Kara Swiftblade's page

Notice & Wild: 1d6 ⇒ 21d6 ⇒ 1

"Can anyone tell if it's heading at us?"

Common Knowledge & Wild: 1d4 ⇒ 11d6 ⇒ 1

"Anyone recognize what kind of creature that is, maybe what its attacks and weaknesses are?"

EltonJ - for those of us who can't afford 14+ RIFTS New West books, perhaps when a new race(?) like "Child of the Desert" appears, could you give us a short physical description of them, along with any common knowledge about them that our PC's would be sure to know (that is, doesn't require a Common Knowledge roll)? Thanks!

Do they react to us in any way when they see us?

We hit the road...anything of interest happen?

Kara wakes up in the morning, and eats some of the trail rations she brought with her. She greets the others as they wake up. Once everyone's done eating, she says "Well, shall we get on with it?"

According to a previous post, Frankie Faro.

This is just a minor point, but if you get a bonus on your "regular" roll, like a +1 from an Edge, and either dice Aces, you do *not* add the bonus to the Ace re-roll - because the bonus has already been incorporated into the initial roll.

Kara wakes up, quickly assesses the situation, and says "It doesn't seem to be attacking us! Maybe if we make loud noises and wave our arms at it, it could be scared away?"

Just to be on the safe side, she activates her suit and sword (as Free Actions).

You all see a suit of dark-red metal appear around her, and two swords appear in her hands.

EltonJ?

EltonJ - let's say we set up a watch order, but leave it unspecified. If something does happen during the night, you can roll a d5 to see alphabetically who was on duty at the time. Sound good?

"I agree. It might be intelligent, and no sense in killing an intelligent creature unless it tries to kill us first."

Is it heading towards us? I assume with a Raise, Malachi saw it when it was pretty far off? How many rounds until it is close enough to attack?

"We'll travel along, singing a song, side by side..."
What happens next?

"Orrin, what is the value of that device? Is it just its age? Do you care if it works, or would you rather leave it as-is? Would tampering with it reduce its value?"

"Ok, so let's go with your idea of having an agent meet us at Cill Onchen to pay us. Who do we deliver it to, and where would we find them? Is there anything else we need to know?"

Can anybody else come up with a payment method that doesn't require one side to blindly trust the other?

"What guarantee would we have that we could sell it for 200,000 credits, and that it's not some worthless piece of junk? I'm not trying to be difficult, it's just that you can't seem to offer us a mutually agreeable payment method. I know trust is something that takes time to be earned, but we've got to come up with something that satisfies everyone.

The only solution I can think of is that you accompany us, and pay us once we've delivered the seeds. Any problem with that?"

Kara says to Orrin "So, you want to tell us *why* you're offering so many credits for such a small haul? And what guarantee do we have that you'll send the credits to our accounts after delivery, if you're not with us?"

EltonJ - given what our characters know of this world, is so much money typical for such a small haul, or not? As a player, I have no idea...

Kara looks at Orrin and says "So how do we handle the transaction? Half now, half on delivery, or are you coming with us and can pay us when we deliver the goods?"

So, how do "credits" work in-game? Do we all have electronic wallets that can transfer funds to and from each other, or is there a network of banks, etc.?

P.S. - I just checked, and in the previous version of SW ("SWD"), Persuasion was *not* an Opposed Roll, so my thinking may have just been a holdover from that, which I played for 6 years...

Frank - just FYI, you can roll two dice at once and not add the results together by typing :
{dice=Persuasion & Wild}d6; d6{/dice}
(with the braces replaced with brackets) which looks like :
Persuasion & Wild: 1d6 ⇒ 41d6 ⇒ 4

Reddit confirms that it's the first interpretation, so yeah - anyone who is trying to *be* persuaded gets an Opposed Spirit roll. I've been playing SWADE a lot over the past five years, and never realized that!

So, in theory the group should have a "defensive Face", but you can only increase *any* Attribute die once per Rank (so only five times over the life of a PC), and you're definitely going to want to increase some Attributes other than Spirit.

