Phonelobster Shakes The Angry Fist at Star Wars Saga

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Judging__Eagle
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Phonelobster,

In a game system that has so many flaws, does anything about this edition you're reviewing stand out as being a good idea, useful or applicable to game design in general?

So far it seems like most of this is sub-par to useless options to (unintentionally, I'm sure) pad out the overly powerful ones.
Indomitable – You were dropped in a cauldron of magic potion as a baby and as a result have eternal super strength.


I'll admit I started laughing at this line. I guess you've read a lot of Asterix, or are at least well familiar with it. Are there any other Franco-Belgo series you think well of?

Some that I've read myself include: Tin-Tin (although reading it gets repetitive with its racism, characters holding the idiot-ball, and the fact that Tin-Tin shouldn't be allowed to handle vehicles); L'Incal/Metabarons; whatever stuff made the jump from Metal Hurlant to Heavy Metal from 79' onward (also some 2000AD to rep. UK comics, but it's pretty blah).

Most recently I've found out about, and read some of: Obscure Cities (only the first story), and Thorgal (one of the more seamless science-fiction/fantasy mashups I've read; however I've only read to about half of the overall series; where he erases his own memory/name, probably the better examples of what a loss state looks like without involving character death).

I've looked at the wiki pages on Franco-Belgo comics and found out about the last two (and was sort of disappointed that I was re-reading Obscure Cities story "The Walls of Samaris", but it was interesting enough that I re-read it to the end). However little else on the list stood out to me enough to track down and read.
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Judging Eagle wrote:In a game system that has so many flaws, does anything about this edition you're reviewing stand out as being a good idea, useful or applicable to game design in general?
First up, if you think it has many flaws, just wait at least several more chapters of review because it starts accumulating more crazy pretty rapidly from here (basic classes turned out to be the thin end rather than the fat end of the wedge, somewhat to my surprise).

And aside from that, after running through the lot I can't think of all together too much good in this. There were a few good intentions they totally screwed the pooch on or seemed to balk at the last minute and directly undermine... and that's about as good as it gets.

For instance fixed HP is good, the way they did it was stupid, and then they immediately backed down and undermined it anyway with rolled hit point advancement after first level and for NPCs.

Destiny points has some glimmers in it that suggest they were. at some point, writing it up as an alternative action point type resource that was actually worth using. But by they seemed to have backed away from that early in the design process and then stumbled off into insanity until by the time you get to the actual selectable Destinies it has become one of the most astounding abominations against RPG players I have ever seen in a WOTC book, if not any commercially printed RPG product. (The destiny rules make for a fun review chapter).

And everything that ever might have potentially been good pretty much follows that sort of pattern.

Still, the one unwritten part in the draft of the core rule book review is the conclusion. And I DO intend to go back and consider it all in sum once all the material is covered. But I've got a pretty good idea of what will be in it now that I've finished the core book and altogether too much of it is less "surprisingly, this bit was good" and is more "surprising even me, many bits were worse than I expected".
Insomniac wrote:The spaceship rules are FANTASTIC.
Really now? Because the next chapter to go up IS the Vehicle rules and frankly it is BAT SHIT INSANE BAD.
...Starships of the Galaxy
And before you go on about it, after prior claims about that book and it's effect on the starship combat rules specifically I have already checked ahead and basically all the bat shit crazy we are about to see in the vehicle chapter from the core book is left fully intact if not ADDED to by the expansion that does NOT "fix" starships in Saga edition.

So lets use that as a segue into... the fucking insane vehicle rules...
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Fuck It Lets Cover The Vehicle Chapter
I was going to cover prestige classes next, but it starts with a god damn ace pilot and we don't know crap about what his abilities mean without covering vehicle rules. So... VEHICLE RULES.

Two Scales!
Sometimes you do everything on character scale with some rules... and other times you do everything on vehicle scale with other rules. They use similar terms that mean different things, like "squares", because that's a great idea. And the triggering condition to switch is if encounters involve characters on foot. Presumably pilots and passengers don't count normally, just when they start doing combat type things you track.

This probably doesn't result in a situation where Chewbacca punches Han Solo and this results in Luke's accompanying X-Wing smashing into the Millennium Falcon killing everyone horribly because they switched to character scale and can no longer share squares, but that is pretty much the first situation that springs to mind reading the clumsy attempt to define the two scales in the intro. And it's not like the game every really gives you a clean way to convert positioning should you need to convert any given situation between scales (which you will need to in far more legitimate circumstances than a needless punch up between Han and Chewbacca).

Bizarre Cross Marketing Shout out devolving into giving up on the idea
“Buy Our Starship Battles Miniatures Products to do your starship battles with”... “because”... “um”... “They don't support heroic characters, or star ship modifications, or these rules at all, come to think of it DON'T use them! No wait, should we be saying, ah fuck it...”

Aaaaaw...
Vehicle classes and sizes and stuff, pretty much what you would think except with a bunch of colossal sub categories instead of sensibly just ditching colossal and going straight to “frigate/Destroy/etc...”.

But gone is the grand fantasy of light saber deflecting a Corvette blaster cannon just because Corvettes are traditionally smaller than Frigates, because they lump them in the one category here. Guess the best thing you can light saber deflect is the main cannons off an AT-AT. Damnit-Damnit.

Things Start To Get A Little Weird Beginning With Attacks
Vehicle weapon attacks, clearly gunner/pilot BAB + Dex +range and... nope! It's Gunner/Pilot BAB+ range modifiers +.... Vehicle Intelligence.

Yep. I suppose it gives you some un-asked for gap to ram in targeting computer bonuses. But then it does weird ass things to character vs equipment advancement and rather strange things should you actually laughably decide to try a Pilot character build, (one centred, might I note around the Pilot skill which IS Dexterity based god damnit).

Vehicle Defense is pretty similar using armour or pilots heroic level bonus, (you don't even need a shit Talent to keep wearing the armour but use a better level bonus!) plus size modifiers (they will also fuck over your pilot checks on anything remotely big), plus VEHICLES Dex modfier. Great now vehicles get Dex too. Which they DON'T apply to ranged attacks because they refuse to let the same named vehicle attributes do the same things as character attributes FOR NO FUCKING REASON, so yeah vehicle rules starting with multiple meanings for the same term "Squares" and moving on to multiple meanings for the same terms "Dexterity, Intelligence, Strength, etc...".

Then its Fort defense which is 10 + Vehicles Strength Modifier... wait what the hell STRENGTH modifier? Oh for fucks sake, they broke with other d20s and gave inanimate vehicles Intelligence and Strength scores but they can't fucking bring themselves to break with the null constitution bullshit to give the fucking things a Constitution score like a sensible person? So they use fucking strength? God damnit Jim.

Characters In Vehicles
Hey look character roles in vehicles, the bit where they try and pretend it's a mini game everyone can/should contribute to!

There is some formal bullshit about filling roles and the timing involved so presumably these all end up actually doing something shortly instead of just standing around assessing and twiddling fluffy knobs.

Hilariously though while one character can fill multiple roles, and anyone (often anywhere) on a ship can fill a role, there IS an exception that many roles can only be filled by one character.

... and there ISN'T an exception limiting boarders or other enemies from taking roles in any way. Or even any way of finding out who is filling a role, so technically you can get on the damned death star as a secret enemy, then during a shift change just declare (to no one in particular) that YOU are filling any and all available roles that don't require a specific position on the ship and then fuck over the entire vessel by being a non-productive engineer hiding in a waste bin on the bottom of disused floor 47 or something stupid. The rebels should send all their Bothan's on this mission vs all major empire ships quick smart.

Pilots – Pilot things, they don't mention in the pilot bit that pilots also control weapons much of the time too. You don't need to know that here. Only one allowed.
Copilots – sit around and aid another the pilot. Gee great. Only one allowed, which is sort of odd. More alarmingly no mentions of co-pilots or co-pilot control stations being able to take over from incapacitated or busy pilots or anything like that, probably won't be important or come up in game, I mean what's the chances? In a violent adventure game?
Gunners – Control the guns the pilots don't. Oh great tell us NOW that the pilot controls guns why don't you.
Commander – You only get to have one, because it's important, because he stands around assessing things!
System Operator – Also one per vehicle. Which seems odd. This guy gets to play with knobs on the shield, sensors and communications systems, because why not.
Engineer – Something something damaged system mitigation something something has repair chores to do after battle. Hm, sounds like a way of not doing interesting things in starship combat in return for missing out on the adventure on the planet surface because you have to repair the ship because you got landed in the Engineer musical chair. Only one person fills this work, so fucking get to work scotty, vader and the other 12000 guys are off on holidays after the battle and repairing this death star is YOUR responsibility ALONE.
Other Crew – Oh thank god the lone engineer can have repair guys, and people can just do... stuff... really... stuff... were these supposed to be formal roles we care about or not?
Passenger – Your role is to set your seats to recline! And nothing else. Except also to replace crew members as needed, because YOU the passenger get that role, because fuck it the pilots dead and the co-pilot isn't likely to fill in according to his role description, and you are the only role on the list with “replace crew members as needed” so I guess the go to guy for pilot replacement is the fucking passenger.

The Insanity Truly Begins
Well, weapon batteries get scaling damage by margin of success on attacks and push aid another as part of some sort of simplification scheme. Seems dodgey, nah I'm sure that won't come back and bite us on the ass with more information later in the chapter, oh look initiative....

AAAAH INITIATIVE WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!

Well at least it gives you an option.

Option one is every character rolls initiative.

We ARE talking all death star occupants level individual character initiative here.

The game acknowledges that even the scale of a Millennium falcon might be a readied action cluster fuck right there and moves on to letting you have everyone just share the pilots initiative.

But that is just an OPTION you supposedly CAN opt to just start rolling initiative for every fucking occupant of the rebel fleet or even just the nearly 50,000 listed occupants of a single Star Destroyer (or even just the 200 or so of them who man actual formal gunner and other roles that will actually do things in combat).

Oh and pilots can use Pilot skill in place of Initiative skill. Because why not just fuck some more with initiative and make pilots somewhat more of nothing but a hollow shell for delivering the pilot skill?

Vehicle Combat Actions
Well. Action god damn one “aid another”. Anyone can aid anyone at anything and screw the roles! No wait, we had roles, oh crap, um only co-pilots can aid pilots, and um... only the commander can provide FUCKING I.T. SUPPORT. Wait what? ONLY the commander can aid another other characters on his ship with computer use. THAT IS BAT SHIT. I mean even aside from making the entire death star's IT department redundant, I mean what the hell, Chewie can't help R2D2 hack the ship they sneak onto because... he isn't the fucking commander, hell, Storm Trooper 712 can't help Storm Trooper 713 pull up files on the prisoners because HE ISN'T THE FUCKING COMMANDER? Really? This ability isn't even combat specific, so it doesn't even require the ship to be in combat or anyone to be punching anyone, you are on a ship? You want to provide IT support ARE YOU THE COMANDER? No? GTFO!

