Why does Grim Tales have the most customized CharGen?

[Denaes]

You might consider adapting something like the feat mastery trees in Iron Heroes to True20 -- that would keep alot of the "crunch" your players seem to want while taking advantage of a more flexible character creation system.

<edit> - read the thread more carefully and saw that you don't like level prereqs for feats, which is the point of Feat Mastery.

Players don't mind basic or common sense pre-reqs. Like in Spycraft 2.0 they don't mind that you have Boxing Basics -> Boxing Moves -> Boxing Supremacy as a chain/tree, but they're a bit more annoyed when like Boxing Supremacy requires a BAB of 12.

We are planning on doing something with the True20... I bought the IH PDF, but I've been absorbed in Spycraft 2.0

 

[Yuan-Ti]

It was probably my claim you were referring to and I think it has already been well supported. I understand your discontent but I tend to see the restrictions on feats (and talents) as partly balancing, but equally important, I think they provide players with a sense of progression. If you get all you want to have the perfect character in the first 4 levels... where do you go from there? Every d20 player I game with has at one time or another eagerly and happily uttered the words, "I can't wait to get to Xth level when I will get YYYY feat!"

My contention that GT is the most flexible character gen in d20 is that there are a lot of options and the 6 classes are generic enough that you can really be creative with your character design... as opposed to having a 4th level Barbarian which tends to limit a player's approach both to character mechanical development but also to roleplaying. If you say you have a 4th level Tough Hero in GT, that could mean a WHOLE LOT of things depending on the feats and talents you chose to emphasize.

PLUS, in GT, skill selection is much more wide open than in almost all other d20 products (Iron Heroes has moved in the right direction, too).

I just find the options liberating.

 

[takyris]

I'm going out on a limb here, Denaes, but my guess'd be that your group is trying to play a mid- or even high-level campaign with low-level characters. My group did that, and it bit. One of the big things d20 Modern is missing is a section entitled "What level is your campaign?" If you want to play "Ordinary folks to whom weird stuff happens", 1st level is great. If you want to play "FBI Unit assigned to paranormal stuff", you want to start at 3rd or 4th level minimum, unless you're comfortable having your players doing a lot of make-time work in order to level-up and get to the cool stuff. For a game I ran in which I wanted everyone to be good investigators AND good in combat, I started them at 6th level, which was about right. For a one-shot that ripped off "Enter the Dragon", I had them make 12th level characters, and even that may not have been high-enough in level.

In D&D, you get immediate and obvious feedback when you're in over your head. If you're first level and the monster is ten feet tall with giant bat wings and flame flickering from its eyes, you know you're outclassed. In d20 Modern, though, you can think you're James Bond as a first-level Charismatic hero, when in reality, you're the guy who details James Bond's car and can occasionally sell a story with a sort-of smooth line. If you try to take that first-level character into an infiltration plot, fighting guards and bluffing security agents and hacking computers, your guy is dead. It's just that easy. And you could very well be frustrated, because in your mind, you were a heroic dude fighting squibs, but those squibs just took you down with extreme prejudice.

That's actually the beauty of the system. It's designed to work at multiple power levels. The trick is choosing the right power level for the campaign you want. You can make a homebrewed campaign about hell coming to earth, somewhere between "Doom 2" and "Kill everything in the Monster Manual that starts with a 'D'" thematically, with the heroes unloading assault rifles into pit fiends and tossing grenades at balors while blasts of hellfire roar past you... but you can't do that with first-level characters.

(Someday, I will run that campaign... Mmmm. And I will add a DMPC sidekick called "Old Doc", a Dedicated7/Field Medic10 with Healing Knack, Healing Touch2, Medical Expert, Surgery, Educated (Earth and Life, Tactics), Skill Emphasis:Treat Injury, Expert Healer 10, Medical Mastery, Medical Specialist +3, Major Medical Miracle, and a +1 Mastercraft Healing Kit, so that I have a +39 to my Treat Injury check and therefore automatically succeed on raising the PCs from the dead provided I can get to them in time. Also, I will have a few grenades and an assault rifle and Improved Damage Threshold a few times, because it's never good when the healer goes down.)

 

[Thanee]

After Spycraft 2.0 the feat selections from d20 Modern & D&D look absolutely clownshoes.

Spycraft is pretty good.

I'm thinking that most likely incorporating the 6 Attribute Classes into a spycraft engine

Funny enough, that's the one thing from d20 Modern, which I would not want in any game... the classes. But most people seem to like the concept.

Bye
Thanee

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I'll go out on a limb here and say: You want Mutants and Masterminds.

