The Gaming Den

Lets say I wanted to play RoboCop in D&D, mostly to troll the GM. Off the top of my head, I can think of four ways to do something like RoboCop- Warforged, Half-Golem, Half-Machine, and Grafts (either Maug or Chaositech). Taking a look at those options, everything but Warforged seems to be lacking, and even Warforged isn't quite a replica of RoboCop, but could work.

Are there any other options that I'm not thinking of?

Analog for mechanical automaton could be a necromantic automaton. Maybe the city guard were using zombies as muscle and they tried making a revenant.

I would lean more heavily on the backstory and the mannerisms rather than trying to mimic a cyberpunk character's specific design too closely. You're a town guard from a destitute, crumbling citystate which is bought out by a powerful guild cartel. After your character is brutally killed by mobsters, he's brought back as a revenant ritually bound to protect the innocent, uphold the law, and serve the public trust. With a hidden fourth law that requires him not to harm the sinister guild puppetmasters.

Yeah, I'd mimic the story more directly if this GM were better...

Prak wrote:Lets say I wanted to play RoboCop in D&D, mostly to troll the GM. Off the top of my head, I can think of four ways to do something like RoboCop- Warforged, Half-Golem, Half-Machine, and Grafts (either Maug or Chaositech). Taking a look at those options, everything but Warforged seems to be lacking, and even Warforged isn't quite a replica of RoboCop, but could work.

Are there any other options that I'm not thinking of?

I honestly thing it would be easier to do a time traveling awakened golem programmed to kill the mother of the man who defeated his creator.

Can we make a D&D party out of nothing but 80s movie protagonists?

Chamomile wrote:Can we make a D&D party out of nothing but 80s movie protagonists?

John McClane - Rogue
Sgt. Larvell Jones - Beguiler
John Matrix - Warrior
Gordon Gekko - Bard specializing in Perform (Oratory)
Egon Spangler - Cleric

This game needs dragons made of neon and a soundtrack by Michael Jackson and Queen.

I've heard of this game before...

Chamomile wrote:Can we make a D&D party out of nothing but 80s movie protagonists?

Egg Shen would end up carrying the party, but sure.

Say I'm interested in using/introducing biological technology or bio-magical stuff like grafts to my d20 game, where should I look for advise? I know Eberron did something with aberrant grafts, but IIRC it wasn't a huge part of the setting. Can Lords of Madness help me out? Or is there a handbook or something like that around?

Antariuk wrote:Say I'm interested in using/introducing biological technology or bio-magical stuff like grafts to my d20 game, where should I look for advise? I know Eberron did something with aberrant grafts, but IIRC it wasn't a huge part of the setting. Can Lords of Madness help me out? Or is there a handbook or something like that around?

Fiend Folio, Libris Mortis, and Lords of Madness cover the Graft Flesh feat.

How does one go about making sure a point buy system is balanced? They're generally more open ended than a level based system like D&D.

OgreBattle wrote:How does one go about making sure a point buy system is balanced? They're generally more open ended than a level based system like D&D.

Short answer. You don't. No matter what you do, there are going to be choices that are objectively better, and choices that are objectively worse. There's nothing you can do to change that. At best, you can mitigate it.

Long answer: You start by balancing like against like. Shitty trap powers should not cost the same as awesome game-winning powers just because they're powers.

I would say that you should start by examining Mutants and Masterminds. It's by no means perfect, or even necessarily well balanced, but it's extensive and fairly comprehensive, so you can look at it and then jigger with point costs.

Prak wrote:I've heard of this game before...

1997: The Future - you are a cybernetic vampire commando forged in the nuclear fires of the Great War. Now you wander the Wastelands of Canada, fighting against injustice whereever it appears. Your only companion is Einstein, a hyper-intelligent genetically-engineered pacifist Utahraptor who serves as your adviser and your steed.

Fund it.

OgreBattle wrote:How does one go about making sure a point buy system is balanced? They're generally more open ended than a level based system like D&D.

If one is putting together a new system that's nominally balanced, limits must be placed as to what genre the game hopes to emulate. If using another system, one begins with a comprehensive discussion as to setting and character benchmarks. To use M&M @PL10 for an example, a 1930s-40s style costumed adventurer might spend 100 points or more on basic abilities, skills, and advantages, while a Grant Morrison Watchtower era style Batman might obviate that with a 20 point Variable 2 (Descriptor:limited to skills and advantages) (Extra: Reaction: Free action).

