Some houserules that I am looking at:
* Transferring a weapon fusion from one weapon to a different weapon should give a discount of 50% of the cost of the original fusion. This removes the glitch where it is cheaper to buy a lower tier weapon and a weapon fusion for it and then transfer the fusion to a higher tier weapon. But it does still give a decent discount for finding a fusion that you want and transferring it to a weapon that you use.
* You can transfer a weapon fusion on a fusion seal item to a higher tier fusion seal item using the weapon fusion transfer rules. The fusion seal item of any tier costs 10% of the cost of the weapon fusion at that tier. This makes buying or crafting a weapon fusion seal not seem like such a waste of credits when you gain access to higher tier weapons.
* A fusion seal will start to affect the weapon it is attached to 10 minutes after attaching it. Fusion effects that attune to the owner of the weapon (like returning or called) still take the normal amount of time to attune to the owner, even if the fusion seal itself was already on an attuned weapon recently. This still prevents switching weapon fusion seals during combat, but makes it worthwhile to keep useful fusion seals on hand for reacting to the location you are in and the enemies you are facing there.
Anything else that you are using in your home games?
My players have not at all touched the fusion rules because they're fiddly. They're using a few that I added to dropped weapons, but that's it.
Houserules I've considered, but haven't really thought through:
Halve the price of fusions, make them entirely non-transferable. Possibly just remove them entirely from the game, replacing found fusioned guns with guns that have an appropriate level fusion seal.
Fusion seals I would put at the current prices on table 7-13 instead of 110% - mostly to skip a bit of math, but they can be upgraded for just the cost difference between levels. Maybe a 10-min attunement instead of 24 hour.
Nothing we are using - we've avoided them.
I think one idea that might work is treating them more like armor upgrades.
I think one idea that might work is treating them more like armor upgrades.
I think that was the intent with the weapon fusion seals. But the RAW 24 hour activation time was too much. Cutting that down to 10 minutes (same as for armor upgrades) should make that work better.
Honestly, my take on fusion seals has been that they aren't really for adventurers. They make sense as an organization-level purchase that will be issuing them for missions that aren't scrambled in less than 24 hours. And having them have that kind of place in universe makes them a logical thing that exists and may be looted from soldiers/agents/minions that would be issued them.
The game is so geared towards adventurers that there aren't even monthly cost of living things in the game just a by the day hotel rooms.
To me it looks like there were two ideas of "how do we go with enchantments?" and both were used, but one wound up strictly better than the other.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah. That is my take on RAW fusion seals too. Cool to give as loot. The players may even use them temporarily until they outgrow them. Not something that they are going to invest in.
Which is really sad. The concept is really nice. I would love to have a handful of magical weapon effects that I keep on hand for situations where they may be useful. But in order to invest in that, I would need to be able to have my stash of them level up with me without causing bankruptcy. And I would need to be able to pick one and apply it in response to the situation that I find myself in.
If they can't do that, then it is better to either not use them at all, or go with the slightly less expensive permanent weapon enchantments.
Which is why I am looking to fix weapon fusion seals - at least for my own home games.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think the best option might be to fiddle with the levels and prices (by a lot), then make fusion seals able to be applied to any weapon regardless of item level.
Oh. Probably a completely different tack than you were thinking of, but that makes me think of something else that bugs me about weapon fusions. They can't be placed on lower tier weapons. So even if the player could afford them, they can't always start the game with a weapon with a fusion that they want.
So as a point of distinction between weapon fusions and fusion seals, have one weapon fusion (but not fusion seal) be able to be placed on a weapon regardless of tier. A second couldn't be applied without meeting the normal item tier requirements. But this would allow the concepts of starting the game with an electric hammer or a flaming sword.
As for cost in this scenario, I would think that the minimum level of the weapon fusion would still determine the price of the fusion when it is being placed on a lower tier weapon.
I think the bigger issue is that so many of the fusions have no effect at all but altering crits, which don't happen enough to really matter in most cases.
Hmm... Looking in the CRB, I am seeing 11 of the 36 fusions being crit-only effects. Some others add a crit effect in addition to other effects (usually a damage type change).
That is about 30%, or just a smidge under a third of them being crit-only.
So yeah, that is a fair criticism. I'm not sure that this problem is a bigger issue than the wonky pricing of upgrades, or the poor return on investment of fusion seals.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I had the idea that fusions seals still took twenty four hours to attune, but you could attune more than one at a time. Since it says it takes a minute to put the fusion seal on you could take that minute to switch out two fusion seals. ex. one level five hammer attuned to both a flaming fusion seal and a frost fusion seal (both level five fusions) it can't have both at the same time but it would only take a minute to switch between them as necessary.
-Beta
Oooh, I like it. Let me repeat this to make sure I have it right.
So the first time you put a fusion seal on a weapon, it takes the normal 24 hours to attune to the item and start taking effect. But then you can remove the fusion seal (and optionally attach a different one) without losing that attunement. By attaching the fusion seal back onto that same weapon, it attunes almost immediately. If you instead put the fusion seal onto a different weapon, it will take another 24 hours to attune to that weapon and will lose its attunement to the first weapon.
This still allows keeping a stash of weapon fusion seals on hand to respond to the current adventure. However, it prevents abuse of doing things like sharing fusion seals with the other players, or immediately using a looted fusion seal.
It does also prevent using your own stash of fusion seals with your own backup weapons and such. Which may or may not be a bad thing. Depends on play style I guess. It also would be easy enough to instead houserule that the fusion attunes to you instead of your weapon, at which point you could use your stash of fusion seals on your backup weapons.
|
How do people feel about the level/price scale for fusions?
I wonder if it would be possible to get rid of it somehow, because it's yet another detail to keep track of, essentially giving each fusion (seal) two levels.
The prices aren't really prohibitively high - a fusion for a level 1 fusion is affordable at level 1 WBL, and so forth. It does seem to discourage putting like 8 different level 1 fusions on a level 8 weapon, because that'd be more expensive than just slapping one or two higher-level fusions on it. I wonder if that was the design goal?
---
I'd really like to go to about a 10m time to get a fusion seal up and running. If you're doing a campaign that's more freeform than the typical "take you by the hand" SFS scenario, then you basically have a couple of timeframes for adapting:
- 10m rest to regain "between rests" abilities (refit an armor, change an armor upgrade? I can't find the times for these but I thought they were 10m)
- 4h time to craft a weapon that the local monsters don't have energy immunity to
- full day rest to regain resolve and daily abilities
I'd like to move fusion seals more towards the 4h or 10m point of this hierarchy.
Would a tiered fusion seal system work better?
Get rid of the ability to install fusions in a weapon, then have mk I - mk V fusion seals that can have up to X levels of fusions installed on them. Any given weapon can only have one fusion seal installed at a time.
It makes low level useful fusions common and easy to install, but is it really a problem that everyone has called machine guns disguised as brooms?
Yes. It is 10 minutes for adding or removing an armor upgrade.
Which seems like a good price point for configuring weapon fusion seals too. Though the 4 hours to match the weapon crafting time is another good price point.
Though regaining daily abilities and recovering resolve points actually only takes 8 hours of rest. Not the 24 hours that RAW attuning a fusion seal takes.