Fantasy Craft Review

[koz]

PR, this is why I find fans of the system to be dense and intractable. Them, much like Spyzils, fail to see that the system is badly done, fixes no problems, and adds a whole lot that nobody gives a damn about except people who want system mastery to involve reading lots of text and finding bullshit bonuses that stack together lots.

Oh, and there are no benchmarks for challenges. Again.

[TarkisFlux]

Since I'm in the middle of dissecting this elsewhere, I'll pick up a couple of things...

saves are still borked

It's worth pointing out that they're borked in exactly the opposite way as 3.5 saves are. They don't scale with level for PCs. They scale with the number of relevant feats you've selected for your character. It's actually fairly hard to pull away on the save DC train here, and really fucking easy to fall behind in PC vs PC fights.

Since those don't happen often though, and it's all just you vs bullshit cherry picked monster, it's really easy for you to face challenges with save DCs or save bonuses (monsters all have the same base, because why make it complicated ) well out of range of your abilities. This isn't a borked save thing, this is an extension of the borked monster thing and it's lack of challenge guidelines.

Certainty: Your error range with proficient attacks decreases by 2 (minimum 0).

Error range? I have no idea what this ability does (though I don't much care).

You don't care, but I'll tell you anyway to fuel your rage . Error range is fumble range, and basically every d20 roll in the game has them (minor exceptions). It's not a guaranteed fumble thing, and requires the opponent (often then GM) to spend their action dice to activate in the same way that characters have to spend their action dice to activate their crits. It's thus less common than standard fumbles because action dice are a more measured resource, and is slightly softened further by later book advice to make then "challenging and entertaining rather than debilitating".

It's still a bullshit fumble mechanic at the end of the day though, just with slightly more narrative impact.

[Psychic Robot]

It's worth pointing out that they're borked in exactly the opposite way as 3.5 saves are. They don't scale with level for PCs. They scale with the number of relevant feats you've selected for your character. It's actually fairly hard to pull away on the save DC train here, and really fucking easy to fall behind in PC vs PC fights.

Do you mean that save DCs are too low? I was talking about saving throws in general still being way off the RNG.

[TarkisFlux]

Not necessarily too low, I just don't like that there's a distinct possibility of getting there.

On the PC side, the save formula for spells (for mages anyway, priests might be different) is 10 + # of Spellcasting feats + Cha mod. The default feat progression for a mage is your 7 normal progression feats plus an additional 5 if you're a mage. So you get +12 to your base DC by level 20 if you don't do any sort of branching out. There are no feats or item boosts to save DC in the book, though you can get bonus Spellcasting feats from items and those do count. You could also get racial bonus feats. But there are only 14 Spellcasting feats in the book, and of those 1 is priest only and only 1 other one makes any sense to take multiple times (it gives you more spells known, and is the only place that spell acquisition is written into the class). There just aren't a lot of places to boost your spell save DCs, so that +12 is very near the high end.

The saving throw side of the equation is largely unchanged. 10 + class bonus + attribute mod + gear. They still have the 0-6 progression and the 2-12 progression, but added a 1-9 one as well. The 2-12 progression is pretty even with the rather bumpy DC progression, the 1-9 keeps up fairly well, and the 0-6 is on the low end but not off the RNG yet.

Attribute differences adjust this of course, but since that's what they're supposed to do I don't actually care. Gear adjustments are worth looking at though. The guy making the save can get the same attribute boosters and pay the same price, but there's still three of them to get and they're more expensive than alternatives so it's the same poor investment it's always been. The "+3 to one save type" item is a much better investment for them, even if they have to buy 3 of them now . The mage can pick up some bonus feats with gear to boost his DCs, and this is cheaper than the save items. So he can get 3 bonus spell known items for slightly less than the defender, leaving them at the same point. They probably will invest in Cha items though, and that will push them over in the same way that casters taking attribute items now get. They still need to invest in skill items so they can cast their high level spells reliably, but I guess you can just high DC color spray people all day if you really want.

So if you get all the feats that you can and all the gear that you can, you only really push poor saves off the bottom of the RNG. But that's as good as you can really get, and it means some serious focus and cost. You don't get to spend feats on non-spellcasting things, and you don't have a lot of other things either. Each bonus feat costs 20 reputation, each +1 to Cha costs 10 rep, and you get 10 x level to work with, so a +6 item and 3 bonus feats costs 60% of the available rep of a level 20 dude. It's not a small investment, and it's coming out of the same pool as any other items, titles, contacts, favors, holdings, etc. If you also want the +7 skill item so you can cast your high level spells reliably (thanks skill based casting mechanic ), it's another 28 rep, leaving you with 52 to work with (about 25% of your starting "stuff" pool).

