Christopher R Taylor

I guess its a house rule, but I allow a dispel to "heal" mind control on characters, even if its considered an instant power, mostly because of its continuing effects.  This isn't body damage, its mental assault that is ongoing.

Too many people in my game roll like crap. And philosophically, that only means you get less damage for rolling poorly.

 

In the end, that's where I ended up with this kind of thing.  Its not that people are penalized, its that they never get to take advantage of a bonus, which sucks.  Its not that I think everything should be all fair and socially just and equal, just that it shouldn't be needlessly antagonistic and depressing.

Sadly, THUNDER agents is pretty obscure despite being such a great concept and comic.

What Martial Arts style allows a character to combine the Offensive Strike or any other +4DC Maneuver with a Staff?

 

Many of them do, yeah.  However, I'd suggest that the staff used for martial arts isn't a quarterstaff.  Those are pretty heavy and not just the long stick used in a lot of martial arts.  I would probably give those 2d6 or 3d6 max.

The problem with using weapon breakage is that you still get the damage in, several hits worth.  Does the staff break eventually?  Sure, but I just did 12d6, so the guy I was fighting broke, too.

You can always tell when you're being affected by a power unless it has invisible power effects (mostly, someone shooting you with a silent gun still hurts, so it varies).  But you can't tell its cumulative until the second tick goes off without some kind of detect analysis ability or something really obvious like being lit on fire.

Doubling limits are a useful tool to control damage stacking but it can still get pretty huge

Yeah Invisible power Effects would make someone never notice the effect on them.

At Heroic Level, it is too easy for a martial artist type, with weapon element, and something like a quarter staff, to very quickly be doing superhero levels of damage.

 

You're right, and that's an issue to be careful with as a GM.  Add skill levels in (2/damage class add) and it can become completely out of control in a very big hurry.  So you cannot just look at a few numbers and decide if a character is safely within your preferred limits in a campaign.

Others have suggested mitigating issues (damage to the weapon, etc) and I would suggest an absolute hard cap.  No matter what, at this power level, you cannot go over x damage classes.  Players understand that and can work with it.

Backstab, vanish, escape (puff of smoke, he's gone!), sap, walk without leaving tracks, etc are all classic stealth tricks

Well to be a smart donkey, according to Clarkes Law wouldn't super science set off any magical special effect if they are indistigushable? 

His law wasn't that they're identical, just that to outside perception they seem the same.  For the medieval peasant, a flashlight is witchcraft, but that doesn't actually make it magical.

Well, you don't put in for the night on an open-water run!

 

You do with galleys because they usually were poor sailors and the captains unused to controlling a ship without oars.

Also, depending on the sophistication of the sailors, they might only be able to sail by day because they're following coastlines.  Only very primitive sailors would do this, but its something to consider.

Its going to depend a lot on the special effects, but in general I'd say the second application or "tick" of effect, the target should be aware of the building effect, if they are self aware or have any reasonable level of intelligence.

Images (not there) with a modifier to perception or change environment penalty to perception can do this.  It can end up more expensive than just plain invisibility with modifiers to be effective, though.

I use a system like that.  For a -2 to hit penalty you can try to get a location, and if you hit, you roll location normally.  Then, for each point you hit by, you can move your hit location roll by 1 toward that intended target.

So, you roll your attack at -2 OCV, then roll location.  Say, you targeted their head, and with the penalty managed to hit by 3.  You roll the hit location, a 9: shoulder.  Since you hit by 3, that is moved 3 points toward the head, which gives you a 6: he threw up a hand between you and his head!

It worked pretty well but I was nervous about people targeting vitals.  Since that's so central, its pretty easy to get a roll near that, as 10-11 is average on 3d6, and its a sweet x2 body, x4 stun hit location.

Well that's just it, I wouldn't base the entire build around the max, but its something I like to keep in mind.

Sure, but it only has to happen once for Joe the Barbarian to one-shot the Dragon King and make everything look silly.

The Maker of Universes by Philip Jose Farmer. 3½ stars

Fun pulpy stuff.  I read it back in high school, but it was nice to revisit after so many years.  He spends a bit too much time explaining things as if there are critics standing around shouting "but how does..." but it still is breezy and entertaining.  Farmer is very creative and he spins a fun yarn with lots of unexpected new ideas and twists.

I don't really understand why he's ducking.  Maybe for aiming?  That thing is no cover.

Part of the reason people are recoiling from using Minor Transforms might be that they are thinking in terms of 5th (10 points per d6) rather than 6th (5 points per d6).  At that cost, I agree Minor is too much.  Its also why you should at least drop the 6th edition cost structure (Cosmetic 3/d6, Major 10/d6, Total 15/d6) into your 5th edition game, if not move to 6th.

Yep, that's the plan.  Lots of recipes, lots of details on end results, lots of information on how to run trade skills and make them part of a game, costs, equipment required, etc.  Its a bit tedious to make, but I think it has some value for fantasy gaming and can be used in pretty much any game system with very minor adjustments.  It will be specific to my gaming world in terms of ingredients, but the concepts can be used anywhere that has dragons, etc.

I think reduced penetration works fine to reduce body damage while doing lots of stun, particularly on a normal attack.  Its just the reverse approach to increased stun multiple: it does less body rather than more stun.

I do like the concept of maneuvers to increase damage or accuracy.  They make sense in real life too: you can hit someone a good 99 times out of 100 if all you want to do is contact, but you're not going to do any damage that way.  And you can hit a lot harder if you don't care about actually hitting, just pure impact.  So sacrificing a damage class to get +1 OCV or one OCV to get +1 damage class seems very reasonable to me.  But no matter how much I sold or explained them, nobody actually wanted to do it.

The trick is coming up with how to make stuff magical, without requiring a mage around to enchant them.  Some substances could easily have magic in them innately - dragon bones, etc.  I'm looking at something like was in EverQuest, with creating mana in a bottle the way Enchanters did in the MMOG, which then is used in trades for enchanted products or activating enchanted potential in materials