Tarik Blackhands's page

Mortal Harvest actually can do a not insignificant amount of work if you build for it. Pick up an energized spark or two and you can tag a person with multiple types of persistent damage. I haven't crunched the numbers since it frankly looks like a nightmare to calculate, but if you do that the damage becomes a lot more palatable compared to the other basic immenence effects.

I'm not debating why Paizo needed to remove them. I just wonder why other properties get a pass. Elder Scrolls have dark elves, also, and Final Fantasy 14 has creatures called Mind Flayers (the last patch introduced a furnishing item based on one with their name as well, even). Is it the FORM of media, being a ttrpg, that makes Paizo exceptionally vulnerable?

Square I think gets away with it because of the pain of litigating something with extremely deep pockets and in another country. Plus the fact they've been using those things for ages now with varying degrees of serial numbers filed off. Just easier to bully smaller companies that can't handle the court fees.

I think the best way to handle stats for PF3 would be like lancer, just with human centric stats instead of mech centric ones. In Lancer, there are 4 stats, Hull, which boosts hp and repairs, Agility, which boosts evasion and speed, systems which boosts hacking, hacking resilience, and how many systems you can put onto your mech, and Engineering, which boosts how much heat you can take and how often you can use powerful systems. Each stat also has its own save and checks, but none of them effect your normal attack rolls. In lancer, all mechs have a reason to take every stat, so its actually a build choice. While the bulky Balor may want Hull to be even bulkier, it is also a slow melee frame, so it wants Agility, and it has some cool hacking options, so systems would be nice, and its low heat cap leaves it susceptible to a lot on hacking options, so both systems and Engineering can help there. A balor that went all in on Hull will be a unstoppable killing machine... if it can reach you before it can over heat it. Maybe you dump agility and use other systems and abilities to move around, or use hacking to move your enemies' to you. Perhaps you focus all in on systems, ignoring hull as your natural bulk protects you, and hoping the hostile hacker doesn't roll a nat 20. Theres so much more interesting and complex than "I invested everything into Hull because I need to do that to hit anything, and then I invested the rest into agility so I don't die. Now I get to decide if I want a +1 to engineering or systems."

I'm as much of a Lancer shill as the next guy, but even there you still run into the fact that some stats just are better than others. Maxing (or getting close to it) Hull is essentially a requirement simply because enemy damage scaling is that brutal and relying on stuff like dodge, invisibility, or (god help you) armor are far too unreliable to act as surrogates. Conversely Systems comes closest to being the Int of the system. Sure everyone enjoys extra SP to play with but at the end of the day only dedicated hackers really enjoy the investment in addition to the fact that hostile hacks or smart weapons aren't anywhere near as common as the physical attacks. That's also not mentioning most frames have at least one stat that's basically useless for their general builds (won't catch a Barbarossa taking Sys or Agi).

It's a good thought but as the saying goes, the cream rises to the top and even fairly well balanced games with minimal stats can't avoid having some more equal than others (1e 7th Sea is another example of this, all stats have their place and are desirable by all, but Panache sits atop the throne as the best one).

Temperans wrote:

A good and pure character accidentally reading the book of the damned will turn evil. The same character can then turn back to good if they keep on going in their merry way ignoring all the bad stuff they just read.

Ah, the power of bad role-playing:

GM: "Dark magic suffuses your very soul. You were Neutral? You are now Evil. You despise all that is good and pure and yearn only to hurt and kill."
Player: "Then I will start doing good deeds."

"Anyway Frodo you have chosen to bear the One Ring, a terrible artifact of unparalleled evil whose mere presence corrupts the most stalwar"

"Blah, blah whatever Gandalf I choose to not care about that and carry on as normal"

Ah, the power of bad roleplaying as they say.

The thing that always gets me about GM v Player mentality is that the whole thing just doesn't work on a premise level.

The GM wins. Every time. Players have finite resources to do their builds and twist and munchkin as you may, you're never going to beat the guy who has infinite resources if he actually did decide he wants "win" the whole charade, that's the whole joke behind "rocks fall, everyone dies".

Every GM wants you to succeed, with varying degrees of ease on the player side. If they wanted players to die, they'd be dead.

