Got framework for ai punisher use for combat project done. I may or may not get it out monday but I'm close. I just need to refine a bit more but am happy how close I am. I will have to do a grammar check or something cause as it stands it has some intentional and unintentional phrasing that looks like it came out of a bad translation.
Other than that I have been making some plans for more M&M. Last time we tested a very odd character design against something that was plainly created from my experience with group fights. So something that may not be soloable at all being fought by something that abused a bit of the energy system we were using. So to make a more fair test I'm making something that isn't quite as gimmicky for both sides.
While I have some tricks for the "boss" it isn't quite as bad as the other one. Last one had some healing mechanics, position ones (knocking PC down and away so they'd take a full turn to get back), and just a lot of toughness to get through. A lot was learned but it wasn't quite a typical case. This one is more "standard" some defense tricks with psuedo summons but nothing quite as bad as the other. Throw on some standard and slightly non standard attacks and it should work alright. For the test PC I have something that is called a "blaster" in M&M's ideas. Ranged attack and nothing too fancy.
It'll be interesting to see what the energy expenditure is. For the real game the idea was you defeat monster to get energy from them, run out bad things happen. Defeating these monsters is the only way to get such energy so DM would need a good estimate on what a regular character uses in a fight. I think he vastly underestimated it with original ideas but by how much I'm not sure. It'll be an interesting experiment if we could set aside the few hours for it.I might come back here with results, I like working on M&M but have few people to talk to about it with them being DMs or players of mine.
Other than that I have one game finishing up and another that could use a bit more work on. A sandbox horror game with lots of "surprises" for my players to find. Far too many NPCs for me to keep track of and I really need to define all their quirks and relation with other NPCs. They were generated from tarot draws a while ago and have some simple back story on each one but with around two dozen even a bunch of simple back stories takes while to flesh out.
So that's my long term entertainment. What are you guys looking forward to working on?
Showing posts with label table top. Show all posts
Showing posts with label table top. Show all posts
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Mutants and Masterminds foe and friend design.
A little late for me but it seems Wednesday is the weekly bug friends day. Project combat test is in debug and low level code work right now. With that said there isn't much that may be interesting so I think I'll talk about something else. As I've mentioned before I play and run Mutants and Masterminds second edition. So today I'll talk a bit about making characters from the DM side of the table.
There are three things to consider when making NPCs in Mutants and Master minds 2nd (and 3rd) edition. What it can do, how does it stay alive with pesky players attacking it, and what makes it interesting. The first two are relatively easy as there mechanic based so I'll start there.
What can your being of pure evil do?
The question we ask ourselves in the morning, it's less about what it does and more about what it can do to your Players. This is is more or less the characters "Attack". This does not necessarily mean it's brute force abilities to cause players pain but more often does. In some games it could be the NPC social connection or even it's ability to enable others to be the big problem with them staying the background. Those social ones can be covered in a few skills and feats or if you get fancy emotion control and some sort of boost system if you don't just hand wave it for the sanity I seem to lack. After that we have the "main" power that work wonderful for refluffing what it can do.
The offensive powers in question are Damage, Fatigue, Nauseate, Paralyze, Snare, and Stun. While this isn't all the attack flagged powers it's the ones I see most useful as apposed to trip and dazzle which have a more limited use. First thing I would like to say which is odd is that third edition had a real good idea which I will explain in a second. first every attack in mutants and masterminds is resisted by a "save" on the targets side, how much you fail by chooses the effect. In Second edition the effects listed above had two or three stages of failure of varying degrees of severity but were set based on the type chosen. In 3rd edition they combined everything but damage and let you choose the effects beyond the powers name. This allows for a lot more customization and more fitting effects. Though either way it should be aimed at some how taking someone out of combat. Which isn't too hard for damage, the non damage abilities have a harder time of sticking though they have the benefit of "stacking" and increasing the severity of their effects if a player has failed a save earlier. Either way these should be kept near the "Power level cap" or how much the game allows you have them at though this is to taste for a Game master and their musings.
While this list isn't impressive it is all based on your execution and proper extra use. For example Paralyze is slated in game as some sort of debilitating attack on a persons ability to react be it having to work through the confusion of some sort of poison or some monsters attack that saps the strength away from them. I have taken it's frame work and used it for an ice based attack from a foe that tries to encase in a layer of ice. I could have also used snare for the effect or even stun for this idea but paralyze was an interesting choice as it could slow players down. The only change was making it a "fortitude" save. I could get into a lot more on this but the bread and butter of any person making something in mutants and masterminds is using the same thing in different manner or even just a different weakness.
What can't your being of pure evil do?
The flip side of what we just discussed. It being inconvenienced, its defense and possibly an Achilles heel in the design. There are less things to consider here but they are very important. The first is do you want this to be a boss or a group of enemy encounter.
There is a big difference, the mutant and masterminds system runs on saves against everything, and a low roll means you fail and possibly takes you out of the fight. For players this is mitigated by hero points which can reroll the save around a "safe" zone or even higher for most attacks they would take. If you make a solo NPC to take the players on it is going to be thrashed by each one of them. Taking the group route hopefully means a division of attention as his buddies will be taking up the slack even if he goes down. Before I can go into the intricate parts I have to talk about saves in Mutants and Masterminds, if you played 3rd or later D&D they should look familar.
