for it.
One of my ideas for making D&D considerably less all or nothing is using a homebrew that intends to models the average of casting spells numerous times. Up to sixty times per round, in fact. The gist of it is that the save DC is actually fixed, but passing the save halves the damage, thenreduces the damage by one more die per point the save passes by.
Translating this to Martial weapons, you get -2 to -4 damage for each point the attack roll fails by, with a total miss if Touch AC is not passed. This automatically makes high damage weapons into armor-piercing, as they have the damage for something to get through on a too-low attack roll. It also means that Strength can do nothing for attack rolls and instead gives +3 to +5 damage per point, causing under-rolled attacks to deal damage as if the attack roll was larger and making damage go up significantly faster. A neat -2 per point of failure and +2 per point of Strength would make it entirely even. And this removes the silliness of super-strong berzerkers(complete bullshit strength, like a +15 modifier) with 8 Dexterity managing to hit someone with 5 more Touch AC than they have BAB on top of having +5 Full Plate every single time because of Strength increasing Attack rolls. Sure, Dex becomes more of a god stat, but it also means that only Touch AC prevents actually being hit.
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I'll note that 2e had firearms ignore the portion of the target's AC that came from physical armor or shields. So they were essentially what would later be called touch attacks.
Dakkaface
Extra Shooty Wordsmith
"The apparent theme of 5e is "forever level one" is in fact, 5e specific.
You dropped a one liner bashing 5e, he issued a riposte using your one liner's structure to bash 2e. You elaborated on the riposte, trying to elucidate why that isn't a flaw in your eyes, while not understanding that his intent was to point out that you're throwing stones from the porch of your glass house. Therefore his follow up message is a 'Just stop bashing 5e.' so as to be clear. The conversation thread is easily understandable to me.
The best hack for handling small arms in d20 I've seen is to make them ranged touch attacks that do an ordinary weapon range (d4 to 2d6) but do direct Con damage. This is means that everyone goes down in a few shots, though most weapons will take at least two without a crit. They're are utterly useless against things without a Con score, like incorporeal undead. DR still applies though, so things that have 5-10 DR can wade through gunfire while taking only minor damage, while ancient dragons will shrug off small arms entirely and require heavier ordnance to put down. You can also put greater or lesser amounts of DR piercing effects on weapons and ammo, so it's not all or nothing like DR10/silver, but you have AP ammo do it goes down to DR8 and you get a partial benefit, not the full benefit of having the weakness material.
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Other than Mage's Disjunction, is there a way to make a caster lose access to magic?
My players in the Second Darkness campaign want to decompress the time line of events a little, so I want to find a good reason for the "big bad", to use that term, to not harry them for a while. Having him lose magic and have to do rituals and such to get his casting back seems like a good way to eat up time and not feel like he just spontaneously quit harrying them.
But I can't think of any ways to make it happen that aren't out of the blue.
My players in the Second Darkness campaign want to decompress the time line of events a little, so I want to find a good reason for the "big bad", to use that term, to not harry them for a while. Having him lose magic and have to do rituals and such to get his casting back seems like a good way to eat up time and not feel like he just spontaneously quit harrying them.
But I can't think of any ways to make it happen that aren't out of the blue.
What kind of caster are you dealing with? A traditional Wizard or Sorcerer can't heal themselves. A serious injury can prevent them from casting spells properly until they can find / beg / bribe / steal the magic they need to fix things.
For example anything with somatic components requires specific, convoluted gestures with the hands. Someone breaking their hands means they can't make those gestures. (Or a broken jaw for verbal components.)
Alternatively you can introduce the concept of a second "big bad" - someone who is going to conflict with the first "big bad." Those two characters can fight it out mostly off screen so long as you include some news here and there. For bonus points you can have the updates work as a driving force on the players. They will eventually have to get back in the fight because someone is going to win - and then they're going to go looking for potential obstacles like those pesky adventurers.
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If you don't want to go the 'second big bad' route - which is a good route, I like that idea - you could have a 'big good', like an old retired hero or something, come at the big bad and die attacking them, but accomplish disrupting their spellcasting ability - whether by physical damage for a Wizard or Sorcerer, assuming they don't have minions that could heal them, or by breaking out some old magical item they have, or something.
A reason the players have never heard of this old hero (if you go that option for the big good) could be because everyone thought they were already dead.
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(Pathfinder)
Hey, I've got a weird question. I saw someone recently, can't remember where, might have even been here, talking about magic item crafting costs in Pathfinder. They said that they could get crafting costs down to 33% of base cost, which seems like a massive savings, when I can only see how to get it down to 47.5%, by taking one of the '5% crafting cost reduction' Traits. There are a few of those, but afaik they don't stack as they're all Magic Traits and you can only have one of those, right? So how is that person getting down to 33% cost, is there a Feat chain I'm unaware of, or something?
Hey, I've got a weird question. I saw someone recently, can't remember where, might have even been here, talking about magic item crafting costs in Pathfinder. They said that they could get crafting costs down to 33% of base cost, which seems like a massive savings, when I can only see how to get it down to 47.5%, by taking one of the '5% crafting cost reduction' Traits. There are a few of those, but afaik they don't stack as they're all Magic Traits and you can only have one of those, right? So how is that person getting down to 33% cost, is there a Feat chain I'm unaware of, or something?