Tarik Blackhands wrote:

Honestly the hardest part for me was parsing the rulebook. Lord does 2e crb have layout problems...

I know it's tangential, but I've been seeing that comment over the past few years and I always want to ask, what's a good layout for RPG's then?

My gold standard for layouts these days is Lancer (and resets my general counter for shilling for Lancer here). Fantastic layout, extremely clean, and very diegetic for new folks. You couldn't straight port the style to PF, but still.

At least for me its not the language that's the issue, it's all organizational. Feats and spells being arranged alphabetically rather than by level, needing to flip between the various appendices to parse out conditions or focus spells, stuff along those lines. All a massive hassle if you're using a book or pdf and makes learning the system horrifically tedious.

Honestly the hardest part for me was parsing the rulebook. Lord does 2e crb have layout problems...

Opsylum wrote:

Kyonin was only repopulated by Sovyrian because Treerazer posed a direct threat to them.

A threat which is more appropriately and effectively addressed by dispatching four to six high-level adventurers (whether to assassinate Treerazer or to smash the Sovyrian Stone) than by setting up a fortress kingdom around the latter.

But then players wouldn't have those tasty plot hooks and we can't have that.

I'll just pop in again to say the crb layout could be better*.

*Choice of words here is to reflect the thread title for respectful criticism, this user's actual opinion on the crb layout is much more vitriolic.

The CRB layout. Dear god that layout. If you want something to singlehandedly kill the average player's interest in learning the game, just tell them to read that sucker.

To this day I remain baffled how that thing managed to pass through editors and the playtest and get published with no one saying "Gee this thing is kind of a pain to read through" and the other side saying "You are correct, go fix that"

Tarik Blackhands wrote:

keftiu wrote:

Grankless wrote:

Shoutout to the Lancer RPG's discord for having a public ban log (mostly full of spam bots) so people can clearly see that bigotry/general chud-ism is unwelcome.

The Lancer devs are also outspoken about their politics, which I imagine filters out the chuds pretty well.

It doesn’t hurt that make a damn good game, too.

For serious. At this point Lancer is the only d20 game that I hold a high opinion of. Also give props for their layouts while we're at it.

A dear friend of mine does their layout!

Tell them a random guy in the internet loves it. Seriously, I find it bizarre RPG layouts aren't a solved problem at this point, but clearly it isn't so I give all my thanks to those who do a bang up job.

Grankless wrote:

Shoutout to the Lancer RPG's discord for having a public ban log (mostly full of spam bots) so people can clearly see that bigotry/general chud-ism is unwelcome.

The Lancer devs are also outspoken about their politics, which I imagine filters out the chuds pretty well.

It doesn’t hurt that make a damn good game, too.

For serious. At this point Lancer is the only d20 game that I hold a high opinion of. Also give props for their layouts while we're at it.

The whole panic attack framing is just kinda weird to me. Like this situation (typically) isn't going to come up when someone's overly stressed due to work/personal life, this is coming up because something hit a party member with a magic whammy or they failed a will save against some eldritch abomination from beyond time and are probably in imminent danger of being disemboweled.

Mental health's important and all, but circumstances are a mite different between the real world and when in the middle of a battle with monsters.

There's also the whole idea that by nature of the level up system, virtually no PC is justified suffering a mundane panic attack after a point just looking at how will saves scale up but that's neither here nor there.

I don't think it puts a number on it anywhere, but they do die of old age eventually. That's the general motivating factor for them deciding to become Raveners.

I mean historically irl Kislev was Empire with miniatures changed to have Russian themes plus ice witches and a bear <_<

Like, ignoring fact that axe-gun is actually real thing that apparently exists, why exactly it would be weirder for fantasy!Russians to have those compared to again straight up tanks and copters. Like its okay for Empire to have tanks because they are fantasy Germans?

You can debate about it yeah, but the comparing axe-guns to laser guns is just silly and it comes across as absurd to be like "no no no this is where I draw the line, this is the part where realistic warfare has become unrealistic".

(it seems to be simplification of lore of Streltsi being "they have halberd/bardiche they slam to ground to use as steadying platform for handgun and they use that in middle of combat" anyway.)

