The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:It should also be noted that the Bite spells are hot garbage and people do not cast them.

-Username17

Really, the main reason players will use a "Bite of the [Whatever]" spells: they want to play a furry, a werecreature, or some other form of skinshifter-themed spellcaster, and it's too much of a hassle to make it happen in most campaigns.

One possible excuse for spending slots on the Round/level "Bite of the [Whatever]" chain of spells might be if you're looking for more Fixed Range Target spells to cast if you've got a way to have more Contingency-like effects, or Persistent Spell Divine Metamagic cheese (such as a Persistent Chamelon build), than you know what to do with; and you're forced to solo for some dumb reason (making the vast array of persistable group buffs less effective as force-multipliers).

Looking at this per level list of persistable options; Bite of the Weretiger shows up as viable @ 5th level; as 4th level has Improved Invisibility and Divine Power.

Heh, sounds like a physical adept from shadowrun.

So, I'm working on a oneshot where the PCs are Doom-style space marines who have to go into Hell and save Santa. Using Koumei's Dungeon Crusade stuff (so, d20), plus some extra little shit I added in.

I'm trying to come up with just some quick, but interesting, obstacles to fill the space between "Ok, we've figured out where Santa is" and "Time to storm Dis!" I want a good 8 or so, allowing two chances for each character to shine, and then I'll just write them on cards and draw four.

The characters are-
Sarge Tactical Sargeant/Devastator, gives team buffs and tears shit down.
Scout Scout Marine/Scout Pilot/Tech Marine, mobility and ranged combat character. Also high stealth and perception.
Spooks Vindicare Assassin/Callidus Assassin, sniper assassin steath character
Chap Assault Marine/Chaplain, has Divine feats with the turning requirement handwaved because it's a oneshot

So far, I've got:

• wall of skulls (allows Sarge to shine by improving the squad's damage against structures)
• A supernatural storm that causes fear and blows characters back (Sarge pops his anti-fear stuff and boosts party saves)
• Hellfire River that basically has to be rafted across or jumped on Scout's bike one party member at a time.
• Bridge with demonic guards that can be sniped, but if they're not taken out in one round (with *really* simplified combat rolls), they alert Dis
• Grove of Suicide Trees that drain wisdom. Could be burned down, though this is dangerous, or Chap can do a turn type thing to put large swaths of the trees to rest, clearing a path.

So, that's five. Sarge has two obstacles to be integral to, Chap gets a couple of options, the trees and their theology knowledge can help with the river. Scout and Spooks each have one.

Any suggestions for another few simple, skill-challenge-y sort of obstacles, giving Scout and Spooks at least one more option each, and giving Chap another "this is definitely your chance to shine" like the grove of suicides?

"There are sentry turrets that are full of bullets (and the same can be said of anyone who tries going down the tunnel). Thankfully, there is a switch to deactivate them... at the end of the tunnel they're guarding."

So Spook or Scout can sneak past, deactivate them, then everyone else wanders along.

A small adjustment to that (and nod to Doom itself) would be:

"A Spidermind is standing in a deactivated crusher, looking over the area and shooting the shit out of anything it sees. If someone were to be really sneaky, they could get to the control panel unnoticed. If they were also good with machinery, they could reactivate it."

"You're going to keep on getting attacked by swarms of Lost Souls (flying skulls) that are a pain in the ass, as you travel through here. They're being generated by Pain Elementals that are an annoying distance away."

Let the Spook snipe the PEs so that the number of LS generated is actually finite and also generally small.

"As you clamber through the ventilation, you see through a grate: a cyber demon is trying to guard an area, and is right underneath you. You can clearly see the loading mechanism on its back that transfers a chain of rockets into its gun-arm."

A Scout can drop down onto its back and sabotage them so that in the ensuing fight, it gets to shoot maybe one rocket before the next one detonates inside the gun. And holy shit, the exactly as bad as you might think Doom novels have contributed something here.

The Chaplain can preach the true meaning of Christmas to/at someone?

The Scout can cause power to be cut from a building, thus deactivating one of the locks to the vault?

