The Not-Awaited Witcher TTRPG Review by WiserOdin

[WiserOdin032402]

2.3: Body

"Hey!" You, a hypothetical viewer might say "WiserOdin you said body only has two skills associated with it, why does it get its own section?" Well, hypothetical viewer, ya see, I'm super lazy and body is special. Very special. It's got tables. Lots of tables. In fact, let me set the mood music for all of these tables. See, body is a wonderful stat, it governs your encumbrance, your rate of recovery from someone treating your wounds, your bonus damage, how hard you punch and kick, the works. It also governs the following skills:

• Physique
  Lifting, tearing, and bending heavy and tough objects. At a base 10 you can lift large people up over your head and break wooden bars. At a base 13 you can rip thin books in half, crush wooden boxes, and bend thin bars. At a base 16 you can snap manacles and break rusted metal. At a base 20 you can bend prison bars and dent metal

  Holy. Fuck. This is probably the most badass mess I've ever seen. Someone with physique 10 can just lift large people up over their head. This is fucking madness. What they also don't tell you is that this is also used as a part of a charge, or to apply/resist the Human Shield combat maneuver and attack reaction. That's right, you can take people as a human shield to eat attacks and spells instead of yourself as long as you win the check and spend the 1 point of stamina. Blew my load a little early here, but you could instead be lame and use brawling to do it to people and dodge to avoid it.
  Endurance
  Enduring fatigue, or the pain of torture and drugs. At a base 10 you are tough, able to perform forced marches and stand up to the pain of a long bar brawl. At a base 13 you have hardened your body to the pain of torture and can stand up to amateur interrogators. At a base 16 you are mentally strengthened beyond the resolve of most interrogators and can march for days with minimal food and water. At a base 20 you are one tough son of a gun, scoffing in the face of seasoned torturers and surviving more than the body should be able to under the hardships of harsh climates and supply shortages.

  Okay. You're gonna look at me. Look at my profile pic's eyes. Stare deeply into them. The Witcher is Dark Fantasy. And nothing is more Dark Fantasy than food shortages and torture. If you're going out on an adventure, you want this skill.

Hey look that's it for the skills. Now for tables.

• Physical Table and Stat explanation
  [Physical Table Changed on 11/5/2018 at 1:28 PM]
  
  This is the physical table, as you see here you add your body and your willpower together, divide it by two, and then see where you land on this table. Imma be straight with ya, ignore everything higher than 10, and we'll get to that later.
  
  HP is your Hit Points, you need these to live. Now while you might think those numbers are a bit low, I'll let you know exactly how low they are. In this game a Redorian Halberdier can walk up and smack you with their halberd for about 6d6+7 damage. And there's a wound threshold in this game where if you go below it, you halve all your physical stats for skill checks.
  
  STA is stamina. You can spend [3 POINTS AS PER THE ERATTA] for [AN EXTRA STANDARD ACTION AS PER THE ERATTA] in combat, you can activate certain skill tree abilities with it, you get one reaction in combat for free before you have to spend 1 stamina point per reaction to defend against attacks. You also spend it for magic. You spend a lot of it for magic. A mage with 10 body and 10 will can cast the portal spell (Super high level, not worth it, get a horse) for 22 stamina, and hold it open for 6 stamina per round. Each round is three seconds, so you can hold it open for 12 seconds and have 4 stamina left to spare before you overdraw And We'll Get To That™ but it's not pleasant. And don't run out of stamina. You will literally be unable to do anything but take the Recovery action to restore an amount of stamina equal to your REC score. Not even Iconics escape from this hell.
  [11/5/18] This is now also your nonlethal track, which means the more someone smacks you for nonlethal the less able you are to fight back. Noice.
  
  REC is recovery. Recovery is how much HP you recover per day while being medically treated, specifically with Healing Hands (Doctors only) or First Aid (Craft).
  
  [Eratta: 11/5/18]Stun is how hard it is to Stun you. When forced to make a stun save you have to roll under this number or be stunned (We'll get to this it's not pleasant).
  Damage and Hand-to-Hand
  
  Here's what standard damage bonus looks like. It's based completely on body. Please ignore how much Witchers fucking rock because they can go over the 10 cap with infusions and such.
  
  
  Here's the hand to hand damage table. I don't remember there being any downsides to spamming kicks other than the GM being mad at you, but hey, there's no IUS you need to grab here. If you're proficient in brawling here are los manos for dudes to catch. Also kick has a unique damage bonus. For some reason.
  Encumberance
  (Body x10): This is how much weight you can carry without being slowed down. When you are encumbered, subtract 1 from your REF, DEX, and SPD for every 5 points you exceed your encumbrance, minimum 1. You can dead-lift 50 times your Body in Kilograms.

  I dunno how to judge this, as I'm used to 3.5's irrelevant encumbrance system that no one uses. Seeing as there's no way to avoid it in this game, I'm actually unable to form a judgment if this is good or bad. It is in kilos though.

And this is me proving I suck at cropping! That's the body stat, and I must say, I don't know if I hate it or not.

It looks like this thread is heating up too, I might have to actually start talking to people. The horror.

BONUS:

More bad crops because I suck.
And point buy, which is done at 1 to 1 if you aren't rolling:

Get used to bad crops because hoo boy there are tables for days.

[hogarth]

You're missing the hand to hand damage table, unless it's supposed to be identical with the table before it.

