LucasC
First Post
Last night's game included a mixture of combat (two encounters), sneaking about, lots of discussion and a little bit of luck.
Combat
Those pools are the average because round-to-round and target-to-target players make slightly different choices about how many dice to trade from the attack to the damage pool.
The Ambidextrous character is the one w/10d6 for damage.
I think that Ambidextrous needs a stiffer penalty and it needs to be much harder to overcome than a single combat trick.
With such a wide range of damage pools you end up with some people basally watching the combat from the sidelines while others dominate it. It is also nearly impossible to keep a monster alive round-to-round once a few key attackers decide they want to take him down.
Of note, the same is true in reverse. My monsters are easily able to take a PC from full health to unconscious with a single attack by trading off attack for damage. As most of my monsters don't have the combat trick to do that 1-for-1 the PCs fare a little better.
Combat tends to be a collection of one-hit wonders.
SOAK
We still find SOAK to be a little odd in actual play. Here's some examples that feel odd to us:
Ignoring the incongruence some of that causes there is a real problem in the rules themselves.
Consider the Ice Dragon
Now, pit a brand new character wielding a disruptor rifle (4d6 heat) with a 6d6 attack pool and Deadly Strike against that dragon (this is easily achievable).
If the new character wins initiative here's what could play out.
This brand new character just out of his/her starting career killed the most powerful creature it the game...
Now, high on the rush of killing the dragon the character rakes in 11k XP for the kill rocketing to Iconic (fast) or (less than 1k below) Legendary (slow) tier
Countdowns
I really like the countdown mechanic but I am finding them a little too unreliable to use.
Yesterday's game included a 'countdown' where every 30 minutes (real world time) the PCs rolled against a decreasing 4-dice pool. This pool dictated when factions on the space station became aware of their presence.
I think to use these countdowns regularly there will need to be either:
Misc Observations
XP
Last night included two combat encounters and a total of five monsters (between both encounters). My group of 5 players each received 1,072 XP for the night using the new XP system.
Assuming that rate of gain holds true they will level up via the slow method after 5 weeks of play, then again after 12 (total) and finally again at 20 (total).
So in about half a year (real time) they will achieve Iconic tier via the slow method.
Combat
- I am inclined to think that defenses are perhaps a little bit too low - particularly when dealing with a creature larger than Medium, the defense numbers fall into the sub-6 range and hitting becomes trivial.
- Damage is way too high. As I mentioned in last week's report, the Ambidextrous melee character does upwards of 100 points of damage every round.
- These high numbers are achieved primarily by players that want to build for damage. These players all select the combat trick that allows them to trade attack dice for damage dice on a 1-for-1 basis and then proceed with destroying the combat field.
- The combination of rules has successfully brought attack pools into a (relatively) tight range but damage pools are all over the place - here's what I had yesterday
| Attack Dice (average) | 3d6 | 5d6 | 5d6 | 3d6 | 3d6 |
| Damage Dice (average) | 3d6 | 8d6 | 5d6 | 10d6 | 9d6 |
- You can probably see that everyone has settled in the 3-5 dice for attacking. I do not believe that anyone missed when attacking with 3 dice.
- On occasion they would drop to 2 dice and then they'd start missing.
The Ambidextrous character is the one w/10d6 for damage.
- This number comes from trading attack dice 1-for-1 to damage via the combat trick and then adding the 3 dice bonus for Seeker along with a high quality weapon.
- He then proceeds to make 4 attacks in a round when movement is not needed and everything in his reach dies.
I think that Ambidextrous needs a stiffer penalty and it needs to be much harder to overcome than a single combat trick.
With such a wide range of damage pools you end up with some people basally watching the combat from the sidelines while others dominate it. It is also nearly impossible to keep a monster alive round-to-round once a few key attackers decide they want to take him down.
Of note, the same is true in reverse. My monsters are easily able to take a PC from full health to unconscious with a single attack by trading off attack for damage. As most of my monsters don't have the combat trick to do that 1-for-1 the PCs fare a little better.
Combat tends to be a collection of one-hit wonders.
SOAK
We still find SOAK to be a little odd in actual play. Here's some examples that feel odd to us:
- A character dressed in a combat suit has no protection from the cold weather of an ice planet but when that character is attacked with a COLD attack the suit now absorbs 10 points of damage.
- A character dressed in a combat suit that becomes the target of a psi-blast reduces 10 points of damage.
- A character dressed in an environmental suit can cozily exist in -300F temperatures on the planet but as soon as that character is targeted by the same COLD attack that was reduced 10 by the combat suit the damage is reduced only by 4
Ignoring the incongruence some of that causes there is a real problem in the rules themselves.
- Characters without SOAK are at a severe disadvantage.
