FantasyCraft

isnt it better to just let players have their crit with a 20?

Not really. If the players are being imaginative and doing cool stuff, you should be rewarding them with action dice. So burning 1 to activate a crit is fine. If the players are running out, it's likely they are being too timid or you are being to stingy. Discuss the problem ("Do cool things, guys!" or "Remind me when another player does something that you think should be rewarded!") and figure out what your group needs to do. When the soldier hits 6th level and picks "activate crit hits for 1 fewer AD", he'll be super hyped you didn't just give everybody something that makes him special.

Not quite. You use action dice to activate your own threats (crit success) and to activate the opponent's errors (crit fails). The GM uses his that way and the party uses theirs the same way. Note that (without the Treacherous quality) only Special NPCs can activate their threats. Standards aren't that cool.

Don't do that. Crits in this game aren't just double damage; they're "you killed them," if the enemy was standard, or you bypass their vitality and possibly one-shot them if the enemy was special.

>Don't forget about the various special combat actions like grapple, trip, threaten, taunt, etc.
This. I started DMing this game after playing Pathfinder with my group and for the first couple of sessions they would mostly take turns slapping each other. Once they start getting a hang of the game, give them some enemies they have to think differently for. Give them a heavily armored foe then remind them that a grappled character loses 1/2 their DR from armor and that as a grapple action you can lower their DR by another half. Or break their weapons so they have to rely on other tricks like Tire checks. Stuff like that.

i was thinking in making all weapons do lethal damage and subdual when you wanted

You can do that by default but you take a -4 or so penalty to the attack check when you do damage that's not the weapon's default type. But it's your game, so you can do away with that rule if you want. Just remember that, for standard characters, you add up all lethal, subdual, and stress damaged they took do determine the save they have to make to not get knocked out. So subdual damage is doubly effective against them since, if the damage doesn't just knock them out, it can still leave them fatigued.

dont be surprised when the lancer winds up riding a gorilla
or a giant robot
or a dinosaur

This is what I generally use, but I saw a modified version that has better writing spaces.

>also what rules of the game should i let out
ESL, huh? Well, what systems you should leave out depends on what kind of game you are playing or, if this is the first time your group is being exposed to FC, what their background in gaming is.

Don't be surprised, be excited.

This should be the first rule of Fantasy Craft.

What is FantasyCraft? A variant of D&D?

A work using the Open Game License.

Interesting. It's about second time I heard abot this game. What are the differences between it and 5e?

FC throws out a lot of dnd legacy and rebuilds stuff from the ground up. A big one is that monster math is designed so that 3/4 BAB is the baseline, not 1/1 BAB. So people with 3/4 are still doing just fine ina fight, people with 1/2 BAB are lagging just slightly behind, and people with 1/1 are extra killy.

FC also includes a new piece of chargen on top of race and class, the specialty. Every character gets yo pick a specialty, and each offers a number of interesting bonuses it can be hard to get anywhere else, along with a free feat. Most dnd classe are actually specialties in FC, including fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard, barbarian, bard, sorcerer, possibly more I'm forgetting. These specialties cover most of what makes those dnd classes what they are, and you can pick a class that goes even further in the same direction if you want to double down on that theme, or pick something wholly different to have a broader character. For example, Burglar is the "rogue" class all about being sneaky and evasive with a sideline on some sneak attack and a focus on making opponents bleed, and then exploiting that. You could be a Rogue Burlgar, and have all of you enormous sneaking ability along with a lot of trap-finding and increased agility, or you could go Rogue Soldier, and be a killing machine with some unusually good acrobatics and trap-finding-- or yo ucould be a Fighter Burglar, and be a much more tanky, violent sneakthief.

FC also does away with Vancian casting, and also with arcane and divine being asically the same thing. Arcane casters have spellpoints which refresh every scene, and a spell costs points equal to its level to cast, meaning cantrips are always free. Cantrips ae also genuinely useful, so there's that too. To cast an arcane spell, you spend your point and then have to roll a spellcasting skill check vs a DC determined by the spell's level.

