Golden Lark
The First Fiction User
Okay, surprise attack mechanics, I had been searching for "from behind" in core. Duh.
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That's not merely a wording revision but an extensive set of idiosyncratic changes to shape the charmset to be more in line with her tastes. A couple of the Abilities are essentially completely new charm trees. It has some interesting changes, but also some really odd ones.
Actually, as she rather dislikes non-charm dice, she's added more than a few new dice tricks.
Touching someone is a difficulty 5 gambit? That seems crazy. Grappling someone is only difficulty 2.
The wording of 4.3 seems odd to me. Specifying that only language in the auto-succeed effect can override the auto-fail effect seems to imply that you can't combine an "attack beyond maximum range" charm with an "automatically hit" charm, because the language that lets you attack beyond maximum range is not in the auto-hit charm. You could argue that this doesn't matter because the auto-miss effect is removed entirely before 4.3 is checked, but if that's the way it's intended to be read I don't know why you need to specify that it can be overridden at all.
The thing in 4.12 about onslaught penalties increasing between checking defense and rolling damage strikes me as incredibly counterintuitive. Why did you do it that way?
4.14, as written, allows you to swing a dagger at a guy 30 feet away to crank up his onslaught penalty.
Isn't 4.15 made redundant by the existing rule that you can't grapple substantially larger enemies?
Ah, my apologies! I've been mostly trying not to read that project, so as to keep 'em separate.
Injury-Forcing Technique, Essence-Draining Touch, and Order-Affirming Blow all use the "difficulty 5 gambit" language already - I just standardized it into a keyword. Which doesn't mean it's not crazy, I suppose.
Hm. That would be my intent, that the "auto-miss effect" is removed and so the auto-hit effect can apply. I'm not sure I understand your last half-sentence, though - can you try me again?
Because it's the only time I can find that seems to be consistent with all published effects, and so it's my best guess for what the book thinks is actually happening. See, for instance, Double Attack Technique, which specifies that in between "compare attack successes to Defense" and "compare threshold attack successes to Defense," the target's Onslaught penalty has increased.
The penalty can't increase before the attack, or you'd have at least a -1 Onslaught penalty on every Defense. It could increase after the attack is completely resolved, but if that's the case, if I counterattack and pop a Charm that adds my current Onslaught to damage, I don't get a bonus even though I've already been attacked. "Immediately after checking Defense" seemed like the only time that made sense.
Ooh, that's a good point. Let me think on that. (My immediate thought is to just add another bullet for "Attacks that automatically miss do not increase the target's Onslaught penalty," but I'd want to word that so it didn't include SSE.)
No, because it clarifies that Charms that convey the ability to grapple substantially larger enemies do not also automatically convey the ability to throw them. It's an edge case, but one that matters to, say, Dragon Coil Technique/Crashing Wave Throw.
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Have you actually used those multiple attack rules in play? Have you had them used on you? How did you defend against them? Not resolving any initiative changes until the flurry is complete may be simpler, but it breaks flurry defenses like Unbowed Willow Meditation, which stops the flurry by crashing the attacker if she misses. I'm not even sure what it does to charms with an initiative cost, such as Heavenly Guardian Defense.
You should probably also clarify that they don't apply to charms like Swarm Culling Instinct.
I've used them informally, but I don't think it's actually come up yet - no mid-flurry Initiative changes have triggered, that I can think of. Which is not particularly useful as data.
The major problem here is that I don't know if they're changes; I have no idea how Initiative changes mid-flurry are meant to resolve. This was less a simplification and more an attempt to give some answer. Do you think a different one is the original intent?
You're saying, what happens if the attacker (say) gets counterattacked and has to use HGD in the middle of his flurry? ... Interesting. Let me think about that.
Good clarification - thanks!
(While feedback is coming in, I may let a few changes pile up before revising.)
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Well, if language in a charm can remove the auto-miss effect, why do you need to explicitly state that language in the auto-hit charm can remove the auto-miss effect?
Even so, ask 10 players how Ferocious Jab works, and I guarantee you not one of them will say it's like this. I think it would be better to make the general rule "after the attack but before counterattacks" and then rewrite Double Attack Technique to include an explicit exception. Anything else will just confuse the hell out of everyone.
How about "the attack automatically misses, inflicts no onslaught penalty, and any effects that would trigger on a missed attack likewise fail. Any effect that negates this automatic miss also causes onslaught an missed-attack-triggers to work normally."?
Bursting Eagerness Soul
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While we're on crunch and stuff that @Irked has done, I was looking through the Let's Read over on the OPP forums and saw the notes in said thread about how a Sidereal with a full Excellency outdoes a Solar with a full Excellency. It got me thinking that, given the past Sidereal Charmsets and how they've been both small and closed, maybe the Sid Excellency is picking up some of the slack that Solar "Double Xs" and "Reroll Xs" Charms are carrying right now. Thoughts?
Ah, I see. I suppose I just want it to be clear - my fear is that, without that call-out, people might read:
-The rules on range say you auto-miss.
-The rules on this Charm say you can hit beyond that range, so you don't auto-miss
-But "auto-miss" trumps "don't auto-miss," so you still miss!
... which would obviously be undesirable. Perhaps it's redundant.
How so? I'd assume that FJ does, by default, add at least one damage for the one point of Onslaught it creates in the target. Would you say no, if this is the first attack on that target, FJ doesn't add any damage?
Heh. Which is also a point in the turn sequence that has to be invented, since there is no default...
It's certainly cleaner, but it doesn't appear to me to be the assumption under which the book is working - I would have actually held Ferocious Jab up as an argument against that reading.