Well the gyrocopters are easy because those are made by dwarfs who are the setting resident non-mad-science technology lads. People would probably get salty if any of the human factions just suddenly got them and it wasn't handwaved away as gifts from the local hold.

Still, it goes down to aesthetics and change at the end of the day. People would get annoyed at the !Eastern Europeans getting tanks because they never had tanks, they were always the winged lancers/ice witches dudes. The !Germans get a pass because they always had those tanks. It's kinda like if they went and gave Bretonnia gunpowder units. Like yeah, it could happen even in setting (since firearms aren't explicitly banned for use by the local unwashed peasants being recentish inventions) but I guarantee you'd have riots because it violates the aesthetic of !French-Arthurian knights people like and its CHANGE and as said, change = bad.

Sort of, that's more CHANGE BAD more than anything else. Historically, Kislev was an extremely grounded faction (Poland/Russia with a few extra bears and ice wizards tossed in by and large) and as things go, some people don't like things changing when the old way (tm) was obviously better. I'm sure that's an attitude everyone here has seen before.

There's actually some bits in competitive weight lifting/world's strongest man type contests where the guys would end up rupturing blood vessels other dangerous ailments from over exertion. Not sure if anyone ever ruptured a heart, but you certainly can break stuff if you go too heavy, hell tearing muscles/tendons in general is a significant risk in weight lifting even if that's more "cripple yourself" than lethal.

Ravingdork wrote:

If you want gonzo powers, just make the PCs 2 or 3 levels higher than normal for what they're facing.

Super easy in this edition. No real need for a mythic rule set to feel powerful.

I feel like if I want gonzo powers I also want the enemy to have gonzo powers but maybe I'm in the minority here

But how exciting is Dragonball Z really if these beefed up mega-strong protagonists are fighting like, normal dudes

About as exciting as typical high level PF1 fare.

The difference between turning a generic bandit into an atomic blast shadow at the top of init and doing that to the Tarrasque is pretty much academic since both put up exactly the same amount of fight (Read: 0).

To expand the metaphor a little, PF1e isn't like DBZ because DBZ is famous for taking forever for its fights to actually resolve (for the main villains anyway). High level 1e is Fist of the North Star being 100% real. The local Kens walk up to the victim(s), laugh off the attacks if they aren't going first, declare them already dead, and several dazing fireballs/pounce barb/archer machinegun/save-lose later they're done.

The guy ruling the fortress is just a guy except when he isn't.

Special/boss npcs aren't above getting templated or having some unique ritual effect going on in the background which is the same thing as bolting on bottom text when you get down to it.

For all intents and purposes PCs are not going to be half dragons, broken souls, or be under the Hell's Harvest Ritual (or whatever) so we're back to no parity because someone along the way decided that their boss fighter needed a bit of spice.

And while I'm thinking about it lack of parity doesn't need to be strictly about personal abilities too.

While I have Hell's Rebels on the mind, one npc is a basic cavalier (no bottom text or templates) but his mount is a full on wyvern (and not a janky archtype wyvern, the bestiary one). Certainly not an option for PCs there which is its own type of lack of parity.

I don't see why adding abilities isn't playing the system as intended. As much as the game likes to say that every undead (or whatever) has the following HD type/saves/AC/etc, it also wants to present challenges and different encounters that usually run contrary to the building block so you end up with random +nat armor, math fix abilities, or just new stuff all penned in the bottom of the stat block because that's cool.

The "fairness" of the building blocks of npcs is honestly all a bunch of illusory malark that can and is twisted and tortured into making a variety of different challenges (not even my opinion there, at least one of the writers said as much). There's no parity with the pc side when near everything has random special abilities penned in at the bottom of the stat block that the player side has no hope of ever getting barring extensive bribes/bullying of the GM.

And there's also the fact that as a GM I can just flat out cheat with the local evil wizard/fighter.