[WiserOdin032402]

Fixed. Carry on.

[Username17]

Well, given the existence of the Teaching skill I'd say this is a bit harder to pin down as valid. A more lenient GM who allows for more downtime and higher IP generation via the teaching skill could have players that are easily skilled with every weapon in the game. Granted, that's also true of the teaching skill itself. And weapons themselves in the game are different and have different qualities available in their weapon class.

Not even a little bit.

However many free skill points you get from Teaching in downtime, it still doesn't mean that you'd want to spend them on skills that only do anything when you're using weapons you don't want to use. A Swords character is always going to prefer taking Tactics lessons or Sailing Lessons, or fucking anything at all other than Staff/Spear lessons.

If you're a Swords character, you're never going to be able to catch or surpass your Swords skill with any other weapon skill, whether you're getting free XPs to spend on skills or not. And as long as your secondary weapon skills are lower than your primary, you never want to use a secondary weapon.

It simply enforces players to lock their weapon choice in at level one and never look back. It's the same bullshit as 4th edition D&D.

-Username17

[Longes]

The real reason to have all those weapon skills is that Criminal and Doctor start with Small Blades and knife people, Mage starts with Staff/Spear and never uses them, Witcher starts with Swordsmanship and swords people, Man at Arms gets any 5 and never levels up 4, and Bard, Craftsman, Merchant and Priest get dunked on.

[Pariah Dog]

Sounds like the MaA needs to sell a weapon skill to the Bard, Craftsman, Merchant and Priest for something else from each.

[Username17]

Sounds like the MaA needs to sell a weapon skill to the Bard, Craftsman, Merchant and Priest for something else from each.

It's exactly the issue we've been arguing about with Shadowrun since 3rd edition broke up the firearms skill. Being a "weapons expert" isn't actually worth much of anything compared to being a "single weapon type expert". And it certainly isn't worth giving up real skills like Negotiation or Stealth.

It's very weird that this is still an ongoing issue more than 2 decades later despite the results of splitting weapons skills being glaringly obvious. It doesn't meaningfully support the weapons expert as a character type. Attempts to play a character with multiple weapons skills results in a character who has difficulty contributing to adventures outside of combat because they have less usable skills, and as an advanced character they even fall behind in combat because single weapon users keep spending XP to keep their single weapon skill one of their highest skills which the multi-weapon user can't keep up with trying to maintain five weapons skills at once.

It's just very weird that you'd make a game in 2018 where one of the key design decisions is to functionally destroy any character who tries to have an axe and a dagger on their belt. I understand why people would suggest such a thing in 1995 but those people were fucking wrong and we all know that now. What the fuck?

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

lift large people up over your head

No mention of Physique whatsoever, also you can dead-lift large men if you have at least 2 Body.

[WiserOdin032402]

So there's going to be a delay for the next post, as I'm currently looking over social combat. Because of course, this game has social combat rules. Also 10 social skills, not 9. I miscounted.

In the 'good' news I tempted fate today and fate dropped a copy of The Witcher: A Game of Imagination at my feet. And by fate I mean The Internet. So for those of you who enjoy my suffering at the hands of bad adaptations, when this review finishes I'll go right into Game of Imagination.

From there, I dunno. I'll run a poll or something. See which game is the least awful.

[WiserOdin032402]

I cast Raise Thread

2.4: Empathy

The social stat. The social stat, that is completely worthless if you don’t have ranks in the Social Ettiqutte skill. It’s basically required for Bards (Due to how skill trees work, 7 of the 10 unique Bard skills use Empathy as a part of their base) and Merchants (4 of 10). It’s a valuable stat that’s also used for the social combat optional rule, which unlike Exalted social combat you can walk away from. The problem here is that most of the skills are super duper MTP and unquantifiable outside of the social combat skill so boy howdy buckle the fuck up and prepare for me to be unhelpful.

Empathy:

• Charisma
  Getting along with people. At a base 10 you can make friends pretty easily at your local tavern. At a base 13 you are a likeable person and it’s pretty rare for you to make enemies. At a base 16 you are the life of the party and it’s hard for anyone to stay mad at you for long. At a base 20 you could convince a raging troll to sit down for a pint over a game of gwent.

  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeugh. And immediately we step into MTP territory, but only just so. I’m more down for Charisma being a skill (given that to some extent one can ‘learn’ charisma) than being a base stat. But like...all it does is make people like you better? Mkay...I guess that’s...important?
  Deciet
  Lying and conniving. At a base 10 you can generally lie about having taken an extra helping at dinner or convince peasants you weren’t spying on them. At a base 13 you are a fairly practiced liar and can lie about most anything without too much of a tell. At a base 16 you can conceal your tells very well and can bluff even city guards convincingly. At a base 20 you are a master of deceit and you could lie your way out of an interrogation by the Nilfgaardian Impera Brigade.

  Not gonna lie, the lack of Glibness in this game makes me not have a point of comparison for how bad this is. However you can use this in combat with the Feint maneuver that eats one of your two attacks, it gives you a +3 to hit on your next attack which can negate the -3 penalty for Strong Attacking.
  Fine Arts
  Creating works of art, from painting to song writing to glass-working. Each time you take this skill you must specify what fine art you are training in. At a base 10 you have practiced this skill before and can create artwork. At a base 13 you are skilled in your craft and can make art impressive enough to be bought at market. At a base 16 you are a seasoned artist and can support yourself entirely by creating and selling art. At a base 20 you are a supremely talented artist and a king or emperor commissioning you is not out of the question.

