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"That's about what I thought," says Tana, cracking her knuckles before lunging forward and swinging for Parsley with her dominant hand.
Her fingers drawing tracks into the ground, Tana rises from her position on the floor, kicking off the ground hard as she hurtles forward much faster than a girl her size has a right to. Picking on Parsley, she tries to angle her arms around the umbrella, pick the girl up and sweep her legs.
"Come on, Princess," Tana grunts, her arms straining as she grips the edge of Parsley's dress. "Fall down."
Tana smiles lopsidedly at Sorzar. "I'm never going to live that down, am I?"
Tana crouches like a track runner as the field comes up, her Semblance slowly swimming into being as she cracks her neck. "So greenie?" She asks Onyxia. "I should still be able to cover some ground. She looks pretty small. I think I can pin her and you can wail on her."
Tana stands and winces a little, putting her hand back to her stomach before cracking her neck and flexing her wrists. "I'll try to dogpile on them with one of you. I'm still hurt, but I should be able to get some hits in if we work together." She gazes at the girls and umbrellas, sizing them up, and quietly concluding "Well, at least I'm bigger than they are."
Just gonna repost my thoughts from the Team CASE thread here for discussion purposes: So upfront: The book looks great and your redesign is awesome. The only thing that bugs me is that the background image for each page cuts off slightly before the margin at the left side. Otherwise that looks awesome. I'll go through and check for typos and stuff, since I imagine there are still some left over from my draft, but it definitely looks good and reads easy. Aura: still a fan of this method of aura soaking and the changes you've made to it are a dramatic improvement in terms of quality of life and game balance. No real complaints. I'm fine with starting off with a single use of your shielding as it still lets you stack your defenses. 2 x rank seems excessive (legendary characters with a large enough power pool could soak well over 100 points of damage), but I'd be fine with 1 + rank as well for fine tuning purposes. It also doesn't feel like it will just turn combat into a slog of hitting each other over and over until someone finally runs out of Aura, which was my other big concern. An aside about HP:
I hate hit points in the vast majority of systems and attempts to fix hit points are usually either unfun or unbalanced. I realized pretty early on that RWBY is one of the only settings where HP is explicitly more appropriate--they even use hit meters in the Vytal Festival Tournament for crying out loud--but it's still no fun for me as a GM. Without wounds or some other measurable depreciation of your character's abilities, hit points just feel like an arbitrary number and sufficiently large numbers of them turn any game into a slog. This is my biggest complaint with DnD, particularly for melee characters.
Some other d20 games (the Stargate adaptation of all things comes to mind) try to get around this with your arbitrary hit points functioning as "luck" or whatever and you only have a handful of vitality points that actually matter when you lose them. In a lot of ways that probably would have been the best system for Remnant, but... Then we would have to make up everything else. :) Semblance: Okay, you and I obviously don't see eye to eye on how semblances work, but your method is vastly superior on game balance, so I'm okay with it. I still feel some type of way about it (how would you stat Yang? Warrior's Gift giving her the Don't Git 'im Riled edge from Deadlands is the closest I can see without use of power triggers or modifiers from the Superpowers Companion) but balance does have to be taken into account and there were some potentially game-breaking uses of Semblance with the original system (nothing *truly* broken until you could stack powers--but by Veteran somebody could have taken, say, Quickness/Intangibility, taken a hold on the first action, attacked and then disappeared and been untouchable every round as long as they could make a basic spirit check) so something had to give there. I'm still mulling this one over as I'm fairly attached to modifiers, but this wins on playability by a mile. Weapons: This probably needs the most tweaking. I am not a fan of a base damage of 2d8 for ranged weapons, I would support that being a 4 point weapon mod (calling it, say, Loaded for Bear or Heavy Rifling, and bringing the Extra Damage mod down to 3 points). I'm also not a fan of medium range for free. It seems a little too heavily weighted to ranged combat right now. Melee combat should be advantageous in some ways (damage, edges) but the tradeoff is that you are in range of Grimm, which tend to be deadly in close quarters. (I think I brought this up during recruitment, but honestly if Remnant didn't run on Rule of Cool, everybody would be a sniper and nobody would ever fight Grimm up close. Like, seriously, why would you? That's my justification for leaning a little more heavily on melee weapons) I don't honestly care for Universal Mods either. It seems a little too easy right now to build a ranged character, spend all of their melee points on universal mods and get a super-sniper for low cost (there's also nothing stopping me from taking every negative melee mod and then dumping the points back into Universal Edges that benefit my ranged weapon. In effect I could have a primary ranged weapon with 13 points of universal mods from my secondary melee form and just never switch). Balancing each form separately seems to make things a little easier. I'm going to mull weapons over and try to figure out a middle ground there. Overall, big fan of everything and fine with it all except the weapon balance changes. Thanks for putting in the elbow grease, Rungok. :)
Tana swaps out of the Beacon uniform. It was a little tight on her anyway, getting back into her casual Atlas clothes and slipping Mors Tua and Vita Mea back onto her wrists. She changes fast, but looks markedly more comfortable when she comes back out of the locker room, rolling her neck and cracking her knuckles. "Reporting as ordered, ma'am," she says to Glynda.
