I really don't know what to think about this system. On the one hand...

Isn't that something that could be fixed by throwing enough Stooges on the map? I have not delved deeply into the combat side of Strike yet, but I would think lots of creatures would be the key to giving a team that relies on alpha striking a handful of enemies. Even with some of the AoE Encounter powers available to Strikers and especially the Magician, they're going to run out of area attacks pretty quickly. Though that would make pretty samey fights pretty fast...

Did you find that particularly helped?

>I am truly not a fan of the noncombat side of Strike!, which is highly clunky and unintuitive. I had wrangled with it over dozens of sessions both as a player and as a GM, and it has always had the nasty tendency to get in the way. It is by far the worst aspect of the system. I have experimented with house rules like actual skill lists, non-randomized skill progression, more standardized rolling schemes, and the like, but nothing seems to work in smoothening the noncombat side.
You should take a page out of OSR's manual and completely remove any skill listing or tables whatsoever, and just decide if a character can do the task or not with no rolls involved. It makes the game far, FAR more enjoyable and about player skill than skill-based systems.

>OSR = Freeform

>stooges

They help (with the caveats you mention; especially the Magician with Inferno is pretty ridiculous), what also works is terrain, cover, and larger maps. The game could use some guidelines for map creation and deployment.

I have been considering some sort of hard limit on encounter powers/turn as well (since most alpha strilking comes from dumping all your powers at once).

I have found that +2 HP is worth doing even for non-optimized groups if yo ustart at low levels, because low level mosnters die a bit too fast.

That's going a bit too far I think; you'd probably still want to have strengths (and weaknesses) for each character. What I did for a oneshot I ran about two weeks ago is use the 2d6 alternate rules, with a twist. The players could select two stats (out of the D&D 6) they are good at, and two jobs (or races). Whenever they needed a skill roll, they added +1 when a stat or job was relevant (+2 if both).

>He actually is

>take a page out of OSR's manual and completely remove any skill listing or tables whatsoever
Oriental Adventures says hi.

>Yeah! That one splat book that was widely recognized as a failure by almost everyone!
>Wow, I sure got you, friend!
>Thank God OSR isn't a mentality, otherwise I'd be hella boned.

P.S. ur a fag

>That's going a bit too far I think; you'd probably still want to have strengths (and weaknesses) for each character.
You do, but you want them in something that makes narrative sense like in combat. There's no reason why someone with 20+ years of experience can't learn and master multiple things, but skill based systems would have you believe that they only learn one or two things and fuck all on the rest. Playing with skills is really an inferior way to game.

What do you think of "job" systems like the one described there, or maybe like the one in Shadow of the Demon Lord?

By "there" you mean in the post I quoted? Personally, I dislike it. But I'm steadfast in opposing games that require any type of "skill roll", and often times, as long as I don't believe that some of the classes are balanced around skill usage, I gut any skill system I come across out of my games. Skill checks at their best offer very little in terms of engaging roleplay, and at their worst, hamper character designs by stringing them up due to a bad roll in a situation where a bad roll isn't warranted or interesting.

The only exception I make is thieves skills in OSR type games, and those I always run as a supernatural ability as opposed to a skill-check like we think of it in modern terms, which is how they were intended to be used to begin with, but was lost in translation so to speak.

But are there not many situations where a skill check could be wanted for a dramatic and risky action in the middle of a fight or finishing some task in a stressful time limit? Would this not and an element of tension and risk to the decision making process?

Wow, that's a very extreme stance!

I can see how it'd speed things up, though it also feels like you need players who are mature enough to accept rulings without negative feelings (and although I wish I'd exclusively gamed with such people, this is rarely the case).

>>By "there" you mean in the post I quoted? Personally, I dislike it. But I'm steadfast in opposing games that require any type of "skill roll", and often times, as long as I don't believe that some of the classes are balanced around skill usage, I gut any skill system I come across out of my games. Skill checks at their best offer very little in terms of engaging roleplay, and at their worst, hamper character designs by stringing them up due to a bad roll in a situation where a bad roll isn't warranted or interesting.

How precisely do you keep a game grounded in any sort of consistent reality otherwise?

Inb4 some FATE nonsense where you just have a few stats that apply to everything in the universe alongside some stupid "player-designed tricks/rules/vaguely worded nonsense that is supposed to give them a bonus whenever it kind of sort of applies if you squint at it real funny" crap

>But are there not many situations where a skill check could be wanted for a dramatic and risky action in the middle of a fight or finishing some task in a stressful time limit?
There are, but there are better ways to do it, such as outright saying that an action will succeed but it will cost X amount of time, such as rounds. So for example in combat, if you had to operate a magical device, tell them it will take you 3 turns uninterrupted to use the device, which means that the rest of the team will have to prevent enemies from approaching and interrupting the worker.

To post another example, Skill Challenges were a thing for awhile in 4th Edition. Nobody liked them and they were quietly removed from the game even before 4th died and 5th's playtest was in progress. The reasons for this were many, but one of the primary causes of death was that it essentially was just flipping coins at the end of the day because the DC would often be at a point where it was a 50/50 chance for the most skilled character in the party.

