Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Primitive Screwhead" data-source="post: 6333395" data-attributes="member: 20805">Finished a game session of OLD using some of the NEW July playtest rules. Rather than a full re-work, we added the Intuition stat and plugged in the score from Willpower. Then we calculated the new defenses, health, and other stats. No change to exploits, equipment, or spells {mostly}PCs defenses ranged from 10 {Fire Mage} to 18 {Small-folk Berserker}. Weapon attacks were mostly 4 to 5 dice with weapon damage mainly 3 to 4 dice.NPCs {3 Ogre Thugs and 3 Orc Hatchetmen} defenses were 18 and 15. Weapon attacks were 4D6 and 3D6. Damage was 3D6 and 2D6. Health was 34 and 24.Combat lasted about 5 rounds, ending with the Fire-Mage down and dying and significant damage to the rest of the team. It would have been worse, but a Transform spell turned one Ogre into a mushroom early on.I think the to hit and damages were about right. Both the mage and druid felt like glass cannons, altho the both players think that the bows they had are now worthless with the stat changes. I thought it kinda had the feel of low level DnD.  The big sore thumb this time around was SOAK. With armor available, pretty much everyone has a SOAK of 5 or more. This means that the Hatchetmen's 2D6 damage might actually be able to do actual damage if they were lucky enough to hit, but probably not. Essentially the SOAK scores of the group meant only exploding dice were a hazard. Because they only had an attack of 3D6 there wasn't much room for trading to hit dice for damage.I think SOAK needs to be looked at due to the lower damage dice pools. Also there needs to be clarification on how natural SOAK and armor/exploit SOAK stack/relate, and whether or not natural SOAK applies to magical evoke attacks {as reads now it doesn't which makes magic doubly powerful with higher damage dice pools and avoiding SOAK}.   Wandering into house rule territory, my thoughts include:    1:  SOAK cannot reduce damage to zero, any attack that hits will deal at least 1 point of damage per die in the pool    2:  Redo SOAK as dice pools and roll to see how protective it is {Chaosim's Elric did this and I thought it worked great} Basically Hide armor would grant 1D6 of SOAK. When damaged, the character rolls the SOAK pool and reduces the incoming damage by that amount.   3: significantly reduce the value of SOAK down to where the smaller damage pools are not pointless.Then.. getting ahead of myself: Magic and the new stat/dice process. The Cleric hit one of the Orcs with a Drain Strength spell.  Its way too fiddly and not table-top friendly. The DM and Players need to keep an excel spreadsheet open to recalculate everything. The Cleric casts an Infuse that grants 5 points of STR to all allies within 30 feet. What happens?      They probably get +5 to physical defense, but maybe not.       Gain +1 or maybe +2 to speed       They might get an additional dice added to the STR pool. Or two  What about a lower level spell that grants only 3 points? Maybe +3 to defence, maybe +1 to speed, and maybe +1 STR die... or maybe nothing at all.  I was okay with the stat modifying when there was an easy math to determine the changes, but now its too much to lookup and reference. Infuse/Drain needs to have enhancements that have clear results that are not tied to changing the stats. Things like 'Boost: 2 MP grant an additional dice to the related attributes dice pool', 'Accelerate {STR}: 2 MP add 1 to the targets speed score', and 'Protect {STR,AGI,END}: 2MP adds 1 to the targets defense score' Abjure and Hex have the Shielding enhancement that grant a defence at a rate of 2 points per MP spent, so the Infuse method is not better and should not steal this niche.</blockquote>

Verification