Aiding on attack however is combat specific (gasp!). The weapon battery stuff is off in a side bar BEFORE this just to fuck you over on the order the rules being presented in being arse to front, but here we get roles remotely right, almost. Gunners can help gunners with aide another by pretending to shoot things, sensor guys can help gunners by pretending to computer use their scanners (with the help of the commander OR NO ONE!), and the commander, if he can find time between helping the guys in marketing sort out their wifi networking problems, can make a Knowledge(go on waste a trained skill on tactics I dare you) check to help gunners too. Which is marginally sane until you remmember the game limited commanders and even sensor guys to ONE per ship no matter how big... but then frittered that away with no limit on gunners other than the numbers of guns that need gunners.

Vehicle Combat Actions Like Melee Attacks
With weapons, by characters against things, mostly other characters, really not a vehicle thing actually, no it doesn't have anything special here other than helpfully telling you that you cannot attack through AT AT walls. And then dropping into needless psychedelic scale warping territory by take time out of the day just telling you that you cannot make melee attacks at star ship scale except inside star ships you occupy, wait can you make melee attacks on ANYONE inside a starship you occupy if in starship scale... but wait... doesn't that change it to character scale... AAAAAGH WHAT HAVE YOU WRITTEN??

Ah fuck it you don't know or care do you game? You MEAN the game switches to character scale for the resolution of that attack. You don't say that but seem to understand you need to say something because you used squares as a formal term in both your scales. If you could just have got it a bit more right and a bit less... fumbled...

Then the same with ranged attacks
At Least Capital Ships take a -20 to hit to vaporise you from orbit
So when a frigate starts shooting turbo lasers at you from up to 6000 squares away it gets an extra -20 if you aren't Capital enough. Entirely sensible, but fuck it you can still just keep shooting until you get a natural 20.

And a Star Destroyer has no less than 30 Turbo Lasers that CAN fire independently on you from 6000 squares and just not care about the long range and non-capital penalty because they are going for critical auto hits for double damage and they get 1.5 of them a turn. So basically whenever the empire hates you they radio in an orbital death laser and you take approximately one and a half auto hits a turn of 10x5d10 critical damage.

I mean there are sight issues because d20 doesn't really do that right. But basically that's how capital ships vs people work. A giant penalty that does nothing because they included auto-hit criticals and large amounts of cannons. They started writing up co-operative battery fire rules which carry over to assumptions in the ship entries that the star destroy always fires that way, but they copped out and let them attack individually in the battery fire rules and fuck it, nat 20s, so long range or bad odds on almost anything (but especially that sucker on foot 6000 squares away) means a long resolution of 30 d20 rolls in order to deliver fairly reliable guaranteed damage.

And that's before they also point their 60 separate Point Defense Laser turrets at you...

Trained Pilots Get Stuff
Like +2 to attack with guns manned by the pilot! And any pilot (trained or not) can do attack runs (flying charges with ranged attacks, yeah don't need training for that).

Dog Fights
Are a way to engage and lock down enemy fighters. They only work at star ship scale. So if your buddies are shooting other people on the ground you cannot engage the tie bombers sent to kill them all unless everyone on the ground agrees to stop fighting first. When dog fights break out in space battles the Commander and the Co-pilot engage in unarmed ceremonial gladiatorial combat with each other on the bridge so no one has to learn or resolve the dog fight rules ever.

Fight Defensively Using a Ship
Due to a minor slip up by the writers when trying not to copy pasta the original wording you can cop various penalties on all gunner attacks for various defense bonuses OR if you are a trained pilot you can give your ship a +10 dodge bonus if you personally don't attack that turn and your gunners can do as they please no penalty. They didn't MEAN that, but it's what they said.

Pilots, get this, can move ships
No particular restrictions other than you cannot enter a square you JUST left, so incredibly tight circles, whatever. Just not the square (or square) you were in before this one!

Pilots Can Stop Ships, but don't need to, and All-Out Movement is stupid.
Pilots can stop their ship if they haven't moved this turn. As a swift action. You can't use this action after all out movement. At a star ship scale this doesn't matter. Because your ship doesn't really have momentum unless the pilot leaves or is incapacitated, so if the pilot just does nothing the ship stops, but in character scale...

I'm not even entirely sure actually. So vehicle movement in character scale is capped for some reason, but capped at levels it describes as “more than the entire battle map, LOL!!”, so not capped for the obvious reason. All Out Movement moves you 4x your speed but is PRESUMABLY capped in character scale, BUT the character scale note instead of telling you how the fuck it works at that scale talks about how all out movement lets you move at your maximum velocity in your NEXT turn with no explanation of what it does on the turn you use it, and then notes if you move at maximum velocity you MUST use all out movement OR move at maxium velocity next turn. Which is sort of momentum there, BUT you can just spin in a tiny circle if you like.

BUT THE TINY CIRCLE NEVER FUCKING ENDS. They wrote that as a straight up infinite loop. If you move at maximum speed last turn you must move at maximum next turn and gee, that means you moved at maximum speed that turn so the turn after you have to move at maximum speed and so on. The infinite loop MIGHT be broken by Full Stop. BUT there is a conflict between “you must not move this turn” if you want to use full stop, and the “you MUST move at maximum velocity next turn if you move at maximum velocity”.

Worse ONE of those two rules is rendered absolutely redundant, because the ONLY circumstance in the game under which full stop actually ends any movement is if it can break the involuntary movement of the Maximum Velocity rule, and the must move text of maximum velocity would be rendered utterly worthless by the ability to just ignore it and fucking stop as a swift action anyway. There is NO interpretation of this conflict that doesn't result in a completely redundant rule that doesn't actually function, and one of them ALSO results in being trapped at Max Velocity FOREVER! Well... you could crash into something I suppose.

Oh and max velocity is measured in fucking km per hour and everything else in the game is in squares per move action, because fuck you that's why. So every time someone moves max velocity, or even the 4xAll Out Movement first (which you may or may not even be able to DO in character scale) you need to check the cap, and convert from km/h to squares per round. The game replies “you are welcome”.

Mind you if you DO perform the conversion it will move you so many "little" squares that you are off the smaller scale map and, (presumably) on a startship scale map. WHERE you are on the starship scale map? ENTIRELY UP TO YOU, the rules have no comment to make on this trivial matter.

Pilots Can Increase Their Speed Marginally
You can risk damaging your ship to increase it's speed by a few squares for one turn. This makes no fucking mention of the two scales, ships have different speeds for different scales, like say, 12 for character scale and 4 for starship. Even without that difference the scales are SIGNIFICANTLY different, so you can risk damaging your ship for like, a Han Solo 12 Parsec Kessel Run or something, OR you can do the SAME ACTION with the same roll in the SAME vehicle and gain a few meters in a foot race with an elderly Jawa.

Raise Or Lower Shields
So when the ONE sensor guy isn't performing his role as a +2 bonus to someone else's attack, his main job is to turn the shields on before combat and turn them off at the end of combat. Whoop de doo.

Recharge Shields
So the other other main role of sensor guy is to spend all his actions forever trying to recharge the shield rating by 5 every turn with DC 20 "fuck you it's Mechanics" skill checks. Since only Pilot's, Gunners and Co-Pilots need to be anywhere specific to function my favored System Operator is a Jawa tied to the rear vision mirror like a fuzzy dice where I can keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn't troll us by turning the shields off for no reason, it's not like he needs to be anywhere special to raise recharge the shields.

The other fuzzy dice will be an Ewok we will call "Commander" so we can get some fucking IT support on this bird.

Reroute Power
The engineer, a small blonde slave boy packed with midi-chlorians stored in the glove compartment, can waste all his actions forever trying to make a god damned mechanics check to make the ship feel better on the condition track. Which is nice because it makes the condition track not matter all that much and everyone by now should fucking hate the fucking condition track and having to (pretend to) track it's cycles of endless self redundancy for every character AND every vehicle.

Full Attack
OK so those gunners on that star destroying making 30 attacks hunting for auto crits... those guys can use double or triple attack. So they can make like... 90 attacks a round...

It's An Ewok! Ramming Speed!
Ramming isn't all that exciting on a star ship scale, ramming a failing fighter into a star destroyer won't do much of anything, damage is relatively low. Which is bad news for that one time in the movies where the Executor super star destroyer was taken out by a single ramming a-wing. Even when doubled in return for risking dooming your vehicle into a potential max speed infinity loop if someone punches someone and (somehow?) initiates characters scale on your ass even the turn after you all out move.

Even ramming a an Star Destroyer into something at high speed is pretty much just a fender bender, for the star destroyer, its pretty bad news for the Ewok that just copped 207 damage to his face.

Kind of odd that ramming your star destroyer into an ewok is fairly hard to aim. Even more strangely with anything short of a highly skilled pilot it's easier to hit the ewok if you get your pilot to point at it then shoot him dead or hold him down or eject him into space (as thats the only way to create an unguided vehicle) and then you get a big unguided object size bonus instead of a pilot check penalty. Also kinda odd that ramming your star destroyer into an ewok also causes your star destroyer to take 207 points of damage. Marginally tragic that it also causes all occupants of the star destroyer, including yourself as the (presumably highly skilled if they didn't just eject you into space) pilot ALSO take 207 points of damage because you rammed an ewok with your wind screen.

Why does it work like that? Really bad wording and a failure to consider the relative outcomes by determining damage in a collision event from a single participant.

Missiles And Torpedoes
Get a second chance to hit if you aim with that horrible aim option that shouldn't be in the game. So you do that. They can be shot down during that and with readied actions, but it's a sorta stupid idea, well, unless you have 90 gunner attacks a round (and an additional 180 Point Defense gunner attacks) to burn through anyway.

Tractor Beams are sorta batshit
So you don't get as many tractor beams on a big ship as you get turbo lasers. You fire them, you get the “not shooting a capital ship” penalty, so presumably shouldn't be trying to grapple smaller ships? What?

Anyway. You hit eventually then if there is any significant size difference massively auto win the grapple check because even the difference between the Strength of a corellian corvette and a star destroyer is well off the RNG.

And if you win it's pretty much stationary and you do what you like.

Now there are rules for smaller ships grappling larger ships that are all about dragging yourself in, clamping on and boarding the bigger ship. Which MIGHT work in a star fighter vs a millennium falcon (that guy has the WORST stats) thanks to strength being similar. But WON'T work with a boarding pod of any kind vs a star destroyer because while you'll be allowed to hit with the attack without suffering a non-capital target penalty you will always auto-lose the god damn grapple contest by about one million points. So it's like they wrote in the option without checking if it's intended concept was even possible with the numbers they pulled out of their asses for ship profiles.

THIS is what happens if you try and just take your broken re imagining of shitty d20 grappling and tack it onto tractor beams people. THIS.

Vehicle Description Highlights
The AT AT may be a lot larger than an ewok, but it moves at the same speed. Or you can put it in max speed and get 60 km per hour and not break the speed limit anywhere in Australia other than build up suburban back streets and school zones. (But then you might be stuck in an infinite speed loop!)

