Norgrath
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Posts posted by Norgrath
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The point is that a lot of people will genuinely lose out if FFG don't create PDFs.
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15 minutes ago, 2P51 said:People don't need it. They're whining for it, but they don't need it.
If there were pdfs of the star wars books I would have bought most of the range, there aren't and I haven't seen physical copies in any LGS and shipping is usually exorbitant (like as much again as the book) to to city where I live. I expect the same to hold with Genysys and L5R. Need is accurate in so far as can't reasonably buy without.
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One minor issue with the survey as I found it: in the GM section it's not clear whether you're asking about a duel between two PCs or a duel between one PC and one NPC. I'd expect to make many more decisions and dice rolls in the later case than the former.
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19 minutes ago, Exarkfr said:Mechanically, your natural weapons are always ready. So you can ward or trap with your bite, and attack with a nodachi.
Everything about this plan seems terrible.
Magnus Grendel reacted to this -
So the Mirumoto Bushi in the new preview has a TN reduction ability and states to a minimum of 1. This is much more likely to apply to other similar abilities than the gm approach section so that put this discussion to bed.
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11 minutes ago, Mobiusllls said:A Clash is a duel. But since they tought that their written duel was a ritualized combat (Its not.) They made the distinction(with no mechanical difference, because its not ritualized). So answering your question, yes Lions tremble when someone ask them to 1x1.
On the more specific part of changing scenes and deal with strife. I would rule that is the same scene, but that two guys are special and they use different rules of the system, instead of 1x1 in a skirmish like any other game would do. Stupid on my opinion, but it is what it is.
About the clash being a "one turn duel"
Here comes what makes sense:
"duel does not last a fixed number of rounds. At the end of each round, if either character achieved their objective, the duel ends and proceeds to Phase 3: Resolution.
Otherwise, the duel returns to Phase 2:Perform Actions and continues for an additional round."one round of duel becomes several.
Honestly if that its not RAW or RAI, I still would make Clashes go forever until someone interferes,withdraw or win.
I disagree with nearly all of this:
- The language of the sidebar implies that the characters aren't technically in a duel (Otherwise they'd just saying the characters are in a duel as opposed to explicitly listing the steps that happen in a clash and wouldn't bother with the word "effectively")
- Given that the Clash occurs "during a skirmish or mass battle" Way of the Lion could still trigger even if it was technically a duel
- The clash sidebar explicitly states "one round" and lists in step 4 that not having a winner is a possibility, there's no reason to suspect that the rules intention is for them to continue over multiple rounds.
That said I do agree that it would make more sense if clashes didn't just last for one round. You can just say that The two characters continue clashing and skip over them in turn order then do another round of the clash (or if a character withdraws from the clash they forfeit their stake and get to act in that round).
The Grand Falloon reacted to this -
**** you people, now I'm thinking about the narrative process one would go through to "turn" a Kuni.
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16 hours ago, WHW said:Page 13 has a sidebar about TN0.
Short answer is: TN cannot be reduced to 0. If a roll had a TN of at least 1, it will never be reduced to 0. It something has TN of 0, it's not worth rolling for.
11 hours ago, rcuhljr said:Most things agree with that, other then some weirdness in the GM approach difficulty section "the GM should reduce the TN by 1–3 (to a minimum of 0)" which I assume just means if they pick a super relevant approach they don't roll anymore?
Given that the sidebar on page 13 doesn't mention TN reduction. I'm inclined to believe that the minimum of zero referenced here applies across the board. As Aramis said above I think you'd still want to roll for bonus successes and opportunities.
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A number of abilities reduce the TN of a check, some by potentially large numbers. The book says that there are no TN 0 checks in the game but it's not clear if that is referring to all checks or just Base TN. So can a reduction in TN reduce the value to 0? What about less than 0? This is very relevant for schools like the Shinjo Outrider and the Isawa Elementalist.
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The advancement table for the Kuni Purifier Akodo commander includes rank 1-4 air invocations and rank 1-4 earth shuji at rank 5 respectively (as opposed to rank 5). It seems odd that these schools alone don't get experience counted for taking rank 5 techniques in their technique category. This could be intentional to specifically dissuade them from getting Wrath of Kaze-no-Kami and The Immovable Hand of Peace but it could equally be an oversight so I'm bringing it up here.
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Is Omeka meant to have a one-handed grip or not? For consistency if it doesn't it should surely be 10 deadliness and list no changes in the grip (and if it does it should obviously be listed).
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8 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:It'd be the equivalent of chopping off someone's leg and expecting to use it with the 'kick' statline (damage 3, deadliness 2) rather than as a blunt improvised weapon (damage 2, deadliness 2).
I don't think that comparison quite holds: an amputated leg can no longer take advantage of muscles in the same way while a tusk, if thrust into someone with the same force as a board could accomplish (which I feel should be a matter for dice pools) should do just as much damage regardless of being attached to the boar.
Not that this is important: I just made that comment to illustrate how absurd the statline is.
