Playtest Feedback (8/12)

[LucasC]

There were 7 players and myself in this session - the players each have 4,000 XP and have not had an opportunity for 'down time' so they have not picked up any additional Career progressions beyond the starters.

This playtest utilized the August playtest guide.

Basic Stats
Here are some basic statistics drawn from each player.

Defenses

• 10, 11, 12, 13, 13, 17, 19
  • (the character with 19 is a star knight and 5 comes from his rank 2 class exploit & requires he be unarmored)

Attack Pools
Five of the seven characters had one of these attack pools. Seems I missed capturing the other two.

• Pool 1 (1 character): 7d6 (3d6 ability, 2d6 skill, 1d6 battlesuit, 1d6 high quality)
• Pool 2 (2 characters): 10d6 (3d6 ability, 2d6 skill, 1d6 battlesuit, 1d6 high quality, 3d6 seeker enhancement)
• Pool 3 (2 characters): 5d6 (3d6 ability, 2d6 skill)

Damage Pools
Five of the seven characters had one of these damage pools.

• Pool 1 (1 character): 6d6 (3d6 weapon, 1d6 racial, 1d6 high quality, 1d6 exploit)
• Pool 2 (2 characters): 5d6 (4d6 large weapon, 1d6 high quality)
• Pool 3 (1 character): 5d6 (2d6 psiblast, 3d6 rank 7 pwr)
• Pool 3 (1 character): 6d6 (2d6 psiblast, 3d6 rank 7 pwr, 1d6 battlepsyc rank 2)

Misc Feedback & Questions

• Can a character benefit from emergency first aid (EFA) for the purposes of stabilizing the dying countdown pool more than once a day and/or if said character has already been the target of EFA and gotten healed 1d6? Presumably yes, but EFA specifically disallows benefiting from it multiple times a day.
• Is a Medic's ability to heal considered EFA?
• Can a character that was unconscious and has been stabilized and now is awake abel to take any actions? Is that character considered Mildly Unconscious (as in the game condition)?
• Can a character progress a racial skill when selecting their free hobby skill (for example, a human that chooses Poker as a racial skill)?

• Consider Smuggler as a viable pre-req for Con Artist
• Battlepsych (rank 1) is looking like a must-have career for anyone serious about psionics

• Do you mean for their to be no LUCK attribute exploits?
• More than half my group ended up with a 2 LOGIC
• Focusing on a single psionic career and ranking up results in a character with only 1 psionic power, is this intended and working as desired?
• Regarding career advancement, limiting skill selection, limiting powers gained and other restrictions seems to encourage jumping from career to career but forcing a 'restart' on career abilities seems to encourage the opposite. Is this working as desired?
• Regarding direct and indirect skills- should there be a requirement that in order to gain any benefit whatsoever from an indirect skill you need to have at least a 2-dice pool in that skill? The observation is that someone with say, 1 rank in Poker, playing against someone with 1 rank in Playing Cards are at on an equal footing despite the Poker skill being more narrowly focused and both having equal 'skill' in their respective areas.
• Is cover meant to protect against Psionic attacks (presumably not but who can say for certain)
• The Seeker item enhancement (+3d6 attack) is very powerful especially given the overall reduction in dice pools
• Is there an exploit for shooting 2 guns at once? Ambidexterity specifies it adds extra melee attacks only.
• Does crawling affect movement?

Special Emphasis
These two items are broken out from above just to provide emphasis on them as they were 'hot button' topics with my players.

• Having no exploding dice outside the LUCK/special pools really disappointed them.
• Permanent damage is universally despised.

Psionics
With new support around psionics, and picking up another player interested in trying them out, we got to see a bit of psionics in action last night.

I will summarize my feedback in one sentence.

Psiblast is an extremely effective attack. ​

The two psionic characters were attacking with an attack pool of 5d6 and a damage pool of either 5d6 or 6d6. This damage ignored all SOAK and the attack itself targeted Mental Defense which tends to be lower for many monsters. These attacks also ignore cover and all other mechanics intended to help with balance (shooting in melee, covering fire, roll with it, etc.).

Furthermore, by adding a single rank in Battlepsych they do all of this without suffering any of the negative consequences inherent in the use of psionics.

Combat Feedback
I still find it difficult to find a good balance between challenge and overwhelming force.

Last night's game involved 2 battles.