If you have a laptop handy, there's a .exe convertor program for npc stats on drivethrurpg somewhere.

Also posting alternate sheets.

le part deux

Anyways, FC was my first love. Sure my first campaign was a bit clunky but valuable lessons were learned regarding player types.

I wanna run Deadlands Reloaded but I also wanna run a FC epic about a corrupt empire and mad dragons but waaaah. Halp.

>Con't

Divine casters follow paths, which they get from their alignment.

Alignment in FC is way more open than in dnd. Each alignment is designed from the ground up by the gm and the players working in conjuction. Thematically an alignment can be anything from a single god to a a whole pantheon to the star-sign you were born under to a non-religious philosophy that nonetheless grants miraculous power-- whatever fits your campaign. Mechanically, each alignment has 3 to 5 paths associated with it, which are available to divine casters of that alignment. It also includes a number alignment skills, which become class skills for divine classes of that alignement, along with a specific kind of ritual weapon and an Avatar, the representative of that alignment that it's possible to summon.

Each path has five steps on it, and each step grants a thematic bonus. Many of these are passive bonuses, but many steps of many paths also offer spells that divine caster can use a listed number of times per scene without needing any kind of roll at all.

Feats are actually worth taking, and are more plentifully available. There are much fewer prerequisites for taking any given feat.

There are a bunch of other differences, but just listing them all would be crazy. Is there anything specif you want to know about?

Also watch for players who don't grok such a rules heavy system brah.

Anyone thinking of ways to help merge Epic Six and Fantasy Craft? Regardless, I just feel that Vitality bloat is a real issue when it comes to high level play.

I would use or design a campaign quality to limit or help circumvent vitality, rather than stop classes from leveling up past 6. You miss out on so much doing that, including most any level but the first couple of an expert class and master classes entirely, along with even base classes getting their gamebreaker at 14.

I'm doing up home brew weapons rules for early WW1 era shennanigans. Essentially I'm planning to run an alternate history occult thing with WW1 and I was wondering what sort of weapons/items would turn up?

Melee weapons are mostly present already, clubs, knives, spears, entrenching tools, etc. Probably need something for brass knuckles though, maybe just a held item that adds +1 to unarmed damage. To emphasize melee I'm also going to add in some feats that let you use spear/club tricks with rifles/shotguns with the appropriate mods.

I've got the usual, Bolt action rifles, shotguns, revolvers, big crew operated machine guns. Is there anything else that should get some stats done up?

Currently I'm planning to add in a flamethrower, mines, big scary howitzers, etc. A lot of siege weapons that will probably be used against the players. Also lots of gas.

I only have about a school year to do the campaign in and it'll probably end at level 6 just because I won't be at that school anymore after that.

You don't necessarily have to start at level 1. Personally I like 3, a lot of classes get their first really standout ability at that point.

I usually do just to start simple - I usually GM for newbs and FC isn't really newb friendly.

How do you use action die to use consequences/rewards for a crit or fail? I get the rules in the book, but the examples are garbage.

It does. Use of fragile heroes helps, that or using the Table of Ouch very liberally.

There is that as well, yeah, Sorry haven't touched the rulebook for a very long time.

>How do you use action die to use consequences/rewards for a crit or fail?
What? To which rules are you referring?

Activating a critical miss or failure. Page 65 only lists one example, so in the middle of a game I'm often at a loss to quickly figure out how many action die give what effect.

I would advise making all weapons do lethal - subdual is kind of broke if players have easy access to it, especially at higher levels when vitality points balloon up.

It works great as a fatigue system, but for weapon damage it doesn't make much sense.

Actually I've given it considerable thought, but I ended up not running that campaign. It struck that in FC, where you scale the enemies and skill checks to the player's level, there's a lot of numbers that go up for no real reason - it only serves to unbalance the game and create a lot of busywork.