Tana fights the battle of a trained soldier experiencing death by lecture. One half of her is fighting with every trick she knows to stay awake, the other half is constantly trying to grab a second of sleep whenever she can. The end result is her half head-banging as she nods off, sits up straight, then nods off again...
Tana stops at the top of her rep, giving a small smile to Beoh's compliment. "Thanks, big guy. You too." She says, resting her elbows on her knees for a second before standing up and dusting off the seat of her pants as her scroll dings. "Nine AM? That's not so bad." "Stories?" Tana says blankly, considering. Her face lights up slightly in reflection. "...I threw a Beowolf off a cliff on a camping trip with my dad once."
"Hey, we're teammates now," Says Tana. "If anybody tries to mess with any of you, for any reason--" she glances at Onyxia's tail "--They've gotta deal with me. Bad luck aside, I'm big and I can throw my weight around." "You sound like you're a lot better at social strategy than me," She continues in response to Onyxia's tail plan. "Let's just hope it doesn't turn out to be that big of a deal. But yeah, the Atlas Girl Scout in me says prepare for the worst." She tucks the last of her laundry into her dresser before falling sideways off her bunk in a well-practiced movement and landing in a push-up position. "Can't be too careful," she says, without breaking form. She'll chat back, banging out reps for another minute or two before switching to a painful looking set of situps.
"Sorry," Tana says, flushing a little. "It was when you grabbed me when I was falling. I saw when you set me down. I don't like, mind," she says awkwardly. "I won't uh, out you, if that's a thing?" "Well, I don't know if it's gonna be as bad as all that," says Tana, neatly folding another set of T-shirts, serenely ignoring the construction noises settling in above her. "But the culture shock here's bad enough for me, and I'm only from Atlas. I figure most students here are tough enough to look out for themselves--even Sorzar. " She glances up as the bed gives another shake and subtly shakes her head at Onyxia's ingenuity.
"I'll take the bottom bunk," she says, sticking up another poster. "I don't really..." She coughs. "I don't know much about faunus, uh, stuff. Is he really territorial just 'cause he's a wolf?" She glances over. "I mean, you're... a... uh...Caaaa...?" Her eyes glance downward. "Squir...? Uhhh..." "Moving right along," she says, and coughs. "I'm more worried about the village berserker thing. Did you see the way he looked at Sorzar when they named him leader?" She cracks her neck, glancing at the door. "I mean, I can probably put him in a headlock, but I'm not feeling a hundred and ten-percent." She sits down heavily on the bed, holding her stomach and wincing as she folds a shirt.
"What, you minded? I didn't." Says Tana, smirking. But she does nod. "It's weird. We never had co-ed rooms in combat school. I guess the mission comes first now that we're going to be real huntresses." She tries to keep her face neutral, but grins a little at the end with excitement. When they reach the room, she sets her bag heavily down on the bottom bunk. "Sounds good. Do they make the boys come later, or...?" She muses, while unpacking and putting up a couple of posters on the wall of the bottom bunk--Atlas Propaganda ("The Atlesian Knight 130 - HE KEEPS YOU SAFE") and weapon specs mostly ("New Rotating Dust Chambers - Optimal Performance and Elegance - From Schnee Dust Company"). A bigger picture goes close to the pillow of the bed - her family, all together, with a much younger and smaller Tana. Glancing around furtively, she lifts it up, taping a much smaller picture of an athletic looking boy underneath it and flipping the picture of her family back down over it.
Thanks Rungok :) I'm super happy I get to be a player character too! And thanks to everyone for putting up with me being a slow ass updating over the holidays. ;)
Dot! And no worries, Paizo occasionally glitches. If it persists, their tech support team usually gets back to you pretty fast. :)
Tana mutters to Onyxia darkly, "I haven't ruled it out yet." Still wincing from embarassment, she smiles in spite of herself at Sorzar. "Thanks, but I mostly got my ass kicked. Worse than not looking cool, I figure." She nods along as he gestures to everyone. "Hear, hear. But I didn't figure you for a girl." She gives another wry smile, hitching up her pants past the stitches. "Then again, you are prettier than me."
