I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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It is intentional, yes. I like it a great deal more than just having armor be raw HP.
NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)
- Thread starter I.F. Ister
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- Original Fantasy Action
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- norse mythology (mythology) original xianxia cultivation western cultivation ask sirihand did your mother tell you anything? discussion pleases yggdrasil farming gloating gets people killed granary management hubris is a coward's word you will die norsemen do not die when they are killed the qm has a bad memory the qm is bad at math viking courtroom drama (legal drama) vikings
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How many hits can our armor negate and how does flashfire cleave interact with this?
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Not at low levels. By the wording they raise the minimum, not the maximum. With Infusion 2 you can never get less than 6 successes when crafting, but if you're already getting 21+, that doesn't matter much. We can already make Superior stuff with 1 Work each, Grand if it's metal...the Infusions would not help with that at all unless we get Infusion 6, which would potentially up it (something I wasn't thinking about when dismissing it). Infusion 6, however, is 63 Odr, and I'd rather have an extra Shapeshifting slot, at least this turn.
Ah! This is the point of confusion: We can already make Grand Items with 1 Work each. That's how Work functions in NQ2. So...this provides no benefit on Work based actions until Infusion 6+. It does provide it at 6+ and that's maybe worth getting eventually, but Work made items can't have runes or bone ash so I'd say it's not an immediate priority.
Work Dice don't work the same as they did. Grabbing an Experience is probably just one, maybe as much as three, definitely not 9. We do want more of it, but we run into diminishing returns eventually, and I think that may be before 5. At 3, plus the Trick we're advancing, we'll have 10...is a jump from 10 to 12 (bearing in mind that we have a bunch of extra Research from shapeshifts on top of that) actually worth 24 Odr? Maybe. But I don't think it's necessary this turn specifically.
Infusion on Tactics has never been at all clear what it does and, honestly, we have enough insight from our existing stuff and Tactics that more, while nice, is not as useful as another shapeshift slot most of the time. It's also a lot cheaper, so we probably grab it eventually, but I don't think it's needed this turn specifically...the nature of the foe should be kept in mind and the owlbear does not seem likely to be a creature of great tactical sophistication.
Oh? Interesting. How does it work, then?
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I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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Essentially, your armor has a 'soak' value. Whenever you take damage, your armor absorbs up to its maximum Soak in damage before it hits you. Every time it does this, the maximum Soak is reduced by 1 until it is repaired. Flashfire Cleave strips more Soak away.
Your armor, I believe, has 20-something Soak.
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Check. That makes sense and works fine (though it makes armor very good)...I presume this comes after the actual pre-armor DR we have, though it doesn't matter much (as serious attacks will get at least one damage through the DR and thus reduce the Soak anyway).
Specific numbers will be needed at some point, but we can work those out easily enough.
I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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Intentionally so. Armor, in real life, was better than weapons in most cases.
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Not complaining at all, just noting. And yeah, it's definitely better if it works like that. We just need to fiddle with numbers and find out what those are.
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I feel like this both makes us too tough and disincentivizes big attacks, since this means that threadcutter is far more dangerous to us than even spark bombs.
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As a suggestion maybe also add a rule that the armor "soak" is only damaged if it was hit by an attack that did at least half its soak.
That way you can't just whittle down the armor with a bunch of strikes that do one damage each.
Also an additional rule that says that if the attacker dos half the soke in damage after the armor soaked the damage (in our case if an opponent dos 30 damage) they do an additional point of soak damage for each such instance.
This way high level armors are difficult to damage and truly powerful strikes also damage the armor more (as they logically should) and the more damaged an armor is the faster it breaks.
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Looking at the armor numbers, we could just halve them and be pretty much good to go, I think? That'd give Halla a 21 which matches what you suggested pretty closely. We'd maybe need to fiddle with shields a little (them adding more is maybe problematic? Or maybe not if they get less and need to burn it to cancel Tricks...)
Not exactly. It depends on the amount of armor and what you're aiming for. If you just want to whittle away armor and are sure of hitting, then Threadcutter was always better than Sparkbomb, and remains so...but our Sparkbombs can do 24 damage each, so hitting someone with, say, 18 Armor with two Sparkbombs is very plausibly lethal, while Basics would likely just eat away Armor without killing. Admittedly, the follow-up Stoking Strike on Threadcutter is pretty likely to be lethal, but that was always true.
I think whittling down armor is intended. The edition change is intended to make Basic Attacks better, after all, among other things.
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The system also needs to work for people who *can't* use a bunch of Odr at a moment's notice. For someone without Odr they're going to be having a much harder time with brute forcing armor.
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I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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So they shouldn't brute force it. Fight smarter, not harder. Leave the guy with the crazy armor for the people who can take him or work around the armor—like by slipping your spear up under the bottom or crushing him with a big rock or choking him out in wrestling or getting him drunk before the fight.