Saves in Mutants and Masterminds are Toughness, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will. From a mechanical standpoint they have more to do with the offensive powers above than what they mean in game but I'll go through the general explanation of each one. Toughness is effectively your HP in Mutants and masterminds, it allows you to shrug off attacks like nothing and take a lot of hits. For the most part only straight up damage. This one should always be near "Power level cap" for a villain because damage saves are rigged to have a higher chance to fail and plainly mess up a character than anything else. Other saves have roughly a 55% chance of succeeding if you are matched with it, damage saves have a 30% chance of passing so it is key that these are up to limits or the character in mind will go down far more easily than would be imagined. For this reason I tend to call everything that isn't Toughness a secondary save as they aren't the primary means of ending combat in a mechanical sense. Fortitude is the "strength of body" save, things like poison or shocks to the system go here. Reflex is actually one of the more import of the secondary saves, some powers may target it directly but it covers area of effect avoiding. Willpower is the flip side of Fortitude as it is the "strength of the mind" save that generally allows overcoming illusions and pain among other generic slated things.
Unlike Toughness these secondary saves are probably not the best thing to cap. In mutants and masterminds second edition there was an odd design decision to allow these to go up to PL+5 which when completely maxed out allows for a 70% chance of passing the save in question, I believe this is more from 3.X D&D than anything and actually makes things a bit difficult in designing solo encounters or boss battles where the villains are a higher PL. There is also the fact that it is kind of cheap to just cap these, as unlike toughness there are only a few powers that can take a character out of combat like toughness and last like an unconscious condition. So in general I follow the Mastermind Manuals "level based progression" of the D&D good and bad saves. One of the secondary saves is chosen to be "good" which means it's roughly double the bad saves values. There is a formula to this equation of good and bad save but it would probably be too long and pointless so I'll post up a small mock up chart here which is effectively what I use anyways. A thing to be mentioned is M&M is assumed to be played around Power level 10, it can be played higher or lower but it's assumed to stick around 10. The result is a character that isn't a brick wall for non damaging powers to get through. These aren't quite up to cap and will have a little variance when attributes are figured out due to save calculation. It also adds a bit of flavor when the big huge monster has a higher fortitude save, the small nibble melee fighter has a higher reflex, and the psionic powerhouse has a higher will save though it may not always be the case.
Why is your being of pure evil interesting?
Hardest question to answer. At the end of the day you will have a pile of numbers to throw at the players but why about this one over the last one is always a challenge. I commonly refer to this as the gimmick portion of the character and it can either be in the power set or its flaws. This one I can't really answer but it should be a theme to the character and how it's powers work, it doesn't even have to be blatant just something to tie the numbers together. I have made bosses that have abilities that drain down and on depletion give them a nasty complication (players never saw this happen) and ones that had reactive effects to show their prowess in ability. Though I will admit over the year or so in this game I've gotten a lot better and faster at this. Early bosses and such were a horrible situation that were often far too easy which was fine in learning a system. There is a lot of mechanical potential just in the books for interesting situations with a bit of thought into what the NPCs.
Well this was far too long and possibly convoluted for people that don't know much about D&D. So as a question for those that have stayed through all of this have you played any table top games?
There are three things to consider when making NPCs in Mutants and Master minds 2nd (and 3rd) edition. What it can do, how does it stay alive with pesky players attacking it, and what makes it interesting. The first two are relatively easy as there mechanic based so I'll start there.
What can your being of pure evil do?
The question we ask ourselves in the morning, it's less about what it does and more about what it can do to your Players. This is is more or less the characters "Attack". This does not necessarily mean it's brute force abilities to cause players pain but more often does. In some games it could be the NPC social connection or even it's ability to enable others to be the big problem with them staying the background. Those social ones can be covered in a few skills and feats or if you get fancy emotion control and some sort of boost system if you don't just hand wave it for the sanity I seem to lack. After that we have the "main" power that work wonderful for refluffing what it can do.
The offensive powers in question are Damage, Fatigue, Nauseate, Paralyze, Snare, and Stun. While this isn't all the attack flagged powers it's the ones I see most useful as apposed to trip and dazzle which have a more limited use. First thing I would like to say which is odd is that third edition had a real good idea which I will explain in a second. first every attack in mutants and masterminds is resisted by a "save" on the targets side, how much you fail by chooses the effect. In Second edition the effects listed above had two or three stages of failure of varying degrees of severity but were set based on the type chosen. In 3rd edition they combined everything but damage and let you choose the effects beyond the powers name. This allows for a lot more customization and more fitting effects. Though either way it should be aimed at some how taking someone out of combat. Which isn't too hard for damage, the non damage abilities have a harder time of sticking though they have the benefit of "stacking" and increasing the severity of their effects if a player has failed a save earlier. Either way these should be kept near the "Power level cap" or how much the game allows you have them at though this is to taste for a Game master and their musings.
While this list isn't impressive it is all based on your execution and proper extra use. For example Paralyze is slated in game as some sort of debilitating attack on a persons ability to react be it having to work through the confusion of some sort of poison or some monsters attack that saps the strength away from them. I have taken it's frame work and used it for an ice based attack from a foe that tries to encase in a layer of ice. I could have also used snare for the effect or even stun for this idea but paralyze was an interesting choice as it could slow players down. The only change was making it a "fortitude" save. I could get into a lot more on this but the bread and butter of any person making something in mutants and masterminds is using the same thing in different manner or even just a different weakness.
What can't your being of pure evil do?