My idea was E8: give everyone their class bonuses as if they were level 8 (taking the average between their classes if necessary), and scale monsters to the same (or 6 or 10, depending on their Menace). PCs still start at level 1 and pick up new feats, class abilities and so on as they advance, but numerically they don't change that much. The bulk of their VP and skill ranks are gained at level 1, but you might want to grant 0-3 in each at every level to retain a sense of progression. To simplify bookkeeping I was going to turn skill ranks into skill "proficiencies", where you can assign up to 2 for a +4 bonus each time and turn the benefit for class skills into a straight +3, so you cap out where a character would end at level 8 by RAW.

On top of that I'd straight halve vitality points for players and special npcs. Or maybe a monsters vitality reserve should just be TL+Healthx5 instead of multiplying the two. I chose level 8 because it's when different classes and npc grades have fairly pronounced differences numerically, but the Vitality bloat has already set in by that point.

Pretty straight forward.

If a character scores a threat, then the person controlling that character can activate the threat according to the skill text.
Alternatively, IF THE GM WISHES, then the GM may and/or the group as a whole can come up with cool and unique things to spend AD on. It can't cost more than 4 AD.

As to what the rewards should be, that is completely up to the GM and/or group. There are two caveats that are presented. Well, one presented and one implied. First is that you should not make it so that if someone spends AD that the scene ends immediately. That's less fun for the whole group and especially jarring to the person who spent the AD. The second is that rewards should be worth the AD spent. Using 4 AD on one thing is A LOT of awesome being thrown around and should be treated as such.

tl;dr: Make it up. make it fun.

Thank you very much for your input. If you don't mind, I would like an example so I have something to call back to if I fuck up.

If I'm reading it right:

Gunther
Level 1 Hardy Guardian Soldier
STR 14
DEX 12
CON 18
INT 12
WIS 12
CHA 10

Talent:
+2 CON
Base Speed 30 ft
Double Boost Con
Iron Gut
Thick Hide 2

Specialty:
Bonus Feat Elusive
Practiced Notice
Step In
Tenacious Spirit

Class:
Accurate
Fight On! (Greatsword Basics)

Proficiences:
Edged forte
Unarmed forte
Blunt forte

Level:
Draconic Heritage (Total DR 4)

Class Bonuses:
BAB: +8, Fort: +4, Def: +5, Init: +5, Lifestyle: +4, Skill Points: 55.

Vit 80, Wounds: 18.

The numbers seem a bit big.

>If you have a laptop handy, there's a .exe convertor program for npc stats on drivethrurpg somewhere.
There's also this online tool:
meadicus.plus.com/craftygames/npc-builder/NPCBuilder.html

If you hit "Load Previous NPC", you can paste in a statblock from the bestiary or your own design, and from there you can scale it to whatever TL you need it to be, or modify it through the various tools it has there.

It does have some bugs that you need to watch out for, though. The load function is extremely picky about the spelling and syntax it will accept, so even statblocks from the book will sometimes lose a couple abilities when loading them in, and you'll have to add those back in manually. (One thing in particular I've found is that the tool misspells the Monstrous Attack/Defense NPC qualities as "Monsterous", and won't recognize the properly-spelled qualities.) It also doesn't really handle templates properly, as templates that add graded qualities (like Tough) will overwrite rather than add to that quality if the base statblock has it.

>How do you use action die to use consequences/rewards for a crit or fail? I get the rules in the book, but the examples are garbage.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with this question. Do you mean how to gauge the payoff for spending multiple AD on a crit/fail using a customized outcome rather than the generic crit effects for that check in the book?

>and turn the benefit for class skills into a straight +3
>PF style class skills in FC

No. Just no.