The smaller AT ST gets to more at human walking speed. Or 90 km/h or 10 km/h slower than a Provisional Drivers License holder is permitted to drive in Australia.

Vehicles have Skills. The skills presumably belong to the crews. The crews are supposed to be generic crews with generic flat “all skill checks at +5” type profiles. But the skills have wildly varying modifiers. There is no explanation.

Costs for vehicles may get totally bat shit, like the minimum 1.5 million credits for a (used) Corellian Corvette. But out of a list including huge military veihcles and capital space ships that are priced there seem to be only a few things you cannot buy. You cannot buy the star destroyer 1, you cannot buy the assault tank, and you cannot buy the AT AT or the AT ST. Look guys you put a price on the corvette, you could have put a stupid price on the star destroyer, but whatever, OK, its a star destroyer, but I can buy a Corellian corvette but I can't even get a price on an AT ST? Fuck you too you walker hoarding assholes!

And you know, even star fighters are kinda expensive. You won't be getting them with anything short of theft or vast GM charity any time soon. So you can technically maybe BE a pilot, and there are things to pilot (sort of), but you are probably going to have to steal them and dump and burn them out in the wilderness to cover your tracks after each encounter. And you sure as hell won't (normally) afford to be an actual star fighter pilot from level 1 (or before level rather a lot) and SOMEONE should tell the fucking base classes because they don't seem to fucking know that.

There are a bunch of relatively small ships pilots could probably fly (assuming something is done about the whole credit cost debacle) to abuse the utterly stupid vehicle rules all the way into regular combat pretty much any time anything happens outside. While pilots should be able to do this to some degree I'm not sure the generous damage, movement and HP profiles are accounted for. No scratch that, I went and checked they are in fact totally unaccounted for in any way.

But hey the CL on these things is pretty huge, it includes crew, but a “skilled” crew is so low level as to have a +2 attack modifier and a CL of +1, and a mere X-Wing with a skilled pilot is CL 10, it's probably appropriate, possibly a touch low. But that star fighter is about +9 CL there, so if your GM DOES let your character, who is a dedicated god damn star fighter pilot because you are encouraged to just do that from level 1, get into a god damn +9 CL fighter, you are instantly bumped right off the top of the CL scale the rest of the party is on combined. And CL Guidelines are going to prevent a single tie fighter showing up to support most character scale combats for pretty much the entire level range anyone would even think to play at.

Not that it ever actually tells you to account for CL like that in any way on player characters, in fact, spoiler here, when you pop ahead and they make some attempt for accounting for CL of the vehicles you put star pilots into in the starships of the galaxy it is incomplete, not like that, not like anything sane you might expect and just plain crazy.

Talking about CL it was quiet unfair to put the star destroyer in as the vaporize from orbit with 90 attacks example, though it certainly demonstrated some issues, because it is CL 20. OR IS WAS IT? As it is worth noting that a party of four 20th level characters on foot are supposed to face off in hand to hand combat with FOUR Star Destroyers and that is a ROUTINE standard challenge for them (and 4 guys on foot are supposed to take on one star destroyer at average party level 7ish, as another standard encounter). Which is both stupid and not likely to be balanced the way it pretends. But hey maybe you are meant to drop your four level 11 party members in an X-Wing each and have the 4 star destroyers vaporise THOSE.... but there isn't any mention of that and also still utterly unballanced.

Vehicles Chapter is so bad it gets it's own mini-conclusion
The Fail Of The Scale
It's worth noting at the end of the chapter how totally failed the whole 2 scales thing is. It was cluster fucked in various ways as they tried to apply "fits both sizes without change" actions, actions with varying specific effects by scale and so on and just totally screwed the pooch while trying that. But actually by the end of the chapter there isn't actually ANY good clear section discussing how to actually deal with the complex multi-scale issues and transitions between them that are going to arise frequently.

The clear answer is “separate possibly overlapping fucking maps and SOME explanation how to transition or overlap between them” but the game basically pretends scale is a binary choice per encounter. And in doing so and ignoring the rather direct implications of a two scale system that it should have addressed only leaves the whole mess open for it's flawed 2 scale write ups of various abilities to be interpreted as even worse than the infinite movement loops they are.

How the fuck do you even fit vehicles into the CL System?
The game doesn't even tell you how to deal with the CL value of a vehicle (never given without the included crew but you can back engineer it for that at least) on a PC. Is the party Pilot guy supposed to bring his Tie Fighter everywhere? Is it “2 jedi a soldier and a Tie Fighter walk into a canteena”? If so how do you justify/handle his CL boost?

The implication is that mixed encounters of character and vehicle scale just don't happen, or if they do they happen at high level, very high level, with only low level NPCs piloting the vehicles. But A) No mixed encounters is shit, B) It has other (limited) but explicit rules encouraging mixed encounters, B) PCs are encouraged to take piloting skills, C) Piloting is available as a thing you can dedicate your character to from level 1. The idea that EVERYONE gets into an equal CL fighter for some encounters then EVERYONE gets out of the equal CL fighters for the next is fucking retarded and not even what they push (but the only way to even come close to making these rules as given begin to work on even a vague conceptual level).

The game just doesn't even bother to present an answer to this, it doesn't even acknowledge the giant fucking tie fighter piloting elephant in the room.

But saying the Miniatures Rules Didn't Support Heroes and Stuff Was Premature
They probably shouldn't have surrendered on that one on the basis that these rules made the miniatures rules inadequate because these rules accounted for heroic character contributions and mixed encounters.

Because the stuff involving characters is stupid and crappy, and the bit where the mini game doesn't support mixed character/ship encounters isn't really a disqualification either since THESE rules don't do that either.

Pilots get to move and do various things, gunners get to at least make attacks the other "roles" are hideously shallow "filler", the sensors guy and the engineer are basically making the same identical choice free action every turn of every battle forever, or close enough to it, some of the other roles are even worse off than that. If that weren't bad enough they have skill taxes (with shit skill choices) attached to them in a system where skills are REALLY costly, and you can just BUY GOD DAMN ASTROMECH DROIDS to fill those roles better than PCs so... the actual optimal thing much of the time is just to buy astromechs to fill all the filler roles and have the excess PCs sit on their asses and twiddle their thumbs during the insane scale warping stupidity of starship combat mini-games anyway.

Not to mention that the pilot and gunner mechanics pretty much reduce pilot abilities to nothing more than a BAB score, a Pilot skill and maybe some shooty feats (or some pilot specific feats IF YOU ARE A CHUMP). Classes with piloting talents? They get BAB penalties. Jedi and Soldiers can just take Pilot if you want, Jedi can also get a Use Force subsitution/reroll on that, and shooty soldiers will probably have all the shooty feats that are relevant by accident. So a team of dedicated characters (with shit classes as a cost for that) who are fighter pilots and gunners by profession may in fact be worse at their job especially in some of the most basic key bonuses, than just some almost random selection of the only two good base classes anyway.

Still the shitty tacked on filler roles DID bring us "Star Destroyer Commander, the IT Crowd" so at least it brightened up this review chapter with that.
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Post by Korwin »

PhoneLobster wrote:Multi-Classing
So there is this insane claim floating around that this system “encourages Multi-classing”.

Now I wish it did. I mean as much as the Scoundrel, Noble, and Scout are incredibly shit, if you just sort of had a thing where people were bumbling incompetents like that but then discovered Jedi powers and stopped sucking or something that might be nice. 1 Noble/6 Jedi/some nice Jedi Advanced Class is a career that isn't a good idea in this system but certainly SHOULD be if at all possible in some way.
Noble 1 and Jedi 6 is an viable choice...
But the game is rife with the traditional d20 multiclassing flaws, like various bad break points for weak BAB progression. Scoundrel 1/Scout 1/Noble 1 is conceivably a thing and possibly should be a desirable thing but leaves you with NO attack bonus for three levels,
This is true and Needs an House Rule. It's called fractional BAB
Then it has some of it's own minor fuck yous to multiclassing your base classes. “Starting Defenses” don't stack, so you don't get that benefit, but you DO get the “best of” starting defense bonuses, but again there is really only a net +1 to a random defense type in that when you multiclass. So it's kinda incremental and unremarkable compared to just levelling up.
You don’t lose the leveling up bonus? So short term it’s an boost, long therm not hurting you?
And generally whatever base class multiclassing you do is rendered pretty much redundant if you ever take a prestige class because they get larger class bonuses to defence... that overide but do not stack with your smaller bonuses from your base class multi-classing.
Except you also get one of the starting feats. (Like Force Sensitive)
The Big Fuck You to Multi-classers
The biggest fuck you to multiclassers comes in the form of "level 1 bonuses" or whatever you want to call them. Because there are some things you just get at level 1 only, and if you DON'T take the RIGHT class at level 1 then you are totally screwed.

Multiclassing skills is fucking bullshit you get your trained skills at level 1 and THAT IS IT. Multiclassing increases your class skill list but NEVER gives you more trained skills EVER. You can ONLY get new trained skills at the cost of feats or by permanently increasing your Intelligence bonus.
Yes its important to know which class to take first, how is that’s an argument against multiclassing?
You also don't get all your starting feats when you multi-class, so no thinking you can “Just” start your sucky Ewok/Gamorean out as something else then take one level of Soldier to “fix” their crippling weapon proficiency deficits in a way that totally matches the fluff of the whole mess. You just get ONE of the new class starting feats. And so if you want lots of weapon/armour proficiencies without huge feat taxes it's level 1 soldier or GTFO. And Ewoks/Gamoreans can just go cry in a corner or opt to be Jedi.
Yes, system mastery is an huge bonus when creating an character, whats different to any d20 game?
I mean this one is an valid critic (requiring system mastery), but not surprising or new…
Meanwhile if you want to be a Jedi or any form of force user ever (you do) then you are a complete fool not to take Jedi at level 1 for ITS starting feats and skills (and the free lightsaber, it's a very big deal for a very short while). Not to mention if you DON'T get your Jedi class features cheap at level 1 you will be paying through the nose to qualify for any of the force using prestige classes (and you will want to do that eventually).
That’s funny, most of my force user build’s don’t start with jedi.
This basically just leaves very little point to multi-classing. Talents generally suck, the best talents are on the best classes you should already be in since level 1 for the starting feats, and dipping out of those classes to the shit classes will ALWAYS slam you with BAB penalties, lower hit points, no new skills only 1 new feat and generally inferior talents.
The point of multiclassing in SWSE is the same as in D&D 3.X.
You do it if you want the things the other class gets. If the other class only has (in your opinion) shitty talents and you don’t need one of their starting feets, then yes, you don’t multiclass.
Is’nt this a little obvious?
The book repeats the multi-class fuckery several times in several ways, in case you didn't get that as it went over the effects of multi-classing point by point with a solid paragraph or two each covering all the details it then mentions it more vaguely at least two times over for another page. Because this tiny book totally has space for that.