>.>

<.<

Oh, it takes some time to gen characters, it takes some hand-balancing by the GM, and you damn well better know what you're doing when you start playing or it'll blow up in your face ...

But it's the only thing I can think of where you can just decide that you want to have 10s in all your attributes and 57 different feats all at the first session of the game.

But the thing is it'll take hand-balancing. What you seem to want is a point-buy character creation system. And with a pure point-buy you're going to have to hand-balance all of the PCs because every single point buy system has glaringly obvious combat holes where one guy can specialize in butt-kicking to such a degree that everybody else might as well take a smoke break.

GT moves quite a bit of the gun combat into the realm of "stuff you can just do". Autofire, area fire, cover fire, etc. They don't require feats. The skill selection involves a few groupings, all of which have player input (one being "player picks any") but it still tries to balance skill selection. (I find it better to add 2 more skills in the Pick Any section, myself).

GT is very open on BOTH ends. All through the book, the GM is offered choices in what rules to use and how to implement them in the game ... and the players get alot more in the way of options, and you feel very much open to add as many more as you want. Because some of the stuff (IMHO) still reflects a little too much in the way of Ben's personal prejudices ... (Like the Wild Empathy talent being a convoluted beast to get to ... which he's admitted was mostly because he didn't like it. For one of my games I moved it to an Advanced Talent. Likewise with Sneak Attack for a fantasy game.).

GT is pretty transparent about giving things the hairy eye and saying: "Eeeehhhh.": Most classes get like a single martial weapon talent. Ben likes it that way, after all, how many weapon types do most people use? You can swap it out with Firearms. But it's not much of a big deal to change it to a "Group Proficiency" and let people choose regional weapon groups. Non-proficiency is actually pretty fun ... in one game a character carried around a masterwork longsword he recieved as a wedding present from one of the other characters. Was non-proficient ... but he still whipped it out when the situation warranted it and went to town. He beat somebody down once with it.

But if that feat is going to get in the way of a character concept ... CHANGE IT. Not going to ruin anything. You want a Smart hero who is a ninja? Give them "Ninja Weapon Proficiency" for free, the non-prof penalty is there to give definition, so when the ninja picks up a 12 guage we know he's never used one before, and he's only doing so because he NEEDS the shotgun right now.

I think it's a really simple change to say: "Bugger the stat requirements, we don't like them!" The game gestapo will not break down the door. I do that kind of thing all the time ... I add more bonus feats, I remove requirements, whatever.

The key is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If the stat req on feats is annoying you, but otherwise things are fine, why the heck go to another system entirely when you can just remove the reqs and run with it. I do all kinds of fun and funky stuff like that and I don't have to buy a dozen game books.

The key is to just lay it out at the begining. You don't like that there aren't enough feats and skills? Say: "Okay, for character creation, everybody will get +1 Skill Point per level and bonus feats at 1st, 4th, 8th, etc." It's a relatively minor change, you might find you need to beef an encounter slightly, but if it's a Modern game they're usually fighting NPCs so just make the NPCs to match.

Another wonderful thing about GT is Wulf included Upper_Krust's detailed CR system. You can then know that +1 Skill Point per level equals +0.1CR and that each feat is +0.2 CR ... when you go to make an encounter for, say, 8th level PCs using my rules above you'll know that each character is: +1SP (+0.1cr), 1st Feat, 4th feat, 8th feat (+0.6) or +0.7 CR each above where a normal character would be. That rounds out to about +1 CR, so make the encounter for 9th level PCs.

Done. No balance issues. No new system to learn, no new book to buy, and you can do that as many times as you need.

--fje

 

[genshou]

One thing I recall from d20 Modern was the AbilityScore Prereqs on feats. Sure you could switch to other classes to make up for your problems, but if you didn't have a good wisdom you couldn't take the gun feats (most of which had pretty lame pre-reqs).

I believe you would be referring to Burst Fire and Dead Aim, both of which are special combat tactics that the majority of soldiers are incapable of performing. Only highly specialized units can do these sorts of things, which require a great deal of perception and control (elements of the Wisdom score). This has been addressed in Bullet Points before; check it out on the Wizards website or wait for me to find the URL for that particular article.

 

[Hammerhead]

Yeah, because I've never seen foolish, ill-trained soldiers use something as complex as BURST FIRE.

Well, actually, I haven't. I've never seen an automatic weapon fired, thank goodness. But it's pretty easy to imagine.

 

[takyris]

Hammerhead, respectfully, how so? You may be imagining something that isn't burst fire.