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On 11/3/2017 at 11:17 PM, Magnus Grendel said:- It's similar to the Kuni Purifier trait, Stare Into Shadow which is awe-inspiringly terrifying against a shadowlands creature or tainted and......utterly useless against anything else.
The thing is, even assuming that both are triggering, Way of the Lion is much more powerful than Stare into Shadow. Beyond reducing strife (which WotL is better at since it can remove excess strife or strife from exploded rolls) SiS can turn a ring die result from opportunity to success or get a free opportunity on a skill die, this is limited by your school rank, the number of strife you actually roll (not including explosions because you've lost the opportunity by that point) and the number of results you roll that are as good as what you can turn results into (so for instance the ability does nothing if on 3+2k3 you roll an explosion and a blank on the skill dice and 2 success and an opportunity+strife (this is an extreme example but at higher skill ranks there's every chance that you won't get leverage out of every rank)). WotL adds successes to an already successful roll and is limited by your school rank and how many strife you have after adding strife for this attack (so one of the upper bounds of usefulness of SiS is a lower bound of usefulness of WotL at high school ranks). Even the shortcomings of WotL, not being able to turn a failure into a success and not being able to add opportunity, are things that SiS will only occasionally be able to do itself.
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5 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:I admit I don't fully understand why the change was required, or why it's supposed to be good.
As I said earlier, the point was the nerf to striking as air and center so you couldn't get nigh unassailable TNs in the early game. The buff to air stance is to make up for that at high levels.
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6 hours ago, Franwax said:Yup, reached the same conclusion here. Maybe there’s matter for an other “Balance issues” thread on this sustaining fury feature. You think the boar is frightening? Try the troll!
I am genuinely more scared of the boar than the troll. The boar has significantly less resilience but sustaining fury severely mitigates how much difference that makes (even given that they both have it), in the context of how you'll encounter them the lower composure of the boar is actually an asset. Trolls have better damage resistance but one that's negated by the sacred quality on weapons (not to speak of all the other things that shadowlands creature enables). The boar also has superior mental stats.
Then we get to the tusks: if the dm allowed players to strip the tusks and use them after killing the boar (which I personally think is something someone should reasonably be able to do) then they'd be the best weapon in the game. They have the damage of a crossbow and the deadliness of a two-handed katana. When compared to something similar they have over twice the damage and over thrice the deadliness of a wolf's bite or more damage and a lot more deadliness than the claws of an oni. When I think about what these are I feel like 5,3 (like a yari but range 0) seems like a more a reasonable line (or 5,5 if you want them to be really dangerous).
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5 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:1E had them be, as with all minor clans, Glory 0.
Glory 0 doesn't mean the same thing in this edition as it did in 1E then. A character with glory 0 is "One of the most villainous or scandalous individuals to have walked the Empire."
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14 minutes ago, CrazyRadio said:The old Air Stance gave +1 to TN.
The new Air Stance gives +1-3 to TN based on School Rank.
While at low levels, where most people might playtest the Beta, this might not seem like a problem, at high levels Air Stance combined with Striking as Air isn't just optimal, it's a One True Path. Air Stance becomes better at avoiding Earth Stance at avoiding crits. While Earth Stance prevents Opportunities from being spent on crits, Air Stance does essentially the same thing by making your opponent keep all their successes to even land a hit, thus usually lacking the necessary Opportunities, if they even hit at all. Further, Air Stance stops crits from Heartpiercing Strike or Iaijutsu: Rising Slash, which Earth Stance does nothing to avoid.
At high school ranks, Air Stance and Striking as Air allow someone to average a TN of 8-9 while still maintaining offense. This high of a TN often leaves someone untouchable.
Worse, Air Stance makes combat BORING. Imagine two people who use it fighting each other. It creates a boring D&D-esque scenario of two high Armor Class characters swinging at each other uselessly forever. You can't even disable someone using Air Stance with crits that inflict a status because Air Stance usually disables getting hit.
The counter argument I saw was that at high school ranks, Air Stance was bad because it was only a +1 and this didn't matter. That is mathematically not true. While explosions and Void Points can raise kept dice, even at the highest ranks characters generally keep only around 5 dice. Air Stance at high ranks reduced damage suffered by lowering average successes, and made it harder to be crit by making opponents have to keep more successes as opposed to Opportunities. Combined with Striking as Air, the old Air Stance was effective at all ranks.
Did you perhaps not notice that Striking as air got nerfed so that it now requires two opportunity per bonus TN after the first? This balances things out when compared to the old air stance.
At rank 5 or 6:
0 Op goes from 3 TN to 5
1 Op goes from 4 to 6
2 Ops goes from 5 to 6
3 ops goes from 6 to 7
4 and 5 ops are unchanged (7 and 8 respectively)
If you looked at a rank 1 or 2 you'd see a similar difference in the opposite direction and that's the point of this change, since high level characters can manage to deal with high tns much more easily than low level characters can.
