I don't really expect you to be casting magic without rolling strain until much higher level. Even a level 20 should be lucky to handle lvl 3 spells without gaining strain, and then only if they are really going for that. This is one of those poor translation cases from switching systems. In the final system, even high level arch mages would not cast lvl 9 spells quickly. They would perform them as rituals unless they are military in which they would take 10 while their comrades protect them.
I think this will help, though I will run a deeper analysis later tonight now that I found where my mistake was.
The idea is that you have positive SP that adds to your roll equal to your con score. This is just the same SP except it starts higher as bonus, and it gets reduced as you cast magic.
I worry about this making it too easy to power higher spells. I could compensate by making success cost the SL in strain, and failure cost double, making higher lvl spells more costly even in success maintaining the focus on lower level spells while still allowing more of them to be cast.
In any case, I'm going to fix the data model and get back to you with that. In the meantime, any thoughts?
I got ninja'd. :)
In any case you understood, but I made a mistake in calculation leading to casters getting fewer effects off than I intended.
Also, I am not so much trying to nerf casters as much as I am trying to favor low level magic over high level magic such that even archmages are careful and cautious about high level magics.
It is sort of a nerf in that this system makes it difficult for casters to use their main class feature. I'm not saying it's bad - we tend to take magic really lightly - but that is a side affect of what is happening.
Anyway, another note to consider is that the most ki points I will ever cast at a time is 4, at 20th level - in which case I think it'd make sense to put me on a similar track to a ranger or paladin, which get 1/2 MB progression. I've never thought about it this way before, but under this system I am basically on the same track as a ranger/paladin - I get access to my casting abilities at the same time (4th level), and max out at the same 'spell' level.
So... How'bout it? 1/2 MB progression for Monks?
Honestly, 1/2 is fine. I intended it to be the same as a low caster. I just need to do better proofreading is all. There is no 1/3 mb track anyway, just 1/1, 3/4, 1/2, and 1/4.
Honestly, I am much better at speaking through these sorts of things, but I can't do this in person, and likely won't be able to for some time. I just refuse to set this project aside because I am weak with the written word. :)
Being stuck using my phone to write posts doesn't help.
I thought 1/3 was kinda weird when I first saw it :P Thanks!
I understand what you mean, though - it's hard to explain stuff via text, so we forgive you for any confusions that may happen :)
On a different subject, did I calculate my AC and fort. save versus damage correctly?
The AC looks good, but You don't add the monk ac bonus to fort.
Basically, if the bonus goes away for being immobile, then it doesn't apply to the fort save.
The ability to keep that bonus while flat footed, I see as a lesser form of uncanny dodge.
You still have the possibility of being caught flat footed, (though there are certain details of that I never liked) you just don't add armor to that. Not that you need to worry over much as I doubt there will much chance of catching you flatfooted. There are a few different minor bonuses or penalties attached to flat footed, but as they aren't dependent on stats, I'll be handling those behind the screen. All you need to know about that is, unless you are sleeping or otherwise staying perfectly still, enemies won't be hitting a flat 10. Still pretty easy to hit ff, but not as easy as hitting a practice target.
Monks can't wear armor, so they get the AC bonus to make up for it. I figured that's what it's there for, so I'd add it. I'll take it out tomorrow.
True, but monks are good at avoiding being hit in the first place, which why you get a bonus to ff ac. The fort save isn't a replacement to ff, instead, it is all about what happens if you do get hit.
It is also an inverse dynamic. Being harder to hit generally means being easier to hurt if you do get hit, while being harder to hurt generally means being easier to hit.
That is the intent. As the monk specializes in avoidance, it maintains that dynamic to not gain identical benefits to fort.
Do you think you could explain how piercing values work? You mentioned them earlier, but could you tell us what the actual values for different weapons are? Also, you mentioned a table that we'd do roll on after taking damage - could we see that?
I mostly have general guidelines for piercing values with the idea of adjusting for the actual items needed rather than trying to fill out an entire list ahead of time. Especially since I also have to adjust differently for PF.
The guidelines are,
energy types, prc 1
bludgeoning, prc 2
slashing, prc 4
piercing, prc 6
positive energy has prc 6 vs undead, likewise,
negative energy has prc 6 vs living
having a weakness to a type treats the prc value as +5.
Having a resistance reduces the prc by 2 for each 5 points of resistance. This can result in a negative prc value.
Specifically nonlethal damage (such as a weapon of mercy) has prc adjusted by -6.
######
The table values may change as I don't think the variance in saves is very good compared to the variance in damage as levels change.