In 3.5 you could just get a cheap as free bonus item, take a couple of feats, and pound away on people with your saves. Here you have to spend all of your feats on crap you may not even want and take a bunch of gear that limits your access to other things. It's substantially more expensive to do this than in 3.5, and I'm more comfortable with getting these sorts of boosts when you uber-focus on something so I'm not really worried about those poor saves falling off the RNG. I also don't see it coming up in actual play very often, and think it more likely that save DCs will stay right around good save bonuses, if not fall behind slightly. PC on PC saves just aren't all that far off the RNG here. I'm much more worried about the monster interactions, but I'll have to come back to that when I have more time.

[TarkisFlux]

Minor aside before I get to Monsters and PCs and RNGs and shit; I forgot to respond to this:

Now, I have to spend a moment on a rantgent. The writers of FC suck at writing flavor text for abilities. While technically that's less important than mechanics, flavor is how you're going to get players interested in a class, and flavor is going to make people want to play a class. The FC writers, however, think that GENERIC ABILITY I advancing to GENERIC ABILITY II, GENERIC ABILITY III, and so on are appropriate.

Seriously? They couldn't think of up better names than "adding Roman numerals"? Even the spells work this way! What is this, Asheron's Call? (You may take a break from reading this to Google that if you so desire.) Keep the reader interested in the class or you're going to make me punch a baby.

They did that for multiclassing / ability advancing purposes. If you have Generic Ability II and you take another class that would give you Generic Ability I, you get the sum of those and have Generic Ability III on your sheet. Yes, they could have been named better, but the roman numeral thing isn't all that bad given what it does to make multiclassing more functional.

[Psychic Robot]

I suppose that's not a terrible system, then.

[TarkisFlux]

NPCs... well, they're not balanced and they can easily be placed well off the RNG the players are supposed to inhabit.

It's been said before, but it deserves a bit more detail. The NPC / creature generation here is not balanced. They actually don't want it to be apparently, since the measure of a creature is it's XP value, so you can make a creature with some really weak numbers or really strong numbers even though they use the same "threat level". It's... annoying and if you're concerned about not murdering your players or making a credible threat or whatever and you don't actually understand what they did, this system will just bog you down.

So let's take a look at what they did before we get to why saves could be all fucked here. Really, just about everything could be fucked here though, such is the beauty of "just pick some shit".

There are a number of things that you just assign a grade of I-X to, things like Init bonuses and Attack bonuses and Base Saves and Defense Bonuses and Base Skill Bonuses. Grade I corresponds to a regular classes poor progression. Grade III corresponds to a regular classes moderate progression. Grade V is a regular classes good progression. Grade IX is as far above a good classes progression as the good progression is above the poor progression. Grade X is a bit higher than that. When you fill in the "threat level" of a creature these grades turn into numbers, and like all linear progression things the divergence is less egregious at lower levels. So we'll be focusing on level 20, where the bad things happen, since you can actually work with smaller divergences at lower levels.

We've already talked about what a mage has to go through to get his DCs up. There's no way that I'm aware of for him to match these bases at high levels, and I think it's more likely in play that these will be pushing the edge of the RNG if not off it. And since these base numbers apply to every save, there aren't any weak points to target unless they come from attribute adjustments. Also note that anyone without a good progression equivalent is off the RNG against a grade X progression creature in that area.

On the DC of NPC / creature abilities, it's less level based. It's 5 + 5 / grade. Each grade costs more or less depending on what effect the attack causes. The step size is dumb, especially since nothing costs 1 xp, and the granularity would have been nice. There's no guidance here, and your DCs can range from 5 to 30 for any level of the game. So sometimes it's on your RNG, and sometimes it's off.

Note that this is NOT the DC of an NPC spellcaster's spells. There aren't actually rules for that DC that I can find. So I have no idea how broken they are.

---

And there you have it. The save system in FC is still stretched, but not as bad as in 3.5 (multiclass shenanigans not withstanding, I think those are still broked). Saves aren't actually fucked on the PC side of things because of reduced gear bonuses and the hoops you have to jump through to keep your DCs up at all, but they're all kinds of broke on the NPC side. Both the saving and the save DC generating are all over the board, and substantially better than the PCs get on average. And there's no significant advice to help you assign these things so that you do it in a way that doesn't rape your party. It's less a failure of the save system here though, and more a failure of the NPC generation and it's general lack of useful advice.