The first included 2 gobbers for each PC. This fight failed to offer any challenge to the PCs. The gobbers attack with 3d6 making a hit unlikely. Then, on the occasions where they did hit, dealing damage against the PCs in armor (SOAK 10 generally) was more unlikely (weapon damage = 2d6). Pack tactics helped with this a little but I think in the entire combat they dealt less than 10 points of damage to players.

The second fight involved vehicles and thugs. I simply doubled all the thugs attack dice pools so that the PCs felt there was some damage. This pumped things up to about 6d6 for hits and 2d6 for damage. When adding in positional bonuses and other benefits I could get another die or two on damage and begin to hurt the PCs. It worked OK but not great.

Rule Presentation

• Terms that have special meaning in the game - like exploits - should be avoided if at all possible in the remainder of the text or clearly differentiated (such as by putting them in all CAPS when indicating the game term).
• At several points during character creation it references adding your starting age to the ages you pickup from careers (starter + 4) but I cannot find anywhere that tells me what the starter age actually is.
• I'd like to see names for all Career exploits for recording those powers on my character sheet -
• p144- Verbiage under death and dying could be cleaned up to use the established countdown language (classify the dying countdown as a "slow" countdown vs. indicating any dice that come up 6's are removed).
• High quality weapons do one extra damage die in the examples but in the text it only explicitly indicates they add to attack.

Character Sheet

• The worksheet on the back of the sheet does not have a place for LUCK increases
• Several people indicated the blue lettering meant to be written over was too dark and should be made lighter
• One player indicated that under the attack section he'd like to see a box for skill dice, attribute dice, weapon dice, etc. vs. just a single box for the attack dice and a second for damage dice
• Several people indicated the species skill box, on the worksheet, is too small to hold 3 skills

Typos

• p143- Eyepatches are cool: when an attribute isreduces due to a permanent...
• p269- You shold also select thespecies' size at this time.

--
Lucas



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[Morrus]

It was great meeting you at Gen Con, Lucas!

Attack Pools
Five of the seven characters had one of these attack pools. Seems I missed capturing the other two.

• Pool 1 (1 character): 7d6 (3d6 ability, 2d6 skill, 1d6 battlesuit, 1d6 high quality)
• Pool 2 (2 characters): 10d6 (3d6 ability, 2d6 skill, 1d6 battlesuit, 1d6 high quality, 3d6 seeker enhancement)
• Pool 3 (2 characters): 5d6 (3d6 ability, 2d6 skill)

The seeker upgrade for the weapon (as we discussed at Gen Con) needs revision following the overall dice pool change. Right now, my thought is that it's *way* too cheap (by a factor of 10 or so) and usage should be limited.

It's interesting that despite all the changes so far, still 100% of your players have 3 ranks in combat skills. I'm really failing to discourage this! Add that to the LOGIC 2 you mention below, it's still a problem, I see.

As a question -- do you tend to introduce non-combat encounters into the game? I need to get to the bottom of why I haven't been able to solve this one yet!

Can a character benefit from emergency first aid (EFA) for the purposes of stabilizing the dying countdown pool more than once a day and/or if said character has already been the target of EFA and gotten healed 1d6? Presumably yes, but EFA specifically disallows benefiting from it multiple times a day.

Yep. I'll clarify that, but yes, stabilization can be repeated freely.

Is a Medic's ability to heal considered EFA?

Nope. It has its own usage limits.

Can a character that was unconscious and has been stabilized and now is awake abel to take any actions? Is that character considered Mildly Unconscious (as in the game condition)?

No, he's unconscious but no longer dying, and is now able to receive healing. He can now be healed to above 0 HEALTH, at which point he is active again.

Can a character progress a racial skill when selecting their free hobby skill (for example, a human that chooses Poker as a racial skill)?

Hmm. I guess. Lemme think about that.

Consider Smuggler as a viable pre-req for Con Artist

I'll give it some thought!

Battlepsych (rank 1) is looking like a must-have career for anyone serious about psionics

Yeah. I'm a dumbass. That ability can be used once per day, not at-will.

Do you mean for their to be no LUCK attribute exploits?

I couldn't really think of any! I'm open to ideas!

More than half my group ended up with a 2 LOGIC

That is a problem, as noted above, and one I'm concerned about. LOG is tied to starship weaponry, scanning, computer operation, etc., so I'd hoped it would prove to be important in playtesting.

Focusing on a single psionic career and ranking up results in a character with only 1 psionic power, is this intended and working as desired?

No, that's not a desired consequence. I'll look into that.