  Elves get a +1 to this and I hate this skill. It’s just more Appraise. I guess if you’re a bard and going into a high society game it’s nice…? But like, you’re missing the point?
  Gambling
  Counting odds, calculating risks, and earning money by gambling. It’s important to note that while dice poker requires Gambling, gwent require Tactics. At a base 10 you can generally figure out odds and win against new gamblers. At a base 13 you can win against most average people. At a base 16 you can swindle most people out of their money and are often accused of cheating. At a base 20 you are known across cities and in most of the underground as a master gambler.

  Gurgles aggressively. At least this skill has some qualifying uses outside of bullshit high society stuff. But it’s also self-explanatory and you can’t use it for GWENT!
  Grooming and Style
  Grooming yourself and arranging your outfits to make an impression. At a base 10 you are a pretty fashionable person. At a base 13 you could work at a fairly nice salon in Novigrad or the capital of the Empire of Nilfgaard. At a base 16 when you put the effort into it you can look as good as many sorceresses. At a base 20 you could be stylist to a noblewoman, arranging outfits that people talk about for months

  My brain is having trouble keeping all of this in line, but this is one of those important NPC skills that players play good money for and your GM will fuck you for not having a successful roll on in high society. Eeeeugh.
  Human Perception
  Reading people’s emotions. At a base 10 you are an empathic person and people often come to you to vent their problems. At a base 13 you can read most people with ease. At a base 16 you can spot even subtle discomforts and often know when people are lying. At a base 20 you could be a true empath, assessing people with a single glance.

  It’s sense motive. But you can also gauge people’s emotional states? So like, I guess it’s useful? DC 10 to know that I want you to kill me.
  Leadership
  The skill of rallying people under your banner, or just taking control of a situation and getting people to do your bidding. At a base 10 you are confident, and in emergency situations people will generally follow your orders. At a base 13 you are a well-versed leader and can manage a small group of people effectively. At a base 16 you can lead a large group of soldiers with no one questioning your command. At a base 20 you could lead the armies of the North with your name going down in history.

  Like most optimization guides this is a solid purple. If your GM is a cool dude this is probably broken and if they’re not this is banned. Not like any army you assemble will stand up to the elven stealth archers all over the woods.
  Persuasion
  Convincing people to agree with you or do something you want them to do. At a base 10 you are a fairly persuasive person and you rarely have to buy the next round at the tavern. At a base 13 you can convince guards to let you go for minor crimes such as trespassing. At a base 16 you can debate in the halls of Oxenfurt. At a base 20 you are a rhetorical powerhouse and could even convince King Radovid the Stern to spare a mage.

  This skill basically requires social combat. Otherwise it’s kinda sorta massively MTP.
  Performance
  Playing instruments, singing, and acting. Each time you take this skill you must specify a form of performance. At a base 10 you can play basic songs and perform on stage. At a base 13 you can not only perform but generally impress crowds you perform for. At a base 16 you draw crowds and can play songs on the fly. At a base 20 you would be summoned to perform for kings and emperors

  Nobody cares about this skill unless they’re a bard and if they’re a bard their job is to sit in a city and print money. Or get stabbed and die trying to be an off-tank (we’ll get to this. Also you can’t actually tank in this game).
  Seduction
  Seducing people and performing in bed. At a base 10 you are flirtatious and you’ve had some practice in bed. At a base 13 you can flirt with ease and grace, and get compliments in bed. At a base 16 you could work at a high-class brothel and make a killing. At a base 20 you often find yourself tripping over admirers and when you take a person to bed, they definitely remember you.

  Oh look it’s that headache-inducing skill every D&D bard player wants to use on every NPC. Except now it’s a separate skill. Oh goodie. This is gonna get like one use in one session that makes the session awkward and then be ignored for the rest of the game.
  
  However, if your GM is familiar with the source material then every time you successfully seduce someone they should give you a nude trading card of them.

Eugh. I swear I like this game. I just hate social skills. I'll be tossing up the social combat tables later today when I'm on a laptop that can screenshot. We're almost to the end of skills and then we can talk about races and classes. I swear to god we'll do it within the year.

Edit: I'm going to be correcting a couple of things and swapping out a table later tonight, specifically in the 'Body' post, to match with the new Eratta'd version

[WiserOdin032402]

Social Combat and Social Combat Tables
Okay, so normally I wouldn’t be covering a big mechanics section this early but it has to happen because this section is not as interwoven as normal combat is. While it’s not Exalted 2e social combat it’s also not...revolutionary? Amazing? I admit most of my knowledge on social combat systems comes from Exalted and the non-system of 3.5. So I’m gonna leave the parsing and number crunching up to you guys. I will do some funny commentary but like, dude. Shit’s hard.

