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31
DFRPG / Re: Enchanted Items Patch - Important, holy crap!
« on: April 21, 2010, 11:55:45 AM »
Knowing where it is and being able to lay your hands on it are two rather different things.

32
DFRPG / Re: Some Guidelines for Thaumaturgical Shapeshifting?
« on: April 21, 2010, 11:26:27 AM »
Okay, I think I see what's going wrong here.

In most systems, self-buffs are discrete from the things you actually do with them. What Fred's trying to tell us is that in DFRPG, you don't use magic to do something so that you can do something..

The magic is used to achieve the END RESULT. What you're trying to do in the first place.

In D&D or White Wolf's Storyteller system, you use a spell to give yourself a modifier (which stacks with other modifiers) on a roll that's already balanced for a particular circumstance.

Here in Fate land, we don't roll like that. Remember, we generally eschew modifiers anyway; it's either part of the character (character aspect or power), or it's part of the story (scene aspect) or we just don't care.

To that end, when you apply magic, you're applying it not to get an intermediary benefit which might help you with another skill roll..

... you're just trying to do the thing you really want, and your success in the magic DIRECTLY TRANSLATES to success in the final objective.


The way I'd approach most of these things is go ahead and use normal thaumaturgy, including the casting time requirements, and just treat the prep time as quasi-flashback or reference to something they spent time doing earlier, within reason.

If the effects are relevant over multiple exchanges, they only get to burn their consequences in the first exchange (but they don't have to use all of the shifts from those consequences then), but they roll as normal each exchange.

(Author's note: These are the ravings of someone who hasn't seen the PDF in well over a week, and is currently enjoying percocet and chocolate pudding)

33
DFRPG / Re: Enchanted Items Patch - Important, holy crap!
« on: April 21, 2010, 10:48:27 AM »
Hope nobody missed me. Been out for a week due to surgery, good times. Still recovering, but I found I'm finally lucid enough to try to catch up.

Honestly, I think people are also overlooking something simple: If someone has a tendency to show up to fights using the magical equivalent of a tacnuke, they're going to get NOTICED. Any enchanted item must be carried in order to be used, and will be trivial to notice/find by even half-assed practitioners.

People will come after you for your gizmo, either to have it themselves, to keep you from having it, or to keep someone ELSE from taking it from you. And since you're a one-trick pony, it won't be hard for someone of sufficient determination to do so.

The story will quickly become about the item, keeping your control over it, and surviving the attempts to keep it. This can be both used as a way to justify the item (perhaps everyone enjoys the edge of the seat 'omg, the fight came to us again, how will we hold onto the mystic amulet of pwnz0r this time' action), or as a way to get the powergamer to get sick of "I've LOST my wadget AGAIN?!" and think up a more clever approach.

Not to mention a weapon of that strength is probably going to get aimed at a mortal at some point, and we already have a huge stack of tools for dealing with THAT through story.. ;)

I might not want something like this in my game, either, but I think trying to scramble to 'patch' the 'hole' is kind of understating the capacity of the game to self-correct without more fiddly rules. :)

As an exercise in curiosity for everyone, if you were going to design a 9 refresh offensive item of power, what would it look like?

34
DFRPG / Re: Animals
« on: April 13, 2010, 11:50:50 AM »
This sounds like fan collaboration material to me.

35
DFRPG / Re: Werebear Problem...
« on: April 13, 2010, 11:49:30 AM »
I'm tellin' ya, eyes. They're the windows to the soul, and to a nice, neat kill. :D

36
DFRPG / Re: Enchanted Items Patch - Important, holy crap!
« on: April 13, 2010, 06:37:46 AM »
No worries. I'm sure things are ramping up to some pretty epic chaos over there, trying to get everything laid down for actual publishing.