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2 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:if the forumlae for PC are bad for courtiers, then the formulae need to be fixed, not the NPCs adjusted.
Okay, how about the manifest Kami. Should fire and air have 6 resilience a piece? Regardless of the PC system it'll sometimes be useful to have NPCs that deviate from it. It's not actually hard to keep track of the stats of whatever you need handy and that over-rides NPCs deviating from the formula.
1 hour ago, tenchi2a said:The NPC system for any game IMHO should make characters that are possible for PCs to be like.
The idea of abilities that players can't have (adversary) or just being thrown together without the build of how they got there just don't work for me.
To me this is lazy game design at its worst.
If the system works for PC, it should work for NPC or it needs to be fixed.
NPCs and PCs have fundamentally different purposes (if nothing else there's an order of magnitude more npcs than pcs in most campaigns). PC build systems are intended to build characters that will be used in multiple encounters in a role. NPCs can be used for nearly anything; it's folly to restrict them to the same rules as PCs for some sense of uniformity.
Tonbo Karasu reacted to this -
8 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:Not a good reason. Actually a pretty damned bad one.
Encounter balance (which is the reason that NPCs don't match the formula) is one of the best reasons to do anything in an RPG. The seasoned courtier is an obvious example of why the derived stats deviate: water and air are the two rings that suit such a characters skill set best but they don't give a character a good compsure value (which doesn't make sense for a courtier and it boggles my mind why the PC derived values work this way but lets not get into that).
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3 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:It's not that big a pressure, unless you're psychologically predisposed to negative views of the odds. (As WHW seems to be.)
The math:
Expected successes per ring die, taking strife: 172/216 †; 79% roughly 4/5
Expected successes per skill die, taking strife: 1099/1728 †, 63%, just shy of 2/3Expected successes per ring die, no strife: 2/6; 33%
Expected successes per skill die, no strife: 628/1728 †, 36% just a hair over 1/3.My players are strife averse from the get go, so only take strife to get explosions.
Expected successes per ring die, taking strife only to explode: 129/216 †, 59%.
Expected successes per skill die, taking strife only to explode: 785/1728 †, 45%For strife averse players, the reduction in odds from explode only to none are not bad at all. Keeping best 3 on 3+3k3, you expect a bit over 3 successes keeping all, or only taking strife for explosions; No strife at all, you still expect ~2.5, and so 2 is pretty reliable.
† recursing only to 3 terms EG: Ring keep all = 4/6 + 4/36 + 4/216; one could recurse further, 4/1272, but doing so adds increasingly less value.
This reads like a ring die has 4 success faces on it: that doesn't match up with the rulebook. Also You see to be using 7/12+7/144+7/1728 for the skill die which isn't accurate because that explodes 1/6 of the time.
Using the same process I get
Ring die, keep all: 129/216 approx 60%
Skill die, keep all: 1204/1728 approx 70%
Ring die, no strain: 36/216 approx 17%
Skill die, no strain: 628/1728 approx 36%
Ring die, strain to explode: 86/216 approx 40%
Skill die, strain to explode: 860/1728 approx 50%
(all percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number)
These numbers make things much worse when compromised with risk averse players losing over half their expected successes on ring dice and about a quarter on skill dice.
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11 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:I wouldn't count on more skills nor rings...
Hence the nearly.
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I think it's safe to assume that the full rulebook will have more of nearly everything, particularly at higher ranks.
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6 hours ago, LuxVeritatis said:I think Striking as Water needs to be amended so that the physical resistance reduction is instant / on the blow in question only, not a persistent effect lasting until the end of the turn. This theoretically makes it weaker - but would mean that it works against someone in Earth Stance; and someone in Earth Stance / Striking as Earth is the person when you most need it to work.
Based on the timing of attacks the effect does happen on the attack that generates the opportunity and until the next round, so you're talking about a strict nerf here.
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9 hours ago, Yandia said:For question 20 I think we can take a rather weird mechanic from DnD 4E.
In general every samurai gets the following ability:
Destiny sees your end clearly. Choose a fitting end for your character. When you are dying in a diffrent way than described, you may spend a void point: After the scene, you recover from you fatal state in a save location.
Depending on what end you choose you are subject to other effects:
- In a Duel - You can not back down from a challenge. Whenever you are challenge you must accept.
- On the battlefield (For Bushi only) - The Way of the Samurai lies in Death. During a skirmish or mass battle you double your focus value.
- Sepukku - You are not a virtues type and it will get to you one day. Your character gains an additional Flaw disadvantage.
- Of old Age - Nothing interesting ever happens to you. All your honor, glory, and status gains are halved.
I feel like there should be a murdered option here. But the mechanic does seem like a very good idea.
Kakita Shijin reacted to this
Will we see PDF's?
in Genesys
Posted
Seriously? I've found indexed pdf's far easier to look up than physical rulebooks. This is one of the reasons I favor pdfs even when both are available (admittedly this is very rare for me).