The ‘hit points’ for social combat is Resolve, which is calculated like: Resolve = ((WILL + INT)/2)x5

• Empathetic Attacks
  
  Seduction seems a tad powerful with repeated use, and also makes you that guy. Persuasion seems weak but it's what you'd want out of this system. All and all great showing, good tools here for leveraging people and it's all empathy and empathy skills.
  Antagonistic Attacks
  
  Who....made this? It uses three stats and three skills that are nowhere near the same skill groups. This is...problematic and really where this system shows off its tacked-on nature.
  Defenses
  
  For the love of god spam Ignore until you can roll Disengage. Then you can stop playing social combat and do something else.
  Empathetic Tools
  
  If you use Romance you're not allowed at my table. Also it doesn't use seduction what the fuck game.
  Antagonistic Tools
  
  Dunno why anyone would use bribe but like...
  >Implying that we'd even use the social combat rules
  HOO BOY I SHIGGY DIGGY.

At this point I'm really tasting the anachronisms hard. But apparently, this is what CDPR wanted. They asked directly for Interlock and got this modified version. I don't even know if Social Combat is part of Interlock. A star for at least trying to make not combat interesting that's then removed because Social Combat sucks and no one does it right.

[WiserOdin032402]

2.5: Crafting

Are you ready? Is your body even prepared for the stat that has the best mechanics in the game? Like, unironically this game has an amazing crafting system. I’ll talk about it more further below, but it’s actually impressive. There’s one profession that uses this stat exclusively and it’s rather powerful if given enough time. We’re not talking ‘Weeks and weeks’ of time like D&D crafting. We’re talking ‘Can make high end weapon in 13 hours’. It’s pretty great. Needless to say, this game expects players to have a lot of downtime, and this stat and the following skills make downtime worth its weight in gold.

• Alchemy (2)
  The skill of creating potions, oils, decoctions, and more. At a base 10 you dabble with the science of alchemy and can create basic things like chloroform with ease. At a base 13 you are a full-blown alchemist and can even create witcher’s oils and potions. At a base 16 you are a seasoned alchemist and can craft alchemical remedies even without a standardized alchemy set. At a base 20 you a master chemist. You can create any chemical in the book as well as witcher decoctions.

  Okay, so this is actually easily measurable. With a base 13 it doesn’t matter what you roll, because your minimum is 14, which is the maximum DC among novice formulae. Novice Formulae run the gamut of invisible ink to sterilizing fluid, and are generally stupid useful. You can, if you really try, start the game with a base 16 from right out of the gate (10 Crafting, 6 Alchemy) and that lets you automatically succeed in making Journeymen formulae when you eventually get some. And a base 20 means you can just about make anything. You do need to gather the Formulae, though but it’s not much different than a Spell Book in D&D, especially given how fast items are crafted, with the added bonus of making the item with the diagram in front of you gives a +2 bonus to the crafting check, which can shift you off the RNG. You can see those in the Alchemy Subsystem tab below this section of the review.
  Crafting (2)
  Making and fixing weapons and armor. At a base 10 you can craft basic shields and daggers with ease. At a base 13 you can make swords and chain mail that will see soldiers through combat. At a base 16 you make swords that people covet and are notable enough to etch your name on the blade. At a base 20 you are sought after, able to craft some master grade items with relative ease.

  Weapons, armors, and shields have durability. Weapons and shields lose durability when you block with them, armor loses durability when you’re successfully damaged through it, and a lot of other things damage your stuff. It also costs time, money, and resources to repair these items. This also has the added benefit of letting you make really good weapons and armor. The problem is, like with Alchemy, this skill runs on hoarding or money, however, the money saved is worth it. Same rules apply though, you need a diagram to make the item, you can have a number of diagrams memorized equal to your Intelligence score, and having the diagram around when you make the item boosts your check by +2. The Bases are self evident, as you’ll see in the crafting tables at the bottom of this review entry.
  Disguise
  Disguising yourself or another as someone else. At a base 10 you are pretty good at hiding someone’s identity. At a base 13 you can make over yourself or others for a particular role, such as a specific culture or profession. At a base 16 you can disguise yourself well as a specific person. At a base 20 you are a master of appearances and can disguise yourself or others as anyone, including other genders and races, with uncanny accuracy.

  Self explanatory, and with no disguise spells to fuck this one up and with illusion spells sucking there’s no way around having this skill if you want to disguise yourself or someone else.
  First Aid
  Stopping bleeding, setting broken bones, and tending to poison. At a base 10 you can tie a tourniquet and generally know what to do in medical emergencies. At a base 13 you are skilled at first aid and can treat most small wounds with ease. At a base 16 you are a pretty seasoned bonesaw and can prepare multiple patients to be transported to a surgeon quickly. At a base 20 you may not be able to perform full-on surgery but you can easily bring people back from the gates of death in seconds.

  Okay so this is a really fucking important skill because of the type of fantasy this game is, however, this is completely overshadowed by having a Doctor. This lets you let people recover HP equal to their recovery derived stat each day, or half if they’re actually active and not resting and recovering. Doctors have an ability called Healing Hands, which is this, but it can also heal critical wounds and adds an extra 3 HP of healing to however much you’re healing someone for. But if you don’t have a Doctor...oh boy you’re in real trouble.
  Forgery
  Falsifying documents and official papers. Forgery also applies to counterfeiting coins. At a base 10 you can imitate official papers or coins but you shouldn’t use them in large cities where they are more likely to be examined. At a base 13 you can create coins that would be accepted by most merchants and can falsify official papers that don’t require a specific person’s seal. At a base 16 you are a great forger and can create most documents, even those that require specific seals. At a base 20 you are a master forger and are probably wanted in at least a few cities for spreading false documents and destabilizing economies with false coin.