FC relies on skills a lot more heavily than 3.PF, and because they're so much more prevalent in gameplay skill access serves a very important role in differentiating characters. Opening up skill access to be totally divorced from class homogenizes the classes considerably. And using PF's method of "class skill" status being a +3 bonus gets way out of hand with how many class skills FC gives relative to the overall skill list. Even a low-skill class has fully half the skill list as class skills (including origin skills). It would only take the slightest bit of multiclassing to nab that +3 class skill bonus on every skill in chapter 2.

That's exactly what I'm looking for. I'm having trouble coming up with things on the fly and so do my players most of the time. They're creative in long term plan, but not 'in the second' ones.

Yeah, this thing's pretty useful.

Used it to build a bunch of XCOM enemies once, though I had to kludge the plasma weapons (at least they're sort of built-in to the monsters)

There's not much in the way of hard and fast rules for it, it's pretty much just a matter of what seems reasonable as a result of the action. What's reasonable kind of depends on the scope of the action in question; for instance, the examples in the book deal with an out-of-combat skill check meant to encompass a fairly extensive bout of sneaking, so the crit could have long-reaching effects impacting the entire scene. A crit on a combat action probably shouldn't have such long-lasting effects, since the action itself is more limited.

Some examples of things I've done/seen in my group with crits in combat are:
>Crits with Trip: Also trip second adjacent enemy, or also deal damage with trip, or fling enemy a square or two away
>Enemy perched on roof/wall or near window critfails attack: Overextends and gets pushed off roof/wall/out window
>Enemy critfails bite attack against character with crystal elemental heritage: Breaks teeth on crystals, can't bite anymore and takes 1 damage

Out of combat, I once had a player critfail a Tactics check I called for to judge the success of his ploy to set fire to a house to lure in zombies that were swarming the town, to thin out the amount they'd need to fight through to get to their destination. I dumped 4 AD on that critfail to cause an explosion, causing the zombies to come running MUCH faster than planned, triggering the midboss fight of the adventure early with plenty of extra zombies around.

Regrettably this was years ago and I'm totally pulling these numbers out of my ass and putting them on top of my head. And they were never tested in play in the first place, so go and do what you see fit.

But judging by I'd say it holds up fairly well. This guy can take a lot of hits but he's also about the toughest human in existence. I'd say it's reasonable if he ends up with 120-150 vit at level 20. Obviously don't implement an option like this if you want fantasy heroes that can chew through armies without denting their hp pool too much.

The potential sticking points for players are:

- he gets most of his skill points up front, so decide what you're going to specialise in early. In practice though, you want to be doing that in RAW.

- if he multiclasses to something less martial, then his BAB and Vit total will go down. Consider it the price of neglecting your training. It might feel like bullshit though, to players who are used to steady 1-20 growth.

>FC relies on skills a lot more heavily than 3.PF, and because they're so much more prevalent in gameplay skill access serves a very important role in differentiating characters. Opening up skill access to be totally divorced from class homogenizes the classes considerably.

I'd argue that the skills characters invest in play an important role in differentiating them, and I don't really give a shit how they get hold of the skills they want. You're right that it does homogenize classes somewhat. That's fine by me, FC already has a very flexible character building system for a nominally class-based game. Hell I'd be ok with reducing them to a menu of class abilities and have players buy their saves and lifestyles and so on separately.

Restricted skill access is one of the problems with FC core anyway, because there are a lot of basic combat actions that can only be defended against with a specific skill.

>Restricted skill access is one of the problems with FC core anyway, because there are a lot of basic combat actions that can only be defended against with a specific skill.
That's a feature, not a bug. Combat actions being skill-based, with having the relevant skill not being a given, is a big part of what makes them useful. And having tradeoffs to weigh where you can't cover every possible base is good game design, since it's a safeguard against overpowered builds, makes character building decisions more meaningful (you actually have to choose what you prioritize rather than just checking all the boxes), and supports dynamic, tactical play where there are weaknesses that can be exploited using unorthodox tactics.

B
U
M
P

Tell me your favorite build, and wackiest build, and most annoying builds

I kinda liked the sexy goblin build, where you can end up with 22 diplomacy or so by level 3.