And BTW Fuck You Arbitrary Class Availability and Training Limits Requiring you to suck the GM's cock
Because they cared enough to drop a line to suggest GMs can totally do that while they were there.
I’ll have to take your word on that, it’s a little time since I red the book *sarcasm*

Did'nt read you whole 'review' only the multi class part, but I'm not impressed with your effort ...
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Post by Koumei »

So is the "Fixed HP at level 1 then rolled" simply "What 3E does"? You make it sound like a big deal, but from your description, as far as I can tell it's exactly the same as d20 always did, except possibly with a bigger chunk of extra HP at first level.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Koumei wrote:So is the "Fixed HP at level 1 then rolled" simply "What 3E does"? You make it sound like a big deal, but from your description, as far as I can tell it's exactly the same as d20 always did, except possibly with a bigger chunk of extra HP at first level.
It's triple HD maxed out at first level. The triple is a big deal. Certainly the saga edition designers and fans thought it was, I remember them going on about how fucking game changing they thought it was in articles and forums and stuff back at release.

After going through the whole system, I think only combined with the second wind mechanic (1 swift action once a day at half hp or less regain 25% HP or your raw con, whichever is greater) and players who realise the value and invest in Con and bonus second winds is it really significantly more bullet spongey in the long term. But then the game is laced with some other stupid fuckery like where if you DO get to 0 HP you are highly likely to perma-die from it if you aren't hoarding d20modern action saga edition force points. So it gets to fail in two seemingly contradictory directions simultaneously.

Which is an achievement.
Kowin wrote:Noble 1 and Jedi 6 is an viable choice...
Because you say so hey? I think not. Now if you wanted to argue Jedi 6/Noble 1, maybe, that only loses out on a few HP and one BAB and at levels where it's not as big a deal. But Noble 1/Jedi 6?

Your first level lost you at least 2 feats worth of character value. You lost your 1 BAB at a level where it is most noticable. You lost out on more than a third of your starting HP another three hp and it would have been half. And you will be 12 HP behind a character that started as jedi for the rest of your career (instead of the mere 2 HP behind that a Jedi6/Noble 1 would be).
...House Rule...
Do tell us more about the game we aren't talking about...
Except you also get one of the starting feats. (Like Force Sensitive)
Do your accounting for the feat hole honestly.

If I wanted to combine noble with jedi (for some inexplicable reason) and I take noble second there is ONE starting feat on noble that the jedi MAYBE gives a shit about (weapon proficiency pistols). So they get that with the one single starting feat for multiclassing into a new class.

Now the Jedi also falls behind on trained skills, the noble gets no less than 4 more... off a kinda shitty list. And THOSE are all potentially feat costs... only you just don't get them because fuck it even if you wanted more skills odds are good you want them off Jedi skill lists and 1st level of noble can't give you them.

But if you take Noble first there are 2 starting feats you almost certainly want off jedi (force sensitive and weapon proficiency light sabers) AND you really really want skill training in Use The Force that you can't get from Noble and will cost you another feat.

All in all if your were combining noble and jedi together picking Jedi first puts you zero feats in a hole while picking noble first puts you Two feats in a hole. Two feats is a lot. Especially when we throw in the HP and everything else. (including a free bonus light saber at level 1, don't forget that, it's a huge big deal for at least a level or two).

All that just so you can start the game lording over the jedi with training in stuff like Ride, Knowledge(Bureaucracy, no really, Bureaucracy), Gather Information and Treat Injury? Really? That sort of shit is not what a "viable character" is made of.

edit: talking about the feat hole in slightly more detail. I think that unless you care about shit skill lists (you don't) your first level is Jedi or Soldier based on the feat hole alone. Of course your first level is Jedi or Soldier based on it being the best first level for everything else bar shit skill lists as well so...

And the stupid thing is really fuck it was it really so bad they couldn't have just let players have nice things?
That’s funny, most of my force user build’s don’t start with jedi.
Really? Funny because then you MAKE SHIT BUILDS.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:25 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Dean »

Phonelobster's review is intended to be over 30,000 words long, the length of a long Novella. We Denners love reviews, so since PL is writing something longer than The Old Man and The Sea I think it's only fitting that we get a review of it. So without further ado

Deans Review of Phonelobster's Saga Review


There are three major problems with this travesty which each need to be tackled separately. They are, in order:
1: This isn't a review
2: PL's system mastery is incredibly low
3: PL is astonishingly dishonest
Lets get to it!

Point #1: This isn't a review

The first problem is that this isn't really a review. It's Phonelobster's 3rd thread of the same repeated statements in a month. In the first thread he jumped into an argument about Saga sourcebooks he had never read, didn't read the posts he war arguing against, and was called a shithead or a liar by literally every single poster. He then made a second thread where he declared victory in the first thread and was called a shithead and an idiot. Now he has mobilized to a third thread that will contain a 30,000 word rant on an argument he has already lost several times with the intention of writing so much he cannot be sufficiently corrected. This thread is not a review, it is a 30,000 word gish gallop. I would be long dead before I could correct everything he says here that is pants-on-head retarded and that is exactly the point. Phonelobster is famous for lengthy dishonest posts and this is likely his crowning achievement; still, it would be poor form for me to just say these things without proof so lets demonstrate some things he is provably wrong about in point 2.

Point #2: PL's system mastery is low

Core Saga is honestly a pretty shitty game. It would not be hard for someone who knew it to talk at length about it's many failings, unfortunately PL can't even do that because his system mastery of it is so low that he's wrong about things constantly. His suggestions about what's powerful and what's weak in this system are consistently incorrect. There are clear winner and loser choices in Saga but Phonelobster is wrong about them all the time meaning that what he's offering is the ability for you to read 30,000 words to know less about the game than someone who opened it for the first time. This is especially bad because for the less wordcount as PL's travesty you could actually read every single class, talent, and feat in the game! For less reading than PL's review you could know the game and have a higher system mastery of it than he does.

There's more wrong things in this review than I could possibly cover so let's pick one and use it as an example. Now, given the size of this abortion, picking any random mistake he made would be dishonest so lets not make it random. In the second thread Phonelobster claimed he had "won" the first thread with his argument about how Evasion was useless, a sentiment he now lengthily repeats in his review of the Scout. Since PL is particularly proud of this argument we'll use this claim as our example to see how useless PL's system analysis consistently is.

In Saga even a basic blaster rifle has an AOE mode. In this mode anyone firing at you can miss and still deal half damage. So while it is trivially easy to get your AC off the RNG of where troops can hit you it doesn't really matter because even if they miss they still hit you. A basic stormtrooper will deal you 3d8/2 or 4d6/2 damage on a miss, both averaging out to about 7. This means no matter how high level or badass you are you can generally divide your hp by 7 to learn how many Stormtroopers can 1 round you. For instance Darth Vader is 19th level, has a 39 AC and 181 hp and 26 basic Stormtroopers will blow him to smithereens in one round. In a system where everyone always has AOE weaponry which upgrade from grenades to missile launchers to vehicle weapons by just the mid levels Evasion is the single most mandatory pick in the game by mid levels. In both of my high-op Saga campaigns every single character had either dipped Scout for Evasion or was using a Force talent that replicates Evasions effects. Evasion is unquestionably the most valuable talent possible to take as your character reaches mid to high levels and gets a strong AC. This would be clear to anyone reading this system. What's interesting about this is that this is an example of bad design in Saga that also demonstrates that Phonelobster has no idea what he's talking about. A mandatory talent to survive high level is shitty design but Phonelobster knows so little about Saga that he declared it was shitty in exactly the opposite direction.

This moves us cleanly to point #3

Point #3: Phonelobster is shockingly dishonest


When Phonelobster was confronted about being wrong about Evasion, when he was told that it was not only not useless but mandatory for mid level characters who will be off the RNG for regular shots but can never ignore AOE shots Phonelobster defended his position with a 4000 word post demonstrating that against a LEVEL 2 PARTY stormtroopers didn't perform better with AOE's than with direct attacks. In an argument explicitly about high level problems he spent 4000 words using a level 2 party as his counterpoint. That is some grade A dishonesty there. It is also worth mentioning that his "actual math" itself is wrong, like in his very first line where he tells us that the average of 3d8 is 12.5. Remember that this is the argument he declared victory on. This is the argument he is the most proud of. The strongest case he's made is one that even casual observation proves is retarded and every page he's written here features dozens or hundreds of these.

The problem, in summary, is that Phonelobster doesn't care that he's wrong. A person who cared whether they were saying things that were right or wrong could have conceded an obviously incorrect point and moved on but that is not what PL did. He got into an argument about the content of rulebooks he had never read, didn't read the posts he was arguing against, wrote factually incorrect things about the areas of the rules he even knew about, strawmanned on command, wrote out a proof with incorrect math under a dishonest framework and then literally declared himself victorious.
Last edited by Dean on Thu Nov 06, 2014 6:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Before I get too side tracked...
Now Off To Chapter XII : Prestige Classes
I've been calling them Advanced Classes, largely because they follow the model of the d20Modern “Advanced not Prestige!” classes thing a bit, but they choose to call them Prestige Classes because on some level they realise they need to pretend this game is a successor to d20s other than d20 modern.

We need to go look at these because they matter rather a lot. They have a big influence on how shitty multi-classing is, they are the “cool place” you are meant to go when you grow out of shitty starting base classes. And we should probably cover them with a marginally higher priority than things like Skill and Feat rules.

Escape From New York Base Class Town
There are some clear inducements (shitty incremental Saga edition sized ones, but still clear inducements) to get the hell out of base classes and stay out starting around your 8th character level.

The first is the one whole extra Force Point per level you get for leveling up in prestige classes. The second is all your hit die are one step bigger. The third is that you get +4's and +2s instead of +2s and +1s on your class bonus to defenses compared to base classes. It doesn't explicitly take the time out to make sure you know, but those won't be stacking with your class bonuses from base classes, it's still going to be best bonus not all bonuses. But it's still basically a net +3 profit on average spread over your defence scores and a whole 1 or so HP per level. Shitty and incremental yes, but it's as close as Saga gets to a neon sign saying “take the fucking prestige class already”.

Fuck you no new class skills anymore
To continue the thing where they fuck you over for multi-classing into a class with more trained skills by not training any of your skills, you now ALSO no longer get an enlarged class skill list from prestige classes, because they don't even bother giving prestige classes class skill lists at all. Gee fucking thanks game, thanks a lot. Edition that got skills right MY ASS.

Ace Pilot
Should we immediately dismiss this as a viable class based on it being about driving a vehicle around and sacrificing your ability to adventure in other ways in order to do so? Yes. Will that stop us from examining it? No.

Requirements aren't too bad other than an inexplicable “fuck you 7th level minimum”. Vehicular combat and the Pilot skill aren't all that hard to pick up if you really wanted in on throwing the rest of your career away driving the bus in between adventures for the guys with light sabers and blasters.

Hit points are "low for prestige classes" bad d8s and base attack bonus is shitty.

In what will be a common theme, but not a uniform standard, for prestige classes you lose your bonus feats in return for a shitty incremental class feature, but still get talents every second level.

