Fantasycraft! (from the makers of Spycraft)

[ludomastro]

Still don't have my book but I'm definitely interested.

[Apalala]

One thing I've noticed is that NPC creation makes little sense. You can basically slap on as much stuff as you want, and you'll only add to the experience reward of the monster. In theory, this gives you a rough idea of how powerful a monster is, but it really doesn't hold up once you start building them on your own.

For instance, making a monster a Construct adds +5 xp. This grants it immunity to wisdom, intelligence, charisma, stress, sneak attack, and subdual damage, plus bleeding, enraged, fatigued, fixated, frightened, paralyzed, shaken, and sickened conditions. It's also immune to half of all critical hits. The downside is it can only be healed by craft checks.

Okay. Now, you can buy damage immunities for +5 xp and condition immunities for +4 xp. Which means that individually, all those immunities would cost you 62 points.

So, how much xp really doesn't tell you much about how much of a threat things are. As an example, the Spirit type costs +5 xp. They have the ability to go incorporeal and solid at will. Give it the Burden of the Ages--only receives half the effect of healing--and the Nocturnal--fights best at night--qualities, and its xp drops to 0. So killing them is literally worthless to the PCs.

Now, they have the ability to go in and out of incorporeal At Will. And, from the condition summary list:

"Should a character lose this condition while occupying the same space as another character or object, they merge and all living creatures in the new mass are immediately killed."

So, you have a 0 xp monster who the PCs can't attack save with Force or other energy effects and that can kamikaze them by simply fading into being.

Yeah, yeah. A good GM isn't going to pull that kind of cheese...but a PC with the Followers feat gets a minimum of 4 npcs with 25 xp each.

At the very least, the tables they give are useful for eyeballing. You can simply say, "Okay, THIS would be a pretty accurate attack, THIS will be average damage, etc.", but it doesn't really offer much more than 4e's monster creation.

[Caedrus]

Wow, that sounds as crappy as Yoda's point system for deciding the LA of races.

And the line about incorporealness instantly killing people... WTF...

[ludomastro]

Yeah, there are some quirks with the NPC generation system. They were there with Spycraft2.0 and from the preview info, most of that NPC system got ported over to MasterCraft (the Fantasy Craft engine).

I'm on the Crafty Forums too and the devs frequently participate. It was a conscious choice as they expect the average GM to NOT be a complete dick and to reign in PCs (or their helpers) as needed. It may not be realistic but at least they admit it was a conscious choice on their part.

Edited for clarity and spelling. (Damn this headache.)

[Caedrus]

Yeah, there are some quirks with the NPC generation system. They were there with Spycraft2.0 and from the preview info, most of that NPC system got ported over to MasterCraft (the Fantasy Craft engine).

I'm on the Crafty Forums too and the devs frequently participate. It was a conscious choice as they expect the average GM to NOT be a complete dick and to reign in PCs (or their helpers) as needed. It may not be realistic but at least they admit it was a conscious choice on their part.

Edited for clarity and spelling. (Damn this headache.)

A conscious choice to do... what? Make the NPC generation system bad? What was the intended goal that they made a conscious choice for?

[RandomCasualty2]

A conscious choice to do... what? Make the NPC generation system bad? What was the intended goal that they made a conscious choice for?

It's really hard to come up with an NPC generation system that's fast, diverse and balanced. You can often get two of those, but rarely all three, and generally it involves coming to a balance between them.

It's not a bad idea sometimes to assume that the DM wont' be a total dick and put together a bunch of uber abilities to fuck you over.

[Apalala]

A conscious choice to do... what? Make the NPC generation system bad? What was the intended goal that they made a conscious choice for?

It's really hard to come up with an NPC generation system that's fast, diverse and balanced. You can often get two of those, but rarely all three, and generally it involves coming to a balance between them.

It's not a bad idea sometimes to assume that the DM wont' be a total dick and put together a bunch of uber abilities to fuck you over.

The main problem I have with it is that the PCs are expected to build their own NPCs using these rules, with the only cap being the total cost in xp. Even if you don't use the extreme cheese of the Spirit type, you still have to deal with the fact that xp tells you squat about how powerful an npc is.

[Psychic Robot]

I'm seeing some bad things on their forums.

Arcane Casters, spells known (p110). This paragraph says how many spells an arcane caster starts with, but not when new ones are learnt. I assume one spell per spellcasting rank (as per spellbound), but I can't find it mentioned in this section.

This is intentional as it's going to vary by setting. One setting might have characters learning spells as soon as the character is exposed to them (reads a scroll, takes hold of a stone of power, absorbs the essence of a murdered sorcerer, whatever), while another might require research and/or a burning in period for each spell learned. This is one of those things I hope to get an S&P article out there about. (If anyone's game to write it, drop me a line.)

Apparently, ensuring that the rules are muddled is intentional.

Ranged combat in melee: From what I can see there are no-longer any penalties to taking a bow into a fist-fight. Is this the new direction or have I missed something?

Those penalties will probably return in 10kB. We didn't see a need for them here.

Leaving out rules and then releasing them later is a conscious design decision.

The rusting grasp spell makes all metal that "you touch" rusted, pitted and destroyed. Do you actively have to go out of your way to touch said metal (i.e. spend actions on it), or are the knights attacking you with the zweihanders going to start crying when they attack you?

What about when you deal the damage to metallic characters? Do you have to go out of your way to touch them? If you do have to go out of your way to touch them what kind of attack roll would it be? Would an unarmed attack be enough? (Could you deliver your rusting grasp as part of an unarmed attack, say a bite?)

prototype00

This is an example where it's sort of up to you and the GM. I would say as a GM that all metal "you touch" means "deliberately touch" (which fits the name of the spell, Rusting Grasp). If the spell said all metal "that touches you" was affected, then I'd say it would work defensively (ie when getting hit by a sword). The intent, IMO, is pretty clear, but play it as your group thinks it should be played.

Not including rules--or even guidelines, for that matter--for basic game functions is acceptable.

[RandomCasualty2]

The main problem I have with it is that the PCs are expected to build their own NPCs using these rules, with the only cap being the total cost in xp. Even if you don't use the extreme cheese of the Spirit type, you still have to deal with the fact that xp tells you squat about how powerful an npc is.

Yeah, that is a big problem. They should never have let PCs use those rules. Any system a PC uses to create stuff should generally sacrifice speed or flexibility, but never balance.

A DM system can sometimes make sacrifices in terms of balance or flexibility, but requires speed. Even still, your DM system should at least get the numbers right, even if the special abilities have a few combos that you shouldn't use. Most of the time, simply telling a DM not to combine certain abilities is good enough.