"I'll be fine, I'll be fine," says Tana, wincing a little as the wound is disinfected and then significantly more so as Oobleck begins to stitch her up. "Those guys were a+##&!#s, but they were outnumbered. I'm sure everyone's alright." As the rest of the group comes up the hill and Oobleck shouts about her wounds for everyone to hear, her face abruptly heats up and goes red and splotchy. "Sweet merciful general, somebody kill me now," she mutters, her eyes lighting on Beoh and Sorzar.
"I mean, I win," says Tana, sliding off of Onyxia's back and holding up the half-orb, still grinning, before wobbling and then sliding down to take a knee next to Onyxia. "I don't think they knew about the spider. Professor, you said they all ran off, right?" She stretches back, her muscles visibly straining as she guides herself down to sit on the grass. "And I'll be alright, I think, nnnngh..." Her eyes roll back in visible pain, but she steadies herself with a couple of deep breaths. By the way... Thanks." She says after a long pause, to Onyxia. "I'm not used to being carried. I'll try not to make it a habit."
"Somebody please punch him in the face," mutters Tana, still leaning against a tree and clutching her lower stomach, doing her best to hear what's going on down in the hole. "If you get me a branch or something, I think I can still limp up there myself." She pulls the orb she grabbed earlier from inside her pocket and gives a lopsided smile. "See? Passing marks."
"Thanks," Tana manages to choke out before half-collapsing against Beoh, then slumping the other way to lean against a tree for support as Beoh steps toward the pit. "Rah. Kick its ass." Her eyes never quite focus, and she groggily plugs her stomach wound with her hand.
At this point I think she owes Onyxia her life at least three times lmao
Frowning at the unmoved grizzly, Tana shakes her head. "No, no, this is the part where you..."
"...Fall, down! Fall down! Fall down, fall down, fall down!" She shouts, getting increasingly more frantic as the huge beast still refuses to budge.
Yeah no this is why I shouldn't make IC posts after a couple beers. Tana has the Takedown edge which is RWBY specific, but it's an opposed Fighting roll, not based on a flat TN--and if it was based on Parry she would have lost. Unless the bear rolls terribly when I update I'll make it clear that didn't make the Ursa prone. I don't have access to my docs right now, but there's an updated version of the SWD errata that says you only need a success to act normally for your round. Since that's the newest ruling, I usually default to that one (although it makes Combat Reflexes really OP). I'll dig that up when I get home.
:
"Thanks for the save," Tana says to Onyxia, standing up and cracking her neck. "And you're right. I'm ready for the main course."
Tana ducks low and sprints, shifting her weight down and sliding between the paws of the Ursa major as it pounds on Sorzar's clone. Grabbing one of the huge rear legs, you hear "Let me show you how we do things up north." The Ursa goes sliding in a half circle on its side as she twists, locking the leg up and throwing the bear onto its back. "Get it while it's down!"
Tana stiffens up from the hit, doing her best to roll with the motion of the massive paw and land without getting any more wounded than she already is.
Despite being covered in splinters and rolling a few feet along the ground, she smiles up at the others. "'M okay," she mumbles before the ground shakes and she shrugs it off. She reaches over, grabbing one of the rolling artifacts as the ground tilts and gets to her feet, trying to jump from the collapsing area.
"I'm fine," says Tana, standing up and cracking her back. The faint glow of a uniform floats over the rest of her clothes, completing the look of an Atlas student. "Thanks for the save," she says, nodding before turning and with blazing speed tearing into the trees to hit whatever Grimm is waiting.
As the students are brought down to the edges of the cliff, she tries to look off into the distance but can't see much. She observes Ozpin and Glynda sharply, her hands behind her back in full parade rest. "Right into it, then," mutters Tana, flipping the safeties on her bracers and crouching into a low southpaw stance. As she goes flying into the air, she starts to snap punches that activate the bolt of her weapons, spraying a three-round burst into the trees to slow her fall.
Once she lands, she tries for a moment to get her bearings, looking around for the altar and trying not to be distracted by the sounds of gunshots in the distance.
Tana can't see much, and shakes her head to clear it before crouching down low, putting her weapons into melee mode, and starting to activate her semblance. Her muscles tense, her eyes sharpen, and the very faint glowing outline of an Atlesian uniform begins to take shape on top of her regular clothes.
"...Me neither," Tana quietly mutters to Tora, smirking. Then, a minute later, as Beoh leaves, she mutters "Too bad." She dips low, resuming her pushups at full-force for another thirty seconds before standing and windmilling her arm as she holds her shoulder, wincing slightly. She undoes the latch on top of her duffel bag with an audible pop, and reaches in, digging around until she finds a set of pajamas and heads over to change as well.
