Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[Foxwarrior]

Action points mean that you can't use action categories as a crutch to make some types of action less spammable arbitrarily (unless you do the PF2 thing of creating many new layers of restrictions that seem even more arbitrary than "standard" vs "move" actions ever did). So then you actually need to balance moving and attacking against each other somehow instead of just requiring that the characters all do some moving or equivalent each turn. Basically I'm calling action points Designer Hard Mode.

[OgreBattle]

Oh yeah DeadManWalking, my conclusion from those previous threads about dice pool melee combat alpha strike problem is to make the engaging (the "I move/charge the guy from X distance away") alpha strike less accurate than following attacks in measure (the 'base to base' range).

Action points mean that you can't use action categories as a crutch to make some types of action less spammable arbitrarily (unless you do the PF2 thing of creating many new layers of restrictions that seem even more arbitrary than "standard" vs "move" actions ever did). So then you actually need to balance moving and attacking against each other somehow instead of just requiring that the characters all do some moving or equivalent each turn. Basically I'm calling action points Designer Hard Mode.

I like how Front Mission 4 (maybe later ones too) have off-turn reactions and team support moves use up AP, so it's not just about doing your ideal attack combination but weighing if you want to go all-in on your turn or be ready to overwatch foes

[OgreBattle]

has anyone done a Good look at Cyberpunk RED yet?

[pragma]

I did a review of quick start guide (link below). I don't think the full rules have come out. There are a variety of real plays run by staff posted on the R. Talsorian site (link also below), and they presumably give you some idea of how the devs intend the game to run. My takeaway is that they intend it to be bog standard; I see little setting this apart from any other penny-ante d10+mods rpg. If it's successful, it will be because of cross-promotion with CP2077.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57550
https://rtalsoriangames.com/actual-play/

[OgreBattle]

Anyone read Gygax and Arneson's books on creating RPG's? Wondering what games they played.

I can't make links but I've read about "Braunstein" which assigned roles to dudes in a napoleonic town, then turned into LARPing to the creator's unexpectation.

Model UN type stuff seems like the precursor to Braunstein, and I don't see Model UN usually called an RPG

[Thaluikhain]

In a bunch of GW games, there's a rule that you have to shoot at the closest enemy target (usually followed to a long list of exceptions). This has always annoyed me, but is there a good reason for something like that to be there, instead of letting players have units/models shoot at whatever they want?

[Foxwarrior]

GW army games are derived from wargames. So sometimes there's an aspect of trying to simulate an army of soldiers you don't actually have firm control over, who might come up with various things they'd rather do than what you want them to. Thus troops can run away, frenzy, and are somewhat unwilling to shoot the guys way over there when there are some enemies in their faces right now.

[OgreBattle]

In a bunch of GW games, there's a rule that you have to shoot at the closest enemy target (usually followed to a long list of exceptions). This has always annoyed me, but is there a good reason for something like that to be there, instead of letting players have units/models shoot at whatever they want?

Allows for screening tactics so the artillery mage and so on don't always get focus fired or sniped. There's usually exceptions for much bigger models, like shooting a trukk that has an ork standing in front of it.

I think most of the GW games that do that let you take a test to ignore it and shoot whoever. So the Elf and Dwarf can snipe more reliably than a Skaven.

Kill Team lets you shoot anyone in range, but intervening models provide cover (-1 to hit) so there's still screening.

Necromunda has you make a Cool Check to see if you can shoot someone other than the closest in range. I don't think units provide cover in Necromunda, don't know if they made exceptions for the ogre+ sized stuff

[Sigil]

As people have said, it's a method for forcing frontlines of opposing armies to actually engage instead of shooting past each other and ensuring there's a benefit to being behind the front lines. There's also generally rules that prevent targeting individual characters below a certain threshold (currently gauged by maximum wounds) from being targeted as long as they're near enough to a friendly squad.

There's occasionally dumb edge cases where this causes interactions that do not result in 'warlike' interactions, such as two units screening each other so neither are targetable, or a big fucking dreadnought just happening to fall below the wound threshold and being 'screened' by tiny little dudes.

[Thaluikhain]

While that makes sense, can't you just have a rule against shooting through enemy units (or giving them a cover save if you do), and not targeting individuals close (or inside) units? That would seem to work a lot better, unless I'm missing something.

Unless, as Foxwarrior said, you want to simulate troops doing their own thing, which just doesn't appeal to me personally.

