As we await the next phase we use this thread to talk about Dearth of Gods. Which had its first public test here and hyere This Thread is a free for all for thoughts and discussion however feel free to inquire about the [DoGs] system , how to play it and gameplay feedback. your local SR would like to know :v
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Later; some lore fluff !
The skinny: Dearth of Gods is an open door skirmish game inspired by dark souls. Play [read: die] as a recently deceased medieval character who fights [read: dies] in a barren realm once sustained by divine [dead] gods and the souls of the fallen but has since then fallen into antiquity as the world accepts more and more into the after life whether it likes it or not.
Dylan Gonzalez
So, what inspired the stat-gen system?
Nathan Davis
It was mostly based off the need to have a dynamic stat system where HP equated to attrition causing fights to either drag on desperately or cause severe upsets. Essentially by its design it would punish complacency and keep people on their toes even if they have a high wall of stats.
Sebastian Davis
bmup
Zachary Baker
"You all seem to be in a spot of troubel. Zere are a lot of enemies and you are spread out zo far. Might I recommend you lot by zee pit make your way east to zee doggy room. Yes I realize zere are a lot of skeletawns and a bans'ee or two between you and zere. But your ozer options are to eizer try to 'old w'ere you are and 'ope for zee best, or risk escape srough zee unknown dark of zee room above you, no?"
Samuel Johnson
The patrolling enemies are pretty fun. It's a lot better than slowly inching through the FoW avoiding ambushes out the wazoo.
It's also nice that enemies can take out the pyre. We have something to defend or barring that to at least have the means to restore it.
Seeing how the gameplay and combat in DS was it's biggest draw what can we expect in that aspect? We've already seen some variety in weapons and I hope there's a lot more of that.
Jason Powell
I forgot to post the pic for my move then fell asleep..
Eli Hall
I just read through the threads. Cool art. I like the feel. Sort of pixelly but not.
I don't understand your rules though. They work pretty well for an rpg where you're face to face with someone else and can do calls on a quick case basis and try things that aren't easily covered but for a wargame they're strange.
What i mean is that it all comes down to luck? It's not so much unbalanced (which is fine) as it is just crossing fingers and hoping you get something playable. The character generation is heavily skewed beacuse of the exploding dice. You've got one a character with move 9 move and 17 attack dice and another two with 3 move and 6-8 dice for their attack. Everyone gets the same two actions, so the actions of the first person is worth 2x or 3x the actions of the latter. They're playing the same game but in three turns one one of them can circumvent the entire map, attack twice and be back where they start and the others can get half-way to where the first person got and that's if they use al their actions.
Since hp = stats the person with higher stats gets better dicepools, are harder to kill and can tank hits to their higher dicepool. With 8 or 9 or 12 dice in a single stat then tanking 6 hits to it still leaves it higher than what someone else can roll. And since every input comes down to 'roll dicepools to do x' the person with higher dicepools just wins.
Plus knights. you roll dicepool to attack and then to soak? A knight gets end and armor. but that's +3 dice. And if they get hit, their defensive ability degrades further against following hits. Their attacks have to be in melee. with 1 attack a round+1move they can't defeat people and they can't reliable soak return-damage because pool vs pool is stacked agaisnt mitigation and favors avoidance. A wylder with a longbow can get lucky on end, beat the knight for defense and do their attacks at range 10. which means they're out of retailatory range.
So no wonder all your knights on the field died.
Henry Ramirez
So i guess my question is why the exploding dice on character gen? it seems like a sore spot that makes the math funky.
If you just rolled and got 1-3 then added career bonus you'd have a much lower spread of pools and class selection would matter more since output dicepools would be lower and class bonuses important. Then the knight getting +3 armor dice and the assassin getting +2 dodge would be more significant.
Elijah Miller
I have some questions. Does lowly upbringing change the range for throwing my axes?
Does it also work for requirements, like that huge axe?
Is there a talking stat?
Otherwise, it's been buckets of fun.
Austin Brown
Just so you know, OP (Monday) is probably asleep at the moment, so you probably won't get a reply for a bit.
Thomas Garcia
For Axes, I believe so. AFAIK, it applies to the Long Bow I'm using (swap Str for Spd) but the wording is pretty broad. I would guess that it doesn't apply to requirements for usage. What do you mean by a talking stat? You mean something linked to social interaction?
Austin Martinez
Lowly upbringing specifically says is don't count for heavy weapons. So it wouldn't apply to weapons like the big axe. It should however increase the range on your throwing axes.