  This is a skill of questionable use in the vast majority of cases but all kinds of skills that let you falsify documents in all games fall under that category. However, this one also lets you counterfeit money. There’s no like, results table or anything for this. It’s all MTP, but what I will do is put a table of different currencies in here for you to ponder which one might be the best to counterfeit.
  
  Pick Lock
  Opening locks without a key. At a base 10 you can break cheap locks without much problem. At a base 13 you can break into most average houses and crack simple locks. At a base 16 you can open bank vaults, given time. At a base 20 you can crack the most complex locks and can open many locks with little time and makeshift tools.

  It’s the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind Lockpicking non-interaction game. Failures don’t break your picks and all that. Gets you through doors. I don’t actually know how to add interaction to picking locks, so eh. It’s whatever.
  Trap Crafting (2)
  Creating makeshift traps and disabling traps. The DC to notice and dodge the trap is based on your Trap Crafting roll. The trap can either grapple an opponent or cause an amount of damage to them equal to 1d6 per 2 points of Trap Crafting. At a base 10 you can build a pit trap and put some stakes at the bottom of it. At a base 13 you can build rope traps that will ensnare your opponent and more complicated traps. At a base 16 you can hide multiple traps in a wilderness area with ease. At a base 20 you can hide traps such as tripwires and swinging weapons in urban areas.

  This is objectively the weirdest skill in the game. It seems like the trap’s damage is capped at 5d6 but due to how the game works you basically get to freely grapple someone or get to (if they fail the roll) splat them with damage to each of their limbs. Which is a stupid amount of damage. Also there are traps and trap crafting but they’re exotic items and take a half-hour to craft and have hard to get formulae. So like fuck if I know how this works.
  
  Actual Named Traps
  
  Minor explanation time: RNG is range, this game uses 2 meter squares for range but has the audacity to have things operate in 1 meter instances. I feel like there was some debate and the two devs pulled different directions, alternatively characters are technically supposed to move in half squares and can be pushed back half-squares. Either way this is fucked.
  
  Trap Crafting DCs and recipes.
  

Due to how late it is when I'm making this post, the alchemical crafting stuff will be in the next post, coming sometime tomorrow.

[Longes]

Lying and conniving. At a base 10 you can generally lie about having taken an extra helping at dinner or convince peasants you weren’t spying on them. At a base 13 you are a fairly practiced liar and can lie about most anything without too much of a tell. At a base 16 you can conceal your tells very well and can bluff even city guards convincingly. At a base 20 you are a master of deceit and you could lie your way out of an interrogation by the Nilfgaardian Impera Brigade.

It's weird how bullshit high these values are. The "base" is stat+skill, and because this is a point-buy with a stupidly large number of skills you probably have 0 in all your non-specialty skills. Which means that "lie about having taken an extra helping at dinner" is actually a very abnormal and uncanny ability in the world of Witcher.

Or rather, what is weird is that Deceit example of what you can do at base 10 is such small peanuts normal skill compared to "everyone likes you" of Persuasion and people come to you to vent their problems of Human Perception (does this cover elves and dwarves?). Seduction too has this problem where base 10 is "you are not a virgin", which has troubling implications for the future demographics of the setting.

And speaking of Witchers, their Empathy stat is capped at 6 and chargen skills are also capped at 6. So being able to lie about double dipping into salsa is a high end social witchery.

[WiserOdin032402]

Lying and conniving. At a base 10 you can generally lie about having taken an extra helping at dinner or convince peasants you weren’t spying on them. At a base 13 you are a fairly practiced liar and can lie about most anything without too much of a tell. At a base 16 you can conceal your tells very well and can bluff even city guards convincingly. At a base 20 you are a master of deceit and you could lie your way out of an interrogation by the Nilfgaardian Impera Brigade.

It's weird how bullshit high these values are. The "base" is stat+skill, and because this is a point-buy with a stupidly large number of skills you probably have 0 in all your non-specialty skills. Which means that "lie about having taken an extra helping at dinner" is actually a very abnormal and uncanny ability in the world of Witcher.

Or rather, what is weird is that Deceit example of what you can do at base 10 is such small peanuts normal skill compared to "everyone likes you" of Persuasion and people come to you to vent their problems of Human Perception (does this cover elves and dwarves?). Seduction too has this problem where base 10 is "you are not a virgin", which has troubling implications for the future demographics of the setting.

And speaking of Witchers, their Empathy stat is capped at 6 and chargen skills are also capped at 6. So being able to lie about double dipping into salsa is a high end social witchery.

Base being of course 'you automatically do this with no roll', and yes, it's massively small potatoes. I'd argue that base should go all the way down to 6 and move in increments of 2. And yes, Human Perception does work on Elves, Dwarves, and Witchers, the name is a massive misnomer. I'd kill for some DCs that aren't attached to combat or crafting instead of a general guideline table.

Example DCs and Modifiers

Difficulty can only go up, not down in this system, so any bonuses you can get, take 'em. It's kinda fucky that it goes up by 4's as well, seeing as we're working with a d10 which can only roll so high.

[WiserOdin032402]

Gear and Craftables
I cast thread necromancy, which uses 25,000 GP worth of diamonds because I'm not actually a necromancer.

