Melkor said:
Greetings Melkor,
I just put two and two together regarding your screen name and your avatar. Ambitious
. Tough act to follow. I'm more a Morgoth man myself, though rereading the Simerillion, I did come across the name of the "King of the Balrogs" Now that is a hell of a job description
.
While you are at it, maybe you can give me some pointers as well.
Sure. What's up. You fired off your reply while I was typing away at my answer to your original observation. Let's see if I can't catch up a little.
When I looked at Spycraft as a base for my "Supernatural Strike Team / Underworld - The Movie" style game, a couple of issues came up - maybe you can offer me some advice on how you would handle them.
First, undead in Spycraft. Vampires would play a prominent role in the game. Spycraft uses Vitality (Hit Dice + Con Mod) and Wound Points (Constitution) instead of hit points. Undead have no Constitution - Would you just use their Charisma in place of Con as has been suggested elsewhere ?
That's an adequate solution, though in a point based ability buy game, you'd also need to either cut out 1/6th of the points for vamps, or make Cha increases cost double. The problem is if you're going to allow character to get 'turned' in play, it puts a weird preference for Cha on character who start with 6 ability scores. You could min max by tanking your Con and cranking your Cha, then go looking to get turned.
My inclination is to leave Con and wounds as they are, but make it part of becoming a vampire (part of the first level of the class, see below) that you are no longer affected by anything that involved a Fort save or Con check (we have rules for this for things like golems in Hand of GLory and android in Stargate, so a straight port should work). Then your vamp still has wounds based on his body type in life (big hulking Con 18 vamp is a little harder to kill than skinny beach wimp vamp - not count class levels...). The class would probably give you extra wounds (probably +x per level). If the class/becoming undead gives you immunity to critical hits like most d20 undead, that would make you really frickin' hard to kill, since opponents would absolutely have to whittle away your vitality before cutting into your wounds
. At that point, no longer gaining a Con bonus to vitality per level is probably an important part of game balance...
What I'm eyeballing is a 5 level Vampire base class (not prestige) so that you can start out as a vampire if you want, or with GC permission, get turned at any point in your career. Start out with all the weaknesses and some of the perks, and gradually master your abilities while perhaps limiting your drawbacks. The first level 'newbie' vamp might burst into flames and die on contact with sunlight, while a more experiences vamp could possibly make a save, and a 5th level takes nasty damage from sunlight, but can run across a patch or quickly choke the crap out of an enemy if he's willing to suck up the damage. Another advantage of it being just 5 level to complete you groth as a vamp is that it won't prevent you from getting 14 levels (the best class ability) of a regular class and still be a fully capable vamp, and in some casses you could start as a vamp, go 5 levels of vamp, and go straight into a prestige class if the skills and feats line up.
This keeps departments free to describe your upbringing/education/early experience, and doesn't trigger any wonkiness with starting in one department, then getting bitten and trying to figure out how to change departments to "vampire". Fortunately it doesn't rule out a 'vampire' department (or macro) for folks born/raised in vampire society.
Pretty much ditto for the lycans. Diferent bonues of course, different penalties (growing ability to control moon-driven changes and/or control over needs to hunt and kill perhaps). Same benefits vs depatments and levels in other classes.
Second - NPCs. I don't own any of the Shadowforce Archer books because I am more interested in creating my own setting....I do own several of the Spycraft Line books, but one thing I have noticed is a lack of "normal" NPC types. The main rulebook seems to divide NPCs into "The Big Baddie" and his henchman.
What do I do if I want to create a school teacher, electrician, professor, computer engineer, telephone repairman, high-school student, etc.....How do you handle those types of characters in Spycraft?
Yeah, we covered all of those in the SFA books with NPC classes like Academic (dedicated highschool student through college professor with tenure), Paper pusher (love tht class), Technician, etc. First stop would be the Fixer/Pointman Class guide where we've got multi-level write-ups of about 25 common types of NPCs fully stated up. The new 60's Decade book is going to reprint a few of the more typical NPC classes for folks who don't buy SFA. If you read our boards, there's a complete list of NPC classes in the "FAQ - Reference Page" thread. Read it over and pick out 3-4 that sound like what you need, and I can send you copies of them as samples to see if they do what you're looking for. Hopefully this will persuade you that the SFA books are worth a second look for your gaming dollar
.
Last but not least - Humans without a "Department Background". For "generic" humans that don't come from a Department, would I just use the standard D&D Player's Handbook human (more skill points and an extra feat) ?
We've added a lot more non-espionage departments, so a better fit than that should be possible in most cases
. Same thing, check the list and I'll send you a couple. Otherwise, I'd use "the basement", with no ability modifiers.
Thanks in advance.....and at the risk of sounding rabid, Spycraft really is an excellent system.
My pleasure. I'm glad you're enjoying the game. It's been a blast to create!
