Dump PC Tricks

[Prak]

I know we have one of these somewhere, but fuck if I know where it is, and I'm pretty sure it's D&D specific anyway.

So, thread for dumb, perfectly legal things you can do in games that would nevertheless be fun.

Intrepid Atomic Dino Reporter
In the Atomic Robo game for FATE, you select three groups of skills from a list of four- Action, Banter, Intrigue, Science. If your game uses Weird Characters, ie, characters on par with Robo himself, then you can also have a Weird Mode, things like Robot, Dinosaur, Martial Artist, Reporter, etc. You can actually make your own weird modes for your concept.

However, the full on Weird Character Creation rules actually gives you 30 points to select your groups, still limited to three, but unconcerned with how many you have from a category. A Skill Group's value is worth a number of points equal to the number of skills in it.

The three example modes in the character creation chapter are Robot (4), Dinosaur (5), and Reporter (9). Ie, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from walking into an Atomic Robo game with a robotic dinosaur reporter. If you prioritize your Reporter skills highest, there's enough overlap that all of your skills will be +3 or higher, save for the Tooth and Claw custom skill of the Dinosaur category, before your character creation improvements, which, depending on interpretations, at least allows you up that Tooth and Claw skill to +3.

If you wanted to maximize you skill group points, you could select two of Reporter, Secret Agent, or Martial Artist, each 9 points, and Soldier, which is 11. If you were, say, a Secret Agent Soldier Reporter, you'd have at least a +1 in every skill except Provoke, plus the custom skill Tactic. If you were a Telepath instead of a Reporter, you have at least a +1 in all skills, and can improve one of your skills by 1 point.

[Blade]

I've got a few for Shadowrun (SR4A mostly)

The 300km/h centaur
It was an experiment to create the fastest running character at chargen.
Started with a Centaur and had him SURGEd (there's a text somewhere that says that it's rare but possible) so that he could have Centaur Legs (I'm aware it makes no sense, but there's no explicit text forbidding it) and the Celerity power. I then added skimmer discs (feet replacements that make you hover above the ground).
Base running speed ends up somewhere around 300km/h. Sprinting speed depends on how you consider that modifiers apply, it goes from 400 km/h to 600 km/h.

I made him a summoner so that he can have a spirit cast Movement on him.

And then I had some points left, so I gave him Elongated Limbs (with SURGE) and some capoeira, so that he could stack reach modifiers... and to see the look on people's face when they try to picture a Capoeirist Centaur with elongated limbs.

Never played him.

[Nath]

Bargaining rules that set in stone the profit that can be made from a skill roll are usually bad. But with the rules in Cynabar's Fantastic Technologiy Droids, West End Games' Star Wars even removed to the need to have any Bargain skill.

The bargain droid: Using the rules from Cynabar's Fantastic Technologiy Droids, design a droid with Perception 5D and Bargain 9D, for a cost of 5000 credits. By the book, 9D in a skill is "One of the best for several systems in the immediate area. About 1 in a billion people have a skill at this level." Which makes it likely to find merchant with a lower Bargain skill. Per the bargaining rules, you can expect to routinely buy any stuff for 85% of local market value and sell for 125% - making a 47% profit.

[RobbyPants]

When I saw the title, I thought this thread was going to be about getting rid of cool things PCs can do.

[Iduno]

When I saw the title, I thought this thread was going to be about getting rid of cool things PCs can do.

Or at least Constructicons.

[Stahlseele]

I've got a few for Shadowrun (SR4A mostly)

The 300km/h centaur
It was an experiment to create the fastest running character at chargen.
Started with a Centaur and had him SURGEd (there's a text somewhere that says that it's rare but possible) so that he could have Centaur Legs (I'm aware it makes no sense, but there's no explicit text forbidding it) and the Celerity power. I then added skimmer discs (feet replacements that make you hover above the ground).
Base running speed ends up somewhere around 300km/h. Sprinting speed depends on how you consider that modifiers apply, it goes from 400 km/h to 600 km/h.

I made him a summoner so that he can have a spirit cast Movement on him.

And then I had some points left, so I gave him Elongated Limbs (with SURGE) and some capoeira, so that he could stack reach modifiers... and to see the look on people's face when they try to picture a Capoeirist Centaur with elongated limbs.

Never played him.

Ah yes, a Binky Variant.

Seriously, SR4 had so many broken things you could add together for perfectly legal broken monstrosities . .
Pornomancer, Mr.Edge, Punch and Judy, Binkies, Bear Walks through Walls, The ultimate mundane Climber Troll that goes up a 90% smooth wall faster than most characters can run on a downward slope . . Franks Bloodzilla . .
And the comparatively utterly "mundane" Megaplex destroying WMD in the Form of a great form Earth Elemental or Spirit with the Quake Power and some more force points . .