Why does the bbeg fighter fire laser beams out of his eyes while you cannot mr player fighter? It's okay, he has the Chosen of the Dark Gods special ability I penned in at the bottom of his stat block. It also gives him permanent flight, true seeing and freedom of movement. Perfectly legal now.

thejeff wrote:

Deserk wrote:

Concerning the Cult of the Dawnflower, I think it's a bad idea and a lack of respect to the past authors as well as to the setting to completely retcon it out of existence. You should instead have had the leaders of the Cult evolve and moderate it's beliefs, or have it shown that it was not actually Sarenrae that was answering their prayers.

Except that it was always an error to start with. It was a mistake those authors made that got into print without being properly reviewed by those responsible for the setting lore - James, I think.

Setting mistakes slip through, just like rules mistakes. They don't need to be bound by either one, just because it made it into print. Errata it and move on.

The question is though, would the setting be better with such mistakes or not?

Depends who you ask. I personally found it comical that the second most granola bar chewing Good deity behind Shelyn was granting divine power to a sect of sword point conversion loons and just kind of eternally rolling with it. "Oh sure, I don't like what they're doing and they're THIS close to me giving them a stern talking to"

It has the same energy as that whole Asmodean Paladin thing from a while back.

Goblin Slayer is very edgy in actual sense of the word (aka as in trying to be dark and shocking), considering that its basically just harem action fantasy series themed around D&D party <_<

Like the dark stuff is there just for sake of being shocking and violent when rest of tone of it is inconsistent with that. I think Berserk is actually more dark than Goblin Slayer because GS' darkness is more immature surface level stuff. Both have sexual violence and gore, but they handle it completely differently.

Anyhoo on sidenote, there is one reason why the "exactly as goblin slayer, but put kobold there instead" doesn't work as well: Kobolds don't really do raids same way as goblins do. Like yeah, if dragon tells them to, they might do it, but they in 1e have sensitivity to light and even if they attacked during night, kobolds practice guerilla warfare rather than zerg rush in open space raids.

Danger of kobolds is in the caves and traps and ambushes they build, so they are more danger to miners and such than villagers on average.

Found the person actually familiar with GS and Berserk.

To build off though, exploiting the dragon connection's probably the best way to scale the character to playable high levels. A straight class ranger's probably the easiest way to handle "really hates kobolds and is good at killing them" but that still leaves you with a pile of favored enemies and other such things lying around. Scaling up to dragons is a fairly natural progression (after all what's a dragon but a very big, winged, and *element* breathing kobold) and it's basically contractually obligated a GM use at least one dragon as an adversary somewhere.

Biggest pitfall in my mind is probably untraining the general idea that you can just brute force the enemy with bighuge numbers and just be set that way.

CR actually has meaning this time around and there's a lot less nuclear pounces/save at 19+ or lose spells/etc nonsense than back in the day.

Minata. the most populated (is)land in the history of Golarion. and it seem like 99% of it's inhabitants start an adventuring life style far far away from it...

They all end up taking a sabbatical in Qadira among the Sarenrites for reasons I'm sure aren't related to scimitars and just kind of proliferate from there.

Frankly I'd just start taking summoner levels and just play the eidolon with your deadweight tether.

Similar energy as just taking Leadership and playing your cohort.

Tarik Blackhands wrote:

Zioalca wrote:

Moppy wrote:

I once thought, "why doesn't Paizo emphasise the keywords"?

Then I wrote some homebrew rules and emphasised the keywords, and every other word was highlighted, and it looked like it had been written by a crazy person.

I totally considered that myself. That's why I think the tag might be the way to go.

Frankly if you're bolding every other word that might just be a sign the system could be use some trimming down. I've seen games like Lancer that have no problems bolding all their keywords and not looking like a lunatic wrote them.

On the other side of the coin, it could be that Lancer has too much descriptive text intermixed with its mechanics rules. If we can fully and succinctly describe the entire effects of a spell with a handful of keywords and a few conjunctions, that sounds good to me. Though that may just be my day job catching up with me

It's an interesting idea, but I chose Lancer for a reason. That being its mech section is an extremely elegant and efficient piece of rules writing. Define a handful of core things up front (what's an object, what's a character, etc) and then all the other relevant tags and noteworthy bits of mechanics are bolded for clarity. Works well, is succinct, and avoids the "written by a lunatic" thing. The basic point of the matter if your mechanics descriptions are an unwieldy pile of tags...odds are something can be done to trim that down whether in terms of mechanic being too complicated in and of itself or your core system has too many fiddly bits ticking inside.