Your Shitty Incremental Talent You Lose Five Feats Over 10 Levels to gain? “Vehicle Dodge”
+1 to reflex defence of vehicles you pilot. Scaling in incremental, exceremental, plus ones every 2nd level. Yes. Instead of getting a feat. No really. No go check it if you don't fucking believe me some asshole wrote this “ability” as the CORE defining thing this class fucking does. Oh and it's dodge typed to potentially screw you over on stacking and create opportunities for you to lose it.

Expert Pilot Talents
I'll start by noting there are six of these. You get five talents from this class over it's entire 10 level career. Also there are four more talents in another tree. This is going to be common in prestige classes.
Elusive Dogfighter – Enemies you dog fight get -10 attack. Remember dog fighting was that thing you can't even do at character scale and that scale could happen at any moment maybe, no one fucking knows. Friends don't let Friends Dog Fight. Those bastards.
Full Throttle – Take 10 on the roll that risks damaging your ship for a few extra squares of movement. And “run” your ship at 5x instead of 4x with that action that doesn't even know how it works at character scale and might result in an infinite move loop, and you also need to do unit conversion math at the table to convert km/h to squares per round to check if this talent doesn't hit your movement cap in character scale (it probably won't, and it's unclear if you even DO the 4/5x run thing in characters scale AT ALL but the unit converted cap is still an issue).
Juke – Oh look requires Vehicular Evasion we haven't seen printed yet, GET YOUR LISTS IN ORDER. Ahem. Anyway +5 to your defense on fighting defensively even if you attack. So. Even ignoring the vast misunderstanding in the fight defensively with a vehicle text that gave a trained pilot +10 defense and still let his gunners attack as long as the pilot did not, NOW you can just have +15 defense at basically NO cost and the way it's worded actually means you don't even need to have a fucking argument about the misworded text in Fight Defensively you can just have fucking 15. However the way it is worded does suddenly open the door for the question “if it is a standard action to fight defensively... does this ability GIVE the pilot an attack with that?????”. This ability is probably just short of godly as written, but is also basically just a giant misworded hole in the game made out of arguments so IT'S A TRAP, but more of a table flipping one than a sucky character one.
Keep It Together – Since you don't want to over work the tiny Anakin Skywalker you keep in your glove box and assign your Engineer role to so he can let your ship ignore the condition track, this ability lets you ignore your Anakin Skywalker in your glove box once per encounter. Ignoring Anakin Skywalker is valuable, but ignoring the condition track on your vehicle on one attack per encounter is not.
Relentless Pursuit – Roll twice on opposed dogfight checks, so hell, by now you probably always catch people in them and they can't get out. Only you just can't do that at character scale so some fucker initiates the “don't make me pull over to break up your fight on the back seat kids” chaff and just tells you that you aren't allowed to do dog fights in this encounter.
Vehicular Evasion – Is Evasion for vehicles. Also Ramming rules specifically call this ability out as a way to avoid or negate damage for BEING rammed... but sadly not for RAMMING THINGS so you STILL take 207 damage on your star destroyer AND on all 40,000+ of it's occupants if you ram an ewok with it. BUT if an ewok rams your star destroyer you are totally set. Sort of. This is more of an ability for actual explosions, the ramming bit is still crazy crap even by Saga standards.

Gunner Talent Tree
Yeah sure, burn a whole PC on pilot specialisation and then since that isn't enough burn another one on being a specialist vehicle gun operator. Yeah sure. Lets do that.
Dog Fight Gunner – No dog fight attack penalty even if you are a gunner instead of a pilot. Again. Dog fights, very much not a thing on several levels. But nice to know this ability completely fucking negates the penalty applied if your enemy has Elusive Dogfighter, thus rendering THAT ability more useless. Notably though this ability's incredibly stupid wording states that you take NO penalty on your attack rolls WHILE in a dog fight but not specifically FROM being in a dog fight. Which is to say if you somehow can arrange an encounter with dog fights, you can enter dog fights, possibly even with allies, and among other things ignore proficiency and range penalties, and indeed ALL penalties on your attacks with vehicle weapons. Sadly however you cannot target things outside of dogfights while in one so this wording is just hilarious, but not actually effective outside of ignoring condition track and other condition penalties.
Expert Gunner - +1 attack with vehicle weapons. THIS, yes THIS is what you entered this specialist fucking 8th level entry point prestige class for A CONDITIONAL PLUS ONE to attack. YEAH BABY. TOTALLY gonna spend one of your 5 ever talents from this fucking class on this one! Oh and every other talent in this tree has this talent as a requirement so AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
Quick Trigger – An attack of opportunity when a vehicle leaves your square or an adjacent one. Maybe an extra one, maybe the only one, will depend on context. The intent is almost certainly “with a vehicle at Starship Scale only”, but the wording neglects to actually say that, so it does hilarious things in character scale if people try to run you over or drive too close to you. Though you'd also need Combat Reflexes and a melee weapon to actually exploit that fully in some circumstances and say things like “I stab the AT AT twice (or possibly a lot more) as it walks past me/runs me down because fuck, I apparently invested a lot into doing that for some fucking reason”. Other wise you just get to say “As the AT AT runs me down I shoot it with this free AoO”. This ability is stupid and only does the fun (but stupid) stuff it does purely by fucking accident.
System Hit – Move vehicles 1 more along the condition track. Oh wooh, now their Anakin in their glove box has TWO rounds of work to do before they can completely ignore the fucking stupid death spiral rules! Thus causing them a minor administrative headache!! Hold me back!

Your Legacy Options Are...
You can still take Talents from the Spacer Talent tree, you know, just in case your dedicated pilot character hadn't taken them already, which you didn't because you didn't take Scoundrel you took god damned Soldier or Jedi to be a better pilot. But then I suppose if you were doing that you didn't take this class either. Those talents are crap but they do indicate this class wanted you to be a god damned Scoundrel first, but set it up so your extra Talent options were all the ones you would have taken already if you were pursuing the career as intended. Stingy stuff mr game, very stingy stuff.

Bonus Feats...
AHAHAHAHAHA you're an Ace Pilot, you don't even get those any more.

What You Do With Ace Pilots
Having gone over the whole vehicle rules chapter before this just to get a handle on this class, I don't even know what you are supposed to even be doing with vehicles period let alone this guy. Mostly because the game was all coy and refused to tell anyone.

But actually an optimized star fighter dude probably isn't this guy. His abilities are shit and one of the few things pilots contribute to their ships is their BAB and he has bad BAB and you are basically expected to enter this class at least half if not all the time from something else with bad BAB. The optimized pilot has high BAB, high Pilot skill and not much else, well, other than a crew of astromechs with a handful of skills relevant to the bullshit aid another and ship repair actions, and maybe some also high BAB gunners for any available gun slots (maybe with some ranged attack feats which are generally applicable to gunner/pilot weapons).

So yeah. Ace Pilots aren't your go to guy for an effective pilot. Once we find an effective pilot (somewhere else) we don't know what to do with him because of vehicle CL, mixed scale issues, and completely insane vehicle rules. But whoever the optimal pilot is, it's a damned weird world if even a dip in this class is a good idea.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Dean wrote:PL's system mastery is low
And your go to "proof"? The storm troopers and autofire thing you already failed on ages ago, had extensively explained to you with rules and math, and responded to with "nuh uh your wrong for reasons I won't actually say, just trust me!"

Which I note is STILL your go to response to everything.

Now had you actually read my review at all, you might have noted an extensive section on Auto-fire and Burst fire and how they indeed are pretty fucking shitty. But you might have noted that for some reason they don't include a mention of groups of 26 storm troopers.

Had you managed to hold it in and not spurge your sickly little load really quite early in the admittedly massively over-sized and over detailed review (largely because YOU set the goal posts at infinity and beyond for "when the system starts being ok"), you MIGHT have got to the section where I cover the challenge level rules and as such you wouldn't have been dumb enough to say...
For instance Darth Vader is 19th level, has a 39 AC and 181 hp and 26 basic Stormtroopers will blow him to smithereens in one round.
... when the rules themselves say ...
The Rules wrote:Encounters with two to six opponents work best. Save single opponent encounter for higher-CL "bosses" like the rancor or Darth Vader. Avoid encounters with more than a dozen opponents unless you want the heroes to feel overwhelmed
And you know, all the other challenge level rules and burst fire rules and basic math you totally fucking ignored and called lies and slander LAST time you didn't read or meaningfully respond to an extensive rules packed post I put together on your total fucking bullshit "just trust me I'm right!" claims.

Still how can we blame you for not knowing or following the CL rules they ARE stupid and DO do things like tell you that Darth Vader alone and on foot, could fight 2 storm troopers and TWO STAR DESTROYERS in hand to hand combat and that THAT is an encounter that "works best" and is still of a CL that actually directly matches a seemingly standard "tough but fair" encounter for him that won't even "tax his resources".

And it's not like you can read or understand my more in depth posts. Or the rule books. Or much of anything really. But hey good work on putting together a REALLY shitty spiteful and empty little post that does a remarkably good job of demonstrating just how shitty your arguments and general presence on this forum is.

I'll be honest, I was against all odds expecting better, like you ACTUALLY finding some inevitable minor quibbling technical inaccuracy I am bound to have committed in such a large project then jumping up and down declaring victory because I got one line of rules text somewhere wrong. Instead you basically just showed up and embarrassed yourself for me. Cheers. Do it again as often as you like. It only makes my stuff look better by comparison.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Thu Nov 06, 2014 10:54 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Bounty Hunter
It's not a “fighter” class so entry requirements are marginally loose. I say marginally because still need to waste a trained skill on Survival. And the only base class with Survival is Scout, so you burnt your first level and a trained skill on the sucky god damn Scout which is bad, but very possibly LESS bad than burning a LATER level on scout and a feat on skill training which is the only OTHER way to fucking train Survival skill.

Oh and then you need two talents from scout anyway. Two talents from the god damn Awareness tree. Which means one of them MUST be Acute Senses, and the other is a choice of three, probably Improved Initiative, but they are all sorta shit. Taking even one more level of Scout nets you a another BAB penalty you don't need, so you probably get the hell out and spend the remaining four levels waiting to meet the level requirement for this damn Prestige Class on something less sucky than a Scout.

But at least bounty hunter will now give you about the best +4/+2 class defense bonus selection you could hope for, HP as good as a base Jedi/Soldier (but not the best prestige class hit die), and good BAB.

Prestige Classes are Level 8 and fuck you wait for it!
And lets pause to note that prestige classes are all level 8 entry. It doesn't matter if what they do is as shitty as the Ace Pilot (be worse at piloting than any random Jedi that trains Pilot skill or takes that Use the force substitution) it doesn't matter if even jumping through their somewhat shitty hoops is over after 3 wasted levels, you still have to wait until level 8. The game desperately wants you to go Prestige, but not until exactly on schedule. And that schedule is level 8, also there are some level 13 and stuff prestige classes, but who are we kidding levels 8 through 12 are spent in another prestige class first. But yeah 7 levels minimum of sucky base class ARE mandatory.