Nolan Diaz
Ah, so it does. Posting the image for reference.
Colton Phillips
bump
Jose Reed
I was hoping. Those these hatchets are nice,. I'll need to find more them.
Persuasion, something I could of rolled to have delayed getting stabbed in the back.
Colton Robinson
I'd imagine you could just try roleplaying and see what happens.
Owen Parker
I'm not sure that's a proper stat exactly. It MIGHT be related to a stat like WILL or TEK or PER, depending on the exact circumstances, but it also might be completely stat independent, or just LUK.
David Reyes
^ I'm pretty sure it's this
Easton Jenkins
I did that a bit, and I guess I saw the results. I wonder what those assasins will do.
"Bloody hell, how do I keep stumbling into these places."
Connor Perez
look, anons - maybe if most of your posts are near contentless bumps or single sentence questions you can just let the topic die? Clearly there's not a whole lot to effing talk about here.
No offense, looks cute, nice art. But c'mon. I see these skirmish threads a lot and they look fun, but you've gotta admit that there's no damn point in keeping the threads afloat if you're having to consistently bump them because there's no conversation to have!
polite sage from here.
Thomas Gray
I'm like 99% sure the reason this is here at all is in the event someone wants to generate a character to have ready for the next action phase.
Noah Ramirez
and so that people don't lose track of the thread when next phase comes up. But I appreciate your concern user.
Owen Rivera
That's cool, it looks fun and I might even join in. I like the wargame format.
It just I never quite have the time, and a lot of the time you do have a loooot of "bump" posts. It's a limited space board, so it feels a bit egrigrious.
But hey if this is for new people maybe walk a dude through chargen? What's smart, what's not? What's happened so far? Do I just roll a ton of dice is there some smartness here?
Nathan Young
See for the rules.
But basically yes you start by just throwing a bunch of dice. I'm going to recommend 20 because twelve typically isn't enough for two sets. When a six explodes the next die in the string is the explosion.
After that you pick a class. Most people go with whatever suits stats best, but you choose whatever you want.
looks like you got 3, 5, 3, 5, 3, 1 into 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 1 with 1 luck
or 9, 7, 1, 1, 5, 2 into 5, 4, 1, 1, 3, 1 with 4 luck
Angel Smith
Double check your math
6, 3, 6, 1, 1, 5, 3, 2,
9,7,1,5,3,2
5,4,1,3,2,1
Ryan Anderson
These are all valid points but the intention comes down to making use of this intentional imbalance in the game. So far I have taken a lot of interesting data involving characters with low stats but got to live longer vs those with higher stats but died much sooner. There are obvious cases of people getting lucky twice over and even circumventing death through other means.
Normally a game like this wouldn't relish in locking someone down with a shitty build nor would balance itself to the 1-5 good characters that get rolled but the question that keeps coming to my mind becomes , " does this make dying fun ? does this make surviving a really shitty situation much more meaningful " there are a lot of mixed reactions but the world has these kinds of situations and while one would expect to rest on their laurels with good stats that is precisely what could lead to their slow unexpected demise. furthermore I am hoping to make it apparent that lots of options exist in this game to circumvent low stats , unbeatable enemies, and various mortalities.
Now if it was a case where unstable character rolls will lead to people playing badly or end up being the "god" element of this game then I will be sure to adjust accordingly or offer alternatives.
Nicholas Richardson
Oh on that note I do admit to giving knights some shitty armor so I'll just go ahead and give the next batch [better] but worse armor than oryx's so expect some calibs on the next char sheet effective asap :v
Sebastian Ross
How did you interpret my post as a bump? I had to squeeze it in before OP got to the processing stage.
These kinds of games have a window in which you can get your move in. If you're unable to before the cut off time, you're either dead in the water or, if someone notices that you didn't get your move in, someone "bots" you.
In this case, I got my move in, but I had intended to include a pic to make sure my move was clear. It might also help to speed up and/or ease the load of processing.
James Miller
cool, thanks for answering my question. You've clearly got a reason to design it that way, so if it works for you and your players then it works. I wouldn't personally do it and tend to abhor rolled stats, so that's probably why it sprang out to me as being a potentially funky rules quibble. I couldn't imagine playing a wargame and knowing I won or lost simply because my opponent rolled well / poorly doing their generation.
From just browing the threads it didn't look like there was a whole lot of options for someone other than 'I roll dice to do x' and so having more dice is better (even spells and ranged attacks are just variations of dice pool to do damage).