Moppy wrote:

I once thought, "why doesn't Paizo emphasise the keywords"?

Then I wrote some homebrew rules and emphasised the keywords, and every other word was highlighted, and it looked like it had been written by a crazy person.

I totally considered that myself. That's why I think the tag might be the way to go.

Frankly if you're bolding every other word that might just be a sign the system could be use some trimming down. I've seen games like Lancer that have no problems bolding all their keywords and not looking like a lunatic wrote them.

Ryan Freire wrote:

Rysky wrote:

Baby being big does not make it not be a baby.

Baby being baby does not make it not be an evil monster

Baby murder is often looked as taboo horrific thing in most human cultures ;P

Course most babies here aren't capable of being a legitimate threat to your continued existence.

Old enough to bite my face off, old enough to get shanked. No mercy for the wyrmlings straight out of the egg.

This is starting to remind me of how D&D Against the Giants module uses literal Giant Baby as enemy encounter without ever even thinking there is anything weird about the scenario :P

...Seriously, that is so screwed up in multiple ways

Not like that's changed much lately. I mean, no one blinks when the GM throws a red wyrmling at the party after all.

I don't have any play experience with it, but at least from a read, the system seems well put together, turn order being one of the things that looks especially nice on paper. The older games honestly got a little too granular and fiddly for their own good even if there's parts to them I'll defend to my dying day (Dark Heresy 1e had the best psychic system and I will not hear otherwise).

As for the story angle, I imagine it's easier to differentiate everything by tier rather than looking at it as a whole. For instance going for the super heroic Deathwatch style of play you'd want to look at Tier 4 play where your party consists of the local veteran Inquisitor, an Intercessor, and Guardsman Marbo under a different name. Meanwhile grim (dark) and gritty Dark Heresy style play would hover around Tier 1-2. The fact the party is ""mixed"" is secondary to the fact that the tier determines the rough level of larger than lifeness your squad is expected to have (see the previous example of not thinking of a T4 guardsman as even a veteran but an essentially legendary trooper considering his badassitude is placed as equivalent to space marines)

Maybe, but ultimately is the game enriched by having the GM need to consult the big table of object HP/hardness to determine that an object made of plant matter with a thickness of 15ft has 5*15 hp with a hardness of 0 (but wait, this is a magic beanstalk so that means...) vs just saying that a magic beanstalk as thick as whatever colorful term he used to describe it will take a solid 10 minutes of thwacking to cut down?

Same with a rope. I honestly don't give the slightest semblence of a bother about looking up that a rope is 5 hp hardness 3 when I can just rule that a 1 action swing with an edged weapon will cut the rope holding the rickety rope bridge up.

Dragging the game to a grinding halt as the gm flips around calculating the durability of objects is frankly the opposite of a good time in my book no matter how much verisimilitude it adds.

I dunno, should giants be considered innately magical because they violate the square cube law and thus when they step into an AMF their legs break like toothpicks?

Having played games with some obnoxious physics majors, I'm pretty firmly in the realm of letting sleeping dogs lie. Fantasy game, real world physics need not apply for my winged lizards and giant monsters.

I dunno, full deities going to punch demon lords in the abyss doesn't seem to have the best track record ranging from the deity getting merced to almost causing the abyss to unite with all the general bad things that happen with that.

Maybe if they sponsor some plucky mortals to do britch adjusting instead, that seemed to work out fairly okay.

Not really sure what pseudo-medieval/renaissance family is going to have something even remotely resembling life insurance (which going off a cursory wiki search originated in the 1700s) but whatever, you do you I spose.

I dunno, the general reasoning of "Due to the current stellar-political climate and activity of other more existential threats, the amount of hardware and manpower needed/would be lost dispersing a bunch of pirates is not worth it compared to largely tolerating the current state of affairs where they just rob/racketeer a bunch of merchant ships" fits fine as far as I can see.

There's a whole host of bigger threats than some pirate yokels lurking around and the various heavy hitters either have to deal with those or can't afford to gut their fleets clearing some relative small frys preying on shipping due to opportunistic "allies" or those same threats.