Basic guidelines,
(injury level:limb/torso/head)
DC 12 Minor: -1 to actions involving limb + spd -5 if leg / 1 con dmg / 1 rnd dazed
DC 9 Moderate: -3 to actions and spd *.5 if leg / 2 con damage fatigued / -4 perception and stunned a round
DC 6 Major: -5 actions / 4 con dmg and exhausted / blind or deaf, 1 dmg to mental stats, stunned 1d6 rounds
DC 3 Severe: Disabled limb / Disabled condition (like at 0 hp) and 6 con dmg / unconcious for 1d8 rounds and 2 dmg to mental stats
DC 0 Extreme: chance of severed limb (10% B, 25% P, 75% S) / Dying and 8 con dmg / 1d4 lose eye, ear, 2 of them, -2 permanent mental score loss (healed only by great healing magics/wish etc)
DC -3 Lethal: Dying and bleed 4 / Dying and 10 con damage / Dying, 1d4 lose two eyes/ears, -6 dmg to mental stats, -4 perm mental stat, dead
DC - 6 Overkill: Dead
DC -9 Evaporated: as in this quote, "They will crush us, grind us into little pieces and blast us into oblivion!"
Slashing weapons alao add 1 bleed per injury level.
Critical hits add 3 to the prc value.
Piercing dmg adds just bleed 1, whatever the injury level
Armor provides half it's armor value as DR. Physical armor provides DR against physical damage. Chain mail has one less DR vs piercing. Armor from force effects provides DR vs energy dmg. Natural armor provides DR against acid and bludgeoning.
All armor bonuses provide DR against nonlethal.
I.E. An enemy attacks hits you and you fail the fort save vs damage. Their weapon is a +1 longbow, prc 6+1 (from the enhancement). You have +1 studded leather providing 3 DR (half the armor value plus enhancement). Your injury roll is thus 3d6 + 3 DR - 7 prc. Your injury level is the highest one your roll meets or beats, so if you rolled 10, then 10+3-7=6 resulting in a major injury.
Crossbows are powerful weapons (not including the hand crossbows) and have +1 prc, for a total of 7.
Self powered weapons, like crossbows and siege weapons, add their size bonus to their prc value.
A caster can take a metamagic feat, Punishing Spell, which can add their casting stat modifier to the prc value of the spell. Costs two spell levels.
Magic is normally prc 1.
Hit locations, roll a d%/d20 to see what location was hit,
40%/1-8 for an arm,
25%/9-13 for a leg,
15%/14-16 for torso,
10%/17-18 a hand,
5%/19 a foot,
5%/20 the head.
Non humanoids obviously have their own spread of hit locations.
To make sure I understand this, let's say I hit someone with my first attack in a flurry of blows, with an unarmed strike.
It does 1d8+17 damage, bludgeoning, and we'll say they have a very optimistic injury modifier of +15.
Note: I'm piecing together the posts above and your posts on the previous page. I found this in one of the original posts describing injury saves:
When rolling for an injury, add DR and resistance if applicable, then subtract twice the weapon's piercing value. This also where any damage bonuses apply
My hit lands, and they make an injury roll at at 3d6 + 15, -4 (prc value * 2), - 17 (damage modifiers) - 1d8 (I assume damage dice also apply?)
Assuming average rolls, that comes to 0.So you should probably space out your injury rolls a bit more, assuming I understood that correctly :) . On the other hand, if the location roll lands on a limb and I roll a 32 on the % die for severed limbs, did my attack have any effect other than to inflict 2 WP?
Also, earlier you mentioned a fortitude save against damage, but it seems to be different from the injury rolls. What is the DC for that fortitude save?
Damage only works against the fort save, not the injury roll. Thus you get a dynamic of damage and prc being inverse to each other.
Attack vs ac
dmg vs fort (armor fully applies)
prc vs injury (dr and resistance )
The DC for fort is the damage. Prc is the only one that isn't a direct contest, and mostly cause I had to put the injuries in it somehow and I figured it slightly simpler than calculating margin of success.
I'll go more in depth with an example tonight when I get the chance.
Any decision yet on how you're adjusting the strain check stuff?
You ninja'd my last post. Sorry for not noticing then.
I didn't complete my analysis as I ran out of time, but I'm thinking rather than changing the strain check, I'll give strain a different DC. This is because after doing the correct math, high level casters could still easily power high level spells.
So I still need to complete my analysis, but I only get to do that on weekends, but a pretty close value that I found and was refining was for strain DC to be (SL*5)+5.
I also figure that making a failure gain the SL in strain was a good idea.
Attacker has +6 atk with a broadsword with a d8 dmg and 4prc. (I'm just tossing out random stats that are each different for illustrative purposes)
The defender has +7 AC, +5 fort save (+2) with armor bonus (+3), 1 DR (half of +3 rounded down).