Your Shitty Incremental Talent You Lose Five Feats Over 10 Levels to gain? “Familiar Foe”
No, it's not AS bad as you think. It isn't ranger favored enemy bullshit under another name (again). You study your foe for 1 full round (fuck you miss a turn), in combat (we mean, it miss a fucking turn), and only after your foe has already acted at least once (miss a turn that matters damnit). To get your bonus to attack and reflex defense. The bonus? A shitty incremental +1 every 2 levels for a +5 at the end of your 10 level class career as a minimum level 17 character. Yep. You conceivably don't bother using this bonus and may come out ahead by actually using the action you miss.

Bounty Hunter Talents
Bounty Hunters get 1 talent tree, but at least they get six choices on it. Which is one more talent than they actually ever get anyway.

Hunter's Mark – I've stopped giving a crap about condition track enhancements it's getting boring and they don't look that promising, what with all the condition track healers. But if you were still trying to do that and not caring that there are basic soldier talents out there that make you redundant and a ubiquitous ability available to anyone who has enough hit points to not just die anyway that lets them significantly slow your condition track damage progress in combat... this adds one more track on hit if you aim first. I guess if you were running a “I get incremental bonuses for the almost free aiming thing” build. It's a boring build but apparently it is “a thing” in Saga.
Hunter's Target – Take Hunter's Mark first, so I guess be aiming build guy or waste a talent, and now you can nominate one guy in a combat and add your Class Level (ick class level dependent) to damage against them. Yes that's like +10 damage, EVENTUALLY. By the time it is that big you are getting almost that much bonus damage FROM YOUR RAW CHARACTER LEVEL. But the campaign is over long before that sort of crazy level anyway. Also, is it just me or should Hunter's MARK (where you aim at something) and Hunter's Target (where you mark something) SWAP GOD DAMN NAMES.
Notorius B – OK you don't get B in the title. Everyone everywhere forever recognizes you if you are not disguised (seems like a disability for a bounty hunter) and, if you are not disguised you can reroll persuasion for intimidate checks only... hmm... that seems familiar. OH YEAH....Wookies get that for free from level 0. I suppose this version lets you keep the better result but the difference is typically incrementally negligible. Also base class Jedi have a talent that can reroll ANY persuasion and use Use Force instead when they do for the double awesome in comparison to this. So that leaves this as a bit crap.
Nowhere to Hide – Reroll gather information checks but ONLY to find specific people you know about already with them. And keep the second result regardless (so not even the Notorious B “better result” benefit). These Bounty Hunter abilities are boring and narrow and terrible. What next “reroll remember what that guy looks check”?
Relentless – Bravo game this requires talents you have already mentioned, nice to see you getting that right for a change. And they are Hunter's Mark and Hunter's Target. The two talents so far that, well, actually do SOMETHING (if not much). And yeah as if there just to prove what I was going on about just now in Hunter's Mark about how many options screw over condition track builds, this option screws over condition track builds by being immune to their thing if you nominate them as your Hunter's Target.
Ruthless Negotiator – This ability sucks so much it fills me with abnormal rage. Reroll Persuasion. On Haggle Rolls only. But ONLY on haggle rolls over the price of a Bounty. HOLY SHIT. Edge case much? Narrow application much. And you know what, the scout, the dumb asshole scout, can just have a talent to reroll any haggle roll. Which seemed narrow at the time since it was haggling only, but at least it wasn't “haggle over blaster pistols only” narrow. I just hate this talent ferociously. Oh. And it requires you to first take Notorious B, possibly the other worst talent on this list.

Your Legacy Options Are...
Noticing they didn't write twice as many talent options than you will ever had, but feeling to lazy to add more. They just give you access to Misfortune from Scoundrel AND Awareness from Scout. So two whole crappy talent trees from two different crappy base classes. Misfortune is probably the worst Scoundrel talent tree (and that makes it pretty bad) so you ignore that. But even after taking 2 awareness talents to get into this class you might actually pick it ahead of Bounty Hunter talents (most of which suck pretty damn hard) and the 2 you took will actually cover most of your pre-requisites.

Bonus Feats...
AHAHAHAHAHA you're a Bounty Hunter, you don't even get those any more.

What You Do With Bounty Hunters
Bounty Hunters mostly exist if you really really want to take the Scout Awareness tree but don't want to eat more than a -1 BAB penalty for doing so over your career. So you Multiclass into Bounty Hunter to put a better BAB and HP chassis onto your Awareness only Scout and maybe pick up some of the 3 out of 6 bounty hunter talents that do ANYTHING other than insulting edge case conditional ass bullshit skill rerolls. This isn't really what the intention of this class was. And Bobba Fett clearly invested in the shit options instead and that's why he flew into a god damned Sarlacc like a chump.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

The Crime Lord
Requirements are the usual “fuck you, you are 8th level minimum” and training in both Persuasion AND Deception. Which is dumb because really pretty much anyone should be using only one of those if any, and Persuasion at least so far gets more rerolls and relevant abilities while deception hasn't had any yet.

Also you need one talent. It's either a Scoundrel talent from Misfortune (It's A Trap!) or Fortune (these ones also suck), or its a Noble talent from Lineage, which mostly suck so hard that it's either Connections or Wealth and Connections is kinda crap so you probably just cash out with Wealth and call it a day. But Wealth will not return all that much unless you throw like all your 7 levels at noble, so maybe you cop a second rate Fortune talent and get the hell out into Jedi before this class.

Your hit points are now Scout hit points (ie the worst HP for prestige classes), your BAB is now the bad one.

Your Shitty Incremental Talent You Lose Five Feats Over 10 Levels to gain? WAIT! What??? Command Cover AND...
You get Command Cover. It is shit. It is incremental it is +1 cover per adjacent ally. It maxes out at +5. Also it is capped by half your Crime Lord Class level, so while your class advancement table lacks the incremental bonus every two levels it's still and incremental +1 ever two levels. It's also a shitty ability because it encourages everyone to AoE you and your allies EVERY damned turn.

BUT WAIT! You DO lose your bonus feats because, “LOL! Whut?” but THIS time you still get a selectable advancement of SOME sort every level, and now it is a Talent! EVERY level! Of course Talents are generally worse than Feats (which is impressive) but still it makes this class at least more interesting than the “5 talents and a shit incremental bonus you don't get to choose” we've seen so far, as this one is “10 talents and a shit incremental bonus you don't get to choose”. This might be an admission from the designers that shitty incremental bonus on this one is extra shitty, or it might be an alarming portent that the Talents on this class will be shitty, or when posed such questions the designers might just say “LOL! Whut?” as that seems to be the general design direction of Saga edition.

Only 8 Crime Lord Talents
Crime lords get only get 8 actual crime lord talents despite earning 10 talents to select with the crime lord class over 10 levels of it's progression. Lets just note that.

Infamy Talents
Inspire Fear 1 – Yes there are only actually 8 crime lord talents, and yet three of them are “Inspire Fear one through three”. How exciting. This one applies a -1 penalty to all rolls by equal or lower level characters against you. Yes, not against higher levels, because like, a -1 to their attacks would be just too awe inspiring for Saga edition. Whoop dee doo.
Inspire Fear 2 – Another -1 to the same thing... I'm assuming there are three of these instead of “take this talent up to three times” largely to pretend crime lords totally have enough talents for all their talent slots.
Inspire Fear 3 – Oh look jump to a net -5 on that. All it took was three talents averaging an incremental -1.66 a pop but back loading all the fractions to the last talent just to screw you until you have invested three whole blasted talents into this. Which you do sooner or later, because you are a Crime Lord and you are going to run out of Talents otherwise.
Notorious C – Oh fuck Notorious B is back, it's exactly the same, rerolls of intimidate that are weak cheese compared to wookies and jedi, with the inbuilt weakness of “everyone everywhere forever recognises you on sight”.
Shared Notoriety – AAAAAH! Anyway. Notorious C for your personal “minions” if they spill the beans and tell everyone who they work for. Requires Notorious C. Now why the fuck do you want this ability? You already can just intimidate people better yourself, if the ability only works if they reveal your god damn secret identity why don't you just do it your fucking self?

Master Mind Talents
Attract Minion – Permits you to seduce those little yellow guys off Despicable me with rerolls. Well, no actually it lets you have an NPC class minion with levels equal to ¾ of your own. Just to give you a quick idea of the value of that, the rules don't actually TELL us what the CL per level is for non-heroics (no really) but in the provided examples a “non-heroic” with 6 OR 8 levels like a Clone Trooper or heavy storm trooper is a CL 2 character. So. Yeah. Even if they were flat out your level in non-heroic levels they would actually at that point pretty much off the bottom of the CL scale as level appropriate challenges by the time you can take this ability even once, and with the extra 3/4s level bit they are off the bottom of the scale even more so what with being basically something like a net 0.2x your level in their CL . So if you were a level 10 crime lord who took this ability 3 times your three CL 2 minions are as it turns out a standard challenge for a level 2 adventuring party. Yeah.
Impel Ally 1 – Spend a swift action to let an ally move. Their normal speed, you aren't giving them a move action, right now in your turn, it's not actually part of their turn. Use it repeatedly if you convert your other actions to swift actions, no restriction on not using it on the same ally three times. The noble thing where you just give your Standard action to someone who isn't a fucking Noble is probably better. But this one is certainly usable and marginally hilarious as you zip allies around in comical ways (at the cost of your entire turn). Presumably you use this to launch jedi's at long range opponents. If you are taking this crappy prestige class for any talent other than this piece of ministry of funny walks you are probably doing it wrong.
Impel Ally II – A marginal improvement on Impel Ally and actually better than that thing where nobles give away their standard action. 2 swift actions to give actual actions (standard or move) to an ally instead of just bits of movement! You use THIS to make the Jedi you launch at long range attackers also attack more. You combine this with the noble ability to give your standard action to a Jedi to never act again in return for 2 extra Jedi standard actions per turn. Finally turning your gimped character into an actual net profit for the party as you get to be a whole standard instead of move action better than just having brought a jedi instead of a noble/crime lord. It's a "strong" ability and very possibly the end point at which you get the hell out of crimelord at class level god damn 2 because the rest is abysmal.

Your Legacy Options Are...
The Influence talent tree from Noble, that was the dumb one where it was called influence but it was all Intimidate options. You might conceivably take the one that lets you intimidate and walk at the same time because it has the audacity to give you the permission the game requires you to have to ADVANCE MENACINGLY on someone. But everything else is even worse than that so you don't take the legacy options.

You only actually GET 8 Crime lord talents so if you stay in crime lord 10 levels you MUST take at least 2 Influence talents. If you entered Crime lord with 7 levels of Noble, took Wealth to qualify and specialized in Influence or “be a scary bastard only crap” before entry, which is certainly thematic if not outright an intended entry to this class. This means that if you don't pay attention and plot your build out fully in advance and do thematically appropriate choices you can actually RUN OUT of talents you are actually allowed to take with the Crime Lord Class. Yes you can hit level 10 of crime lord and say “oops, I can't take a talent with my crime lord talent this level!”.