Are there Tome rules for Lycanthropy?

Game On,
fbmf

I don't think so. I attempted a fix myself, you can judge the quality yourself.

OgreBattle wrote:How does one go about making sure a point buy system is balanced? They're generally more open ended than a level based system like D&D.

Generally speaking, having balance on a point buy system is next to impossible (unless it's for a subsystem with limited choices like the spell customization rules in Shadowrun) especially since it will not be used the same way by everyone. For example in some groups, social skills will never be used while in others they'll be far more valuable than combat skills.

This being said, I can see a few ways you could try to keep some sort of balance :

- You can go the mathematical way. If you can break down your mechanism into basic components you can easily give a price to then you can compute the price of all the stuff (raising AGI give higher chance to hit, which is 5 points, and higher chance to evade, which is 7 points, so one AGI point costs 12 points). This will work better if your system is completely linear (if raising AGI of 1 point has the same benefit no matter if you're raising it from 1 to 2 or from 10 to 11) and combos might still cause imbalances that won't be detected (option A has a cost of 10 and options B has a cost of 5, but together they have an effect that's worth more).
But in order to be able to easily price basic components, you'll need to have a very strict and limited set (comparing the cost of causing 1 point of damage and the cost of resisting 1 point of damage is quite trivial, comparing the cost of making an illusion with the cost of causing 1 point of damage is much more difficult).
Plus chances are that at the end you'll end up with a pretty boring system where all characters types are the same with a different skin.

- You can go the economist/empirical way. Start with everything on the same base price and then raise the price of most bought stuff and lower the price of less bought stuff. Run many playtests until the prices are more or less set.
That works better if you can easily simulate automatically your system (or if you do that for a video game where you can easily push updates to the prices and get feedback quickly).

If you've got people doing the tests some good options might go on unnoticed and stay at a low price while other will be overpriced but this will be based on the expectations people have, so it doesn't matter that much.

- You can have a system where the points are merely here as a reference, but not a rule and balance is enforced by something else. I've had some success with this in Shadowrun: rather than tell players to create characters with x karma points/BP, I'd give them an idea of the power level I'd expect them to have, let them create their characters freely and only used the points value to help find possible imbalances.

Blade wrote:

OgreBattle wrote:How does one go about making sure a point buy system is balanced? They're generally more open ended than a level based system like D&D.

Generally speaking, having balance on a point buy system is next to impossible (unless it's for a subsystem with limited choices like the spell customization rules in Shadowrun)

Bad example.

Why is that?
Ok, it's not strictly point buy, but the resulting drain code could easily be converted into a point cost for the spell and it's one of the best "customization" mechanism that I've seen. It's pretty balanced while still leaving some freedom and letting creative players come up with interesting but not overpowered stuff.

How to build point-buy.

1: Create usefully contributing characters at various progression points (starting out, after a few games, and after a dozen games, in D&D that's level 1, 3, & 6).
2: Allocate some points to their various sub-systems in an aesthetically pleasing way. Linear growth costs encourage specialisation, exponential costs encourage broad skill sets.
3: Check what happens when you swap out some class-A stuff for class-B stuff, so no character can just do everything because it's a team game and shit.

3a: Generally you want entry barriers into distinct power sets, as it also helps people make choices when building characters, but you need to keep buying them for exponential costs to work.

4: Then make sure that, like, you can't overly specialise, so that your basic defences and ability to contribute anything at all still exist after you spend all your points on an attack.

4a: Which either means "levels" you have to buy to open up better options but come with basic attacks/defences and useful skills and stuff, or some sort of free track for characters with various amounts of points spent. So a 100 point character has +5 basic saves and 30 basic hit points or whatever. With linear costs, you want some free basic utility skills turning up too, while with exponential costs it becomes trivial to buy your own.

Wiseman wrote:I don't think so. I attempted a fix myself, you can judge the quality yourself.

It's kinda hard to pass any kind of judgement when there is no LA/+CR or significant drawback.

This is, if I'm the DM, why isn't every NPC lining up to contract that awesome "curse" that gives you a bunch of stat boosts, regen and utility for no significant drawback? You even went through the trouble of including "nibling" rules for safe transmission.