Tana shrugs off her bracers and set them down heavily next to her pack on her cot. Wringing her wrists out, she stretches for a moment, surveying the room before falling into a forward leaning rest and starting to crank out pushups, breathing steadily with every rep. At the top of the fortieth, she stops, her gaze coming directly in line with Beoh slipping his thumbs into the waistband of his pants across the room. She takes a heavy breath in through her nose, flushing red and descending on her next rep very slowly and watching.
"Well, yeah," she says back to Shamrock. "But by the time they get to our age, they usually cool down." She fishes the rank insignia back out of her pocket. It's red, encased in silver, with two short stripes. "Then again, I don't think we like uh... Being individuals as much as Vale does." She shrugs. "You two seem down to earth," she says, "And she--" gesturing to the girl dressed all in blue, "--Seems quiet, so I think I'll get along okay." "Ah! Well, good to know," Tana says to Carmine, eyeing the staff and noting the joints and seams. "And that looks amazing. Especially with a third mode! Melee, mid range and long range?" She leans back into his conspiratory whisper. "You'll have to show me those specs. I'm pretty good at repairing but I don't build much from scratch." She nods appreciatively at Shamrock's weapon as well. "Maybe I need an upgrade..." She muses, looking down at her bracers and inspecting them carefully.
I guess with a PBP part of the experience is embracing that it moves a lot slower. Which can be frustrating when you're inspired and want to have your RP right now, but it's really nice for long narratives and doing more complicated stuff. I think I just got confused because you had the greeting and then the goodbye in the same post and that made it harder for me to understand what you were getting at. My bad. No worries though, this is all part of the learning curve. :)
Tana's frown deepens considerably at Onyxia's onslaught, although she's still maintaining a careful, outward politeness. "I'm from Atlas," she says once the questions abate for a second. "My dad's a Colonel. And the point of a mass-produced weapon isn't necessarily so everyone can use it all the time--it's so everybody knows how to use it if they need to. If your weapon breaks fighting Grimm in Atlas, you can always find another Px39a. Although I hear they're working on some kind of new model..." By the time she finishes, the faunus (cat?) girl is already saying her goodbyes and moving away. Tana sighs, waving awkwardly. "Okay, later." She masks a snort with a cough at Beoh's statement, taking note of his eyes and solid build. Sparring partner? At the stop, she nods back to Shamrock, who seems like the least excitable person she's met so far. "Yes, I'm from Atlas. My mom went here, though." She glances around, making sure Onyxia and Sorzar aren't too close before quietly asking "Are you from here? Is everybody in Vale this hyper?" "Good eye," she says, nodding to Carmine. "Right on all counts--these are modded from H102s, actually. I prefer having something in both hands, and I'm big enough to handle the recoil." She flushes after a half a second. "Sorry. Weapon nerd."
A tallish woman sits next to Sorzar on the flight over. Her white clothes and their girlish cuts contrast heavily with her dark skin and muscular figure. Atop it all, her blue hair (neatly kept in a bun, with the sides shaved) and blue eyes look down on the Faunus' warmly-tinged hair and ears. Outwardly, she's polite, nodding and "mmhmm"ing along to Sorzar's string of chatter, but by the end of the flight, her face is loudly and clearly reading "Please, no more". A white military duffel bag, marked "ATLAS ACADEMY, T. KAZAKH" in a black stencil sits on the seat next to her. Her forearms are covered in two heavy charcoal gray bracers, the tips of barrels just faintly protruding past her wrists. When she's not crossing her arms, tapping her fingers into her biceps in mild irritation, she fiddles with them, or glances meaningfully down at them and across at Sorzar's oblivious chatter before thinking better of it. Tana's no nonsense demeanor does evaporate as Beacon comes into view. The forest holds little interest to her, but the high ramparts of the Academy and long winding sidewalks, to say nothing of the city off in the distance do at last crack through her frown. She smiles a little, pressing wistfully up against the glass for a moment before Sorzar's chatter cuts the illusion for her again. She grimaces, picking up her duffel bag and putting on the backstraps. As she listens to Glynda's speech, and the two new teacher's introductions, she suddenly realizes she pushed her way to the front of the group too. She sighs and glances back, realizing she should have let someone in front and given her a buffer. "Tana Kazakh," she responds to the fox's question. "Junior Huntsman First Class... Vale probably doesn't do that, do they?" She glances down at a small rank insignia pinned to her collar, then pulls it off and stows it in her pocket.
@Rungok: Take a look at Tana's profile at some point since I swapped out her edges. :) |