The flip side of what we just discussed. It being inconvenienced, its defense and possibly an Achilles heel in the design. There are less things to consider here but they are very important. The first is do you want this to be a boss or a group of enemy encounter.
There is a big difference, the mutant and masterminds system runs on saves against everything, and a low roll means you fail and possibly takes you out of the fight. For players this is mitigated by hero points which can reroll the save around a "safe" zone or even higher for most attacks they would take. If you make a solo NPC to take the players on it is going to be thrashed by each one of them. Taking the group route hopefully means a division of attention as his buddies will be taking up the slack even if he goes down. Before I can go into the intricate parts I have to talk about saves in Mutants and Masterminds, if you played 3rd or later D&D they should look familar.
Saves in Mutants and Masterminds are Toughness, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will. From a mechanical standpoint they have more to do with the offensive powers above than what they mean in game but I'll go through the general explanation of each one. Toughness is effectively your HP in Mutants and masterminds, it allows you to shrug off attacks like nothing and take a lot of hits. For the most part only straight up damage. This one should always be near "Power level cap" for a villain because damage saves are rigged to have a higher chance to fail and plainly mess up a character than anything else. Other saves have roughly a 55% chance of succeeding if you are matched with it, damage saves have a 30% chance of passing so it is key that these are up to limits or the character in mind will go down far more easily than would be imagined. For this reason I tend to call everything that isn't Toughness a secondary save as they aren't the primary means of ending combat in a mechanical sense. Fortitude is the "strength of body" save, things like poison or shocks to the system go here. Reflex is actually one of the more import of the secondary saves, some powers may target it directly but it covers area of effect avoiding. Willpower is the flip side of Fortitude as it is the "strength of the mind" save that generally allows overcoming illusions and pain among other generic slated things.
Unlike Toughness these secondary saves are probably not the best thing to cap. In mutants and masterminds second edition there was an odd design decision to allow these to go up to PL+5 which when completely maxed out allows for a 70% chance of passing the save in question, I believe this is more from 3.X D&D than anything and actually makes things a bit difficult in designing solo encounters or boss battles where the villains are a higher PL. There is also the fact that it is kind of cheap to just cap these, as unlike toughness there are only a few powers that can take a character out of combat like toughness and last like an unconscious condition. So in general I follow the Mastermind Manuals "level based progression" of the D&D good and bad saves. One of the secondary saves is chosen to be "good" which means it's roughly double the bad saves values. There is a formula to this equation of good and bad save but it would probably be too long and pointless so I'll post up a small mock up chart here which is effectively what I use anyways. A thing to be mentioned is M&M is assumed to be played around Power level 10, it can be played higher or lower but it's assumed to stick around 10. The result is a character that isn't a brick wall for non damaging powers to get through. These aren't quite up to cap and will have a little variance when attributes are figured out due to save calculation. It also adds a bit of flavor when the big huge monster has a higher fortitude save, the small nibble melee fighter has a higher reflex, and the psionic powerhouse has a higher will save though it may not always be the case.
Why is your being of pure evil interesting?
Hardest question to answer. At the end of the day you will have a pile of numbers to throw at the players but why about this one over the last one is always a challenge. I commonly refer to this as the gimmick portion of the character and it can either be in the power set or its flaws. This one I can't really answer but it should be a theme to the character and how it's powers work, it doesn't even have to be blatant just something to tie the numbers together. I have made bosses that have abilities that drain down and on depletion give them a nasty complication (players never saw this happen) and ones that had reactive effects to show their prowess in ability. Though I will admit over the year or so in this game I've gotten a lot better and faster at this. Early bosses and such were a horrible situation that were often far too easy which was fine in learning a system. There is a lot of mechanical potential just in the books for interesting situations with a bit of thought into what the NPCs.
Well this was far too long and possibly convoluted for people that don't know much about D&D. So as a question for those that have stayed through all of this have you played any table top games?
Thursday, August 25, 2011
game night
Today's post was mostly delayed by watching some friends stream games and run my own. I run a silly fantasy Mutants and Masterminds game that has been going on for a very long time now. It's a fun little game that is getting towards the end of ti's lifespan.
For a change of plot driven pace I decided to have a little dungeon crawl through a very splatter house themed session. This was roughly 3 sessions ago that this started. I filled a house with undead things and mid bosses who've been easily dispatched. While fun I expected this to be at most 2 sessions, even after many sessions in the game and realizing how slow combat can be online this caught me by suprise.
The general hope was to finish it up this month take a month off to finish up some lose ends in my next game and then start that. That deadline is being delayed. Not that this is a bad things, at the moment I'm trying out a few ideas in system for what I'm calling mid boss enemies that I've described before, and variations on it. They go down fast or get weakened more easily then the usually created monsters in the game. Some work in game, some are just hand wave for interesting sake but either way it's a learning experience. Just wish it was a little faster but we're having fun with it.
For a change of plot driven pace I decided to have a little dungeon crawl through a very splatter house themed session. This was roughly 3 sessions ago that this started. I filled a house with undead things and mid bosses who've been easily dispatched. While fun I expected this to be at most 2 sessions, even after many sessions in the game and realizing how slow combat can be online this caught me by suprise.
