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Zarick

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Posts posted by Zarick

  2. Posted

    The reason I'm ignoring your "math and theory" is that it's all based on the assumption that on any given check, two things are true:

    • You only need the minimum margin of success (TN 2 for attacks, etc)
    • Consequences for failure are not severe

    Like, you are probably right. You can totally stay in Water Stance (as long as you design your character around it, since there are plenty of abilities that require other stances) and negate a large majority (maybe even all!) of the Strife you suffer. I don't know why you haven't mentioned Void stance much, since it lets you just flat out ignore Strife results on dice, but hey, let's talk about Water. But that's sort of the point, isn't it? You can take the relaxed, flexible approach, keeping your calm in battle. You can take the sturdy, defensive approach and keep enemies from gaining decisive advantages on you. Or you can go all out, stressing yourself out to push yourself that much harder. That's the whole point of the mechanic. Like, yes, absolutely, you can negate Strife if you try hard enough. But then that's all you'll be doing, isn't it?

    The fact that you can play around the mechanic is absolutely fine, but so is the opposite: going all out and accumulating tons of Strife and succeeding harder while you're at it. If you don't like that, great, have your Water stance. Your example of deciding to accept a bunch of Strife to get more successes is the whole point, and your example absolutely does sound like a fun minigame to me. With each roll, you're basically deciding how much effort to put in.

    I'm not even going to argue the point of Disadvantages with you, which I'm sure you will take as a sarcastic victory, with memes and TMs all over the place. That's fine. If your game throws characters gimmes all the time that they can fail on purpose and there's no story or mechanical consequences, then it probably is a bad mechanic for you. Though I think a lot of people are additionally forgetting that you'll never be able to have entirely gimme disadvantages in a long-running game since severe criticals inflict them on you.

    6 hours ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

    The first system where Min/Max will be the player trying to minimize the amount the rules can be annoying, and maximize their ability to have fun playing the kind of character that interests them.

    This is the most telling thing to me. You're pretty much explicitly defining "annoying rules" as things that disadvantage your character. Characters aren't supposed to be perfect. Perhaps you shouldn't have taken the Perfectionist disadvantage.

  3. Posted

    I'm not going to quote that whole ridiculous wall of text, but "Exploit Ninja" isn't a thing. It doesn't exist. If you're failing on more rolls because of your Disadvantages, you get more Void points. If you're not, you fail less. This is how it's supposed to work. A character more affected by their disadvantages gets more Void points, a character less affected by them doesn't have to worry about failing because of their Disadvantages as much (or accumulating as much Strife) but they get fewer Void points.

    Your whole argument about Strife this time both claims that it's unimportant and easy to manage, and yet that you have to use Water Stance to manage it. Which is it? And regarding needing TN 3 checks... have you looked at the Techniques? There are a lot of Techniques that have TN 3+, as you get higher some of them go as high as TN 6, which is flat out impossible without Fire Stance's bonus successes or explosive dice. Additionally, some stronger targets will have high armor that you need bonus successes to get through, or alternately you'll just want them to end a fight quickly.

  4. Posted

    47 minutes ago, Rawls said:

    This is patently false. In combat, Water provides you armor reduction and bleeds. Both are very effective.

    In intrigues, Water approach is basically the "charm" approach that makes people like you more and/or empathize with your cause. Both seem very important.

    Water Stance (the thing that removes Strife and competes with the other four stances) does not cause armor reduction or bleeds. The former is Striking as Water, a kata. I'm not sure what Water effect causes Bleeding, but it's pretty irrelevant to my initial point. The claim that was made was that you can just sit in Water Stance all the time and not have to worry about Strife ever. My counter-argument is that Water Stance doesn't do anything on its own to actually help you succeed or make enemies less likely to succeed against you. Water certainly has its uses, for mobility and obviously for removing Strife, but I'd argue that all the stances do.

  5. Posted

    TheVeteranSergeant, all of your arguments against Disadvantages and Strife seem to be based on the notion that PCs have an unlimited number of checks they'll be making that they don't care about the outcome of. Why are there so many unimportant rolls in your game?

    While Water Stance does allow you to remove Strife, outside of allowing for some mobility tricks, it doesn't actually make you better at whatever it is you're trying to do. Same with Void stance. Earth and Air make you harder to affect by enemies in various ways, while Fire lets you risk Strife to succeed by a larger margin than you would have otherwise. If your game is full of rolls your characters can either easily succeed at or don't care about the outcome of, it probably isn't very dramatic and I guess Strife probably won't matter -- since Strife is a measure of stress and all your characters do is trivially succeed at things or don't care about the things they're attempting.

    The examples a few people have painted of spending time outside of stressful situations making checks to get rid of Strife are being silly. You mean that doing calm, low-stress activities in times when things aren't on the line relieves stress? It almost sounds like that's the idea. Strife is something that becomes a problem in times of conflict, not when you're "driving home from work".

    Similarly, with Disadvantages, it seems silly to assume that characters can just take Disadvantages to things they don't care about and just continually refill their Void points that way. If the players are making a check for something, it should be something they want to succeed at. A failure on a check should represent a missed opportunity, a delay, or some obstacle for the PCs to overcome. If a failure doesn't matter, why was there a check in the first place? The Void point you gain from one of your disadvantages causing you to fail/suffer an Outburst is meant to mechanically take the sting off of failing when you would have rather succeeded, as well as rewarding the players for roleplaying flawed characters. Someone who picks a disadvantage that isn't going to cause them to fail often gets the benefit of not suffering its effects as often; someone who picks a disadvantage that will actually disadvantage them gets more Void points. I think it works pretty well.

    The main thing I disagree with as it relates to these things is the fact that Void points reset each session and are not entirely predictable to acquire, which makes it seem like having a high Void score isn't that useful because why would you need to store 5 Void points if you probably won't get that many most of the time?

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  7. Posted

    I feel like people might be under-selling the other stances a little. Fire can cause very dramatic success results by accepting Strife. Water is very versatile, letting you remove Strife every time you make a check (a check is basically every time you roll dice, so even defensive checks cause you to remove Strife) or have unmatchable mobility in combat. Air makes everything that targets you more difficult to achieve. Void lets you ignore Strife entirely on your dice, getting the optimal amount of successes/opportunities on your dice while not gaining any Strife.

    I think a lot of people are judging it too powerful just by reading and not by actually trying it out in play. The best argument I've seen against it is that it makes play too boring since it cuts off the options of others, but so do a lot of the other stances, in their own way. Water can deny options by simply not being there due to superior mobility, Air can counter high-damage attacks (or Fire stance) by not getting hit in the first place...

    I've only done a minimal amount of playtesting and while Earth stance does seem strong, so do Fire and Air. If it does get toned down I do think that making Opportunities cost more rather than limiting it to 1/turn or something would be the correct choice.

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