(Oh, and I think you are obliged to make a "Claus"/"Claws" joke)

Thaluikhain wrote: (Oh, and I think you are obliged to make a "Claus"/"Claws" joke)

The most potent punchline is often a diverted one.

Play up an aspect you think is funny, but confused with an other slightly similar aspect, as intensely as you can. Only after things have been mostly resolved (i.e. after the last second) do you reveal that said aspect was merely a tangent to the actual truth.

First, some confusion that St.Claws has defeated enemies with their shrewd legal skills (i.e. their many deadly "clause"). This could happen in more urban settings, or with civilized NPCs. They also maintain some form of pan-dimensional census that is automagically updating itself; perhaps the first Yule gift a mortal receives invokes some form of "Yule clause" that is vagule understood, or has different/conflicting interpretations.

Then NPCs in rural and wilderness settings could heavily play up the fact that St. Claws has the power to rend their enemies apart with their massive mitts (a rework of the Skyrim quote about Ulfric Stormcloak 'shouting' King Torryg "apart", i.e. "He clawed them apart"; might be an option). Perhaps even have environmental demonstrations of forest paths, mountains, giant cities, which are rent with successive parallel scoring lines (indicating claws large enough to destroy forests/coliseums /mountains).

The reveal would be that the "claus" is actually a result of the fact that people are lazy, and have shortened St.Nickolaus, to St.Klaus. St.Nick themselves would be the best way to make that reveal, when the PCs finally meet up with them.

When confronted, Claus could explain that the other misattributions are simply compounded laziness and cognitive bias by people who have observed the results of eons of St.Claws' labours, but have misinterpreted their causes.

Yes, St. Claws will admit that they rely heavily upon inventoried lists/rosters/documents to enforce their Imperial Yule. However the fact that clause and claus are homonyms is purely coincidence compounded by human ignorance.

While their environmentally destructive powers come from the vorpal switches/bundles carried by the minotaurian Krampus-reindeer which pull his war-sleighs through forests and mountainous terrain.

After all, how are you going to create, update, & leverage, a pan-dimensional census if you can't even hold a fragile quill in your hand without snapping it inside your mountain-shredding claws?

Awesome suggestions, Koumei. I already have them fighting waves of lost souls while trying to triangulate Santa's position, so I probably won't go with the pain elemental, but I like the stealth suggestions.

Might also set up a point where Chap can try to preach the true meaning of Christmas to a hoarding devil or something, thaluikhain.

It's been 20 years and I don't have searchable pdfs of SR3 and I'm fucking lazy, so here's a question for the old hands: What are the best spells that can be cast at low force and still be effective? I'm looking at playing an aspected elementalist who only casts a little as a sideline because reasons. Water & Illusions looks like an attractive pick because Illusions look pretty easy to cast and the spell list was short enough that it didn't give me a headache just by looking at the page. On the other hand Manipulation bloat appears so stupid that I'm assuming there's bonkers stuff tucked away in there somewhere if only I could be bothered to read that bullshit.

Manipulation bloat is worst in SR3 of all the editions. But Illusions are still pretty fly. I can't recall off hand all the force independent illusions, but the big one is Personal Silence. You can literally cast it at force 1 because the nominal effect of force is to set the target number of the target's resistance roll if for some reason they don't want to be completely inaudible. If you cast it on willing targets only,force does literally nothing.

I vaguely remembered the sr3 skillwire rules being shitty but going back and really looking at it again has made my brain full of fuck. They cost essence, nuyen and have two separate cost modifiers based on rating and megapulse bandwidth. The megapulse shit is the worst since it feels like accounting for the sake of accounting and since there's multiple ways of storing and accessing data in SR3 you end up doing compare and contrast exercises with datajacks, chipjacks, headware storage, cluster chips and chipjack jukeboxes. Why was this ever considered a good idea!? It's a shit ton of crossferencing and the payoff for the game as a whole looks to be virtually nil. The best case Skillwire scenario appears to be that your techie players get to grab a few extra low rating downtime skills without dropping Resources down a Priority which is... ok. But the the worst case scenario appears to be someone going whole hog with the damn things and flipping karma progression the bird. The whole setup makes me want to travel back in time so I can start punching writers in the neck.