3d6 is the core roll and represented below as "CR."
So an atk goes like this, (npcs would use 10 in place of rolling)
Attacker CR + 6
Defender CR +7
If the attack hits,
Attacker rolls d8+str
Defender rolls CR +5(fort and armor) -WP (wound points)
If the damage fails against the save, the defender gains 1 wound point.
If the damage exceeds the save, then the defender both gains a WP, and rolls for injury.
The PC rolls this whether attacker or defender but it affects the defender only, CR +1(dr) -4(prc)
The result is checked on the injury table.
mm - I'm not sure that makes too much sense, though. Wouldn't that mean that although hitting harder (such as through higher strength) would make it harder for an opponent to avoid injury, how much it affects them only really has to do with the prc value of the weapon? Hitting them harder would guarantee that they take some WP (2, in my case with a bludgeoning weapon) and make it harder for them to avoid serious injury in the future (taking those WP as a penalty to the fort. save), but have very little immediate effect.
What if they took some penalty to the injury roll based off of how much they failed the fort. save? Such as taking half the difference between their result and the damage (minimum 1) when rolling for injuries?
For example, the opponent has a +5 fort save. I deal 21 damage, and they roll average for a final result of 15. 21 - 15 = 6 / 2 = 3, so they take a -3 when rolling for injury.
Well, I can see your point, but I don't really want it turn into high damage always being best option.
Another way to think of it is that a sword might cut you, but it is likely to pierce your heart than an arrow, particularly if wearing armor, in which you practically need a pick to get through unless you grapple them to the ground and slide a dagger through a weak point.
And I think I've hit the problem point.
A sword can sever a limb, if it is unarmored, but once armored, the sword will do nought but batter an opponent.
I want to avoid any math other than addition and subtraction, and possibly multiplication (though leaving this to prep time is preferable)
Perhaps I should flip the armor and DR bonuses, and reduce prc values for bludgeoning and energy types. A sword will then have a decent chance of slicing off a limb unless armored, do to high enough damage to get through the fort save and a moderate prc, but once an opponent has armor, that pick is suddenly very much needed despite the lower damage, so that if it does get through the fort save, it'll have best chance of causing injury.
The reason behind separating the two, aside from strategic variation, is that for example, a fireball is likely to burn the outside of the target, but is not likely to hit vitals. Likewise a stick will easily cause bruises and broken bones, but has nowhere near the same chance of hitting vital organs as an arrow, and yet the arrow does less overall damage. This is what I want to represent with a distinguishment between damage and piercing.
Anyway, switching the armor and dr bonuses, what do you think of that solution? Does it make sense? Do you think it still fits what I'm trying to represent?
PS, @Everybody, thanks for everything so far. I know it is slowing things down a bit but this is really helping and is exactly the sort of stuff I need. :)
I'm not exactly sure what you mean, sorry.
What if we found some way to combine the fortitude save and the injury roll? One problem we noticed at the beginning of the thread was that there is a lot of dice involved in attacking - would there be a way to combine the two?
We could add together all the modifiers for the fortitude save and the injury roll together, and then change those DCs you had for the injury roll to instead take effect based on how much you failed the save vs. damage.
The scaling penalties might seem more complicated, but I don't think more so than making 2 separate rolls.
I like the direction this new system is headed, and I want it to work - I'm trying to throw out ideas that, even if we don't use them, may inspire ideas that will work.
The reason they are separate rolls is to have that dynamic between battering an opponent and hurting something vital. Putting the fort save and injury into a single roll basically reverts back to the d20 equation of "high damage = always better" which I am trying to avoid.
For example, a sword can easily kill an unarmored person, but if they are wearing full plate than the sword is unlikely to do much to them, at which point you want to use a pick to pierce the armor even though the pick will glance off more often, or a hammer to hit with such force that it still hurts through the armor but will basically just batter the opponent through repeated blows rather than outright killing, or the poor man's solution of tripping the armored man, jumping on him and using a knife to slide between the layers of armor into a weak point.
The point being, I want different weapons to be better for different situations and opponents. But if the system boils down to where dealing higher damage is always the best way to win, then all players will use is just one weapon against everybody and damage becomes a premium thing to optimize.
In order to accomplish that I need at least two separate facets of a weapon's effect on the target that each are equally important to killing the target, and they need to be associated.
I could reduce to one roll with more complicated math, or lookup tables, but I'd rather avoid too many tables, and I really don't want to include division into the attack roll. I only have hit locations because one of the earliest versions of the game that I am still testing elsewhere is FoE, with which the players see hit locations as a big thing.
I am not really sure how else I could achieve that, how to make different weapons better for different foes, break apart the "high damage is always better" paradigm, and to keep math simple.