37
DFRPG / Re: Enchanted Items Patch - Important, holy crap!
« on: April 13, 2010, 01:14:02 AM »
You might wanna consider at least one push before then for the simple reason that a final proofing stage by all of us miiight catch something. I mean, since we're already mimicing an open beta here. :D

38
DFRPG / Re: Enchanted Items Patch - Important, holy crap!
« on: April 12, 2010, 03:34:02 AM »
This is pretty awesome. Are you still looking at Crafting Frequency specialization/focus as an option?

Out of curiosity, is there any thematic space for someone burning some of their per-item shifts on uses, instead of additional item slots? I did like the idea of someone with high lore producing a weak but available often item, and it seems to be in keeping with the source material (citing a particular potion in a particular book that's still not spoiler safe). I'm not expecting this to be in core rules, i'm just curious about your thoughts on this.

39
DFRPG / Re: Pure Mortals
« on: April 12, 2010, 03:19:07 AM »
In my group, we're looking to have one pure mortal. High Concept: Stunt Driver Extraordinaire. Trouble: "I'm better than that. Just watch."
We're still doing some research and whatnot, so we haven't really pinned down characters fully, but it's a really fun set of concepts in our initial brainstorming.

40
DFRPG / Re: Answering some stuff about Crafting and Armor...
« on: April 12, 2010, 03:13:36 AM »
This reminds me of when I was a ADSL technician. There's a conceptual snag here in that "always on" will for some people imply always on. That'd mean every time someone goes to attack, this is there.
We might consider "always available". It's there for you to call on, but it isn't automatically already on.

41
DFRPG / Re: We had our first Session and...
« on: April 11, 2010, 01:33:39 PM »
A set of quick reference sheets as a separate download would be awesome anyway. Great for linking to a member of an online play group who can't lay their hands on the books.

Could we get THESE in printer-friendly format? :D

42
DFRPG / Re: Werebear Problem...
« on: April 11, 2010, 01:30:26 PM »
If all else fails, you can go, "The Catch [+0]: The eyes are unprotected." I mean, that's almost always true, isn't it? And hitting such a small target on a large creature isn't really that much help most of the time. :D

43
DFRPG / Re: Skill Options
« on: April 11, 2010, 01:25:54 PM »
I had this exact same conversation with one of my players. Basically, the answer is, there's no sane reason to do this on the skill sheet directly; this belongs purely as an Aspect, or simply as non-statted fluff.

Reason being: Remember the extremely course granularity of the skill system. Each jump on the scale is fairly significant, since 0 somewhat represents 'random person on the street asked to do something under pressure they probably aren't used to doing that way', and +5 represents 'damn near peak of potential absent other assistive factors'.

Conversely, considering that it's possible to get as much as a shift of 4 either way on your 4dF roll, someone with a base +0 is perfectly capable of doing absurdly horribly already. An intentional drop below mediocre isn't really going to significantly alter results in any real circumstances where the test actually matters. Considering the grade of tests even Feet in the Water tends to get when a roll is actually needed, if you were likely to fail with -1, it's probable you would have failed with +0 as well. Success or failure under those circumstances depends more on the application Aspect invocations and tags more than anything else.

And if being sucky ata particular thing is truly important to the character concept... well, here in Fate land, we use Aspects for things like that, not merely skill points.

After discussing all THAT, if someone still wants to do it, they're probably trying to min-max, since the skills dropped below Mediocre were certainly ones they didn't intend to rely on anyway.

In my opinion, that kind of intent is more than slightly antithetical to a narrative-focused game system like this.

44
DFRPG / Re: Mythic Toughness -- Must have a permission?
« on: April 11, 2010, 01:10:09 PM »
Okay, cool. My world is right again. I hate feeling like I've missed something. :)

45
DFRPG / Re: Answering some stuff about Crafting and Armor...
« on: April 11, 2010, 01:08:16 PM »
The game rules did seem to be anti-stacking in general, though, so I think some of that message got through. I don't have time to go digging through right now, but I remember reading at least one sidebar saying "we take the biggest bonus". That never felt like an inconsistency to me.

(Of course, my main complaint about armor was looking for enhancement of an existing material, not stacking distinct sources, and that's been indirectly answered. :D )

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