So unless your initial build has a high Spirit (which would be *very* detrimental to many other aspects of the character), it'd be really hard to get a high Spirit over time.

That line comes from page 33 of SWADE. The line itself is referring to the Support rules on page 106.

Support is an action where a character doesn't actually do anything against their opponent directly, but makes a roll in order to (hopefully) add a bonus to *another* character's direct roll.

So if Kara was the one trying to Persuade the merchant, and Frankie was trying to help her, his massive roll would add a +2 bonus to her roll.

But since Frankie was trying to influence the merchant directly himself, this was definitely *not* a "Support" situation.

However, the wording of Frankie's quote is unclear. Is it two separate situations :

1. When used to Support allies (page 106) it's an unopposed roll.
2. If (in an ordinary situation) the target is resistant, it's an opposed roll vs. the target's Spirit.

Or is the second sentence referring to the first sentence :

1. When used to Support allies (page 106) it's an unopposed roll.
2. (When used to Support allies,) if the target is resistant, it's an opposed roll vs. the target's Spirit.

If it's the first scenario, then I've been doing Persuasion wrong for years!

I'm going to make a quick post on Reddit for clarification.

Persuasion is a non-opposed roll, which means the "persuader" just rolls their die and looks at the result.

Note that Persuasion isn't mind control, it just changes the "attitude" of the target.

Years ago, after getting some on-line feedback from some expert SW players and one of the system developers, I created a one-page write-up about Persuasion which the dev said was ok. You can read it HERE.

So, no "defensive Face".

Frankie - SW doesn't have "classes" of PC's which act like Faces. Anyone who's put Skill Points into Persuasion would have the best chance of negotiating the price of the job up, if that's what's you're thinking. Taking an Edge like Charismatic (or a couple of others) would probably make that PC the official "face" of the group.
But since Persuasion starts at d4 for "free" at character creation, any of us has a shot at persuasion - in theory, at least.

Kara comes over and shakes Orrin's hand after Agate does and says "Hey, Orrin, I'm Kara. We're new to these parts, what kind of dangers are there between here and Cill Onchon? What direction is it from here? And are there any trails from here to there? Sorry, I've had a lot of coffee this morning..."

Kara has been observing Agate, and hears the conversation between the stranger and Julian. She jumps into the conversation :

"What do you need delivered? And to who? And where are they?" she rattles off the questions quickly, probably from the four cups of coffee she's had.

Kara, wanting to meet new people, goes down to the dining room as soon as it starts serving breakfast. Having been eating trail rations for over a week, she first orders scrambled eggs and coffee, and when she finishes them she orders pancakes, and then bacon, in order to extend her stay in the room. Afterwards, she continues to order coffee and sips it slowly.

If anyone comes in that she doesn't recognize from yesterday, she will introduce herself, ask what they do for a living and make general small talk.

The web pages I found that referenced small cones all seem to be third-party materials. I don't think "standard" SWADE has smaller cone sizes.

But, along the way I did find some alternatives to the SWADE constant "number of people affected by templates" when using theater-of-the-mind :

SBT: d3
Cone/MBT: 2d4
LBT: 2d6

Which makes more sense to me than the small constants in SWADE. I mean, an LBT covers 113 square inches, and it can hit at most 4 people???

"Well, I started fighting rift monsters after my entire family was killed by ome. So I vowed to protect as many other families as I possibly could by killing as many monsters as I could.

More recently, I've gotten kind of burned-out working on my own for so long, and thought I'd try to find some like-minded people to work with against these monsters."

Meanwhile, in the hotel, Kara has taken her bath and is now eating in the dining room along with Julian.

"So - what's your story? What brought you to New Salt Lake?"

EltonJ - is this a small town, mid-sized town, big town, or big city? Maybe in terms of population?

Ha, I just looked and they all cost several million credits...how does anyone afford any of that stuff during play?

Welcome to RIFTS - where you can't afford to buy anything, unless its included in your PC build! :(

Or are there some books that aren't essential for a player to have in order to enjoy the game?

