Duke Bushido

Thanks, Hugh. 
 
 
how about that!  It took sixty-odd years, but I finally found a place where I'm the _subtle_ one!
 

 
 

Thanks, Hugh. 
 
 
how about that!  It took sixty-odd years, but I finally found a place where I'm the _subtle_ one!
 

 
 

Pretty much, yes. 
 
 

Wow.
 
 
Looks like our friend Rich "the lych" McGee has some competition, necromantically....
 
 

Thanks, Hugh. 
 
 
how about that!  It took sixty-odd years, but I finally found a place where I'm the _subtle_ one!
 

 
 

... Subtitle ... ?

Thanks, Hugh. 
 
 
how about that!  It took sixty-odd years, but I finally found a place where I'm the _subtle_ one!
 

 
 

Thanks, Hugh. 
 
 
how about that!  It took sixty-odd years, but I finally found a place where I'm the _subtle_ one!
 

 
 

You're too subtle for this crowd, Duke...

Pretty much, yes. 
 
 

Thread necromancy.  I think that was a lighthearted attempt at finding humor in necromancing the thread with the oldest last post.

What are you on about?

Wow.
 
 
Looks like our friend Rich "the lych" McGee has some competition, necromantically....
 
 

IMHO the problem with (1E-5E) Find Weakness that 6th Edition attempts to fix (by removing it) is it halved the targets defenses no matter how much defenses the target possessed for a very low 10pt fixed cost - and it did this repeatedly. This effect was powerful and a magnet for min/maxers. It showed up on characters far too often - and outside the character concept.
 
The 'fix' put into 6E is Armor Piercing w/ Requires a Roll X-. Yes not directly but thats the Limited Advantage it competed against. Yes you only get one halving and you have to make the roll every time you fire. So...
 
Progressive Armor Piercing (PAP) - +1/2 for initial level +1/4 for each additional level. The targets defenses are halved when successfully attacked the first time. Defenses are further halved for each successive successful attack - for each additional level PAP purchased for the attack. Hardened eliminates (removes) one level of PAP. For example, Spear purchases a 10d6 EB w/ PAP 3 times (for +1/2+1/4+1/4 = +1). He then attacks a wall. Its defenses will be halved. He then attacks the same wall (and same hex), its defenses are quartered and then for a third time its defenses are 1/8. If the wall was Hardened, Spear would only have been able to achieve 1/4 defenses.
 
If PAP has the Requires a Roll limitation any failure of the roll prevents any further halving of that targets defenses (for that combat).
 
This way *find weakness* costs more for a bigger attack and for more potential halving of defenses. This loosely simulates finding (or forcing) a weakness in the opponents defenses then progressively exploiting it.
 
Alternately, make Find Weakness cost more for more halving of greater defenses. 5 pts base cost for the ability to halve 10 Active points of defense (10 pts minimum?) for the 1st halving, +5 pts for each additional halving. You cannot halve the defense of a target with a greater active point cost than for which you purchased Find Weakness (i.e there is no weakness you can find.
 
This puts the original cost in line with Heroic Campaign point levels but allows it to scale to Superheroic levels.

"Top. Men."

Well Electronic Dance Music is important for those speed runs in a star ship. Sets the mood.
 

Thoughts?
 
Mine?
 
Dude, following through on things the players _like_ in your game is, bar none, the best possible thing you can do.
 
If your players are sympathetic to his plight, they may very much enjoy seeing what changes this brings about in his behavior, personality, and life.
 
And if not- well, they will still know that you lead them through a story that they were interested in.
 
 
Go for it.
 
 
For what it'a worth, in our own games way back when, my co-GM used Hideous a bit, but on one particular occasion, a PC, attempting to distract him, removed his mask.  Turns out he was absolutely _gorgeous_ underneath.  So half the party stops and stares while he beats them senseless....
 
 
Turns out the chemicals that disfigured him also gave him regenerative powers, but made him dim-witted.  He had never noticed that hia face had completely healed.
 

 
 

Thoughts?
 
Mine?
 
Dude, following through on things the players _like_ in your game is, bar none, the best possible thing you can do.
 
If your players are sympathetic to his plight, they may very much enjoy seeing what changes this brings about in his behavior, personality, and life.
 
And if not- well, they will still know that you lead them through a story that they were interested in.
 
 
Go for it.
 