Regarding career advancement, limiting skill selection, limiting powers gained and other restrictions seems to encourage jumping from career to career but forcing a 'restart' on career abilities seems to encourage the opposite. Is this working as desired?

I'm not entirely clear on the question. I do want to discourage career-spamming (multiple careers at rank I), although the rules don't currently accomplish that.

Regarding direct and indirect skills- should there be a requirement that in order to gain any benefit whatsoever from an indirect skill you need to have at least a 2-dice pool in that skill? The observation is that someone with say, 1 rank in Poker, playing against someone with 1 rank in Playing Cards are at on an equal footing despite the Poker skill being more narrowly focused and both having equal 'skill' in their respective areas.

Sure. That sounds reasonable.

Is cover meant to protect against Psionic attacks (presumably not but who can say for certain)

Cover applies to any attack against DEFENSE, but not MENTAL DEFENSE. So a psionic lightning blast is affected by cover, but reading someone's mind is not. Although I can see an argument for cover making mental attacks more difficult - it's hard to project your mind through stuff; line of sight makes it easier; etc. Given some of our dicussion on psionics at Gen Con I'm inclined to go down that route.

The Seeker item enhancement (+3d6 attack) is very powerful especially given the overall reduction in dice pools

Yeah, an old upgrade for the old dice pool mechanic. I had some thoughts on it above, but it's far too powerful right now.

Is there an exploit for shooting 2 guns at once? Ambidexterity specifies it adds extra melee attacks only.

No, but N.O.W. will have a lot of "gun-fu" type stuff in it. I might repeat some of the basics.

Does crawling affect movement?

Same as climb speed.

Permanent damage is universally despised.

I think I'm going to sidebar that as a purely optional rule.

With new support around psionics, and picking up another player interested in trying them out, we got to see a bit of psionics in action last night.

I will summarize my feedback in one sentence.

Psiblast is an extremely effective attack. ​

The two psionic characters were attacking with an attack pool of 5d6 and a damage pool of either 5d6 or 6d6. This damage ignored all SOAK and the attack itself targeted Mental Defense which tends to be lower for many monsters. These attacks also ignore cover and all other mechanics intended to help with balance (shooting in melee, covering fire, roll with it, etc.).

Furthermore, by adding a single rank in Battlepsych they do all of this without suffering any of the negative consequences inherent in the use of psionics.

Covered above. I will look into SOAK vs. psychic damage; that's slightly harder for me to conceptualize, but I agree it's needed.

My current thought also has it linked to sentience -- non-sentient are already immune, semi-sentient have SOAK 5, sentient takes full damage.

Last night's game involved 2 battles.

The first included 2 gobbers for each PC. This fight failed to offer any challenge to the PCs. The gobbers attack with 3d6 making a hit unlikely. Then, on the occasions where they did hit, dealing damage against the PCs in armor (SOAK 10 generally) was more unlikely (weapon damage = 2d6). Pack tactics helped with this a little but I think in the entire combat they dealt less than 10 points of damage to players.

The second fight involved vehicles and thugs. I simply doubled all the thugs attack dice pools so that the PCs felt there was some damage. This pumped things up to about 6d6 for hits and 2d6 for damage. When adding in positional bonuses and other benefits I could get another die or two on damage and begin to hurt the PCs. It worked OK but not great.

One thing I would say is that you're using extremely weak enemies. Gobbers and thugs, in particular, are designed to be the sort of enemies competent pCs can mow through and show off, feeling cool and heroic. They're pretty much cannon fodder. Attaching them to more powerful enemies as a distraction is probably the way to run them, but don't expect them to put up a fight against PCs.

At several points during character creation it references adding your starting age to the ages you pickup from careers (starter + 4) but I cannot find anywhere that tells me what the starter age actually is.

It's 0 plus your starter career.

• I'd like to see names for all Career exploits for recording those powers on my character sheet -
• p144- Verbiage under death and dying could be cleaned up to use the established countdown language (classify the dying countdown as a "slow" countdown vs. indicating any dice that come up 6's are removed).

Sounds good.

High quality weapons do one extra damage die in the examples but in the text it only explicitly indicates they add to attack.

Attack only. Additional damage is gained by exchanging attack dice. Maybe some legacy references in there.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Cover applies to any attack against DEFENSE, but not MENTAL DEFENSE. So a psionic lightning blast is affected by cover, but reading someone's mind is not. Although I can see an argument for cover making mental attacks more difficult - it's hard to project your mind through stuff; line of sight makes it easier; etc. Given some of our discussion on psionics at Gen Con I'm inclined to go down that route.