With some creative tinkering, you can get it to become a useable piece of kit actually.
Level 5 without the internal storage capacity. Expert-System.
Then you need a smuggeling Compartment in your body somewhere.
Into that you place both a datajack and a chipjack with the expert system.
Then you get yourself a jukebox, modify it to work with DNI-Command.
That you fill with the chips you want to use. And then you hook it up.
To the datajack and chipjack. And then you put clothes and armor over it.
Nobody will see it. Nobody will find it. And if somebody managed to get at it?
By that point, you are without armor and defenseless in the first place, so eh.
And with that you can have 15 skills with 8 dice each. PLUS your natural skills.
At that point, you ARE actually the swiss army sword the Street Sam is supposed to be.
And at level 5 it is not too expensive in terms of both nuyend and essence and thus you can put more usefull stuff into the body to give you things like the task pool in addition.
And the joints for more dice as well. And the synthacardium and math SPU and the such . . Eye-Stuff too.
There will be, at some point, nothing you can not do anymore. (Magic aside obviously, and even some magical skills can be learned without magic attribute and thus skillslotted.)
And getting new skills/chips is easy and legal as well. Meaning you can effectively forget about karma for character advancement for most of the characters life.
Well, Attributes being improved maybe and your few natural skills as well.

As for WHY?
Because that was the whole idea of unskilled labour.
Just chip whatever is needed and off to the assembly line you go.
Of course, that only works if this stuff did not cost an arm and a leg in money.

Look at Matrix dude:"I know kung-fu!" < = that's more or less the effect you get.
If that is not what you want . . yeah, then you are completely right and they don't work.

As for WHY THE RULES?!?
Because: dude, have you LOOKED at SR3?
That was the "Yes it's got rules for that" part of Shadowrun.
You could make a computer game from that ruleset, because there are. rules. for. fucking. everything.

After that, with SR4, they tried to reduce that heap of rules.

Oh, I know that they work. That's why I said that they appear to bend the game over and cornhole it if you actually make heavy use of them. Skills are fundamentally a bad thing to be offering at different prices in SR3 given that they're how you do literally everything and do not actually require attribute support for the vast majority of tests.

And they only got better in SR4 still . . exactly BECAUSE you now have the dicepool from your attributes to use as well. Low-Level-Wires are cheap and easy, and if your attributes are high enough, you still get a decent dicepool for the skills. And there is no more storage limit. And you can have a warez network as a contact to make acquisition of new skills cheap and easy.

I think the SR4 skillwires weren't as big of a deal, because dicepool sizes didn't matter as much (bug or feature?) and you couldn't spend Edge. Like you said, if you had good attributes, you could default (not as big of a problem, -2 DP) or you could add like 4 extra dice (so total swing of +6 DP, or 2 average hits). Yes, it's pretty good, but I wouldn't call it game breaking. Especially because the gear for it got pretty expensive at the high end, iirc.

I think the bigger game changer for skill wires was the expert system introduced in Augmentation (?) that let you spend Edge when using skillwires.

I could be misremembering all of this though...

Expert System Drivers for the Chipjack were introduced in SR3 or even earlier my friend.
And back then, they allowed the use of the applicable dice pools for the slotted skills to a certain extent. No Expert-System? No Dice-Pool.
Level 1 System? Limited Pool Use (am at work, no complete rules at hand).
Level 2 System? Half of Pool Use.
Level 3 System? Complete Pool Use. So for example, if you slotted an active combat skill, with a Level 3 Expert System, you could then add your complete Combat-Pool of 6-9 Dice to the Roll if you so desired, if i remember correctly.
It may have been slightly less broken and only allowed you level of expert system dice or level x2 dice of pool usage. Again, no rules at work.
Somebody else had better look this up and correct me if i am wrong.

Also, SR4 introduced Skillwired included in MoveByWire-Systems. Which made them more useable, since they were otherwise competing for Essence and money with each other. And both of those Systems could get bloody expensive.

Furthermore: If you boosted your Logic and Agility Attributes up to softmax in SR4 and then got a Level 1 Skillwire-System, you basically went from Defaulting (Attribute -1?) Dice to roll and i think other drawbacks to Attribute + 1 Dice to roll with no drawbacks at all aside from money and essence spent. But same deal here, no SR4 books at work either.

