Character roles, at a higher granularity

[Username17]

1200330500[/unixtime]]Certainly the genre of a story can can spawn new character roles.

But, to try to get a better example than the earlier one (which did discount rocket launchers, for example): something characters expect to fight in a level-based game is unbalanced enough towards damage dealing that it can kill same-level PCs by a large margin with a single hit. DR is an useless ability. Extra dodge is highly valuable, despite them having a normally true mathematical correlation.

Well not really. If you are in such a situation, the DR just has to be a lot bigger. It has to be so big that you can barely survive a hit when you're giving up enough dodginess to avoid getting tagged half the time.

Do I need, before deeming those 2 methods of "preventing damage" that play out differently, to consider any genre?

You do, but mostly because in a system where people are runing around with rocket launchers you actually don't want people to get tough enough to survive a hit - even though it's possible to balance such a system.

Let's consider a really simple setup: Monster Movie Characters. Weapons which are effective vary massively of course, but we could easily arrange it so that everything was killed by weapons that were Iron, Silver, or Fire. Right?

• 
  Fire[/b]
  It destroys and purifies. Drives away the beasts and the darkness. It is effective against Prometheans, Evil Plants, Zombies, and Giant Animals.
  
  Iron
  Seriously, Iron. Like the stuff that your steel knives are already made out of. It's a symbol of modernity and industrialization and stuff and it classically drives away the old cthonic stuff. It is effective against Witches, Leviathan, Ghosts, and Fey.
  
  Silver
  Shiny and inconstant like the moon, silver is hard enough to kill a man and easy enough to cast that you can do it before the invention of bronze. Silver is clearly magical. It is effective against Vampires, Werewolves, Transhumans and Demons.

So you could run around with silver bullets and gun down vampires or the invisible man. Or you could run around with a flame thrower and chase away Frankenstein's Monster or Trifids.

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Stake through the heart, silver, fire, crosses, holy water, running water, etc.

What works? What doesn't? In blade, silver is the way to go. With Buffy, you want the stake.

I don't really see a problem with that.

Exactly. I mean you could just as easily have a Wood category like Buffy or a Salt category like Supernatural. Nothing wrong wth that. You just have to establish what people are supposed to use ahead of time. It's not actually important what it is save that it stay the same from the beginning of the campaign to the end.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

It's unfortunate that too many Fey fans insist that Cold Iron be something special.
Regular ol' Bessemerized steel should be possible given the iron content; determining a set monetary value of a rare material is such an asslicking pigspanking slapdown of "because I said it's rare, that's why" straight from the mouth of Gygax long, long ago.
It's another Koresh-damned puzzle, that's all. Why must I keep fighting Feybook members on this subject?

Steel = iron = 'cold' iron. The 10th most common element in the universe.
Same.
Fucking.
Shit.

[Crissa]

Steel isn't cold iron.

Really. And in a place where you can use magic to make steel, perhaps steel is at a point that it is now fine enough that magic can use it.

So cold iron - pots, kettles, cold rolled steel - has some advantages, but it's a worse material for most applications. We no longer even make buildings out of the stuff.

I don't mind that.

I do mind that it needs to be mined from an anti-magic zone, or needs to be enchanted. That's weird.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

Modern steel is in fact, even more cold iron than original cold iron itself ever was. Everything that cold iron represented that made it a symbol that was potent against other symbols (like the Fey) is as well or better represented by modern steel.

[Jacob_Orlove]

You don't need "cold rolled steel" to have cold iron. From Wikipedia:

Cold iron is a poetic and archaic term for iron, referring to the fact that it feels cold to the touch. In modern usage the term has been most associated with folkloric beliefs that iron could ward off ghosts, fairies, witches, and/or other malevolent supernatural creatures.

Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines cold iron as "A sword, or any other weapon for cutting or stabbing." This usage often appears as "cold steel" in modern parlance.

...

Misconceptions

Some sources have claimed that "cold iron" referred only to iron that was wrought without heat. This is a mistake from modern fantasy fiction. As can be seen in the folklore section above, iron was thought to repel evil spirits whether it was wrought using heat or not.

See also the brief but excellent subheading under wrought iron, explaining the amenability of that material to coldworking but not to tempering treatments.

[RandomCasualty]

Yeah honestly, I like just having cold iron be anything iron or steel that hasn't been touched by magic. So basically you've got to have a non-magical sword, not created by fabricate or anything. The whole point of cold iron is basically that it represents technology over magic, and it wards away creatures of magic, so the weapon itself should have to be nonmagical.