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I have a fun one from Pokemon Tabletop United that one of my players sort of stumbled into. It's a game with mandatory multiclassing and every player is playing an entire party's worth of dudes at a time (even if most of your dudes are monsters instead of humans), so there's plenty of shit that slipped through the cracks, but this is what I have the most experience with:

I Will Kill You With My Sword, Then My Sword Will Kill All Of Your Friends.
Step 1: Pick the Fortress class so you can give everyone adjacent to you DR, boost your Defense, and tell the GM "Fuck you, your attack doesn't hit me".
Step 2: Pick the Musician class so you can also buff everyone within 4 squares of you by giving them damage or DR (or a bonus to skills, but nobody cares about that).
Step 3: Tell your GM it would be super badass if your starter was a Honedge because ghost swords are awesome.
Step 4: Level your Honedge to 20 so it can intercept attacks targeting you as a Free Action once every fucking turn and laugh at being immune to 3 types, one of which is the type that every fucking regular weapon attack is, while giving your sword massive amounts of damage and yourself massive amounts of DR.
Step 5: Get a boner as your slightly min-maxed sword one-shots three dudes every round while you tank for the entire rest of the party and you can both take attacks that would ROFLPWN the other.
Step 6: Do more stuff with your other skills and pokemon, because you still have those too.

Apparently picking up a ghost sword is such a popular and powerful option that most people just outright ban it as a starter and say the game is worse for it... but this is the level of synergy I'd like most builds to have, since the vast majority of players in my experience just throw together a bunch of random shit and hope it works out. Oh, well.

[Zaranthan]

Pokemon has always had that vast gulf of power in its playerbase. I had one friend who would play like a gym trainer: all ice types, all grass types, etc. I had another friend who challenged me to a duel with "our random campaign team, before we beat the final four". His team was six level 100 Omastars with Horn Drill.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I think they're just like that because they play a lot of tabletop RPGs and can spot obvious synergy, while most of my others don't seem to really care that much and just kind of do whatever... I think. They appear to have little to no long-term planning, so while we have that guy, at the same time we have someone who... sneaks around and makes items and does well on skill checks. She still contributes, but clearly she's not as flashy about it.

Also, I'm not sure who's supposed to be the powergamer in your scenario.

[Omegonthesane]

I would assume the powergamer there is the one whose entire team consists of one-hit KO attacks. I have no context for whether Omastar is particularly powerful, but it's fucking ridiculous to be level 100 before facing the Elite 4.

[Mord]

Depending on the generation of the game, Horn Drill might be a flashy trap option. In Gen I that team would be pretty much helpless against a team that's got higher Speed stats - which would be just about anyone, because Omastar is one of the slowest Pokemon and Horn Drill doesn't work on targets with Speed higher than the user's.

That behavior was changed in later games, with the upshot being that that team becomes very very nasty. Somebody could probably come up with a counter to that, but you'd have to know it was coming.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Omastar has a quad weakness to a common type, poor special defense and even WORSE speed. His plan just looks like some gimmicky shit where he spams Horn Drill to OHKO all of his opponents, but he would be better off just beating the piss out of them with regular moves, since they're already so fucking overpowered. I'm not impressed.

[Mord]

If you start a Grass-type with Razor Leaf you may well sweep, but if you don't know what's coming and put somebody else out first you're on the back foot and praying for Horn Drill to miss in the turn you get your Venusaur out - which is progressively less likely the larger the level gap between you and the squids.

Leveling your whole team to 100 takes either absurd dedication or a GameGenie. I think the highest I ever legitimately leveled a team to was in the 65-70 range. Imagining the hours it would take to get a team of six basically identical Omastar to 100 legitimately sounds like a self-inflicted hell.

[Iduno]

but this is the level of synergy I'd like most builds to have, since the vast majority of players in my experience just throw together a bunch of random shit and hope it works out. Oh, well.

I'm guessing most of us around here feel the same. Synergy is a great rush.


The game also needs to have rules for you to work around, not just roll over and let you do whatever you want. I played a game of Tristat (an open-source game engine before that was something you'd name) where the character generation system was stats, skills, special powers, stats with leftover points, skills with leftover points. I was curious and noticed that the point values had different costs, did some math, and noticed you could tank all of your stats in the first round (and most importantly, to any value, even below zero), then apply those points to your stats in the 4th round. There were no minimums or maximums on stats, so you could set your stats all to -arbitrarily large number, and get enough points to break the game in half without trying. Having different costs for the same thing in different rounds (or did they multiply/divide the value of points or something?) is such half-assery that it takes all of the joy out of messing with the system.