If those options exist and there's meaningful ways to use them, then I'm sure it'll work a lot better than my kneejerk 'huh?' response indicates.
Also if I may, a good rule of thumb in dicepool systems for soak damage is to make the soak inbuilt for those who are meant to be very strong. There's a tendency to give "+soak dice" but that doesn't help much because each individua soak dice is weak (20-30% chance per dice) and you need to give more than are commonly reasonable to achieve the same level. An extra +3 or +6 dice doesn't matter enough because they still fluke (+6 dice is, what, 2.5 damage reduction on average?). Then stack that up with someone's attack and the hardy characters get maybe 1 or 2 less damage if they're lucky, and nothing if they're not.
If damage commonly centers around rolling, straight DR for hardened classes work better and means they tie into the underlying math more (since then +additional soak and dodge has the same "value" for them and isn't adding +1soak to a pool already inflated).
Maybe just give knights straight 1-2 DR on their armor? It's basically a dice auto-success, which means they can safely ignore low level hits and ablate some of higher level hits. Then add in standard game mechanical damage / soak dynamics and they get a slight edge.
Nathaniel King
It's interesting to see how the dice pool evens itself out in spots. Sometimes you get negative numbers and while larger dice pools can yield greater results, it also opens the door for greater failings.
Aaron Howard
Ceremonial Armor Patch: " With the invention of the longbow many knights took to requesting thicker armor for their full plates with focused plates for defending their vitals with their arms -- but died anyway due to exhaustion in the field. " -reports from the 100 year war.
Xavier Hernandez
Armor raised to 2. With an ability to "block" for an extra 1DEF or straight damage reduction when paired with shields and hand equipment with a def rating.
Yo Monday, old Ironhearter here. Good to see you still alive and kicking. Wish I still had the free time to skirmish with you!
Jaxson Thomas
Action Phase Posted. > People should not be alive yet they are
Noah Smith
How? You don't get greater failures on higher dicepools, you get more dice to roll which means more succeses and more failures. But as 6s count for two, each additional dice is higher success chance mathwise.
They don't even out. Having a higher starting pool at generation just gives people better stats.
And if you get negative numbers, you really do want a higher pool too. -3 is 50% gone to someone with 6 and a mere annoyance to someone with 17.
Easton Jones
Because when you roll 17 dice and get only 7 successes it hurts a lot more than rolling 4 dice and only getting 2 successes.
Especially since a proper knight with high end can shrug off both of those and then beat you about the head for moving and attacking.
Elijah Barnes
Also 1s are -1 so your success rate is about even still.
Dominic Wright
Re: Greater Failures Not only do 1s count as -1, they have the power to "denature" 6s.
Jace Wilson
for the record , I have been processing 1s on mitigation rolls as "damage+" signifying a betrayal of one's faculties to cope with a horrendously altered body parts.
Anytime 1s are rolled is always bad. But its a 1 to 6 chance with cited chances of being overwritten or evened out against.
but the statistical average of taking not a lot of damage happens even still. again, the amount lost is proportional to high stats. It's not like enemies roll six 1s everytime they get hit by one damage. But they are valued about as high as match crits to an attacker's eyes. and bring about interesting results when they do show up with crits.
John Gonzalez
Information on the sheet was outdated so I had to fix this once again. You do not deserve a game run by a madman on little to no sleep.
Front Armor is mitgation from the front arc and so includes End + Armor + Frn A.
Def or Defense contributes to active functions like Block or specialized shield bashes only. and once again only applies to the front arc.
No shield or weapon, no matter how big, will protect you on the back.
Even if its DEF from armor.
Elijah Howard
Can you give us a sample knight then?
Assume the person rolled 5's across their entire stat sheet. So they have 3 in every stat and 0 luck.
Front Armor= 5 end + 2 shield front armor + 2 armor = 9 Flank armor= 5 end + 2 armor = 7
Ian Lee
Because I cannot be fucked with doing this halfway I bleached the entire sheet and burned every last word, formulae, and errata involved with shield def being exceptional to rules.
Wyatt Price
I do have a clarification question about hit dice. Do things like Assassin Training and Knight Training give additional dice to attacks? I see some people adding it, and some people do not.
I do not add +2 to my Estoc for example for my Assassin Training 2. However the example sheet above does have it giving additional dice to from Knight Training.
Cameron Parker
Asssassin training 2
+2 to: Dodging Weapon and exotic weapons usage
If you're not adding +2 to your weapons then I recommend you start doing that, since you're shorting yourself out 2 dice by not doing it.