The general hope was to finish it up this month take a month off to finish up some lose ends in my next game and then start that. That deadline is being delayed. Not that this is a bad things, at the moment I'm trying out a few ideas in system for what I'm calling mid boss enemies that I've described before, and variations on it. They go down fast or get weakened more easily then the usually created monsters in the game. Some work in game, some are just hand wave for interesting sake but either way it's a learning experience. Just wish it was a little faster but we're having fun with it.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Blast from the DM past
Now for something a little less boring. Between resume shuffles, working on some aspects of combat project, and doing minor DM things I've been digging through my DM notes and folders to find some of my most earliest Mutants and Masterminds workings for my current game. So I think I'll share some laughable things with you.
First off this was made with very very sketchy knowledge of Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. So much so that I overlooked a few things. To start with Mutants and Masterminds 2nd editon was green ronin taking the OGL for D&D 3.5 and thoroughly gutting it and replacing its innards and limbs with modular cybernetic running off an arcane magic generator that was brought to life by cosmic rays to make a point buy Super hero game. All the basic ideas are in there to a degree along with the "Toughness" save system. So the six stats everyone loves is still there, with some attack bonus, and the gutted armor class system renamed defense. The game is point buy with "power levels"(which will be refereed to as PL) which works like regular levels to a degree. How easily a character can hit another character, damage them, or otherwise effect them is caped by these things. I won't get into it too much but it's actually an interesting balance system in a game that relies on the DM keeping it from being horribly broken due to it trying to replicate super heroes.
There is attributes, saves, skills, and feats. All the fun stuff D&D has come to gained in 3.5, on top of that is powers and the power structure which would take a while to explain. Effectivly Attributes get modifiers that are applied all over the place, mostly saves and skills. 2nd edition divorced most of attributes from combat things beyond strength modifier damage. Other than that mostly functions the same.
So anyways with that onto the things I did. These were some proto ideas from my Fantasy Mutants and Masterminds game. The thought was that if I need something quick I'd pull out one of these classes and add up some numbers on the fly and be good. I went a different direction but will talk a bit more on that.
So without further delay the "fighter" template.
General fighter
Attributes
(1:1) +1 bonus per 2 above 10
STR 12(+1) 2 points
DEX 12(+1) 2 points
CON 12(+1) 2 points
WIS 10
INT 10
CHR 10
-6 overall
Combat modifiers
(2:1)
ATK +0
DEF +1 2 points
-2 in section,-8 overall
SAVES
(1:1)
Ref +0
Fort +1 1 point
Will +0
-1 in section,-9 overall
Feats
(1:1)
Attack Focus(melee or ranged) 1 rank
Equipment 1 rank (upgrade in armor and weapon)
Takedown attack
-3 in section ,-12 overall
Skills
(1:4)
-0 in section, -12 overall
Powers
(Rank*Cost)
Device 1 rank 3 points
base 4 points a rank
Flaw Easy to lose -1 point a rank
-3 in section, -15 overall.
So to what this all means. First this idea follows that "each PL is 15 points so if I fill up 15 points I can slap them together to make foe NPC!" idea. It works and it doesn't. While this does stack up well there were some things I missed. First not a skill rank in sight, while this isn't too horrible sometimes players like to try something that isn't beat them over the head until they stop trying to impede their movement. It's rare but it happens and that's where skills come in, I generally run NPCs under a system of "Excellent","Proficient", and "not trained" as per a twist on the 2nd edition Masterminds manual splat. Instead of paying 1 point for 4 ranks of some skills it's 2 points for max ranks in a skill and 1 point for half of max ranks, no points means it's relying on attribute bonus only. Not the worst thing.
The worst thing was that I made things that violate PL and took non stacking feats along with this "fighter" is just as good with his fist than without. Not bad if you were going for that sort of thing but this was to be the classic he uses a weapon fighter. Strength bonus goes straight to your unarmed damage which is capped at your PL, with devices or certain equipment you can get weapons that add it to their damage as well, up to the PL. By having a +1 bonus per PL you end up Capped on strength based damage and any more is just pointless, should have it be 1 point a rank so it's at least half of the potential cap but that's not what I did.
The next bad thing is the saves. They're just horrible and way back then they seemed alright but really weren't. First thing is not an ounce of will save, which is fine for fighter minions I shouldn't care about but it seems like a vast oversight when I'm using this template for stronger than town guard things. The Fortitude save is completely non functioning past PL 3. The reason being that it takes the constitution bonus into account and the Saves (besides toughness) cap at PL+6. At PL 4 it'll have 8 fortitude when it should only have 7. This is a big oversight. having PL in reflex save is acceptable though.
Last bit of problems is in with the feats. Attack focus isn't bad, that or attack bonus which is just wasted points for a one range NPC. The first problem here is equipment. Equipment runs on what is effectively the power system only scaled down in cost and mundane for the most part. A lot of them are just given out in a list but you are encouraged to make other things for it. With this I was expecting all the points to be dropped into armor and such. With the oversight that con goes to "toughness" saves which is where armor would go, not only that it maxes it out. Jumping ahead you'll see the device entry is wher eI planed the weapon to go so buying weapons is pointless here. The only thing I can think of is a bunch of rope or other little useful trinkets that are only useful to PCs for the most part unless I want to play Tuckers Kobolds. Not a promising aspect as I'll be getting a lot of such items with every PL getting 5 points worth of them. After that there is the non ranked takedown feat, so every PL added woudl mean I have one point floating around that I would probalby ignore or take a random rleated feat in.