At first blush, that sounds good - thanks!
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Bursting Eagerness Soul
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I suppose you could say "unless some effect explicitly overrides the automatic-miss effect in question" without specifying what effect does it.
Well, yeah, I figure the damage added is equal to the onslaught suffered on the attack roll, so zero on the first attack, one on the second, etc. I suppose your reading doesn't actually contradict anything either, but suffering two different onslaught penalties at two different points in the resolution of the same attack just feels way too hairy to contemplate, especially in a set of houserules intended to clean things up.
You say that like "3e's default turn sequence" is a thing that exists.
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The answer is that the Sidereal Excellency in the book exists solely for use with their quick character antagonists. They haven't started working on the Sidereal book yet so don't know what the final form of it will look like. I expect it will change.
Jon Chung
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Automatic surprise attack from being attacked by multiple opponents ("five man rule"). There is no actual way to prevent this from happening without Charms, specifically Reflex Sidestep Technique. If you try to put your back to a wall and limit enemy approach angles, this amusingly only serves to reduce the number of enemies it requires to trip the automatic surprise attack instead of removing the vulnerability.
Once someone has an automatic surprise attack, he either hits you with his sledgehammer (or any other generic high-damage weapon) and causes significant damage or worse, clinches you for his four friends with sledgehammers to have fun with. Being hit with a clinch sets your DVs to 0 and you don't get to roll to take control of the clinch until your action comes around, by which time you would have been beaten to death by sledgehammers.
Or: Have Reflex Sidestep Technique, and always have it available in a combo, or die.
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I haven't played with Martial Arts at all to speak of, so it's harder to ballpark that. I have kind of an initial gut-level aversion to the whole "Spend 19 XP just to get back to 5 dots again, hooray!" thing - even if it's needed for balance, it's distasteful.
But it's not quite as bad as Craft; "I'ma pick this one MA and stay here" works in a way "I'ma pick this one Craft doesn't." So I guess I have no plans at the moment to introduce houserules there, subject to future player conversations.
Well, my focus was primarily "Make it explicit what's happening" rather than "Make what's happening simpler." I wanted the rules to at least be clear, if they couldn't be simple; generally, I erred on the side of What Seemed To Be The Intent To Me over What Would Be Simplest.
(If nothing else, this project is nicely highlighting places where people reach totally different - and yet reasonable and defensible - conclusions about what the rules actually intend.)
I laugh to avoid weeping!
(Instead of an explicit sequence of a fixed number of resolution steps, we have an actually much more complex partially-ordered set of implicit resolution steps! Hooray!)
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Golden Lark
The First Fiction User
And if your five dudes with hammers actually coordinate their attacks for the first strike, It Gets Worse.
Jon Chung
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In 2E, you don't choose the paranoia combo life. It chooses you.
Out of curiosity, does this mean that if you're in a crevasse or something and only one opponent can reach you, you can't defend at all?
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Even so, It'll likely end up looking similar. TN manipulation is kinda the Sidereal "thing". I also can't see a Sid Charmset that is as bloated as the current Solar one, so it would make sense that they wouldn't get a ton of dice tricks beyond the base Excellency.
Technically the rule is more about having room to move around in. If you're in a room and are holding them at a narrow doorway so only one can approach at a time you're fine. If you're literally in such a tight crevice that only one other person can approach you and you can't back up or anything then you're probably in a position where you can't meaningfully defend yourself.
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I think they were intended to be resolved immediately. This is especially obvious (and simple) in the case of Unbowed Willow Meditation and Wisdom of the Celestial Crane. Boom. You lose all initiative and are crashed, aborting the flurry as you can't make anymore decisive attacks.
The question is if you lose just a couple initiative, which initiative do you lose? Does it come from attacks you have yet to make, or can it also come from attacks that missed?
Probably wise.
I definitely agree that this is the effect of those Charms, under your ruling; I'm just not sure it's the intent of 'em. They serve a very definite (and potent!) effect even without that... which doesn't mean that you're wrong, just that I'm honestly uncertain of the intent.
Exactly.
To your earlier question, re: HGD - my first thought would be that you pay for HGD from whatever your Initiative would be at the end of the flurry. But then... how much Initiative do you have to spend? Under my current rules, if you miss all your attacks, it could be as much as (starting amount - 2); if you ever hit, though, you're going to reset to base Init, and you'll have less on the table to spend.
Saying "You can pay as you go" introduces the problem you note above, though - great, so I'll pay for HGD out of all of the attacks I've already made and spend that Initiative twice.
I suppose one alternative would be to say that you have only the Initiative from your not-yet-resolved attacks to spend... but then that punishes the guy making the attacks, who might miss all of them and yet be told most of his Init is unavilable.
I don't have a good universal solution for this yet, though I'd welcome suggestions. At the moment, the last entry has some appeal - "If you would lose Initiative, you must pay it out of attacks you haven't yet resolved" makes Decisive flurries a little more of a gamble, but since you're the one who chooses to make 'em, it's your risk to take.
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If both martial arts use the same weapon then you can use the higher dot rating of the pair with either one's charms. So dipping into another MA for a few dots to pick up some of its charms totally works. (This works even better for defensive charms.)
I don't think it makes sense to go "well I think they're going to make the Sidereal Excellency more powerful than the Solar; I wonder what their reason will be?"
In the short term, we've been ruling that the Sidereal Excellency costs 3/7/12m for a -1/-2/-3 TN modifier. That helps quite a bit with the mote math, but it doesn't solve the XP problem - a Sidereal making Withering attacks with a light artifact weapon hilariously outpaces a Solar unless that Solar has bought several supporting Charms.