Bitching About Poltergeists

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Grek wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Your suggestion of "3 agility like a random normal asshole" is honestly WAY fucking stupider than the "all stats equal to it's willpower, but no skills" approximation Hicks wanted to go with.
Read the OP you asshat. Hicks went with 12 Willpower and 0 in absolutely everything else, including non-telekinetic Strength. It died in one hit as a result, to his dismay and confusion. That was a transparently poor choice and produced transparently poor results, as Hicks would have known if he had read the chapter on designing challenges. Having all of the states be 12 would be less stupid than that (in that it would at least be a challenging component to a boss battle) but still pretty awful insofar as it would be a summoned monster more powerful than the entire party combined.

Yes, it would be nice if the Poltergeist had a stat line. No, that doesn't mean that there's no earthly way to which numbers you should use in the absence of that stat line. Nor does it mean that there isn't advice in the rules that you can use to inform your decisions. If Hicks had come up with numbers that were less obviously and ludicrously awful, I would be much more sympathetic than I am being right now.
Hey you, really dumb asshole. HICKS WAS MY MC IN THAT GAME. We play D&D and recently After Sundown pretty regularly.

Hicks used 12 Str, and 12 Willpower, because the rules for Poltergeists specifically say "Strength and Willpower increasing." Hicks wanted to use Agility 12 too, but I said that would be bad, because then the attack that killed it would instead have missed, and the Poltergeist had already done 6N damage to my Khaibit and I didn't want to get fucked, so I said we should just let it have Agility 0 instead of 12 to keep the attack from my fellow party member hitting it and killing it.
Grek wrote:I'm perfectly willing to admit that there's room for disagreement in the range of 1 to 7 for most attributes, since that is the standard range for a supernatural extra with a Potency of 1.
Weird, because you are here demonstrating that you have not the faintest clue of the rules. The poltergeist has a willpower of 12. Which means if you want to treat poltergeists as "regular people" the MINIMUM potency would be 6. So we should probably be looking at the attributes and stats of a Potency 6 Supernatural instead right?

But of course, if you do that, if you let an advanced power summon a Potency 6 supernatural who kills some guy for you, and you give it actual combat skills and agility scores in line with that, then you are inherently giving an Advanced Power the ability to summon a creature to murder someone that is for the cost of 4 power points, literally a Potency 6 Monster that is just objectively better than PCs.

Weird and unbalanced and shitty right?

But it can't have less than 6 Potency, because it has 12 Willpower. So hey, here's an idea: It has no skills because it's a collection of wisps, but still has stats comparable with a Potency 6 creature.

OH SHIT MY DUDE, MAYBE THAT'S BETTER THAN WHAT YOU HAVE.
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Hicks
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Post by Hicks »

@Grek: What are you talking about? My op said I gave it Strength 12, and it still died in one hit to a dude with a stick. Literally a PC with a wooden 4 damage sword, and that was with a threshold 1 to hit it in melee for no reason because there is no way to determine a summoned poltergeist's agility score and combat skill.
Last edited by Hicks on Mon Jan 22, 2018 8:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Grek »

Hicks wrote:It has no actual strength for any physical resistance test, and even if it did it would only roll 2 (GODDAMN TWO!) dice because that's all it gets with basic fortitude.
You were saying?
Kaelik wrote:But it can't have less than 6 Potency, because it has 12 Willpower. So hey, here's an idea: It has no skills because it's a collection of wisps, but still has stats comparable with a Potency 6 creature.
Poltergeists very specifically don't have their Willpower or Strength capped by Potency, so no, it doesn't need to be Potency 6.

Furthermore:
You can hurt just about anything by just running it over with a car. However, supernatural creatures have supernatural defenses that make them incredibly tough. There are a couple of universal weapons that cut through crap like regeneration and magic force fields. They are effective based on the type of creature you are trying to kill. When used on the appropriate foe, these weapons inflict aggravated damage and negate soak bonuses from disciplines. Note that simply having a high Strength with the aid of a power like Giant Size would not constitute a soak bonus, but that a specific soak bonus (including bonus armor) such those provided by Force Field or the passive benefit of Fortitude is negated.
Last edited by Grek on Mon Jan 22, 2018 8:53 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Grek wrote:
Kaelik wrote:But it can't have less than 6 Potency, because it has 12 Willpower. So hey, here's an idea: It has no skills because it's a collection of wisps, but still has stats comparable with a Potency 6 creature.
Poltergeists very specifically don't have their Willpower or Strength capped by Potency, so no, it doesn't need to be Potency 6.
Where, in the rules, does it say that?

"They have no specific limits for other attributes, larger storms have more Strength and more Willpower... "

No supernatural has "specific limits" on any attributes, because they can all have the Potency to have any attribute, The specific limits sounds like the limits they have for BEING Poltergeists. You know the 0s they get to Charisma and Logic.
Grek wrote:Furthermore:
You can hurt just about anything by just running it over with a car. However, supernatural creatures have supernatural defenses that make them incredibly tough. There are a couple of universal weapons that cut through crap like regeneration and magic force fields. They are effective based on the type of creature you are trying to kill. When used on the appropriate foe, these weapons inflict aggravated damage and negate soak bonuses from disciplines. Note that simply having a high Strength with the aid of a power like Giant Size would not constitute a soak bonus, but that a specific soak bonus (including bonus armor) such those provided by Force Field or the passive benefit of Fortitude is negated.
Yeah dude, it had 12 Str, and it got hit with a wooden stick by a guy with ( or more Str (don't know if he was vigored up) with Devestation. But if the threshhold was 6 higher because it had Agility 12, he probably would have missed, maybe he would have still hit but done less damage, but subtracting 6 net hits from staging up is the difference between 4 damage and terminal wounds and -2 net damage or not doing fuck all anything.
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Hicks
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Post by Hicks »

Hicks wrote:1 guess since poltergeists are potency 0 they can use vigor for 10 strength... which is actually less than the 12 I ad-hocked for it.
To be fair, I said in my second post, not the OP, in this thead that I gave it 12 strength. My bad. The first post was saying as I say now that poltergeists summoned with Nightcry have an undefined strength, or 0 since the power dosen't mention Strength, Agility, Intuition, or any Skill, nor is there any explicit default rule that says they recieve ability scores or skill ranks when summoned with Nightcry, nor is there any explicit default assignment of those anywhere else in the AS text.
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"Besides, my strong, cult like faith in the colon of the cards allows me to pull whatever I need out of my posterior!"
-Kid Radd
shadzar wrote:those training harder get more, and training less, don't get the more.
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