The more I write this review the more I feel like I’m circling a drain, almost like I’m going down some sort of downward spiral and I just can’t stop. This section’s just a fucking tangent for god’s sake and it’s going to be huge and have a bajillion fucking pictures. The more I read the more I question why I like this, the more I question why I like this the more I end up looking at the TTRPG industry as a whole and the more I feel like I’m acting out the bargaining stage of grief. Or I’m just going crazy for nothing on a backwater internet forum because I feel like it.

I’ll leave that up to the viewership to determine. Anyhow this is a tangent showing off all the gear you can buy and craft. There’s a rating system in place for how common things are.

Of note, I’ve been advised by JGray of R. Talsorian to limit my image usage, though he approves of the work I’m doing. For what it’s worth the game is really pretty and the layout isn’t blatantly offensive. It’s a very readable book and the work they’ve done on the PDF is admirable.

Alchemy

• Alchemical Items
  
  
  Mix of useful and not useful. Situational but useful because magic sucks. This isn’t the complete showing, but this should give you a taste.
  Witcher Potions
  
  Okay, so these are a 'do not drink' if you're a normal person unless you can make a DC 18 endurance check. Notice the lack of cost: That’s right, you have to craft these. If you fail the endurance check you’re poisoned and take 3 unresistable damage a round
  Blade Oils
  These are usable by literally anyone if you can get the formula and there's no reason to not have one. This stacks hilariously well with a Craftsman perk later on in this review that lets you easily beatdown monsters with preparation. Also: Have to be crafted. I didn’t include an image but imagine a favored enemy list from 3.5 and that these are potions that give you +5 damage against that enemy type
  Decotations
  
  These are like potions but if you're not a Witcher they just fucking kill you. And if you're a witcher they last for 30 minutes and give you 75% toxicity. Same deal as potions and blade oils.

Normal Crafting

So I talked about traps in the previous entry and I should clarify since they’re an ‘experimental diagram’ they take half an hour to craft.

• Bombs
  
  These are unironically really really good, and they’re expensive as hell. We’ll get into a full explanation of the status effects in a little bit, but to give you an idea there’s no way I know of to get around the effects of the Dimertium or moondust other than leaving the area, which is uh...hard. You attack with these babies using athletics and they have a range in meters equal to your body x4. The ‘range’ just indicates the AoE of the bomb. These are experimental, so basically you have to look really hard for the diagram or just buy ‘em in character creation and hope to restock.
  
  Made in half an hour, which is sweet. Since I’m not posting the crafting recipes, the lowest DC is 16 and the highest is 20. A craftsman can easily start off with a +16 to craft this and gets a +2 for having the formulae in front of him.
  
  When we get to class trees I’m going to fully explain why this shit’s super wack in the hands of a Man At Arms, which is gonna sound dumb but trust me, this isn’t going to disappoint.
  
  ADDENDUM: Bombs do damage to every limb, so they deal their damage to the torso, head, both arms, and both legs. Meaning that Grapeshot does a metric assload of damage.
  Normal Ammunition
  
  Standard issue highly-reliable ammo for bows and crossbows. I’ll explain effects later but non-lethal is like unarmed, which pings stamina. Armor piercing ignores DR which is different from SP.
  Elderfolk Ammunition
  
  Elven burrowers are asshole weapons for assholes. They’re like the broadheads but require a DC 16 heal check to remove the head otherwise you keep bleeding. The stealth archers I bitch about use these.
  
  Dwarven arrows/bolts are good for deleting someone’s armor a few points. You’ll understand when I explain SP later.
  Exotic Ammunition
  
  Shit’s wack yo. Like seriously these are expensive-ass trick arrows that will just fuck up someone’s day. These get extra wack if you’re a Man At Arms, given they have the only archery tree in the game.

I’ll be going over weapons and armor in the combat section because I’m a talentless hack and to give you an idea of damage vs HP and stopping power.

To give you an idea of this book’s organization, the decotations, blade oils, and witcher potions and their crafting materials are in the Witcher section of the book, which is towards the back, while the bombs, the grey table special ammos, and traps are in the experimental weapons section of the book along with Relics (Super duper magic items that can’t be bought), the weapons are found in the gear section, which is at the front, and the alchemy and weapon crafting rules get their own section right after character creation and magic.

Before we get into specifics, I should go over how the steps of crafting work.

Step 1: Determine if you have the formula. If you have a written copy in front of you, you get a +2 to the alchemy roll
Step 2: Determine if you have the ingredients. If you’re crafting traps, bombs, weapons, special ammos, or armors you need very specific ingredients. Like they’re outright named. Alchemy uses stuff that falls into different categories of symbols and only cares what symbol the ingredient falls under.
Step 3: Do the crafting roll. Roll your Craft + Relevant Skill to make the thing.
Recovery: This is an optional step if you fuck up. You can make the craft roll to either recover half your materials round up (normal crafting) or an ingredient (Alchemy)

Funny Alchemy Symbols

Now, I’m trying to limit images from the PDF, however, I’ll throw around some example recipes

Alchemy example

Funky symbols in alchemy orders enclosed

Crafting example

• Armor:
  
  Not gonna post the full thing, too much of the PDF shown. There’s like five of these tables plus elderfolk
  Weapons:
  
  Another example, but should give you a good idea of what you generally speaking need to craft stuff.

The cost is what the diagram itself costs. The listed price that says 'investment’ is the cost to just buy the materials rather than gathering them. Let’s talk about gathering materials if you’re a real go-getter!