Kara follows Julian and asks the manager how much a single room would cost per night, and if they offer hot baths (and for how much). Overhearing Julian's conversation about the food, she asks if there is a specific serving time or if it's available for the rest of the afternoon.

Adalphorius hasn't posted in 9 days, and Bashag in 15 days. Is a 2 PC team going to work? Maybe open recruitment again? I'm GM'ing 3 games, and in another RIFTS game, I could make posts in those to see if anyone's interested...

"Yes, and let's see if we can find a local who can fill us in on the rift situation here."

"Well, that was interesting - what next? Any of you found a place to stay in this town?"

Now that I've thought about it some more, I suppose I could roll a single d10 and add its value in again manually, like :
Damage: 1d6 + 1d10 ⇒ (3) + (5) = 8+5 = 13
It's just going to be tedious with 4 rolls to make each attack.

So...Adalphorius and Kara are up!

Activating Boost Trait/Spirit as a Free Action :
Psionics & Wild: 1d10 ⇒ 21d6 ⇒ 5 = Success; Spirit is d10

Attacking : 2 actions (Two-Handed, Ambidextrous) with 2 attacks each (Imp. Frenzy)
Fighting#1 & Wild: 1d12 + 2 ⇒ (1) + 2 = 31d6 + 2 ⇒ (3) + 2 = 5 = 5
Fighting#2 & Wild: 1d12 + 2 ⇒ (2) + 2 = 41d6 + 2 ⇒ (6) + 2 = 8
Wild ACE!: 1d6 ⇒ 6
Wild ACE! ACE!: 1d6 ⇒ 3 = 17
Fighting#3 & Wild: 1d12 + 2 ⇒ (12) + 2 = 141d6 + 2 ⇒ (4) + 2 = 6
Fighting ACE!: 1d12 ⇒ 5 = 19
Fighting#4 & Wild: 1d12 + 2 ⇒ (9) + 2 = 111d6 + 2 ⇒ (5) + 2 = 7 = 11

Doing :

Damage#1: 1d6 + 2d10 ⇒ (5) + (8, 3) = 16
Extra d6 if Fighting#1 is a Raise: 1d6 ⇒ 2

Damage#2: 1d6 + 2d10 ⇒ (3) + (1, 2) = 6
Extra d6 if Fighting#2 is a Raise: 1d6 ⇒ 1

Damage#3: 1d6 + 2d10 ⇒ (1) + (1, 2) = 4
Extra d6 if Fighting#3 is a Raise: 1d6 ⇒ 3

Damage#4: 1d6 + 2d10 ⇒ (2) + (5, 6) = 13
Extra d6 if Fighting#4 is a Raise: 1d6 ⇒ 6
Raise ACE!: 1d6 ⇒ 2 = 8

NOTE : I cannot get the dicebot to roll "2*d10" - that's what I have typed in the above, and it treats it like "2d10". I have posted a question to Paizo's General Discussion asking for help, but for now this will have to do.

9 ISP

FWIW, I usually tell everyone with a higher initiative than the bad guys that they can post their actions in any order.
After they've done that, I post the actions for the bad guys.
Then I tell everyone with a lower initiative than the bad guys that they can post their actions in any order.
It helps speed up the game IRL, but also applies any potential new states (Wounds, Shaken, etc.) to those who come after the bad guys in initiative order.

Agility & Wild: 1d6 ⇒ 51d6 ⇒ 1 = 5

"Hey, this shouldn't be too tough. Let's attack!"

Running up to it, Kara swishes her swords around a little bit.

Waiting for initiative...

How big is it? Lion-sized, or larger?

As Kara runs out of the bar, she activates her Cyber-Knight armor and sword, with a blade appearing in each hand. Both are a rich, dark, metallic red.

"I'm ready - let's go!" Kara follows Adalphorius

Have we lost Faustus? He hasn't posted in two weeks...

Faustus, Bashag, feel free to chime in...

"I've gotten kind of burned-out working on my own for so long. You guys want to team up and hunt some monsters together?"

"My entire family was killed by a rift monster. So I vowed to protect as many other families as I possibly could by killing as many monsters as I could."