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In addition to what IF said, that wasn't counting Odr. With Odr we can hit 34 damage Sparkbombs. Now, our non-Sparkbomb Tricks are mostly much lower damage, but yeah.
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Does that have mechanical support or is that more vibes based?
…How?
I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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Column A, Column B
I do like this though
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It's Perfected, so we can use it with Ignition, which can do +2 damage, we have Runes for a +1, and as of this upcoming turn we'll have 9 shapeshift slots...that'd get us to +12 damage, and it has a base damage of 12. That's 24. Actually, given we're hitting Ignition 9 (which adds another +1), so it'll actually be 25.
So technically only 23 with the current stat-line, but it'll go up to 25 real quick (getting it past that is much harder).
For the record, that's our highest non-Incalculable damage other than a maxed out Stoking Strike (which can hit 26 without causing a heart attack if we burn a whole 63 Stoked Pool on it). The next highest damage we can get after that is 20 on Knee-Drop Back Breaker, 19 on Leaping Cleave, then 16-18 on Firebomb Strike. The highest damage we can do on Basic Attacks, meanwhile is 13.
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Could you expand on this? It would be helpful to know about this kind of stuff before we encounter it on the battlefield.
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I actually like the system if even lesser hits can impact armor because it provides a real incentive for numbers, even if individually weaker. 5 people doing 3 damage hits would reduce soak far faster than one person doing 15 damage hits. It makes ganging up even more efficient which I think fits the Norse Saga 'grab my buddies and gang up on some super heroic (in power) dude' vibe
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Yeah, I'm in complete agreement here. I like the idea that armor can be whittled down, it's a solid piece of flavor and makes defensive things that allow you to defend against simultaneous attacks relevant, which is important. Guards are a lot less powerful in NQ2 and defending against multiple foes leaves something good and useful for them to do.
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I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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Slipping up under the armor is a once-in-a-lifetime sort of deal. It's not something you're going to be running into all that often.
Being crushed by a big rock does arbitrary damage. Being choked out ignores armor. Being drunk adds a significant malus to your rolls.
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Shields and Armor edited to reflect the new rules on both Halla's sheet and the 'Iron Cost Of Forging Things' post, which includes armor stats.
Oh for sure, I don't think combats will become just a matter of who has a higher skill. I think builds will suffer. Its a bit like my problems with skills. Instead of every warrior having a list of skills applying to his weapon, having different tricks for each, and needing to improve them all meant he had to choose more meaningfully between combat skills and stuff like tricks. Here though, it's just how much you expand on that 'vanilla' combat skill which is uniform and kinda boring. It becomes just a scalar on combat strength, an obligatory xp tax with no choices or interesting impacts, and gain that is mechanically important but doesn't really feel exciting. When one rolls 7d6, rolling 8-9d6 instead matters a lot, but just doesn't feel very different. It's a boring skill that Halla and all future PCs will have to expand a lot on only to see numbers go up slowly. But I don't see anyone being very excited from it increasing as they would from a new trick, or from Hamr increasing or Stoker state bonus
I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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Just noticed you wrote this! Nice work, thank you very much! 2 Reward Dice sent your way.
0~0~0
I need to revise the Work mechanics if you're going to spend them all doing Research, which are one of the purposes of low-effort actions. A big reason behind why I went through with the mechanics change is because it was just too much for me to do. I want to be able to spend my time focusing on the actual content of an update rather than thinking and stressing about Research or crafting or what have you.
Essentially, I want to be able to make all of an update enjoyable to read, which is simply impossible (for me, at least) if there's too many disparate things going on
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They do not say these things.
But they do not say them very, very loudly.
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Just remove research as a work mechanic and instead make us spend actual actions doing our experimentation? Instead of something like Norse Armor being 5 Research actions over a year, have it be an Extended Action over a season to find the secrets of knightly armor, with adventures seeded in that same 'action' to like, find a Latin teacher and stuff. Make researching, really researching, more of an indepth time consuming thing. Our current 'add animals to our soulscape' type researches could fall under this as well, where we undertake an extended action to hunt down and make sure we have a balanced ecosystem, which evolves into us getting involved in the spirit disputes, etc? Less intensive researches could use our normal actions instead of our Extended Action, such as us building a bolt thrower with Sten, which can double as both crafting and us spending time with our brother and bonding over craft sciences.
For less interesting 'researches' like 'learn a language' I think that could just be turned into an xp type thing, but rate limited? So you can only go from Frisian 0->1 in a month, and then 1->2 in the next, etc, with the scale being like, Rough/Passable/Fluent/Native? Though that doesn't hit the nice Norse numbers
And other even less interesting researches like 'can we Alloy x' could remain as a work option since those don't seem like they require much work?
This would make some researches More intensive, but they'd be actual Actions, where we are making them a focus, doing them as a real adventure to really delve into the secrets.
It would also make us do less of them though.
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