[Grek]

It probably would, but that sort of thing was removed from the game along with all other examples of 'real line of sight' precisely because it would lead to all sorts of intensely stupid arguments about whether someone can be seen through a particular piece of cover. People would sculpt their minis to be in different poses based on which poses would give them the best sight line or make the mini fit behind other minis better and shit. It was very bad and now the whole rules line is allergic to anything that even resembles it.

[OgreBattle]

Infinity avoids "my giant robot is crouching so it gets cover while your standing robot does not" by having size categories that you can measure. Silhouette Templates: http://wiki.infinitythegame.com/en/Volu ... _Templates

True LoS sucks ass, the root of all my tabletop unhappiness. Would love to have skirmish wargames all use D&D style terrain grids

[infected slut princess]

how does Hide work in 3.5? Or rather, Hide doesn't work in 3.5, but how do you make it workable? I'm running a 3.5 campaign and honestly I can't remember what my old house ruled semi-functional version of 3.5 stealth was.

[Lord Charlemagne]

I'm probably not the person most qualified to answer this question, but I'll try.

You need cover or concealment from something (actual walls/barriers, magic, sand in the opponents eyes) to attempt a hide check. All those who it would matter & are able to (if there are two enemies & you only have concealment against one of them, you may attempt to hide, but it would only matter for the one you have concealment against) that you are hiding against may make a spot check opposed against your hide check. For the sake of simplicity, I have the hiding group only make a single hide check & the DC of those who matter if they spot you is that result + 1 (seeing as the players are usually the ones attempting to hide, I let them win ties).

If you would attack a target while hidden from them, they are counted as flat-footed.

Hiding is something you may attempt to do as part of a move action, so you can't remain hiding after making a full attack, but you can make a single attempt & then try to hide, albeit with a -10 penalty (this is normally just for sniping & you can't move after making a sniping attempt, but I haven't had a problem allowing it, but I can see it be abused if your party is good at optimizing).

[Hicks]

How i run Hide is not in the rules at all.

Roll a hide and move silently check. You are now hiding
Doing stuff can move that number up (being behind/in cover, being far away, being invisible) or down (attacking, talking, spellcasting) by a modifier stated in the hide rules.

Spot and listen rolls are passive, and you just get a roll if something is hiding "around you".
"Around you" is a nebulous narrative distance but basically it is rolled before you even enter the ambush area to see if the players do a counter ambush. Unless there is a class ability or feat that does it automatically, subsequent spot and listen rolls use a standard action. If you discover something, they are discovered until they spend a standard action to roll a hide check higher than the check that discovered them.

That isn't the rules. But it is what usually happens when I run.

[WalkTheDinosaur]

For the sake of simplicity, I have the hiding group only make a single hide check & the DC of those who matter if they spot you is that result + 1 (seeing as the players are usually the ones attempting to hide, I let them win ties).

That's not just simplicity, you pretty much have to do that or something like it to make group stealth possible. If you made every party member roll, at least one of them would almost always roll a 3 and fail which is as bad as the whole group failing. Same with letting all ten orc guards roll individually, at least one of them will almost always make the check even if their individual bonuses aren't great.

It's the same principle as letting every player make a perception check for some information you need the party as a whole to have because at least one of them will make it, but in reverse. Any opposed check that gives both sides a reasonable chance in a 1v1 is almost a foregone conclusion when one side has to succeed 5-6 times in a row.

[merxa]

I find group stealth somewhat elusive, I think it can be done in an interesting way but it needs to address various edge cases.

Group size. The party rogue helping their three adventuring companions is one thing, having the same party rogue lead an army is probably another.

Only Advantages. Most stealth systems provide modifiers for things like size, 'dex', armor, magic. If the party rogue is an invisible pixie leading heavily armored and visible frost giants, granting all the bonuses the pixie gets and none of the penalties of their companions can cause somewhat absurd and immersive breaking results.

Generating a group stealth check for the flying invisible rogue pixie and his 3 platemail clad frost giants seems difficult.

You could have them all roll, add up all the numbers and divide by 4. This lets the high rolls from the pixie rogue pull up the lower rolls, but it does require a number of rolls and some math so resolution speed is a little slower. It also gets watered down quickly as more companions get added. But it does let everyone who is good at stealth contribute to improving the group score, and conversely models those who are bad from either lack of skill or choices in armor or both.