I've never gotten to play and never got to have a build as I just bought the books, so I will tell you what I am up to right now instead. I am currently preparing a pseudo-spelljammer setting for my group. I am attempting to achieve maximum fun in it, so any suggestions from you fine gents would be lovely.

FAST FEATS, Mr. Trips. Give it to your players. It's the most fun quality.

I'd half the vitality again. Tempted to put Gunther into a proper sheet.

Anyway, how exactly do expert classes factor into this hack?

Being speed buggy is pretty cool.

I built an oni once who could reliably beat the Tarrasque in a grapple.

Sadly, no way of actually forcing the issue, but if the Tarrasque tried to grab and chomp this guy, he'd actually inevitably, if slowly, win because he could reliably keep the Tarrasque pinned and then CdG with his horn.

Whip Mastery + Knife Mastery for ultra asshole build.
>oh whats that you're next to me and on your ass.
>oh whats that a knife in your gut? Here are some sneak attack dice.

I prefer Wrestling Basics + Knife Basics. Ideally with Fluid Style so that after your Wicked Dance stab you can shift right back into Open Stance and trip the next nerd who tries to hit you.

"Of course my hands are free. Knife's in my boot."

Thank you sir!

For a recent one-shot set under the sea I built a drake to be a giant moray eel. Azurescale, Truescale (Aquatic terrain, sonic breath weapon) and Dragon-Tailed are a pretty great combination, especially on a Martial Artist.

You need the Sorcerer specialty for that, right? Sucks that most bizarre combos require that.

Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate that there isn't another published specialty that gives a species feat. Not that it's hard to brew one up, given origins' point system, but even so.

There's a couple in the unofficial Book of Holding. I think I'm going to allow that in the future.

On the note of the Book of Holding, how well does it stack up to the published material?

I haven't tried it, but it's hard to go wrong with the point based creation system. Decent production values too.

Haven't read the Book of Holding stuff. Have read Grand Adventures, another big homebrew doc. A couple bits were wobbly but there was a lot I liked.

Where can I find that?

Not sure I can share it. I'll toss the thread at the guy who showed it to me, though, and he can decide if he wants to post it.

Oh ok. If you can't that's fine.

Id post bag of holdin, but its to big. Will condence then post when I get home tonight

Here they are. Or just do what some GMs do and give out free speciality feats like candy.

>Monster
>Draconian Legacy Palm Snid Martial Artist/Dragon Lord

...

Late reply, but the way I'd do it is

- when you level up, take the next class ability from any class available to you as normal. take the skill/vit contribution appropriate to the class as well, whatever you've decided that should be for this hack.

- if you have levels in more than one class then average out the attack, save etc. bonuses from each of them. how many levels you have in each doesn't matter, so if you dip into an expert class for one level it'll still change your character fairly radically.

You could also do the more traditional E6 method and just add the ordinary table bonuses until level 8, when they stop advancing. I personally don't like how that skews things like save progression.

Not the guy who originally asked, but I've been eyeing up Fantasycraft for a while. A lot of what you said sounds quite technical, is the game hard to get into for someone who, like me, is quite scared of all the tables and crunch of DnD/PF?

Easiest way to learn is by doing.

Honestly, I'd be willing to run one of the pregen adventures for a few folks from Veeky Forums who have been wanting to try FC and not had the chance, guide you guys through chargen and such.

I'm all for characters having weaknesses, but the all-or-nothing skill defense is pretty clumsy, and it feels unfair that the single-classed Captain or Soldier will always be wide open to trip attacks. It's especially obnoxious if you have great dex and reflex save, but you'll always be a lumbering oaf unless you learn gymnastics specifically.

4e did this much more elegantly, by turning Fort/Ref/Will into generic defenses that each protect against broad classes of attack. You can still have a weak defense, but it won't be so weak that specific attacks are an auto-win, and you'll be weak to similar styles of attack in a way that makes intuitive sense.