So all in all, this didn't quite accomplish what I wanted. Thanks to how I ran the games I ended up more often than not hand constructing the little obstacles in the players path until I got the hang of winging it. Winging it being I pick what saves the best, what attributes are high and low, what gimmick it has, and a few powers at the relative level for anything without a name. Which works pretty well and I know I could fit it all together without breaking the guideline of Power points per Power Level ideals I keep as a GM.
Well hopefully this was a bit more entertaining, it's a bit of a challenge to come up with something worthwhile on a near daily basis. Though it's probably a good thing for me. Anyways I might revise this idea in the future, if I'm really feeling like it maybe I could see if I could make a book of minions and mooks under Green Ronins OGL licence for Mutants and Masterminds. Either edition would work though I would think 3rd would be the one to work under, and that isn't quite my style.
First off this was made with very very sketchy knowledge of Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. So much so that I overlooked a few things. To start with Mutants and Masterminds 2nd editon was green ronin taking the OGL for D&D 3.5 and thoroughly gutting it and replacing its innards and limbs with modular cybernetic running off an arcane magic generator that was brought to life by cosmic rays to make a point buy Super hero game. All the basic ideas are in there to a degree along with the "Toughness" save system. So the six stats everyone loves is still there, with some attack bonus, and the gutted armor class system renamed defense. The game is point buy with "power levels"(which will be refereed to as PL) which works like regular levels to a degree. How easily a character can hit another character, damage them, or otherwise effect them is caped by these things. I won't get into it too much but it's actually an interesting balance system in a game that relies on the DM keeping it from being horribly broken due to it trying to replicate super heroes.
There is attributes, saves, skills, and feats. All the fun stuff D&D has come to gained in 3.5, on top of that is powers and the power structure which would take a while to explain. Effectivly Attributes get modifiers that are applied all over the place, mostly saves and skills. 2nd edition divorced most of attributes from combat things beyond strength modifier damage. Other than that mostly functions the same.
So anyways with that onto the things I did. These were some proto ideas from my Fantasy Mutants and Masterminds game. The thought was that if I need something quick I'd pull out one of these classes and add up some numbers on the fly and be good. I went a different direction but will talk a bit more on that.
So without further delay the "fighter" template.
General fighter
Attributes
(1:1) +1 bonus per 2 above 10
STR 12(+1) 2 points
DEX 12(+1) 2 points
CON 12(+1) 2 points
WIS 10
INT 10
CHR 10
-6 overall
Combat modifiers
(2:1)
ATK +0
DEF +1 2 points
-2 in section,-8 overall
SAVES
(1:1)
Ref +0
Fort +1 1 point
Will +0
-1 in section,-9 overall
Feats
(1:1)
Attack Focus(melee or ranged) 1 rank
Equipment 1 rank (upgrade in armor and weapon)
Takedown attack
-3 in section ,-12 overall
Skills
(1:4)
-0 in section, -12 overall
Powers
(Rank*Cost)
Device 1 rank 3 points
base 4 points a rank
Flaw Easy to lose -1 point a rank
-3 in section, -15 overall.
So to what this all means. First this idea follows that "each PL is 15 points so if I fill up 15 points I can slap them together to make foe NPC!" idea. It works and it doesn't. While this does stack up well there were some things I missed. First not a skill rank in sight, while this isn't too horrible sometimes players like to try something that isn't beat them over the head until they stop trying to impede their movement. It's rare but it happens and that's where skills come in, I generally run NPCs under a system of "Excellent","Proficient", and "not trained" as per a twist on the 2nd edition Masterminds manual splat. Instead of paying 1 point for 4 ranks of some skills it's 2 points for max ranks in a skill and 1 point for half of max ranks, no points means it's relying on attribute bonus only. Not the worst thing.
The worst thing was that I made things that violate PL and took non stacking feats along with this "fighter" is just as good with his fist than without. Not bad if you were going for that sort of thing but this was to be the classic he uses a weapon fighter. Strength bonus goes straight to your unarmed damage which is capped at your PL, with devices or certain equipment you can get weapons that add it to their damage as well, up to the PL. By having a +1 bonus per PL you end up Capped on strength based damage and any more is just pointless, should have it be 1 point a rank so it's at least half of the potential cap but that's not what I did.
The next bad thing is the saves. They're just horrible and way back then they seemed alright but really weren't. First thing is not an ounce of will save, which is fine for fighter minions I shouldn't care about but it seems like a vast oversight when I'm using this template for stronger than town guard things. The Fortitude save is completely non functioning past PL 3. The reason being that it takes the constitution bonus into account and the Saves (besides toughness) cap at PL+6. At PL 4 it'll have 8 fortitude when it should only have 7. This is a big oversight. having PL in reflex save is acceptable though.
Last bit of problems is in with the feats. Attack focus isn't bad, that or attack bonus which is just wasted points for a one range NPC. The first problem here is equipment. Equipment runs on what is effectively the power system only scaled down in cost and mundane for the most part. A lot of them are just given out in a list but you are encouraged to make other things for it. With this I was expecting all the points to be dropped into armor and such. With the oversight that con goes to "toughness" saves which is where armor would go, not only that it maxes it out. Jumping ahead you'll see the device entry is wher eI planed the weapon to go so buying weapons is pointless here. The only thing I can think of is a bunch of rope or other little useful trinkets that are only useful to PCs for the most part unless I want to play Tuckers Kobolds. Not a promising aspect as I'll be getting a lot of such items with every PL getting 5 points worth of them. After that there is the non ranked takedown feat, so every PL added woudl mean I have one point floating around that I would probalby ignore or take a random rleated feat in.