Myself I'm kind of confused on how a guy who played/liked things like ODnD, Shadowrun, and KDM is managing to get stymied by PF's ruleset since being honest, those three are either far more roughly cut (KDM/ODnD) or more complex in general (SR).

Either way more on topic, I can generally say that being annoyed at people backseating your char gen is a pretty valid response since for every person that'll be grateful for fixing a sucky character there's someone else who doesn't want to get squeezed through the clone factory that is internet char-op builds and "Blast it OP, I picked this nonsense for a reason!"

Just fix the math errors, glare in Rule 0 if they kvetch about it, and let things ride from there. If they liked playing Kingdom Sodding Death, they shouldn't have too many issues with quick demises or useless characters anyway.

Or there's the old GM special:

"Huh. It IS odd that no one's taken out the Free Captains yet, don't you think? Maybe there's something more to it... *wink/nudge*"

Being real, attack and HP scaling by level with AC being largely gear based is just the general paradigm for most d20 systems.

1e PF and DnD 3.x had the same general thing that a naked L20 fighter is still going to probably AC 15ish on a very good day. Stars Without Number is even more extreme where the best your AC can be naked without a specific focus is a whopping 12 if you cap out your dex (which isn't an easy feat under vanilla rules)

Just how the game's designed and frankly isn't even that out there all things considered, especially for Sci-Fi games where they tend to put more stock in what your character has more than what they are. SF's actually pretty forgiving overall with the whole "naked defense" due to stamina and general damage/HP ratios. Stuff like SWN or Traveler will fairly cheerfully put your character in the dirt for walking into a firefight naked, even against "mooks"

Then again in 5e, the main schtick of Matsus is Enraging (read: going berserk) in response to either getting critted or while unmasking so its not like this sort of thing doesn't change based on the whims of the devs/edition at work.

I personally just prefer introducing the goblin suicide bomber squad in response to the 30 blast locket situations. Players want to make it fair game, they don't exactly have grounds to complain when they're on the receiving end from folks with more resources than them.

In other news, don't be a jerk.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Enabling the GM to make those calls in the moment is just a good thing. If you don't have something more interesting to do with the table, it's a pile of ash and charcoal.

Whats the point to have the GM being able to make a call when you have rules known to everybody that govern that very incident? When both players and GM know that the chair has hardness 5 and 10 hit points then it is clear that he will probably not withstand even a 6d6 fireball. The difference being that in one case I have to wait for the GM to make up his mind versus already knowing what probably will happen upfront and greatly speeding up any decision making process.

Typically speaking it's generally not faster because it involves rooting around the rulebook for the right chart, consulting said chart to find the closest approximation to the chair in question, apply modifiers (Uh is this a masterwork chair? It's a noble estate I guess), and then resolving that vs "eh, wooden chair loses to fireball"

I'll go ahead and say most gms aren't going to just memorize ye olde common object hardness/HP charts and have it ready off the cuff.

Seisho wrote:

lemeres wrote:

Seisho wrote:

The former succubus queen visiting desna, meeting with sarenrae bringing a bottle of wine, now let shelyn pop in and lets see what happens...uhm... sorry, oftracked a little

ew.... wasn't Nocticula dating Sarenrae's daughter at one point? That seems like it is way too messy.

Noctilcula also slept with her brother, so I guess this is not nearly as bad.

Baby, that is old Noctilcula. New Noctilcula is a brooding artist sitting alone at picturesque 'lonely' locations (note- the church of Noctilcula is selling portraits of her in those scenes for $49.99. By from your local Hot Topic now, available for a limited time).

This is now one my favorite snide god descriptions up there with some person way back when saying Shelyn is the goddess of the participation trophy...

I mean, what if I were to make the statement "every Wizard you ever played had green eyes"?

Funny you pull that particular example. In 7th Sea practitioners of Pyeryem (spelling butchered, but basically shapeshifting magic) as a rule did have green eyes, color changing as needed if they developed it later in life. No real point I'm trying to make with this but just an amusing parallel.