Fortunately you can take Attract Minion more than once. But then again. Do you really want to? I mean CL2 minions at level 10, and (estimated but never specified) CL 4 (if not less!) minions at level 20? bought one level at a time? That's for chumps.

Bonus Feats...
AHAHAHAHAHA you're a Crime Lord, you don't even get those any more. As usual.

What You Do With Crime Lords
Crime lords are spectacularly terrible. If you have to be one there are probably two talents to take (in two levels) then you are out, and they are talents that stop you personally from using your own actions and give more screen time to the PCs that actually picked the good classes.

Presumably you actually take Crime Lord if it is suddenly important for you to rapidly accrue Talents RIGHT NOW in your build... as long as they come from really shitty talent lists.

Crime Lord (2 levels) is also where the Noble Build that eventually gives out it's Standard Action to someone else goes to die.

Alternatively if you really want a lot of Force Talents you can just use the talent per level thing and Force Sensitivity to do that, but then if you want to do that you should probably be a Force Adept or something instead.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Elite Trooper
Well it's an actual fighty class, which means it has a "fuck you wait until your 8th level" BAB requirement instead of just a fuck you character level requirement, it still means you enter at level 8, but it DOES mean that if you cop any BAB hits from the trap base classes you have to wait longer, so for instance a Soldier 6/Scout 1 has just screwed himself another level away from a fighty style prestige class like this.

It also has some asshole feat requirements, light armour, medium armour, and both Martial Arts 1 AND Point Blank Shot (so screw you no pure specialists allowed in Elite Trooper learn some unarmed combat for no reason or GTFO).

Then it also has a talent requirement from Soldier, you must have one, from any soldier talent tree except brawler (the class already forgot it made you take Martial Arts 1). You won't be taking one from Armour because as a level 8 character it's basically too early in your career for Armour Specialist talents TO ACTUALLY PROVIDE FUCKING BONUSES, so you are probably taking weapon specialist or commando talents before entering this class, conveniently there are maybe 5 vaguely passable options between those lists and you'll have spent 4 talents before entering this career from straight soldier.

For all that you get better Hit points than even a base soldier or jedi (as good as it gets for prestige classes in fact), and full base attack bonus.

Hey What An Extra Class Ability?
Hey look you get an EXTRA class ability at level 1. Delay Damage. Once per encounter as perhaps the only clearly labelled reaction I've seen on a character class since the action type was defined, you can basically refuse to take the damage/effects of an attack until the end of your NEXT turn. So you refuse to die, die in the interim, then die again afterwards. Or something like that. It could be better. A lot better. It seems like a bit of “A TRAP!”, and the kind that may actually flat out murder your character if you spring it.

Your Shitty Incremental Talent You Lose Five Feats Over 10 Levels to gain? Damage Reduction
DR ½ per class level for a maximum of 5 points. Now lets note the base soldier class has a talent that ignores DR 5, we haven't yet seen DR anywhere other than on inanimate defense profiles and this trait. And that in this game every heroic character is adding +1/2 their level to their damage output anyway before all the other bullshit. And also light sabers (surely no one will attack you with those in Star Wars?) ignore DR too. It's an incremental bonus that basically ensures it is always less DR than would ever matter at a the level at which you can get it (by a wide margin) and it's potentially completely bypassed by lowly base class soldier characters, and every jedi ever, that you used to be many levels before you even started to get this, and indeed for now it least that lowly base class talent seems to exist almost exclusively to screw you for taking this trait.

But it probably is better than the incremental shit the other prestige classes have given up 5 feats for. But probably not as good as 5 fucking feats.

Weapon Master Talent Tree
You have 5 talents, here are 8 choices inexplicably on one big tree to do with weapon mastery. That's everything Elite Soldiers do right? That and the dumb legacy crap we give you? Right?
Controlled Burst – Take the broken shitty Autofire ability that shouldn't even be in the game and get less attack penalty for using it. You take this ability because done right it leaves you with the option to just say “fuck you its basically a regular attack but it cannot miss”. But this ability, and the base action it enhances pretty much should not even be in the game.
Exotic Weapon Mastery – Proficient with all exotic weapons without the feat. But not less than exotic weapons. That would just be weird. I want to like this ability, but really it's the sort of sub optimal “permission to be cool but no really bonus” ability that you should basically be getting free along side goodies that actually fucking matter.
Greater Devastating Attack – This requires 3 different incremental talents and feats. Including Devastating Attack (a Soldier talent no less that is NOT on your legacy talent list), Weapon Focus and Greater Weapon focus (a shit incremental talent from this class). The benefit an extra 5 incremental points on the exact same thing Devestating Attack does. Which is nice, and by the level you get it possibly just short of required if you want to progress the condition track with direct damage, but then again, as we know, trying to do that is looking like a chumps game by now and that's a lot of god damn investment.
Greater Penetrating Attack – What the hell? Look it's an extra +5 DR bypass on the base Penetrating Attack ability from soldier (and the only DR we have seen never exceeds the first 5 points that the original ability bypasses). That ability was questionable at the time and has similar excessive requirements in weapon focusing as Greater Devastating Attack. This is as good as or worse than Greater Devastating attack as in marginally insulting but you might close your eyes and take it for Britain if nothing better comes along. Look lets say you want this AND Greater devestating attack, well you also need the two base talents and the Greater Weapon focus talent, that makes a minimum 5 talents down the drain along with 8 character levels. Not counting the weapon focus feat. Just for -10 threshold and ignore 10 DR. Holy crap. And that actually looks like one of the main builds this class wants you to be going with!
Greater Weapon Focus – Weapon focus again, for an extra +1. Hey you can take this multiple times!!! No really, take it 5 times, use all your talents from this class on it I DARE YOU! Requires actual weapon focus feat first as well, because INCREMENTAL +1 ATTACK BULLSHIT is the name of this edition.
Greater Weapon Specialization – OK make that example of the apparent intended build from Greater Penetrating attack and make it 12 character levels and add +4 damage. No really. Fucking hell.
Multiattack Proficiency (Heavy Weapons) – 2 less penalty for making multiple attacks with heavy weapons, basically applies to double and triple shot, might apply to other things like dual wielding if you can pull it off, if it applies to god damned autofire it shouldn't, is an accident of vague wording, and makes controlled burst largely redundant. Take this as many fucking times as you like. No really.
Multiattack Proficiency (Rifles) – Multi-attack proficiency would just be too good of an incremental +2 if it applied to rifles AND heavy weapons at the same time. I mean, what if you used both simultaneously or something? So they split it into two separate talents to make it more incremental and make your build more bullshit and narrow.

Your Legacy Options Are …
Commando from Soldier and Camouflage from Scout. You might pick up like 1 whole camouflage ability, but probably not since you only ever get 5 talents from this class and there are 8 talents to pick from here and about 3 good talents (and one requirement for them) on Commando. If forced to pick legacy because the Elite Soldier talents turn out to run out of good shit before you hit 5 choices and you've already taken those and you refuse to take multi-attack proficiency again you can just take Indomitable an extra time or two because it lets you laugh some more at idiots building Condition Track builds that can't 1 round KO you and it's generally better than anything on scout.

What You Do With Elite Troopers
I'll start by pointing out I went back and checked multiple times if the Weapon Specialist tree was actually Elite Trooper and not some other class because fucking hell it doesn't seem thematically right and looks more like “crappy non-jedi weapon master” class. But whatever.

This is supposed to be the class soldiers go to. And they might if they don't find anything better. But the talents are actually either shit, or too shit for their cost. You pretty much end up taking Multi-Attack Proficiency (in the one category of weapon you commit to use forever) twice or so and GTFO. The “collect all the greaters weapon bullshit and deal condition track progression!” build is looking too damned pricey for what little it does by the time you come out of it and there just isn't much else there. Some time mid way through this career a soldier suddenly wants to go back to base class anyway and drop 2 talents on Armour Specialist that suddenly matter but previously didn't function and staying in this class would be a bad idea at that point. I guess you go back and get more incremental iterations of Multi-attack proficiency If you just flat out run out of anything else to do.
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Post by Korwin »

PhoneLobster wrote:
Kowin wrote:Noble 1 and Jedi 6 is an viable choice...
Because you say so hey? I think not. Now if you wanted to argue Jedi 6/Noble 1, maybe, that only loses out on a few HP and one BAB and at levels where it's not as big a deal. But Noble 1/Jedi 6?

Your first level lost you at least 2 feats worth of character value. You lost your 1 BAB at a level where it is most noticable. You lost out on more than a third of your starting HP another three hp and it would have been half. And you will be 12 HP behind a character that started as jedi for the rest of your career (instead of the mere 2 HP behind that a Jedi6/Noble 1 would be).
So you are listing the disadvantage of starting noble and ignoring the advantages?
--> Skills in case you missed it
Yes, if you don’t want the skills of the noble you don’t start with noble, obviously.
PhoneLobster wrote:
...House Rule...
Do tell us more about the game we aren't talking about...
Funny, I agreed with you (game not good at that point) and you quoted only an part to continue the argument.
PhoneLobster wrote:
Except you also get one of the starting feats. (Like Force Sensitive)
Do your accounting for the feat hole honestly.
What are you talking about?
PhoneLobster wrote: If I wanted to combine noble with jedi (for some inexplicable reason) and I take noble second there is ONE starting feat on noble that the jedi MAYBE gives a shit about (weapon proficiency pistols). So they get that with the one single starting feat for multiclassing into a new class.
Yes, if you don’t want the skills of the Noble class you don’t take the noble class at first level.
Your point?
If you want more skills than an jedi you could take every other class and get more.
Honestly the Jedi class is pretty bad. Start with Soldier (or Scout or Scoundrel) and multi class into Jedi, more skills more feats.
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Post by Concise Locket »

PhoneLobster wrote:This book is stupidly shaped. It's not a standard large sized RPG rulebook of the scale of prior WOTC star wars rulebooks. It's a funny little sorta square thing.
As someone who hates the ridiculous children's book proportions of 'standard' RPGs, Saga's trade format was the one thing WotC got right with this product.
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Post by virgil »

PhoneLobster wrote:Now had you actually read my review at all
Seeing as how he went out of his way to describe your entire review as a gish gallop, reading it would actually be stupid on his part.
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Post by ishy »

Yeah reading what you're critiquing is just so passé.
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

ishy wrote:Yeah reading what you're critiquing is just so passé.
A "gish gallop" is when you do the following:
  • make OVER 9000 ARGUMENTS as fast as you can, regardless of validity.
  • Let the other guy sputter around refuting arguments until he's exhausted or out of time.
  • Declare victory because the other guy didn't refute all of your arguments, even though you're probably wrong.
It is, in fact, unreasonable to demand that someone read all the arguments in a gish gallop, and the appropriate response is something along the lines of, "please prune your list down to the five or so most important points so I don't need to write a ten-thousand word essay to refute you, asshole."