 
For what it'a worth, in our own games way back when, my co-GM used Hideous a bit, but on one particular occasion, a PC, attempting to distract him, removed his mask.  Turns out he was absolutely _gorgeous_ underneath.  So half the party stops and stares while he beats them senseless....
 
 
Turns out the chemicals that disfigured him also gave him regenerative powers, but made him dim-witted.  He had never noticed that hia face had completely healed.
 

 
 

Well, seeing as how it's a BMW, I'm OK with this.

"Naughty boy, I've never Kipled before!"

I might be if I knew what it was. 😁

First, I recognize that the (snip) campaign was a labor of love.  There's way more work here in terms of details, structure, and underlying rationale than in nearly all the campaigns we do.  Unfortunately, I think that's both a blessing and a curse.  Now I go on a long personal exposition as why I think that last "curse" part.
 
I had a parallel experience a bit more than twenty years back, while I was still in Pullman.  You may recall that there was a brief science fiction campaign ... I no longer remember even what system it was, because that wasn't important to me; may have been Hero.  (snip) was the at-table GM.  The social/political context of the campaign world was largely based on C J Cherryh's Chanur books; we didn't use her races but the interstellar political strucutres were similar.  It was more or less current-day Earth, albeit postulating the invention of an interstellar jump drive by humans.  Some of the PCs had been abducted by aliens and transported off-Earth.  Others were in a crew for a Space Shuttle class ship fitted with the jump drive.  There were other bits to it, almost all of I've forgotten now.
 
That campaign, too, was a labor of love.  With lots of input from (snip), I created a race of sentient, psionic shrubs, with a couple of client races, the most important being something like partly uplifted weasels.  (I don't think the PCs ever "met" one the shrubs, though a couple I think did interact with a couple of the weasels.)  Based on what was at the time very recently released real astronomical data, I chose stars for other inhabited star systems (and got a bit of satisfaction years later when the one I'd chosen for the shrubs' homeworld was found to have a planet orbiting it), computed distances and so on.  I postulated performance characteristics for the jump drive, and did a bunch of thinking about what that implies for the physics of interstellar travel (trajectories and velocities needed for entering jump so as to reach your intended destination, and what the emergent velocity would be at the end of the jump, how you'd get rid of most of that velocity snd get politely and safely into the habited parts of the system, etc.).  Lots of interesting physics and reasoning out the interstellar travel and defense infrastructure a starfaring race would need.  I had lots of fun doing thst.  Similarly, I had lots of fun on side calculations as I explored what all that would mean for a special case, if you postulated our Solar System with an interstellar culture.  Those side calculations informed me a lot about how other cultures would act and the infrastructure they would have to build with that ensemble of interstellar travel characteristics.
 
Eventually we kicked it into a shape where we thought we were ready to play it, and we got started going with table play.  Things went south in short order.
 
As is the flip side of any real-physics discussion of interplanetary travel (not interstellar, which is all inconsistent impossible crap), physically realizable techniques force you into regimes where ... there's nothing for people on board such ships to do until literally the last few minutes of docking micromanuvers.  The orbital mechanics of manuvers and trajectories are dictated by the original incoming velocity and pop-in point, the calculations require heavy computation no human can do, and so on.  For hours or more likely days at a stretch, there's nothing for passengers of such a spaceship to do but think about information about the system as it comes through the instrument array.  They can't do anything with that information, but they can think about it.  Maybe.  It's hard to think about a situation when there's serious question about how relevant you are.
 
The players rebelled before it got too far.  There was nothing for them to do, and their attempts to do anything had to be talked down as being either impossible or counter productive.  All Tell, no Show, as we have heard this situation described in some discussions on the web of this sort of GM failure.
 
Yes, there was, I think, another session, where I spammed individual-player infodumps out to people between sessions.  Ultimately, though, I recognized that I had put together something that was a personally fascinating construction, and could perhaps be made into the overall setting for an interesting ***story***, but it made for a more or less unplayable ***game****.  Of everyone at the table, I was the only one who could understand and work with the physical problems my chosen axiom set posed.  Far more important, I was also the only one at the table WHO WOULD CARE.  It was an astrophysics problem.  By real-world personal preferences and interests, I was the only astrophysicist at the table (I believe (snip) had not yet joined us at that point).  By the logical requirements of the underlying circumstances, there wasn't much chance of anyone else being interested in those sorts of problems, even though I found them fascinating.  Yet, for the quality of the game, by far I was the one who mattered least.
 