Thanks.

It's a little confusing having the numbers of a level 8 but being level 1 and having the qualities of a level 1. But I think I will try a few sessions with this with my house mates and see how it pans out.

Please tell me you're in Europe or something. I'd love to do that, I have a week off work next week if you can only do American hours.

It's a bit hit and miss. Some of the races are great, some are technically sound but built with some pretty backward/ill-fitting design decisions, some stretch rather too far beyond the known territory of the origin point system and are highly questionable for it. Classes are actually mostly pretty solid, nothing too jarring there. Feats are very much a mixed bag.

I'm American, but I have a pretty open schedule except Mondays and Wednesdays.

Could always just link the Google Drive version.
drive.google.com/file/d/0B8FCrAZcFJJDOV9nLUlyVlZLUDA/view?usp=sharing

>and it feels unfair that the single-classed Captain or Soldier will always be wide open to trip attacks
>What are Origin skills?
>What are paired skills?
>What is Prodigal Skill?

If you are missing a skill, it is because you chose not to invest in it. Period.

Of course that's true. I just think it's silly that not wanting to invest in Acrobatics leaves you defenceless against trips. It's a major noob trap.

Cool. You know how IRC works? Join me in #FCdemo on Rizon, those of you who are interested.

If not let me know and I can give more detailed instructions.

"Noob trap" suggests that defense against trips is something totally indispensible, like lacking it will totally cripple you. That's a rather catastrophizing way to look at it, and frankly suggests to me that you're just stuck on the powergamer idea that you have to be able to cover all your bases and having reliably-exploitable weaknesses is unacceptable.

Being vulnerable to trips is far from crippling. Remember, most other characters won't have Acrobatics either, and not all that do will be inclined toward tripping. And if you do get tripped, it's hardly the end of the world. Yeah, you're made a bit more vulnerable, and can't attack quite as effectively, but you're hardly helpless.

I wouldn't say you're defenseless against trips, you just don't have good chances in an actual trip attempt. You can always spend action dice to improve your roll if it comes down the that, for one thing, but there's a lot you can do to avoid being in a tripable situation in the first place. Engaging from range is a one-- to trio, you usually have to be adjacent. You can get a lot of mileage out of tricks like shove or fend to keep would-be trippers at a safe distance, especially with a Reach of 2 or higher-- which is easy to get.

This reminds of me of when climbing was involved and only one member of the party had Athletics. Good times.

thanks m80. had lost the link to it

If anybody else wants in, this is an open offer, by the way.

Might go for it if it's on next week.

It's on whenever's convenient for folks. Except Monday and Wednesday, I've got other games those days.

Cool, cool.

This is what pitons and rope is for! Climbing a rope is easy.

Indeed. Even an untrained character should be able to manage a DC 10. Heck, it's only DC 6 if you can take your time and have climber's gear or otherwise rig up some manner of harness so you can hang and rest for a bit.

So what exactly does it mean to suffer a critical failure? Is it just rolling the 1, or does it need to be activated by someone spending an action die? For example: if an npc has the Critical Hesitation trait, do they get slowed when they just roll a 1 or when that critical failure is activated by a PC spending an action die?

A natural 1 (or perhaps slightly higher, if you have an increased error range), in and of itself means nothing.

A natural 1, if that is a failure on the check in question, is an error. (If you can hit the DC even on a 1, a natural 1 is not an error.)

An error becomes a critical failure only if somebody spends an action die to activate it.

So, for the example of an NPC with Critical Hesitation, they would be slowed only if (1) they rolled a 1, (2) they failed the check by doing so, and (3) an opponent spent one or more action dice to activate the critfail.

Rolling a 1 (in general) is an Error.
An activated Error is a Critical Error.
Rolling a 20 (in general) is a Threat.
An activated Threat is a Critical Success.
You spend action dice to activate Errors and Threats.