In order to actually start crafting, you need materials, which is split into four sections. You have Crafting Materials, Hides & Animal Parts, Alchemical Treatments, and Ingots & Minerals for the Crafting skill, meanwhile Alchemy just has components that fall under the funky symbols.

Example table from Ingots & Minerals

Okay, so I covered Wilderness survival before, and the Forage DC on here is for using Wilderness Survival to collect this stuff. N/A means you must use the cost section to buy or have a diagram to craft it if it specifies that. Yes, that’s right. You need a schematic to craft crafting materials for your crafting project.

Example table from Alchemy

This is actually just the table for Vermillion, I'd post the rest but eh, that'd take up too much.

You can also disassemble weapons, armors, traps, munitions, and bombs you come across, but only gain one of each material used to craft the item when you do.

Repairing damaged or broken items requires one of each material used to craft the item and a craft check at the item's DC -5, so repairing a double-woven gambeson is a DC 10 rather than 15. This DC goes up by 2 for each enhancement/rune/glyph you stick on this (which we will get to). If you fail to repair it, you can make a recovery check to get the items back.

It's a really interesting and rather complex system, and I think it's where most of the work went into this game.

Coming sometime 2019: Willpower and Luck, then classes.

Future WiserOdin Note: Change made to the bombs section because past WiserOdin is an idiot and forgets how this shit works[/i]

[virgil]

The costs look weird. Like, what what was the justification for chitin to be 106 or an arming sword to be 404, rather than something more round?

ADDENDUM: What the hell is toxicity?

[Krusk]

there seems to be 2 main ways that I think lead to successful item crafting systems.

1 - everything is a snowflake. monster entries specifically call out "you can totally harvest basilisk venom and it does X following normal poison rules". You have few that can be used for stuff and its fun and exciting when it comes up. I'm glad they put it all in a table, which looks handy.

2 - nothing is special and you can't harvest basilisk venom. You can harvest "3 Poison" or whatever generic thing you want that can be used to craft something that needs 3 poison, 2 fire, and 1 stone.

This seems to go the middle road. You need complex recipies of 3 spotted griffon eggs, 2 (gay) owlbear dicks, and the (blue) eye of a hag. I feel like this usually leads to PCs who butcher and package any animal or thing they come across, and the game just becomes accounting sim.

combined with the teaching and learning skills, it really seems like this is emulating runescape more than anything I'd enjoy. (I never got around to more than an hour of one of the witchers, so maybe its totally accurate.)

[WiserOdin032402]

The costs look weird. Like, what what was the justification for chitin to be 106 or an arming sword to be 404, rather than something more round?

ADDENDUM: What the hell is toxicity?

The cost of an arming sword diagram. Diagrams are supposed to be of some rarity and importance as they're basically pages out of a spell book. Trade secrets and all that

And chitin comes from endrega and arachasae.

Endrega

Arachas

These are big poisonous bugs that eat damage like no tomorrow and can rip your legs off with relative ease.

Toxicity is a build-up to you being poisoned, which makes you take 3 unresistable damage every round (which is 3 seconds) until you lower it, the potion wears off, or you make a DC 18 endurance check.

[WiserOdin032402]

there seems to be 2 main ways that I think lead to successful item crafting systems.

1 - everything is a snowflake. monster entries specifically call out "you can totally harvest basilisk venom and it does X following normal poison rules". You have few that can be used for stuff and its fun and exciting when it comes up. I'm glad they put it all in a table, which looks handy.

2 - nothing is special and you can't harvest basilisk venom. You can harvest "3 Poison" or whatever generic thing you want that can be used to craft something that needs 3 poison, 2 fire, and 1 stone.

This seems to go the middle road. You need complex recipies of 3 spotted griffon eggs, 2 (gay) owlbear dicks, and the (blue) eye of a hag. I feel like this usually leads to PCs who butcher and package any animal or thing they come across, and the game just becomes accounting sim.

combined with the teaching and learning skills, it really seems like this is emulating runescape more than anything I'd enjoy. (I never got around to more than an hour of one of the witchers, so maybe its totally accurate.)

It's a semi-accurate representation of at least Witcher 3 and all of its crafting systems. Granted, Geralt never really has to be taught anything, but it's trying to do more than the videogame. So you are, in fact, somewhat right, and I would totes pull a lot of these systems aside if I ever made a Runescape TTRPG.

[EightWave]

Trying to faithfully transfer a video game crafting system to TTRPG never works because the opportunity costs of each system are wildly different. Video games have neigh-unlimited single player downtime and literal spreadsheets to track how many owlbears you've hunted down and harvested, and how many iron daggers it takes to raise smithing by 1. In a TTRPG tracking down a single gryphon because you need its feather for a potion of flight is a fucking quest and training your smithing skill is seriously just "I'll study leatherworking while we camp"

However many free skill points you get from Teaching in downtime, it still doesn't mean that you'd want to spend them on skills that only do anything when you're using weapons you don't want to use. A Swords character is always going to prefer taking Tactics lessons or Sailing Lessons, or fucking anything at all other than Staff/Spear lessons.

The weird thing is that the Witcher games make a deal out of switching between Steel and Silver weapons for fighting mundane/supernatural enemies. Being able to golf-bag your way to victory with the lore checks and weapon choices is a setting feature. There are plenty of ways you can bake that into the system so that there are plenty of puzzle monsters you have to flip over with a halberd then stab the soft underbelly with a silver sword, and yet apparently the game just doesn't do any of that.