At that point I realized I'd made a fundamental mistake: I'd let my interest in the physics override what ought to be a GM's principal concern, and that is to keep the players engaged and entertained.
 
It was a bit more than a decade before I tried running anything again as I internalized those lessons and thought about how I might run something again.  (It's not like we had a shortage of GMs and stuff to play, so I felt OK about spending that time and doing long thought about it; also, embroiled in a temporary career change as I was at the time, I did have other things on my mind.)  I was resolved not to repeat those mistakes, while at the same time recognizing another personal issue of mine, without which I wouldn't want to run anything at all.
 
That personal issue is that I am a die-hard top-down simulationist in terms of running an RPG.  When constructing a game which I alone am running, I have to have a fundamental idea of a grand plot arc, and I make sure everything that happens in the game fits into that arc (modulo intentional red herrings that I might put in for their own plot reasons).  At the same time, the players *can* do things to affect the arc's path and it's my job to accommodate those player alterations of the world while maintaining a meaningful and enjoyable campaign.  (Shared games like Rocket Age and Feng Shui don't count; for those there doesn't need to be a unifying plot, in my opinion.)  Also, I greatly prefer playing in games where there is such an arc so that I can puzzle out what it is and how it can be solved.  You've seen me enough at the table to recognize this shortcoming of mine.  It's a big reason why I have never, ever liked Star Wars as a game-world.  The attempt after the very first movie to retrofit story and rationale into the Star Wars universe is so hopelessly inconsistent that I lost interest in it immediately.  As action movies, the first three are great movies.  But taking that setting and putting players in it ... it doesn't scratch an itch I personally need to have scratched.  What happens is what's going to happen, and what anyone outside the nucleus of the Skywalker clan, Sidious, and Yoda does is more or less irrelevant to the course of future events.  Lots of people can have the opportunity to kick serious butt, but even the most spectactular of this peripheral butt-kicking doesn't have any effect on what happens in that universe.  Further, because that means the entire purpose of the game itself is that butt-kicking, one of my personal favorite situations -- finessing the party around direct physical confrontation with large bad guy forces and accomplishing a major strategic goal while sidestepping the big team of Big Bads -- is rendered impossible.  The butt-kicking itself is the whole point of the game, so to try sidestepping it is counter to the only reason to play.  That combination of PC irrelevance to the fate of the world, and the inherent necessity of exclusion of the kind of lateral strategy I like to create, makes it hard for me to have any real interest in that setting.

I recently decided I had to write something of an apology to a group member when I felt that I had to withdraw from his campaign.  Piece of that is over in NGD-land (here).  There were other reasons on top of the GM-foibles described in the link why I felt I had to bail, but those aren't in the snippet linked.
 
A monologue may happen to work in a game, but you have to be sure it's the character monologuing, not the GM.

We had a homebrew villain, an uber-brick in Luchador trappings called El Gigante.  Massively overpowered, though that was due two comparable power (in terms of build points) noncombat types, Bambi and Thumper, cheerleaders who pumped up his stats and END and STUN to way way way above what anyone imagined, and this in a campaign with CvK required in all PCs.  The cheerleaders were built on points comparable to ours, but they were ords (other than some rather boosted charisma-type stuff) physically, everything going into those Aid powers.
 
In this campaign was my old character Mr. Terrific, who was a Multiform guy, one of which was an "invulnerable" form with maximized defenses but no offensive powers other than the stungun and the antitank/antifortification rocket launcher (4 levels of armor piercing, but not a lot of intrinsic damage) he carried.  (He was a test pilot for his day job, and supersonic controlled flight into ground tests were among his duties.)  His other forms were more offensively-minded, but the way I built him, each form was available only once per day.
 
El G thin-red-misted one PC in a single punch in the last encounter (that is, went from full points positive to more than full points negative; that character was at DCV 0 at the time needed for the spell he was casting).  Our brick could stand up to him though not hurt him (using defensive maneuvers) and Mr Terrific could get in his way, but otherwise we Could Not Touch Him, relying on some illusions (he wasn't very bright) to keep him off the other squishy types.
 
Our ninja type snuck away and KO'ed his cheerleaders (who, frankly, I had left entirely out of my calculations), and immediately El G started deflating visibly.  (Amazing the things you can't do when you're used to having 50+ END a turn pumping into you and it suddenly stops entirely.)  When he went down, I had to be talked out of pressing the rocket launcher to his head and pulling the trigger.  Instead I pressed it to his knee and vaporized that instead of his braincase.