Applying the same rule to the army would scale in one sense of the word, even if you have the bulk of the army 'take 10' a high level rogues uber bonus will get quickly swamped and may not even contribute a +1. And maybe that is ok. Abilities could always be written to give the rogue domain level modifiers, so high level rogues can lead squads, battalions, legions etc, maybe by treating such categories as individuals contributors to the 'everyone rolls and divide by number of rolls' rule.

There's still some issues when these large groups aren't identical, if the squad is 20 disparate individuals, or if it just happens to be 19 ninjas and a cook. If we continue allowing a group to take '10' instead of rolling 20 times, it could be the rule of thumb that the person in a given group that is the worse at stealth takes 10 for the group, then you might end up in a situation where the leading rogue rolls, the 19 ninjas take 10, the cook rolls (or takes ten as separate group) and then the 3 numbers are added together and divided by 3. Of course if you're confident in the 19 ninjas, maybe you would insist on them all rolling individually so you end up with 21 rolls to average, the goal being to swamp out the low roll of the loud cook, and maybe thats ok too, but could be abused easily, if you have a 1000 loud cooks, having group into 1 roll while 19 ninjas weight up the check could feel a little silly. Guidelines on group division would probably be needed to avoid such abuses.

Maybe guidelines would come from the domain level powers, a domain 1 rogue can group up one squad, domain 2 can group 3 squads, domain 3 could group 1 battalion or 6 squads, etc some thought would be needed on categories, how they scale and how you convert them up and down.

Presumably, if reasonable guidelines can be made, the GM could then throw the group stealth problem back to the players asking them how they are going to divide up into groups and who is rolling / taking 10, to calculate the group stealth check.

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, random thing that's been bothering me.

Because of Tolkien, elves and dwarfs and orcs and hobbit/halflings and tree-ents (to an extent) and barrow wights are all over fantasy. Now, you can argue that he didn't create them, he just helped popularise them or whatever.

Why did the Woses seem to get completely left out? Now, true, they are barely in it, like the barrow wights, who at least got to do stuff in their one appearance. Even so, it seems weird that Tolkien fans still haven't been obsessed with the little things and run with them.

They weren't invented by Tolkien, they've long been a part of European mythology, and Bigfoot is popular every so often, but they don't seem to have caught on.

[Prak]

I had to look them up, because for some reason I was thinking woses were a form of elemental and I wanted to be sure I had the right thing in mind.

I mean... they're just hairy guys who live in the woods. The Rohirim even thought they were goblins. They don't seem to have any particular special thing like "thin forest humans but better," "vaguely scottish humans who make cool shit," "monster men," "very small english farmers," "literal tree men," and "Zombies, but medieval europe" do. Like, "hairy guy" just... at best, the orc and dwarf have that covered.

[Grek]

They're big and strong and uncivilized like Ogres, but Good- and Nature-aligned. Gentle, misunderstood giants.

[angelfromanotherpin]

They're big and strong and uncivilized like Ogres, but Good- and Nature-aligned. Gentle, misunderstood giants.

Even if that were true, Ents do it better and more memorably. But the Woses are specifically short and not particularly gentle.

[OgreBattle]

What do Historic European lore Wose do anyways?

[Thaluikhain]

Hang around being hairy and naked, sometimes the males abduct human women, sometimes the females use magic to make themselves look like beautiful women to seduce human men.

Apparently they are often depicted on churches, defending the entrance and holding a shield or a hat over the groins to cover their nakedness.

[Prak]

Yeah, I really don't think it can be stressed enough how absolutely nothing wose are.

[Grek]

They're big and strong and uncivilized like Ogres, but Good- and Nature-aligned. Gentle, misunderstood giants.

Even if that were true, Ents do it better and more memorably. But the Woses are specifically short and not particularly gentle.

They get mistaken for goblins, but remember that Tolkien didn't really draw a firm distinction between orcs and goblins either. Having them be big and strong like an orc, but with more hair and a totally different disposition seems like a perfectly reasonable take. Add a little of the same artistic license which lead to Gygax drawing on Three Hearts and Three Lions for his Trolls and you have a race of misunderstood forest-wookies who are perfectly friendly and even compose poetry and shit, but get painted with the same 'savage' brush as the orcs and the goblins and the kobolds. Statistically, +Str, +Wis, -Int.

Ents don't really work for that roll, because A] they're plants, which makes them weird, B] they're as big as a fucking tree, and C] their whole thing is that they're hyper-passive and refuse to act until the very last moment. Having a guy who is is basically an Orc with the personality of a Satyr seems way more viable as an player character.