So all in all, this didn't quite accomplish what I wanted. Thanks to how I ran the games I ended up more often than not hand constructing the little obstacles in the players path until I got the hang of winging it. Winging it being I pick what saves the best, what attributes are high and low, what gimmick it has, and a few powers at the relative level for anything without a name. Which works pretty well and I know I could fit it all together without breaking the guideline of Power points per Power Level ideals I keep as a GM.
Well hopefully this was a bit more entertaining, it's a bit of a challenge to come up with something worthwhile on a near daily basis. Though it's probably a good thing for me. Anyways I might revise this idea in the future, if I'm really feeling like it maybe I could see if I could make a book of minions and mooks under Green Ronins OGL licence for Mutants and Masterminds. Either edition would work though I would think 3rd would be the one to work under, and that isn't quite my style.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Critical development
So you always have two choices when you want to add something to a game. You make a new system entirely or you modify a system you already have. This is just my personal opinion but modifying your basic system is more appealing to me. I've run into games where you had to know one too many systems that weren't related to anything else. A common one that's been showing up a while is minigames straight out of the flash that are completely separate from everything else involved in the game but have seemingly become a staple. For the first few times they seem unique and even entreating though it wears thin.
Newer Pen and Paper games have gone the opposite direction, they seemingly rarely go away from their established main mechanic in any situation. The olden days they had tables upon tables for how things worked. It was quite a mess of referencing and hand waving. While I do prefer this sort of approach a bit more variety could be worthwhile. The image at the start of this is quite a few examples of taking a mechanic and changing it slightly without actually changing the final outcome. You roll the die you get a number and you use it. It still does the same effect though it's 'different' for better or worse. In fact there are times where the worse mechanic for the outcome is there to balance out some reward for it succeeding.
With that said I shall dive into what I'm using in Combat Test. You choose an action primary an attack, then go about rolling a pool of dice. From here you distribute these dice to an initiative pool, an action pool, and a defense pool. The action you choose could modify these a bit but for the most part success are counted like this; 1 per dice in the pool then 1 more for each die over or equal to the value being tested (attack value or defense value both defaulted to 7 right now). Performing an attack for instance causes you to test against attack value with the dice you allocated to your action pool earlier, the AI tests defense value with the defense pool it determined, if your attack is higher damage dice are rolled and you go on. The entire idea of the system is that you can't get everything, you want more attack you sacrifice defense and initiative for it. Right now Initiative is kind of pointless though there are some weird things the current system allows for it namely guarding for two turns if you go first on initiative on the first turn then go second on the following, it's somewhere between a glitch and a standard idea as the guarding status ends when your next action is executed.
The current thought is to add things like feinting or other techniques like stunning possibly while using the current system. Though that seems cheap though not as a cheap as my other idea. An idea taken form Weapon of the Gods was to have something of an "edge" pool. By taking dice out of your pool before assigning it to others you increase edge. Basic thoughts right now is spending that edge to cause the possibility of less successes in the other pool or thoughts on things such as reducing armor if the opponent is using it. Though like magic this seems a cop out.
So a bit of a standstill on this lazy hot day. Though I have managed to fix a few more menu things and take out a bug or two so some progress.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Knowing your Lim f(x) = L
I run a very silly game in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. Ran it starting at PL 6 and it's about PL8 now. It runs on the premise of any bad yet funny idea I can throw at a party of "Adventures guild" members that take contracts and do stuff. Nothing too deep but I usually have thinly veiled refrences the players can laugh at while they roll virutal dice. That aside I'll get to the meat of all this.
Knowing your limits. And a GM's limits is the groups fun. A GM can do anything they want as long as the players stay at the table and take it. It doesn't mean that they should. Personally I try to have different parts in my sessions, I don't quite like having entire sessions be consistent of one thing. Often I want the situation to always be on the change, they do something something new gets to be chewed on by them. Doing this hopefully keeps it fun and allows them to fill up most of the session with in character talk instead of me dictating what is going on.
This latest bad idea didn't quite have that. As I have possibly 3 members who occasionally look here I won't get into deeper reasons but effectively they had ideas about this entire situation which made the plans for the session seem a little short. So I threw a wrinkle in it, a minor boss fight that could prove entertaining and possibly scare them through some of the dirty tricks I threw on it. Nothing too major though but outcomes of the fight would have extended this session in interesting ways. As the image shows, that fight didn't take long (and they did strip both of them and time them up so they could check to see what was causing some of the complications). I did have ideas on the spot how to extend the fight and make it seem like a boss fight. But with some thought didn't take them. Time was almost up and while I did plan this to be a drag out fight I thought actually dragging it out would not accomplish much. I do lean more towards lengthening plot fights through villain points
While knowing this it always seems a cop out to let players just smash and grab something that I designed to put up a bit of a challenge to them. Overall it did accomplish what I wanted though, it gave some more conflict and added a complication to what seemed to be a mission that was involving "go here talk to them, make a decision and come back" with how they went about things. One fault was I had one of the duo be a lower PL than the main guy as it seemed to make sense, another was some misunderstanding on just how effective some of the players effects were. Other than that I did get to show off a few of the tricks though not all of them which makes it feel like a waste. Though it is food for thought on better design later.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Statistical analysis
There has been a long standing tradition in games to take a nature vs nurture approach in games. Nature being your innate abilities that are largely unchanging, though can grow in minor ways , and skills which are constantly being increased in decent numbers. There is a lot of weird things to this, so I'll begin with the parts I know decently well.