Consider the Ice Dragon
- DEFENSE 2
- SOAK 20
- HEALTH 54
Now, pit a brand new character wielding a disruptor rifle (4d6 heat) with a 6d6 attack pool and Deadly Strike against that dragon (this is easily achievable).
If the new character wins initiative here's what could play out.
- Attack One
- The character safely trades away 4d6 attack to damage, leaving 2d6 for attack (no roll needed)
- The disruptor rifle does heat damage ergo it ignores the dragons 20 SOAK and adds another 1d6 damage on top of it
- Total damage = 4d6 (base rifle) + 4d6 (Deadly Strike) + 1d6 (vulnerability) = 31.5
- Attack Two
- The character safely trades away 4d6 attack to damage, leaving 2d6 for attack (no roll needed)
- The disruptor rifle does heat damage ergo it ignores the dragons 20 SOAK and adds another 1d6 damage on top of it
- Total damage = 4d6 (base rifle) + 4d6 (Deadly Strike) + 1d6 (vulnerability) = 31.5
- The dragon is now dead
This brand new character just out of his/her starting career killed the most powerful creature it the game...
- ...in one round
- ...with no attack roll required
Now, high on the rush of killing the dragon the character rakes in 11k XP for the kill rocketing to Iconic (fast) or (less than 1k below) Legendary (slow) tier
Countdowns
I really like the countdown mechanic but I am finding them a little too unreliable to use.
Yesterday's game included a 'countdown' where every 30 minutes (real world time) the PCs rolled against a decreasing 4-dice pool. This pool dictated when factions on the space station became aware of their presence.
- The first roll of the night occurred at 6pm and came up 2 6s and 2 other dice.
- We rolled every 30 minutes then throughout the night, and we played until 10pm roughly.
- The last roll took place as we were quitting (it was roll #9) and the pool was still at 2 dice.
I think to use these countdowns regularly there will need to be either:
- an outside limit on the number of rolls (maybe twice the pool size?) or
- an increasing chance of pool depletion that kicks in eventually
Misc Observations
- ROLL WITH IT (fall prone, reduce damage by 2 dice) coupled with the IRREPRESSIBLE age trait (adolescent) essentially gives the character a free 2-dice reduction as that character stands from prone as a free action.
- Character traits have no meaningful impact on gameplay. They provide interesting roleplaying encouragement but the game mechanics around them do nothing meaningful. This is especially true after the latest change to XP. Using your trait gives you 1 point of XP, in the new XP system 1 point is trivial (it wasn't much before, now it's basically nothing).
- My players have a massive variance in miscellaneous skill checks. This makes it difficult to properly set DCs. There were a lot of PERCEPTION checks needed yesterday. The one set of rolls that stood out had the low-end result of 4 (2d6) and the high-end result of 30 (6d6 w/1 exploder).
- This is similar to the damage problem noted above. Dice pools vary largely from character-to-character and skill-to-skill making it difficult to get things into a 'normal' range.
- Seeker is just too good (+3 dice to hit)
- Healing needs to be looked at - as it stands in-combat healing is either 1 point or 1d6 points per round (via various options) then as soon as your out of combat if you have a medic you go from hurt to full automatically by the medics infinitely-repeatable 1d6 heal. If you do not have a medic your stuck either sucking up a bunch of potion-equivalent items or waiting it out naturally.
- If you want a Medic to be required in every group this isn't necessarily a problem
- It doesn't 'feel' right to any of us that the medic can heal infinitely after combat
- The inflict pain PSIONIC power is devastating when used against a melee attacker - particularly in what is primarily a ranged game. A single use of this power immobilizes a creature for 2 rounds. If all the others simply back away and shoot it the thing can never do damage.
- The target has only its MENTAL DEFENSE to resist and, like DEFENSE, this means it's basically a guaranteed hit to anyone with any training - this is made worse by the fact that often it's an animal being targeted with a particularly low MENTAL DEFENSE.
- LUCK is getting used more often. The way I'm seeing it used is that on one roll of the night each player gets an added chance to succeed. I'd guess that they actually succeed due to luck about half the time.
- I found another useful option for LUCK yesterday
- PCs had to quietly neutralize a guard that was watching a building, they asked if there was an alley nearby - I had them roll a LUCK check - and called it based on the roll
- When they further asked if the guy was near the alley a second LUCK check was used to adjudicate this
- I found another useful option for LUCK yesterday
XP
Last night included two combat encounters and a total of five monsters (between both encounters). My group of 5 players each received 1,072 XP for the night using the new XP system.
Assuming that rate of gain holds true they will level up via the slow method after 5 weeks of play, then again after 12 (total) and finally again at 20 (total).
So in about half a year (real time) they will achieve Iconic tier via the slow method.
