Levelup

What edition has soak?

Technically FantasyCraft doesn't have 'soak' either, but I feel like the only reward for specializing in violence is a growing sense of disillusionment as he scales all encounters to keep pace with the most capable member of the party (for that encounter).

I just wanted to get it off my chest, user. I'm sorry.

>he scales all encounters to keep pace with the most capable member of the party (for that encounter).

I had a DM like this.
>The Melee DPS
Player was abjectly retarded, but his character was competent as the GM helped him make it. His schtick was a magical enchanted sword that altered its elemental type to suit enemies. By the third session of the campaign, all enemies, even random town guards, had elemental resistance.
>The Sorcerer
Essentially a turret we plopped down at the start of an encounter who ended the encounter when the initiative order finally rolled around to people in the negatives. Crazy burst damage, decent AOE. The first boss had a special rule where every spell the sorcerer cast was an opposed check against the boss's retardedly high Will.
>The Tank
My character, who I had made to be as unkillable as possible since this GM had a history with player death. AC was basically "Too High" and was linked to the fact I was a giant mechanical monster being ordered around by the sorcerer. We were introduced to a new enemy type that added 5 to all rolls against mechanical enemies, and later on they couldn't even be taunted by me.
>The Rogue
Specialized in bows and sneaking, and that was basically his entire character. This was made useless by the fact that it was impossible for him to use any kind of low light, as he couldn't see per GM ruling, and he couldn't shoot his bow in low light. By the third or fourth session he was basically just a Ranger.

The campaign finally came to a head when we met a boss that the wizard and I came to call Balancemus, who was a giant demon thing some cult had summoned. His attacks ignored any kind of damage reduction, he couldn't be taunted, he took half damage from magic, he automatically won sneak checks made against him, and to boot he owned the sword the DPS had, and sucked it away from him at the start of the fight.

We just turned around and went back to town. AFAIK no one showed up the following week.

>more challenging
>just adds 2 hp and undoes your new thing

uhh lol

Why even level up?
That's like, let's just multiply all stats by 10 and roll a d200 instead of a d20.

That sounds like a good system.

Why not both ?

You have a list of stuff you can spend XP on. Once you spend enough XP, you level up, which adds new things to the list of things you can choose to spend XP on.

The WH40K RPGs did this, until Black Crusade where they switched to a less class focused system.

Come to think of it, they also have talents that give +2 damage, one for melee weapons, one for ranged weapons.

>he scales all encounters to keep pace with the most capable member of the party (for that encounter).

I had a GM like that. We had recurring enemy NPCs that beat us every single time we met them. The GM claimed that they were balanced because he built them like they were PCs and they had as much XP to spend as the PCs did. When we earned XP, they earned the same amount.

The problem was that our PCs had to generalise our skills to handle whatever was thrown at us. Those NPCs were minmaxed for the situations where we would run across them.

For the record, handling d200 is physically uncomfortable.

>I get tushy-troubled if my character can't eventually breeze though every combat encounter

Rollplayers detected.

As an experienced DM, I like to balance out harrowing high-reward Boss battles with encounters where the party gets to kick ass and impress the locals with their heroism.

I've never understood the "competitive DM", your job is to lose in a challenging and entertaining way, after all.

>Why not both ?

Because post-BC 40krpgs are so vastly much better at character creation and development its not even funny.

I mean seriously just look at shit like how you were forced to be shit at the very thing your class did cause someone thought basic ass soldiering was a high level advancement.

Classes can get fucked.

Roles, starting templates or all out classless.

/r 1d200

If you oppose progression, why bother with leveling?

RT will always, fucking always, be better than anything involving Only War and DH2.

Soak?

retard

You'll never lose your virginity and your father will always be just a little disappointed in you. Drink my piss and eat my shit.

...

You making a shit and piss smoothie from your's truly yet? If not, keep you fucking mouth shut until you've ingest my frothy goodness.

I want to say the reasons are more thematic than mechanical, but really even the mechanics are kind of easy to work with

???

Had a GM like that.
>Session 1
>Fighter and barbarian were rolling a solid %40 crits just with crazy rolls and slaughtering the enemies.
>Session 2
>All enemies have insane damage resistance and only a critical can do anything. Leads to TPK.

Man, just...just fuck that DM.

If only there was some way to change the mechanism of leveling so that you actually increase your accuracy, but not so far that the game has to dramatically change to compensate. Some sort of..."bounded"...accuracy.

I've had sort of the reverse problem, player get new abilities I make monsters/encounters that are solved/made much easier with the ability they proceed to dick around not using their new toy or assigning the wrong pc to deal with it. Ignore all attempts to get them to make monster knowledge checks and ignore npc advice. Complain that the encounters are to hard.

They're still the same game under the hood, except that someone realized how retarded the class system was and how bloated the skill list was and fixed that shit. Sure, that new system didn't really work when it showed up in BC, but by DH2 its so much better you'd have to be retarded to insist the older way was better.

And the rest of the rules have been cleaned up too, fucking auto fire for example was retarded.

Also psychic powers were ruined with RT and toughness bonus as soak has always been cancer.

Poker Powers was shit and gimmicky as hell.

Toughness Bonus does not even work on 3/4 of all damage type out there.