[WiserOdin032402]

I'll talk about weapons more in-depth when we get to the actual full-blown weapons category, but for now there are silver weapons and non-silver weapons, and if you decide you hate yourself, you can use the optional meteorite weapon rule, where some monsters are only vulnerable to meteorite weapons because that's how it works it in the books. Silver damage is dumb and complicated and I'll talk about it when we get there.

As for the weapons themselves, there are weapons players definitely want above all others because they have dumb and overpowered properties. Some weapons have more Weapon Accuracy (and we'll talk about this), some of them have more damage, some of them force a stun save (Due to how crits work for the love of god don't get stunned), some of them are focuses for magic, some of them punch through DR, some of them cause bleeding, and some of them are Short Blades and thus don't matter outside of using one specific skill to initiate combat with a crit. Oh and some of them have the reach property.

The big important part is that unless you get into relics a lot of weapon types just have completely unique properties that you might want. And, of course, the Melee Combat skill exists and covers both axes, maces, shields, and blocking with shields.

[TheFlatline]

Jesus, this is basically Cyberpunk 2020 so far. Ref and Int, BOD for survival, and botches on a 1 in combat leads to retarded shit like shooting yourself in the ass.

Speaking as an amateur designer - do I need to develop the sad condition of being TOTALLY FUCKING UNABLE to learn from my mistakes in order to sell games? Is that the secret?

Or is it actually just a case of maybe publishing a thing for people to buy? I guess that might help, too .

I believe Poundsmith wrote both CP2020 and Witcher. It's a *severely* old school game & design. Like, I know about the old school revival thing, but this is one of those "I didn't know they still made games like this any more" books. And not in a good way.

[TheFlatline]

Witcher art is good:

I believe literally all of the art in this game is CD Projeckt Red's conceptual art, and yes, it's beyond gorgeous. I mean, they gave Triss Merigold a playboy spread when Witcher 2 came out.

As for what this setting has, it's metaphysics is actually kind of interesting, and a high level, ballsy-enough GM could plane-hop almost anywhere (There's a joke line that Ciri went to the Cyberpunk world in Witcher 3, which is officially not considered canon and more of an easter egg, but basically yeah). In the right hands it's got an obvious setup for monster hunting, which is something that non-witchers are doing more of these days. In the right hands, it could easily be a political intrigue and kingdom simulator heartbreaker, but instead it's a spray-painted Cyberpunk without guns.

[WiserOdin032402]

Jesus, this is basically Cyberpunk 2020 so far. Ref and Int, BOD for survival, and botches on a 1 in combat leads to retarded shit like shooting yourself in the ass.

Speaking as an amateur designer - do I need to develop the sad condition of being TOTALLY FUCKING UNABLE to learn from my mistakes in order to sell games? Is that the secret?

Or is it actually just a case of maybe publishing a thing for people to buy? I guess that might help, too .

I believe Poundsmith wrote both CP2020 and Witcher. It's a *severely* old school game & design. Like, I know about the old school revival thing, but this is one of those "I didn't know they still made games like this any more" books. And not in a good way.

This was written by Cody Pondsmith, not Mike. Mike was apparently going to turn it down when Cody overheard and took the offer. This is slow-going because school and life and such but you'll see a radical divergence in approach when we get to the character classes. I mean skill trees. If you're familiar with CP 2020 think professions but Non-Solos get actual results from their stuff.

And also there's no Solo-equivalent skill tree because the entire design of the Solo profession skill is a blight upon tabletop gaming.

[Rasumichin]

So what is the main selling point of an actual mid-budget Witcher tabletop RPG like this? I've played the first two games, and I enjoyed them, and I imagine I'll enjoy the third when I play it. But I couldn't tell you a single thing about the setting or the magic at this point. Do people have a genuine investment in [googles] Redania in the same way they care about Cormyr or Westeros?

I do. I'm only familiar with Witcher 3 and the two expansions to that, but i absolutely loved the setting. It's not reinventing fantasy or anything, but they managed to mix in enough elements from Slavic folklore and the Polish-Lithuanian Union to give it a very recognizable feel once you get deeper into the game. A lot of it is just minor visual details like the architecture, the landscape, nobles with weird undercut hairstyles and thugs with Vory prison tattoos and stuff like that, but it works quite well at giving you the impression that you're not in one generic mediaval fantasy not-Europe all the time, but travel from medieval fantasy Poland to medieval fantasy Norway to mediaval fantasy France as you journey from Velen to Skellige to Beauclaire. It's not wildly imaginative, no, but i always had the impression that it was done with an eye for detail and a great sense of tone. Pseudo-historical vanilla fantasy done right tends to work better than "hey. let's do everything different than Tolkien and D&D just to come off as original" most of the time. To go with your examples, is Westeros a particularly unique setting? No, definitely not. But it's still a nicely-written world just because there's people and factions you care about who screw or murder each other in scenic locations and because GRRM is somebody who can write about large-scale conflicts from a strategic perspective.

I believe literally all of the art in this game is CD Projeckt Red's conceptual art, and yes, it's beyond gorgeous.

Sounds likely, given that it looks exactly like the game and CD Projekt work with Pondsmith all the time due to Cyberpunk 2077.