Using static DR and DR negation alone doesn't work, because of the ends of the scale. If DR is too high, then sometimes no damage occurs at all, or if the DR negation of one weapon is less than the damage improvement of another weapon, then that other weapon is is still better. Basically DR negation is just conditional bonus damage.
I am certainly still searching for another way to do this simpler. I just am not seeing a solution yet.
I see your point, and I think the character I made tries to do exactly what you were hoping to prevent - make damage the most important thing. Sorry :) after we sort this out I'd be happy to change it up, if you like.
I do think there just needs to be some relationship between damage and the injury roll though. The difference between the hulk punching you and a commoner punching you isn't just that it's harder to avoid being seriously damaged by the hulk (the fortitude save), but that when you fail that save you will also be significantly more harmed by that punch (the injury roll).
Bleh. Is anyone else having troubles with the Paizo website being down randomly?
Oh, thanks. I haven't been to the home page in a while, wouldn't hve known about it otherwise :)
Hmm, busy week filled with doctors and disappearing coworkers, and all kinds of fun. My apologies for the silence. Disorganization is a terrible thing for me. Severe lack of potassium as well. You should see the size of these pills. Interestingly, few supplements that have potassium are absorbable in any significant quantities. Makes me wonder what else is commonly taken as a supplement that isn't very absorbable. I already know calcium must be from corral to be readily absorbed, as far as artificial supplements go. Potassium deficiency can kill you btw. Not a nice thing to find out you have.
However, back on topic...
I think the hulk would have a higher size modifier, and size should definitely apply to the piercing value, it just doesn't come up very often. Now that I think about it, I forgot that d20 uses static size modifiers rather than relative modifiers, so that means size must be applied to both sides.
In any case, I feel like I'm forgetting something here. I'll go back through and see if I can find something I missed, or someone can post if they think I'm missing something (I already know I am missing some marbles, so no need to tell me that. :D )
Now that I really think about it, d20 sizes are kinda messed up. A three size difference has different total modifiers depending on which sizes they are, anywhere from -3 to -14.
I didn't mean it in that way. I meant that the mechanical difference between two sizes changes depending on how those sizes relate to medium size.
For example, medium to tiny favors tiny by 2 points, but small to diminutive favors diminutive by 3 points, and tiny to fine favors fine by 6 points, yet each pair have the same difference in size relative to each other.
Hi! Welcome back!
Sorry I haven't posted.
I still have my doubts, but I'm willing to give this a try before asking for more changes.
I think I'm ready for play - what needs to be resolved for the magic system?
Movin, have you figured out what you're playing yet?
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Hi there!
I was perusing this thread, and I just wanted to chime in with one of the above problems. As far as the effects that different weapons have.
I may be missing something here, but it seems that there is already a solution, and it's built in to the existing PF equipment, and is really a similar take to something that Balder's Gate has: That is, the three weapon types have different values vs. armor worn. (This is a complicated mechanic, but you seem to be going for more realistic vs. more simple.)
Simply, there are three types of weapons: Slashing, piercing, bludgeoning. Slashing does a lot of damage vs. unarmored, but gets reduced due to the intrinsic surface area. Piercing does roughly the same amount of low damage regardless of armored vs not, and bludgeoning is better against armor due the mass of the weapon (which is why King Baratheon used a hammer. =)
Hence, in might be a little more work, but you could even go so far as to have three different tables to roll for damage/injury, each one of which is cross referenced vs AC of target. (This sounds like a lot, but it's not. It might just be literally 3 columns of numbers. =)
Hope that helps! =)
Sorry, I have been out of touch haven't I.
I do plan on continuing. I apologize though for being so slow. Time for me can easily pass without notice (one of my autistic traits) and I've been borderline maxed out recently.
I wil post a recap tonight of the rules to be played with including the magic.
I went ahead and made the campaign. I'll start putting the houserules in the campaign tab. It'll take me time to get it all in there though. Phone is a very poor typing device.
It looks like you have a monk and a mage. We need a divine. I love warpreists, so how about that? Would they get the same bonuses vs. Complexity and drain as clerics?
You'll see more once I get the magic adjustments up in the campaign thread.
But for the moment, your MB is 3/4 since you only cast up to 6th lvl spells.
+2 strain or complexity depends on whether you choose spontaneous or prepared casting, which may be different than what the class normally does as you get to choose whether to be spontaneous or prepared.
What an excellent idea!
:)
I forgot they don't appear automagically.
Nearly there with the putting the rules in the campaign tab. I have already needed to adjust what was written, so extra eyes always helps. As always, questions or comments are welcome.
Recruitment is not closing, so additional players are welcome to join.