Staffan Johansson wrote:

Barnabas Eckleworth III wrote:

Beholders are some of the baddest baddies ever to be beholded. I wonder what a PF2 beholder would look like, if one were statted out.

Back in the day, Ari Marmell made a short monster book with monsters meant to approximate the non-OGL iconic monsters, called "Iconic Bestiary: Classics of Fantasy". Those could likely be converted to Pathfinder - it's not as if Paizo has shied away from using other OGL sources in their works.

The legal department of Wizards of the Coast thinks it's a great idea.

I mean, videogames have filed the serial numbers off beholders and used them without incurring the wrath of the WotC lawyer brigade and Zweihander managed to survive Games Workshop's lawyers while filing off far more than a few monsters.

Not saying its a fantastic idea in general, but it's probably doable as long as the creative folks aren't dumb enough to keep the names and shuffle around a few details.

On the other hand, it's pretty well in their rights to go

"What that? That's just a piece of flayed skin with words on it. Did you actually think that was binding to me? Next time you want a deal, make sure you're getting something authentic foolish mortal. Later sucker!"

Tarik Blackhands wrote:

MaxAstro wrote:

All this talk about bosses has been reminding me how much I want to try running a boss that uses the alien ruler mechanic from X-Com 2 (in short: the boss takes one action with no MAP after each party member's turn) and see how that works out...

I'd imagine poorly. Alien Rulers were an exercise in pure frustration that can and did drive nearly everyone in existence to cheese them out with free action, DoT, and LoS abuse. Then again that might just be the Xcom 2 chassis at play where big beefy monsters with heavy damage, disables, and auto hits against squishy humans isn't the most fun especially when you're on a mission timer...

Oh, trust me, I am well familiar with the pitfalls of the original system (side note: There is a mod that makes Ruler Reactions only trigger on offensive actions, instead of all actions - it makes the rulers a LOT less frustrating).

But I suspect that a boss that gets one single action at the end of each player's turn, instead of having its own 3-action turn, would be a credible but not overwhelming threat, and would force the players to think on their feet without putting too much stress on them.

Best of all, it automatically scales the encounter to the number of players, which is nice for me because my group fluctuates from 4-6 week to week. To borrow the terminology used above, it makes the boss "wider" instead of "taller".

Personally, one initiative system I found interesting (on paper, haven't had the chance to see in play) that was similar to what you proposed was in Wrath and Glory (aka the latest 40k RP system). Basically init always alternated between party/enemy with the caveat that the same person couldn't get a new turn till their side fully cycled.

It was just an extremely elegant solution for scaling encounters and basically eliminates action economy advantage since a party of 3 vs a single enemy would go.

P1
E
P2
E
P3
E
(or whatever other orders the PCs want since they pick their relative order)

No worries about mass consecutive enemy/party turns instantly overwhelming dudes either. It's extremely gamey (being almost literally inverse ninja law in action) to be sure and has some corner case jank but I found it an extremely elegant solution for scaling encounters and making solo enemies threatening without giving them "boss rules/reactions" to compensate or unduly slowing the game down.

Can't really incorporate it into PF2's framework unfortunately without gutting a decent portion of the system though.

All this talk about bosses has been reminding me how much I want to try running a boss that uses the alien ruler mechanic from X-Com 2 (in short: the boss takes one action with no MAP after each party member's turn) and see how that works out...

I'd imagine poorly. Alien Rulers were an exercise in pure frustration that can and did drive nearly everyone in existence to cheese them out with free action, DoT, and LoS abuse. Then again that might just be the Xcom 2 chassis at play where big beefy monsters with heavy damage, disables, and auto hits against squishy humans isn't the most fun especially when you're on a mission timer...

Tarik Blackhands wrote:

I'm still largely amazed that Zweihander is as good a system as it actually is if you can look past all the ahem homages (which are easily the worst part of the book along with incorporating in jokes that aren't the small but vicious dog).

Homages? I'm assuming this is some sort of euphemism?

Sort of. It's more the fact that if we're being honest/vaguely observant, Zweihander is more or less Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with the serial numbers filed off in terms of fluff and its general mechanics (along with a few other things that had their serial numbers filed off like Hexers which are not at all like Witchers citizen, move along).