Hey you, really dumb asshole. HICKS WAS MY MC IN THAT GAME. We play D&D and recently After Sundown pretty regularly.Grek wrote:Read the OP you asshat. Hicks went with 12 Willpower and 0 in absolutely everything else, including non-telekinetic Strength. It died in one hit as a result, to his dismay and confusion. That was a transparently poor choice and produced transparently poor results, as Hicks would have known if he had read the chapter on designing challenges. Having all of the states be 12 would be less stupid than that (in that it would at least be a challenging component to a boss battle) but still pretty awful insofar as it would be a summoned monster more powerful than the entire party combined.Kaelik wrote:Your suggestion of "3 agility like a random normal asshole" is honestly WAY fucking stupider than the "all stats equal to it's willpower, but no skills" approximation Hicks wanted to go with.
Yes, it would be nice if the Poltergeist had a stat line. No, that doesn't mean that there's no earthly way to which numbers you should use in the absence of that stat line. Nor does it mean that there isn't advice in the rules that you can use to inform your decisions. If Hicks had come up with numbers that were less obviously and ludicrously awful, I would be much more sympathetic than I am being right now.
Hicks used 12 Str, and 12 Willpower, because the rules for Poltergeists specifically say "Strength and Willpower increasing." Hicks wanted to use Agility 12 too, but I said that would be bad, because then the attack that killed it would instead have missed, and the Poltergeist had already done 6N damage to my Khaibit and I didn't want to get fucked, so I said we should just let it have Agility 0 instead of 12 to keep the attack from my fellow party member hitting it and killing it.
Weird, because you are here demonstrating that you have not the faintest clue of the rules. The poltergeist has a willpower of 12. Which means if you want to treat poltergeists as "regular people" the MINIMUM potency would be 6. So we should probably be looking at the attributes and stats of a Potency 6 Supernatural instead right?Grek wrote:I'm perfectly willing to admit that there's room for disagreement in the range of 1 to 7 for most attributes, since that is the standard range for a supernatural extra with a Potency of 1.
But of course, if you do that, if you let an advanced power summon a Potency 6 supernatural who kills some guy for you, and you give it actual combat skills and agility scores in line with that, then you are inherently giving an Advanced Power the ability to summon a creature to murder someone that is for the cost of 4 power points, literally a Potency 6 Monster that is just objectively better than PCs.
Weird and unbalanced and shitty right?
But it can't have less than 6 Potency, because it has 12 Willpower. So hey, here's an idea: It has no skills because it's a collection of wisps, but still has stats comparable with a Potency 6 creature.
OH SHIT MY DUDE, MAYBE THAT'S BETTER THAN WHAT YOU HAVE.