I know there were other games around when chain mail became Old Dungeons and Dragons but I just don't know how to find them, a lot were probably lost to the passing of time. But D&D had Stats. Back then stats didn't matter quite as much, in fact I think it had weird system of bonus EXP when you did things involving the bonus from your governing stat and magical things.
First things first, D&D is rooted in wargames so is a little weird at times. I know the modern statistics are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Don't know if any were added along the way and not in the mood for long research, which I may take up later for fun, on the original game. I do know stat "bonuses" were calculated completely differently making an 18 in them a godly thing. Supposedly wasn't too different throughout the years until 3.5 started making them mater a lot more and be prerequisite to a lot of feats which were needed, or spells cast, or even just hitting something.
The approach to this is a little weird. A lot of stats line up with one thing, sword hitting things intelligence hitting another, and in latter editions exceptions get made everywhere. 3.5, and possibly 3rd, in general had feats or little extras that you can get when you level up allow you to use Wisdom to fire bows and arrows. Strength has added to accuracy for melee attacks, except for light weapons which could use dexterity if you took the feat for it. Wisdom is some where between common sense, experience over time, and flat out natural instinct as every natural animal has high wisdom. The more "what is this stat actually representing?" of all of them is Charisma. It's always been described as a "force of personality" while having attractive races get bonuses to it and ugly races getting penalties, until 4th edition but another box of dead horses.
What does this all mean? Stats, attributes, and characteristics are somewhat silly. Though they serve a purpose. Table top gaming or even computer RPGs need some amount of abstraction to not be horribly cumbersome and not understandable by the people who use them. This is where QWOP comes in, it's a game that is realistic to a degree. You don't hold left or right to move the guy along, you actually go to the source of how he goes about moving muscular movement. Legitimately categorizing how a character should realistically go about things would be about as elegant as making QWOP man jump a hurdle, it can be done but I doubt most people will enjoy it. All games use some form of abstraction for this reason, reality isn't clean and fun. The most we can ask is that we can only eye roll a little at the designers choice and keep them constant. I'll probably revisit this under different systems, nWoD had I think 9 stats in total and comparing it to D&D could be fun.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Random NPC tarot creation
First: The Fate Card. Out of only the Major Arcanes is the fate card. It's a binding force for all the following cards be it primary going with or against such a fate.
Second: The Mask card. This is obvious a persona refrence but it works, it's what the person appears like to the world be it how they project themselves or just how they end up being percieved.
Third: The Impression card. This is important for me for NPCs. It could be just how I have all other NPCs who don't know that particular NPC reference them as that's their only exposure or how the party gets to first meet them. Typically it's first impressions, just some things that are easily remebered about the character regardless of their mask.
Fourth: The Action card. How the NPC goes about things, or things they have done in the past and are remembered for. It's self explanitory to a degree though can get tricky.
Fifth: The Reason card. This can help lend a lot of help to the Impression, the Mask, and The action card. It's an event or a thought process that makes the character what it is today.
Sixth: The Hope card. This is what the character wants (or fears) to happen. Like the Reason card it retroactivly helps with all the cards before it and can tie them together.
So with that out of the way I'll go about generating an NPC with my Rider-Waite deck.
The Fate: Strength. The Strength card is a card about power, though it can represent the struggle with ones self. We'll see which works better after the others.
The Mask: Knight of Cups. The Knight of cups has a list of things involving messages, arriving, advancements and other such things. For a mask this easily can be used as a charming person. One who goes about doing things involving other people. A life of the party person.
The Impression: The world. A major arcane card, while I don't make a big deal about them in these readings they help a lot more than the minor arcane due to their nature. The world Is the journey card, going about places but also arrival at the end in some instances. It does fit the charming persona that has been somewhat established, always doing things with other people. Disapearing on trips or other assorted adventures.
The Action: Reversed The moon. I use reversed tarot cards, what a reversed card generally means is an inverse of the meaing, or in some cases a strengthening or deluding of some aspects. The moon is a somewhat dark card. Talking about hidden enemies and deception. The little booklet I have likes to reduce the aspect of the moon and for this it fits. The character is known for streching the truth on more than one ocasion or outright fabricating lies to carry a conversation.
The Reason: Reversed Two Swords. Swords is rarely a happy bunch of cards, this sword however has a meaning in Conformity, courage, friendship and a few other nice things. Normaly reversed it means imposter, falsehood, and disloyalty among a few other things. As a reason this really works for this charcter, could make a very dark reason but today I shall make it silly. They were mistaken for another person at a party and shown the town under a lie. Now the lie continues in some fashion. Simple enough.
The Hope: Seven of Pentacles. Every once in a while you run into means that are conflicted with another. Seven of pentacles has quite a few readings, the one you settle on is going to based on other cards. For this character with all the fun loving roguery I'll settle on business. With all his trips and other actions they could be making up some form of clientele or business partners. Always charming everyone in hopes of further gaining their business or suport in the future he keeps on rolling like a ball of energy.
So with these taken as a whole we get this.