I would recommend that you go with the EoM:R approach where there is an additional MP/Psi cost. Using 4e terms the powers could be LOS target {magic missile}, Line {lightning bolt, blocked by cover}, Blast/Cone {fireball, emanates from a point and expands out, blocked by cover}, and Burst {Entangle, the entire area if affected regardless of cover}

By encoding the powers/spells/weapons with these sorts of code words you eliminate the debate over whether cover applies or not. So something like Psionic Bolt would normally be a LOS target but could be enhanced to be a Burst, single target {ignores cover}

Alternatively you could declare all Psi powers used against the Mental Defense ignore all cover except lead plating, 10' of rock, or other anti-psi material. And of course the obligatory Psi power that grants cover versus mental attacks

 

[LucasC]

It was great meeting you at Gen Con, Lucas!

Absolutely! Awesome time at dinner.

It's interesting that despite all the changes so far, still 100% of your players have 3 ranks in combat skills. I'm really failing to discourage this! Add that to the LOGIC 2 you mention below, it's still a problem, I see.

As a question -- do you tend to introduce non-combat encounters into the game? I need to get to the bottom of why I haven't been able to solve this one yet!

My objective is to split our time 50/50 in combat v non-combat encounters. Non-combat includes a wide array of possible actions from social situations to interrogations to investigations to travel. Here's a few breakdowns of the last couple-

Adventure: Whatever Happened to Grizzly Smalls
In this adventure the PCs are following a smuggler named Grizzly Smalls. Grizzly has been colluding with Durog, the villains in the setting. Grizzly has a very powerful bomb and means to use it to destroy Earth. The PCs have become wanted fugitives so they are not able to move around freely.

This adventure took two weeks to play through and was heavily front-loaded w/non-combat. The first night of play there was no combat encounter. The second night of play was closer to a mix of combat and non-combat.

Scene 1: Oort Cloud

Objective: Get to local Earth space
Options: (1) shoot through checkpoints [combat], (2) sneak through asteroid fields [non-combat], (3) bluff through checkpoint [non-combat]

They chose the skill-based option and piloted their ship through the Oort cloud.​

Scene 2: Landing on Earth

Objective: Safely land on Earth w/out getting arrested [non-combat]
​

Scene 3: At Roberson Sterling

Objective: Discover where Grizzly Smalls went as he passed through town, find a guide, acquire supplies for long-term trip into irradiated wasteland [non-combat]
​

Scene 4: The Radlands

Objective: Survive in the harsh irradiated environment of the Radlands [non-combat]
​

Scene 5: The Cave

Objective: Figure out what's going on in this creepy cave [non-combat]
Objective: Survive ambushes and battles in cave (3 or 4 encounters) [combat]​

Scene 6: Grizzly Smalls

Objective: Learn useful information from Grizzly Smalls, save him from the Durog mind control [non-combat]​

Adventure: Edition Wars
On Earth the PCs have now learned that mutant gangs living in the Radlands have the bomb and are threatening to set it off. During scene 1 their vehicles are ruined so they must trek on foot, without proper supplies, through the wasteland to an area where several tribes are at war with one another.

Scene 1: Gobbers

Objective: Survive a gobber attack [combat]​

Scene 2: At Old Newton

Objective: Learn about the area, talk w/the locals, get clues on the possible location of the bomb [non-combat]​

Scene 3: Grognard Attack

Objective: Survive an attack by the Grognard army [combat]
​

Scene 4: The Z

Objective: Interrogate surviving Grognard soldiers and learn the truth about the bomb. Do the Grognards have it? Who does? [non-combat]​

Scene 5: Radland Travel

Objective: Survive a Radlands sandstorm [non-combat]
Objective: Survive an attack by a t-rex [combat]
Objective: Survive a stampede [non-combat]​

Scene 6: At We Plead the Fifth

Objective: Acquire supplies needed for surviving the Radlands [non-combat]​

Objective: Learn about the location of the bomb [non-combat]​

(stopping here as this is where the adventure is at and my players read this board)

One thing I would say is that you're using extremely weak enemies. Gobbers and thugs, in particular, are designed to be the sort of enemies competent pCs can mow through and show off, feeling cool and heroic. They're pretty much cannon fodder. Attaching them to more powerful enemies as a distraction is probably the way to run them, but don't expect them to put up a fight against PCs.

I went up to t-rex's this week (post to follow shortly) and the encounters were definitely harder.