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Well, using homemade magic items you can slash the price by like 30% by making it only usable my specific alignments IIRC, but I don't know how to just decrease generic crafting.
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
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Bonus: They could actually have been dead, but raised as an intelligent Undead and went to town on the ones who raised them, going back down from Heroing at the guy at the top of the chain of command for the group responsible. Level drain could also be used as part of the explanation: They need to get back the very peak of their power for the Evil Plan.
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Back in the old days, fucking up some of the forms of ritual magic that existed back then (Elven High Magic in particular) could do that. As could backlash from spells interacting badly with magical locations. There was an incorporeal monster that could temporarily drain wizards and permanently drain items called a Balhiir. Killing them was a process that could burn out wizards long term or even permanently. (Could also wind up giving them Spellfire either instead of or in addition to the casting loss)
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(Pathfinder)
For a Dwarven Fighter who doesn't benefit from the movement increases, is getting all four levels of Armour Training worth it for the three lower ACP and three higher potential AC, or should I be aggressively sacrificing Armour Trainings past the first for Advanced Armour Training options?
For a Dwarven Fighter who doesn't benefit from the movement increases, is getting all four levels of Armour Training worth it for the three lower ACP and three higher potential AC, or should I be aggressively sacrificing Armour Trainings past the first for Advanced Armour Training options?
The Narrator
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Like with Power Attack/Deadly Aim in 3.X/PF, you have to declare that you're using the feat and taking the penalty before you roll, not after you already know that you rolled high.
(Not sure if you realize that this concept isn't from a home brew, but from a game released by Wizards of the Coast in 2007, Star Wars Saga Edition.)
The idea is for your character to be able to deal more damage based on his combat skill, rather than only ever getting damage increases from magical weapons and strength bonuses, so that your badass gunslinger isn't unable to bring down a mook because his damage maxes out at 2d6+3.
Critical hits in Saga Edition doubled your total damage, including the bonus dice from the feats and the level-based bonus, so scoring one was still a big deal when it happened. (They were also much rarer due to smaller crit threat ranges.)
Honestly, I'd like to see D20 finally give up the "Armor as Defense" nonsense. Nearly every other RPG uses armor to soak damage, and bases how hard you are to hit on your speed and skill.
Firearms are also touch attacks in Pathfinder, at least at close range, which can be problematic for balance considering how most D&D monsters have low Touch AC and a shitload of natural armor.
Seems like a pain in the ass to keep track of ability score damage. I'd rather let hit points do their job, but make damage more based on the badassery of your fighting prowess instead of how much you spend on magic items.
I've run Second Darkness before. Where are they in the campaign? For most of it, the big bad doesn't really notice the PCs, much less bother to "harry" them.
It's going to depend on your tastes. Me personally, I like having high Dex fighters with good mobility who can make Acrobatics checks to do Cool ShitTM, so I'd want the Armor Training to keep ACP down. There are also some cool options in AAT, however.
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I want to be able to do Cool Shit too, but is the -3 penalty so bad, if you've got max Acrobatics and got is as a Class Skill?
The Narrator
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Having it be a class skill basically cancels out the -3, so that one at least is good to get.
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Cool, thanks.
Next question (Pathfinder again): Should I take a level of Brawler to get Martial Flexibility, giving up a bonus combat feat and Weapon Mastery (not making a crit build though, so Weapon Mastery isn't as important as it could be), or should I take the Barroom Brawler feat and the Abundant Tactics Advanced Weapon Training? Martial Flexibility will give me four free combat feats a day, while Barroom Brawler + Abundant Tactics will start at one, but eventually scale to six. One is more powerful early on, the other scales better. I won't be getting more than one level of Brawler, so Martial Flexibility will be a Move Action, same as Barroom Brawler.
Our DM does allow retraining, so I could theoretically train out of Brawler back into Fighter and take Abundant Tactics, after Barroom Brawler + Abundant Tactics has scaled to be better than Martial Flexibility, but that would require downtime...
The Narrator
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Never heard of it. A quick Google search says that it's the base system for a few other RPGs that I've also never heard of. What's the core mechanic?
Morphic Tide
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There's always grabbing a few levels of an archetype that gives the effect. Free Style Fighter trades away both Weapon and Armor Training, so... that's out. Warsighted Oracle, Eldritch Scrapper, and the Martial Master Fighter(trading just Weapon Training/Mastery) all give the Brawler's Martial Flexibility with all the same characteristics of a Brawler of the same level as the archetyped class.Brawler has fighter as a parent class so unfortunately, you can't dip there
Wade Garrett
Just trying to do the right thing
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"Arrow!" said the bowman. "Black arrow! I have saved you for the last. You have never failed to strike your mark, and I have always recovered you. I had you from my father, and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true King Under The Mountain, go now and speed well!"
- The Hobbit Ch. 14, "Fire And Water"
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Wait, what? *checks SRD* it just says that redundant abilities don't stack - Martial Versatility isn't a redundant ability with Fighter, is it? There's nothing in Fighter that gives the same ability - Barroom Brawling is a Combat Feat, not a Fighter Class ability. Same for Unarmed Strike and Brawler's Cunning, right? None of those are duplicating a Fighter Class ability, so they should work, right?Brawler has fighter as a parent class so unfortunately, you can't dip there
Relevant rules:
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@The Narrator it's post campaign. I was just using the Second Darkness moniker to differentiate it from the Strange Aeons Campaign I'm also running.