Stahlseele wrote:And they only got better in SR4 still . . exactly BECAUSE you now have the dicepool from your attributes to use as well.

That's nonsense. SR3 Skillwires are still more powerful and problematic within their environment. Attributes are more important in SR4 than in SR3 but functionally that just means that generalists have an easier time with downtime skills and low threshold tests while specialists enjoy more role protection on opposed tests. That is, rolling Skill+Attribute versus a fixed target number is good for an amateur when he's merely trying to beat Threshold 2 but it's bad when you're in a dick measuring contest with a chromed up Samurai since you're effectively competing on two fronts. In SR3 pure skill rating is just plain more important because it's quite common for your Skill rating to be the only thing you roll in a test or at least make up the vast majority of the dice.

They made skillwires cheaper and easier to get.
And the actual skillsofts as well.
And with their inclusion in move by wire, it made them even more useable because they did not have to compete with each other in meatspace.
And i still maintain that because of how the new system worked, a sam with high logic and agility and skillwires would end up with the better allround skillset and dicepools than he would have in SR3.
I am not sure, was there ever a limit on hits due to actual skill(wire) level?
If so, that would definitely turn things around and not in favour of actually using them . . Which, i think, was part of the design goals.
To actually make the more iconic implants more useable and used more often.

Stahl, the problem I'm complaining about with Skillwires has fuck all to do with whether or not you liked your Samurai build better in SR3 or SR4. The problem I'm talking about with Skillwires is fucking build divergence. Because in SR3 you do not in fact roll your attributes unless you're defaulting. Instead, attributes contribute to a some derived stats and modify the karma cost of increasing your skills. So running with tweaked out Skillwires in SR3 saves you karma coming and going because you also get to skip doing some push ups before trying to learn Kung Fu. It's really quite fucked.

Also in SR4 while the move-by-wire thing was great in terms of value (wired reflexes + skillwires and only sorta fluff downsides), the skillwires still weren't amazeballs because they were limited to like lvl 3 I think, so at max you could have most any skill at 3...not exactly game breaking...

Move-By-Wire justified themselves mostly by being NPC kit in sr4. The availability rating was high relative to its cost and the stats were effective but not actually better than what a chargen Street Samurai could get by combining Wired Reflexes or Synaptic Boosters with Synthacardium and other All-Stars. So they existed primarily as a piece of world building that allowed corps to cheaply field a bunch of mid-tier goons that could crush gangers but still die to Street Samurai.

Honestly, i do not think that is a problem . .
It may clash with the rest of the system and as such may constitute bad game design in terms of rules, but for the samurai to be able to save on karma by using an implant that is simply not used in over 90% of the cases due to the rules associated with it? There is the mnemonic enhancer, which does basically the same, allbeit on a smaller scale and everybody and their mother wanted one of those . .

The problem with Skillwires isn't people's delicate sensibilities, dude, and saying something is defensible because people gentleman's agreement virtually out of existence is pretty fucked.

Prak wrote: Any suggestions for another few simple, skill-challenge-y sort of obstacles, giving Scout and Spooks at least one more option each, and giving Chap another "this is definitely your chance to shine" like the grove of suicides?

Spooks might shine in an encounter with a bunch of mooks being powered up by some type of leader with a force multiplier buff. If he can assassinate the leader, then the mooks become way easier to deal with.

In a normal campaign, yeah, but I was trying to minimize the combat obstacles in this part, since this is meant to be a one-shot

Anyone had experience with Traveller? I'm going to be running a game of it.

One idea I was kicking around was having the PCs get stranded on the Zoldani side of the border after another Imperium-Zoldani conflict kicks off. It looks like they're going to be riding in a yacht, so they'll have 2x Jump 1. Is it feasible within the universe that these kinds of wars create "battle lines" that would be difficult to traverse without attracting attention from the militaries of both sides? Or does the vastness of space/the fact that battles happen around focal points like planets preclude this?

Also, I'm mostly trying to stay way from New Traveller, but I might use some variant of the Virus/the vampire fleets. I can't find that book anywhere, though. Is it worth buying, or is the execution really stupid?