A person of considerable power of personality. Always in a state of motion he travels about entertaining others at events even if qutite a few stories are far fetched. Actions stem from an incident in the past where he found out that some lies and fun can help quite a bit especially with meeting new people. With this there is hopes of the busniess partnerss of the now and future look favorably upon the person.
And that's what we have. Hopefully this has been somewhat of a fun read.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Hit points, Attack, and damage. The components of the padded sumo slap fight.
This comes up a lot more in Table top games than video games. A point where the fight is already decided or no one knows who is winning until 5 more attacks hit. For a while in 4th edition D&D the term Padded sumo fight came up when people realized that the monsters high hit points and other defenses while not being a high enough threat to the players perceptions. It's popped up in other systems; as stated 4th edition had a problem with the monsters just having too much HP to deal with in a 'fun' time frame, Dark Heresy for being a very lethal system has laughably easy ways to survive damage considering it's low to hit aspects, and Mutants and Masterminds has this effect alot where fights run a lot longer when it could be the players effectivly just finishing off the boss I set up while the only threat at this point comes from them rolling too low when taking damage. It's just not satisfying at those points and becomes a chore.
Pen and Paper combat takes a decently long time, online it takes a lot longer for magical reasons. When combat becomes a chore instead of an exciting situation people quit describing attacks and just rolling their most effective attacking against the most threatening target or weakest target, it honestly doesn't matter to the players at this point. They just want the fight over with and while the GM may have some surprises left they quit caring too and just want to get back to the "fun". Which is a big problem, as the entire gaming experience should be fun to some degree.
There a few factors in what causes a fight to be a boring grind, and like my title suggests it's all about the abstracts used in games. The majority of games like the hit point concept, have 1 and your fine. They also like a simple way to reduce them, straight up damage rolls. Simple enough you can get how long you're expected, in a boring fashion, to take down a monster. Hitpoints/average_damage gives you how many turns it's likely to take down that monster in the bread and butter fashion. Though most games have an attack roll to hit the monster, making the formula a bit longer Hitpoints/(chance_to_hit*average_damage) making combat longer. In D&D and it's general rule of thumb 50% chance to hit a target of the same level you're effectively doubling the length of fights. Some system also let the defending player negate attacks leading to something akin to Hitpoints/((chance_to_hit*chance_to_negate*average_damage). Give a player a 50% chance to hit and the defender a 50% chance to ignore that hit and you've effectively quadrupled the length of the fight. At these stages you could reduce the hit points of the target to taste and arrive at something that would take an estimate few rounds. This presents a problem as the formula takes into account the player missing and the negation chance happening according to average static terms. Dice don't have memory and typically like to ignore averages in the short term scale, long term 10000+ rolls not so much. Generally called "swingyness" where a few rolls control the fate of a character you can end up with the monster in one hit your designed challenging monster can happen enough that you'll question dice randomness. On the other side the one hit mooks you send out could prove more effective than any boss encounter you carefully prepared.
How to solve this problem seem to be a dilemma in gaming at large and various solutions have come up for it. Action point systems let you reroll dice is a common one. Some others give you insurance that if you get taken out in one shot letting you ignore it that time. Either way a lot of systems require a lot of taste in how combat works to enjoy it. I prefer mine a little more swingy. I'd rather have a battle short and over and deal with the consequences than to have the battle take too long.
Pen and Paper combat takes a decently long time, online it takes a lot longer for magical reasons. When combat becomes a chore instead of an exciting situation people quit describing attacks and just rolling their most effective attacking against the most threatening target or weakest target, it honestly doesn't matter to the players at this point. They just want the fight over with and while the GM may have some surprises left they quit caring too and just want to get back to the "fun". Which is a big problem, as the entire gaming experience should be fun to some degree.
There a few factors in what causes a fight to be a boring grind, and like my title suggests it's all about the abstracts used in games. The majority of games like the hit point concept, have 1 and your fine. They also like a simple way to reduce them, straight up damage rolls. Simple enough you can get how long you're expected, in a boring fashion, to take down a monster. Hitpoints/average_damage gives you how many turns it's likely to take down that monster in the bread and butter fashion. Though most games have an attack roll to hit the monster, making the formula a bit longer Hitpoints/(chance_to_hit*average_damage) making combat longer. In D&D and it's general rule of thumb 50% chance to hit a target of the same level you're effectively doubling the length of fights. Some system also let the defending player negate attacks leading to something akin to Hitpoints/((chance_to_hit*chance_to_negate*average_damage). Give a player a 50% chance to hit and the defender a 50% chance to ignore that hit and you've effectively quadrupled the length of the fight. At these stages you could reduce the hit points of the target to taste and arrive at something that would take an estimate few rounds. This presents a problem as the formula takes into account the player missing and the negation chance happening according to average static terms. Dice don't have memory and typically like to ignore averages in the short term scale, long term 10000+ rolls not so much. Generally called "swingyness" where a few rolls control the fate of a character you can end up with the monster in one hit your designed challenging monster can happen enough that you'll question dice randomness. On the other side the one hit mooks you send out could prove more effective than any boss encounter you carefully prepared.
How to solve this problem seem to be a dilemma in gaming at large and various solutions have come up for it. Action point systems let you reroll dice is a common one. Some others give you insurance that if you get taken out in one shot letting you ignore it that time. Either way a lot of systems require a lot of taste in how combat works to enjoy it. I prefer mine a little more swingy. I'd rather have a battle short and over and deal with the consequences than to have the battle take too long.
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