...which doesn't necessarily mean that PL is performing a gish gallop, or that he's wrong, just that if he is, "TL;DR" is actually a reasonable response.
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Post by spongeknight »

RadiantPhoenix wrote:It is, in fact, unreasonable to demand that someone read all the arguments in a gish gallop, and the appropriate response is something along the lines of, "please prune your list down to the five or so most important points so I don't need to write a ten-thousand word essay to refute you, asshole."
The top 5 arguments can be taken from the whole text rather easily, I think. In no particular order:

1. The classes are bullshit unbalanced. You can play a jedi or a soldier or an NPC, there are no other options.

2. You don't get real abilities, just tiny bonuses that barely matter on a d20.

3. Vehicle/ship mechanics don't function if you also have dudes with rifles shooting at things- like in the majority of all cinematic Star Wars battles.

4. Multiclassing doesn't function properly. A jedi1/noble1/jedi5 is pretty much better in all ways than a noble1/jedi6, except for shitty skills.

5. Skills are shitty. You can take Use the Force and win, or a bunch of skills that don't actually do anything for you despite them claiming to do so.

At least that's what I'm getting out of the review. PL may have a different list, but like he said in the beginning he's pointing out all of the little things he sees wrong with the game too. It's not a gish gallop if he states from the start that he's pointing out every flaw he sees and then proceeds to list out all the flaws he sees.
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Post by ishy »

RadiantPhoenix wrote:
ishy wrote:Yeah reading what you're critiquing is just so passé.
It is, in fact, unreasonable to demand that someone read all the arguments in a gish gallop, and the appropriate response is something along the lines of, "please prune your list down to the five or so most important points so I don't need to write a ten-thousand word essay to refute you, asshole."

...which doesn't necessarily mean that PL is performing a gish gallop, or that he's wrong, just that if he is, "TL;DR" is actually a reasonable response.
Do you understand the difference between:
A) please prune your list down to the five or so most important points so I don't need to write a ten-thousand word essay to refute you, asshole."
B) Deans Review of Phonelobster's Saga Review
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

Yes, ishy, congratulations on figuring out how to read. Dean's review is saying there should be a TLDR and is also critiquing PL's work. Contrary to what you may believe, it is in fact possible to tell someone to trim down their work and then criticize a part of their work.

Speaking of doing two things at once, let's return to two things PL said on this very page.
PhoneLobster, responding to Dean, wrote:Now had you actually read my review at all, you might have noted an extensive section on Auto-fire and Burst fire and how they indeed are pretty fucking shitty. But you might have noted that for some reason they don't include a mention of groups of 26 storm troopers.
PhoneLobster, in the work he criticized Dean for not reading, wrote:Option one is every character rolls initiative.

We ARE talking all death star occupants level individual character initiative here.
Because having an encounter with 26 stormtroopers is terrible and the game doesn't support it evar, but every single person on the death star? Totally fine. In fact this hearkens back to Dean's review Part 3.
Last edited by ...You Lost Me on Thu Nov 06, 2014 8:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by ishy »

...You Lost Me wrote:Yes, ishy, congratulations on figuring out how to read. Dean's review is saying there should be a TLDR and is also critiquing PL's work. Contrary to what you may believe, it is in fact possible to tell someone to trim down their work and then criticize a part of their work.
Do tell, how do you criticize someones work without reading it?
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Post by PhoneLobster »

...You Lost Me wrote:Because having an encounter with 26 stormtroopers is terrible and the game doesn't support it evar, but every single person on the death star? Totally fine.
Oddly enough I DO get to have that one both ways.

Why? Because bat shit crazy starship/crew don't count CL rules is why.

Because under the rules of the game as written a Star Destroyer IS in fact a single opponent as far as the CL system considers it BUT is also somewhere between 1, 100-200ish and 40-50,000ish initiative checks. Depending on which totally viable "option" for initiative rolls you choose to go with and whether you interpret "all occupants" as "all occupants" or something creative but more practical.

Why? Because star ships get to opt to roll initiative for all occupants, and star ships get CL ratings by the individual ship for challenge level and experience gain calculations, and star ships are EXPLICITLY CALLED OUT by the rules as NOT providing experience, rewards or indeed any particular accounting at all for their normal, often tens of thousands, of occupants.

Unless you have some important imperial moff type guy on board (even as a non-contributing passenger on a weak shuttle) THEN he doesn't explicitly add to CL but he DOES explicitly provide experience and maybe other rewards as if he had been a contributing factor. Because "lol randomz!".

I know it is completely insane that something like only 5 out of like 9000 or so storm troopers are allowed to get off their star destroyer and join it in combat against you while the rest can stay on board to be nothing but an optional admin headache. Even the compliment of tie fighters and shuttles probably aren't allowed to leave the fucking hangers without breaking the game rules. But that IS the way the game is actually written.

I don't recall seeing a stat line for the death star in the core, but I guarantee you, should it turn up. It works like the Star Destroyer. Stations do get a name drop in the starship section.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Thu Nov 06, 2014 11:43 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Dean »

ishy wrote:Do tell, how do you criticize someones work without reading it?
There are several reasons this is funny. The first is that I actually have read PL's review. You keep repeating a claim he made, based on nothing, which is wrong: Accepting his claim made you wrong, and that's something which will happen a lot more if you keep doing it, which is what I said in my review. It's also funny that not reading things should be a moral sticking point for you because this whole thing started with PL jumping into a discussion to criticize books he had never read then criticizes posts within that thread without reading them. Would you like me to link you to them? It's quite recent. Where people call him out for not reading a single thing he's talking about and his response is to threadshit for weeks.

PL's specific statement that seemed to convince you is that I hadn't read his review because I don't know his claims about challenge levels, which of course I do. The post in question, like all of PL's, can make a good example of the many different layers of dishonesty he applies, so lets look at it.

First I attack Phonelobster for writing a dishonest and mathematically incorrect "proof" here
I wrote:When Phonelobster was confronted about being wrong about Evasion, when he was told that it was not only not useless but mandatory for mid level characters who will be off the RNG for regular shots but can never ignore AOE shots Phonelobster defended his position with a 4000 word post demonstrating that against a LEVEL 2 PARTY stormtroopers didn't perform better with AOE's than with direct attacks. In an argument explicitly about high level problems he spent 4000 words using a level 2 party as his counterpoint. That is some grade A dishonesty there. It is also worth mentioning that his "actual math" itself is wrong, like in his very first line where he tells us that the average of 3d8 is 12.5. Remember that this is the argument he declared victory on. This is the argument he is the most proud of.
Phonelobster's response to me pointing out that his "proof" is both intentionally dishonest and factually wrong is this
Phonelobster wrote:your go to "proof"? The storm troopers and autofire thing you already failed on ages ago, had extensively explained to you with rules and math,
Holy fuck did you see that? The "rules and math" he's referring to there is the very proof I am attacking! He's defending his wrong proof as right WITH the results of his wrong proof. That's amazing. Go through his post just in order to appreciate it.

Finally he moves onto Challenge guidelines. PL defends his argument that it's fine that 20 odd Stormtroopers can 1 round Darth Vader by saying that no more than 12 people can be in a fight at once, that I don't know the CR rules, and that I didn't read his review. Literally everything he's just said there is unrelated or wrong. 26 is the number of Stormtrooper attacks that kills Darth, even if not in one round. Darth only has two attacks a round, so even if he's fighting 12 basic troopers and goes first he gets hit with 10,8,6,4, and 2 attacks on the following rounds. Since that number hits 28 by the 4th round Darth can absolutely be killed by Stormtroopers. Stormtroopers also aren't the final word in enemies and are only the most basic opponent, by level 8 enemies with Missile launchers are common which also use AOE's and deals 16 damage on a miss and Darth's CR budget tells you he is expected to be able to beat 8 or 9 of them at once. Finally the last reason PL's CR guideline defense is retarded is it is a pointless distraction. If a character without Evasion can beat 12 enemies but a character with it can beat 60 the character with Evasion is stronger. CR guidelines are meaningless to that discussion. The argument is whether Evasion is a strong choice or not and obviously it is because it lets you fight stronger opposition. A character with Evasion is stronger at combat both within his CR and above it than a character without Evasion which makes recommending not taking Evasion obviously fucking retarded. The argument that Evasion lets you take on challenges above your recommended level is a point for Evasion being strong, not it being weak.

What we've learned here from top to bottom Ishy is that repeating things Phonelobster says will make you wrong because his arguments, like those we've covered here, are intentionally dishonest. It is also the reason this whole thing is a gish gallop. Because even when narrowing down to one point that PL is inarguably wrong about, where his statements are self contradictory and dishonest, I have been arguing with him for almost a month. It would be years before I could correct everything and he'd still be saying it.

Here's a 72 second summary of the use of the Gish Gallop, see if it seems apropos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12nYRa8PTzo
Last edited by Dean on Fri Nov 07, 2014 12:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by DSMatticus »

PhoneLobster is arguing that the encounter building guidelines stipulating that the ideal encounter is 2 to 6 opponents are actually an Assassin's Creed style prohibition on the number of combatants who can be active at any one time and that all the rest will sit in the background twiddling their thumbs. He is straight-facedly claiming that if you walk into an imperial parade and declare death to the emperor, six enemies roll initiative and hundreds sit idle because "encounter building guidelines." It is incoherent and completely fucking insane. He is an asshole with an axe to grind grasping desperately for something, anything that will let him continue being bitter and stupid on the internet, and it is not going well for him.

But the most interesting thing about this is not that PL is a stupid crazy person (that's rather obvious), but that he would rather be a stupid crazy person than make the completely obvious sober argument smacking him in the face; even if encounters outside the guidelines aren't impossible (they aren't), they are not intended to be covered by the game's playspace and are not particularly appropriate for balance discussion. From there, he could go on to talk about whether or not AoE's are a viable threat in the context of encounters within the guidelines and possibly establish that they are not. Maybe available healing is expected to outpace damage from AoE attacks, making it a waste of resources compared to just taking the damage and then erasing it when the encounter is over with other abilities. I don't know if that's true, but that is an example of a sober argument that evasion is inferior to some other alternative (healing) in the context of the guidelines the developers recommend, and it's very specifically not the argument PhoneLobster is making.

So why is PL contorting himself into pretzels of unlogic in order to reach the conclusion he wants? Because he's not actually reviewing Saga, he is whining about Dean's badwrongfun in high-op, over-the-top Saga games mentioned in the first thread, and trying to argue that encounters which would challenge high-op characters are breaking the rules is an essential plank of his b-b-but you can't do that argument.
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Post by fectin »

Dean wrote:This thread is not a review, it is a 30,000 word gish gallop.
Calling something a Gish Gallup is an exercise in failure. Either people believe the arguments are stupid (so calling it out gains nothing), or they believe they are valid, and batch answering "nuh-uh" makes you look whiny.

If Zak S, or Byron Hall, or Mike Mearls, or God himself came here and tried to claim that the sheer volume of arguments that their work was bad actually somehow proved that it was good, no-one who regularly posts here would buy that. It would be utterly risible. Yet somehow that exact argument has been creeping into everyone's rhetoric as though it were a serious consideration.

This isn't directed at Dean specifically either; he was just a target of opportunity here.
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