Well the characters would still learn new skills so even though the fights are still challenging the players would have more methods available to them. "Now my wizard has spells D through X rather than just the three he had at start. Plenty more tricks he can do." "Now my barbarian can fight from horseback with a bow or spear as well as he can on the ground." "Now my rigger has several more drones and we can pick the ones that suit this situation the best, sneaky ones, flying ones, pure-combat drones etc."

Simply doing X points more damage is a rather boring improvement, most games allow more character growth and the enemies getting stronger won't negate that.

>Toughness Bonus does not even work on 3/4 of all damage type out there.

That's a house rule son. RAW toughness bonus subtracts from all attack damage and cant even be reduced by armor penetration.

Also, the fuck you mean 'poker' powers?

>levelup
>proficient weapons
>2 higher soak

what the fuck game is this

>Leveling in Skyrim and Borderlands

Borderlands' enemies don't scale, though.

>Kill "Grunt"
>Level Up
>Now you have to fight "Angry Grunt" who deals more damage actually so the gameplay is more lethal. The model and the lore behind him are still the same.

They do on Newgame+ mode,or whatever it is they call it there.

The Badass enemies are random spawns that are meant as minibosses, enemies getting new titles only happens in the new game + that mentioned, and that's more setting the starting level higher.

Fantasycraft or Dark Heresy.

So how do you give the impression of PCs becoming badass without just totally outlevelling the world around them?

Keep them moving or send them places known to be dangerous as they go.

>Simply doing X points more damage is a rather boring improvement,

that's the only real thing that fighters do though
>inb4 >d&d

>playing fantasy craft
>my character dies
>DM is scared of killing more of us
>we get nothing done for 3 months
wake me up

>playing 4e
>one player flakes
>one character dies
>DM deletes the campaign

>Character progression is best expressed through increasing numbers for the entire universe
Rollplayer detected

>DM is scared of killing more of us
Fucking WHY. Fantasycraft is literally designed so it's not a problem.

Personally, I'd be happy with a game where there was no leveling up or stat changes or anything like that.

GMs have all kinds of grief doing things like challenging players, having the same faction remain a problem for the players, making sure the regular law enforcement can give the PCs a run for their money, and other problems stemming from ludicrous scaling.

We could just not have that happen. Just make the PCs game statistics more or less the same through the whole game.

>DM's been throwing lethal shit at us since day 1
>Dumps the whole game because someone died
I'm so sick of this. Just make a new party go to the same questgiver, have the questgiver say "haven't heard from the last guys in a while huh, now go finish their job". It's not like the campaign was tailor-made for those specific PCs or anything.

OD&D handled it better than 5E ever did, FYI. Or at least pre-Greyhawk, before they started the AC inflation. There's not a single monster in the LBBs that can't be hit by a peasant on a 17, although some of those monsters will win against the hectopeasant anyway on account of getting a fuckload of attacks against them.

Of course, the actual winner there is games that just don't increase the numbers much at all and instead just go with relatively static stuff, like Dungeon World and its ilk. Or just games that forgo level progression whatsoever!

DM here, while a candidly agree with most of this thread, "making" the PCs do anything is not only stupid and difficult, but boring for you as an independent player, and annoying for me. Keep in mind that most of you want to go off and do your own thing anyways, and if not, then you are so busy keeping the party's that guy in check you miss the storyline.

A good DM won't force his players back into a quest, instead, alternatives can be turmoil related to the outcome of the first party failing, an investigative squad sent out to find the fate of the last heroes, or even a new party stumbling across the tracks of the old party. There are different directions to take in the case of a party wipe, and plugging your new adventuring party right back into the story is a shitty one.

Sorry for the rant, just tickles me bum with all these shitty stories on the thread, There ARE good DMs out there. If you cant find a good DM, BE a good DM.

>Pick Orcs as favored enemy.
>Suddenly, not a single orc for the rest of the campaign.

That shit almost literally happened in a group I was in for 4e (inb4 shitstorm).

I proposed to the group that we all take this Tribal feat that gave an Initiative bonus equal to the number of people in the group that had the feat +2, capping at +5. Combined with my Warlord class feature gave the group a minimum Init of +8, with the two Dex based guy sitting at +12.

The first session after we took the feat, the entire party beat the enemies init rolls the first encounter. The DM looked really perturbed that we essentially controlled the top of the round. The next combat only the Dex based guys beat the enemies, leading to the group calling bullshit as the group rolled fairly well on their init rolls and they weren't enemies you'd call "fast." The DM got all huffy and said our Init feat was overpowered because we'd almost always go first and because we were good at threat assessment we'd kill the most dangerous things before they could act.

It led to the DM quitting in a hissy fit. I took over as DM and things were significantly better, we ran into low epic before we ended the campaign.

TL;DR: Fuck off Frank, you suck as a DM not just for nullifying our feats, but as a shitty DM in general.

Yeah, that's just a shitty shitty thing to do as a GM. If you wanna threaten players doing that? Give them enemies with Immediate Actions/Reactions/On Bloodied Effects or the HOST of minions with on-death effects.

The players get to feel like the feats were worth it and the enemies stay not a joke.

Indeed. I'd have been cool if we fought a Ranger-ish character with a falcon that were fast on the draw as us as a skirmisher in a larger encounter. In fact, I did exactly that in a fight that was essentially the party fighting Bizarro-versions of themselves.