Any soldier with firearms proficiency can use autofire -- so he can pick up an assault rifle and unload 2d8 or 2d10 over an area. And any soldier can fire at someone with the weapon on automatic, using a lot of extra bullets but getting a normal chance to hit and do 2d8 or 2d10 -- which is gonna be more than the average handgun. So right there, your picture of "someone firing a burst of bullets at someone else" could just be that. It's gonna look a heck of a lot cooler than firing at somebody with a handgun, too, since firing at somebody with a handgun means a maximum of 12 damage, and firing at somebody with an assault rifle could get you as much as 20. No feat required. Even without burst fire, or even Advanced Firearms Proficiency, an assault rifle kicks butt. It does a lot of damage, and trying to hit Defense 14 instead of Defense 10 is, well, not that hard once you're at a level where an assault rifle is normal equipment for your character.

Burst Fire simply means that you have the option of hurting your chance to hit in order to increase the damage if you do hit. It's the automatic-weapon version of Power Attack. Maybe it means that you're trying to shoot a hail of bullets at the guy's head instead of his body -- he's more likely to get his head down and duck, but man, if you do hit, all those bullets are gonna chew him up good.

I could see Burst Fire requiring Dex instead of Wis, but I like the fact that they went with "Requires the ability to stay calm and cool while shooting a bunch of bullets at somebody" as a requirement. I don't see this as any weirder than requiring Str 13 for Power Attack.

(And if it strikes you as weird, strike it out. I've run a campaign where I ditched all stat requirements related to ability scores, so Power Attack, Combat Expertise, and Burst Fire could be purchased as long as you had any other requirements -- like the right BAB or Personal Firearms proficiency. It didn't break that game, and I wouldn't mind doing it again.)

 

[genshou]

Listen to takyris you should. Since you're less experienced in the ways of redneck deer-blasting than some others on the boards, I'll try to explain to you a few things about firearms, so you can understand the reasoning behind how those mechanics were written.

Charles Ryan, one of the d20 Modern designers, offers the following:

The Three-Round Burst Setting

Now let's talk a bit about the Burst Fire feat and weapons that have three-round burst settings. A lot of people figure that a hero who picks up such a weapon ought to get the benefit of the Burst Fire feat, even if he or she doesn't have that feat. But that's not the case, and here's why.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what a three-round burst setting on a weapon does for the user. Many people think the setting is designed to allow more accurate use of autofire, presumably by limiting the recoil of the weapon. It would seem to make sense, then, that the user should get the benefit of the Burst Fire feat when using such a setting. The truth, however, is that the three-round burst setting is simply a limiter designed to prevent waste of ammunition.

Real-world weapons designers discovered some time ago that even the best-trained shooters could hit the intended target with only the first few rounds from a burst of automatic fire. Weapons fired on automatic simply shake too much to stay on target; after the first couple of bullets have left the weapon, the others invariably fly wide and wild. Some people think this tendency has to do with the power of the recoil, but that's not true. Even weapons with very light recoil can't be kept on target while on autofire. As a result, military forces train their soldiers to use autofire only in short, controlled bursts. Even then, however, most shooters fire off six or eight shots in a burst, most of which are wasted. (We were generous in the game design and specified that a burst uses five bullets.)

To address this situation, the designers created the three-round burst setting to limit the burst of autofire to three bullets -- the only three that have any reliable chance of hitting. This feature doesn't make the weapon any more accurate in autofire mode. All it does is prevent the user from wasting ammo.

And the following, in an article related to skill points, speaking previously of why Concentration uses Constitution as a modifier, he offers a bit more insight:

I've also encountered similar questions regarding some of the feats in the d20 Modern game. For example, some people wonder why the Burst Fire feat has a Wisdom prerequisite -- what does Wisdom have to do with firing a gun? If you find yourself wondering about such issues, try not to take too narrow a view of the ability in question. Wisdom is the ability that governs perception and self-control, and that's what's a character needs to use the Burst Fire feat. Sure, any old mook can fire off a blast of autofire, but not everyone has what it takes to do so effectively.

 

[Thanee]

Burst Fire simply means that you have the option of hurting your chance to hit in order to increase the damage if you do hit.

That's something I always found weird (in other games, too)... that firing a burst overall lessens your chance to hit, but increases damage, if you do.

Shouldn't it make hitting easier, if more bullets are fired (even with recoil), with the chance to deal extra damage being pretty slim (i.e. hitting with multiple bullets)?

I always thought, that's the whole point of burst/auto fire, to make it more likely to hit with at least one bullet.

Bye
Thanee