>I can see how it'd speed things up, though it also feels like you need players who are mature enough to accept rulings without negative feelings
Oh yeah, it definitely requires the DM to know how to build up a strong player-DM trust relationship, and a little bit of finagling to get those pesky 3.5 players out of the mindset of rolling for everything and actually trying to figure out how to accomplish a task the old, manual way. But the reward for it is huge when you have 3 players working together to orchestrate someone picking the nobleman's pocket when none of them are thieves.

>How precisely do you keep a game grounded in any sort of consistent reality otherwise?
Heavily. To a point where I outright tell them that realism will trump everything including rules, with the exception of my final rule as DM, for cases where magic is at work or I'm not quite convinced that it will work and haven't seen proof.

>To post another example, Skill Challenges were a thing for awhile in 4th Edition. Nobody liked them and they were quietly removed from the game even before 4th died and 5th's playtest was in progress. The reasons for this were many, but one of the primary causes of death was that it essentially was just flipping coins at the end of the day because the DC would often be at a point where it was a 50/50 chance for the most skilled character in the party.

Skill challenges were updated, not removed. I don't remember the exact changes, but I know it ended up with something pretty serviceable (assuming you are ok with skills to begin with of course).

Do you also remove rolls in combat? Or is chance only ok when you get into arbitrary conflict sequences involving fighting?

>It's another "my games are super realistic because I read some articles on wikipedia" GM

Stop embarrassing yourself. Part of why systems have consistent difficulties for different tasks and modify them through the abilities of the player characters is to ensure the world *feels* consistent and isn't just at the GM's arbitrary whims or some stupid Oblivion-esque "scaling difficulty"

>actual skill lists, non-randomized skill progression, more standardized rolling schemes,
What problems did you run into with these?

>Do you also remove rolls in combat?
Combat is an abstraction of people moving in and out, ducking and weaving, and attempting to get the best of each other in a deadly fight to the death. Chance is lowered with experience and different gaps of power.

>It's another "Dragons exist therefore it's okay that my loli character is a barbarian with 20 str" debate club brainlet
First, I use realism in my games because I want my players to have the ability to think through situations. If you remove realism, eventually you will break the point where players can use logic and reason to solve tasks and instead have to rely on asking you to reveal what you think the best course of action is subtly, or outright having a DMPC explain the situation.

Second, all games use realism to fill the gaps between what the DM has described and what he hasn't. It's why Acid in your game melts, why fire burns, and why humans breath air and bleed when you stab them. But anti-realism autists don't think about this until they have to justify their fetish fuel character.

>Part of why systems have consistent difficulties for different tasks and modify them through the abilities of the player characters is to ensure the world *feels* consistent
lolwut? The reason why skill systems thrive is because we haven't undone the damage from 3.5, and by extension, the less popular and optional non-weapon proficiencies from 2e. Skill systems leave far too many gaps in narrative and logic for them to be "consistent" in the slightest, such as the problem of when the Barbarian rolls an 18 on arcana right after the Wizard who specialized in that field of study with the much higher intelligence rolls a 2 and fails miserably.

>Chance is lowered with experience and different gaps of power.
And pickpocketing, acrobatic manuevers, athletics feats, and everything else skills offer do not have this?

>Muh realism

First, you're stupid because what you perceive as realism is not necessarily actual realism. Two undeniable things that ensure this will be the case is first the necessary simplification of physical realities in order to make them into a fun game, and second your own human fallibility.

Secondly, as a consequence of the first fact, other people's perspective on realism is not going to necessarily line up with yours, because both you and they have imperfect knowledge of what is realistic or even likely. That is why we have rules at all, to act as an impartial arbiter of what is truly likely, "realistic" if you will, within the game-world, and as a consequence of accepting that actual physical realities are infinitely more complex than what can be expressed with the usual die roll and modifiers, we further accept that it will not necessarily line up 1 to 1 with what is realistic in real life.

At best, your games are *trying* to be realistic, and failing due the natural consequences of the medium. At worst, you're just making shit up that "sounds about right," and your players are left trying to read your mind to determine what's likely rather than actually engage with the game-world that actually has clear and concise rules to explain what can and can't happen within it.

>3.5e invented the idea of skill points to express competence

You are retarded.

I enjoy how different the classes feel. I like when games give each role a way to generate and spend a resource unique to them.

>Feats
lol

Seriously though, such abstractions are rarely necessary and often not interesting to play, and don't do much for the overall story.

Athletics, for example. Why? Do a comparison of raw Strength value vs strength value, or dex vs dex. When they come across a narrow ledge, gameplay is more interesting when, instead of telling them they must each make an Acrobatics check one by one until they are all across or fall, tell them that the ledge is just a little too narrow to walk so that the group has a more fun time figuring out some sort of alternate means across like laying a 10 foot ladder across or using pitons and rope to make a bridge.

Even pickpocketing. Usually I rule that it's a thief-only ability at the table for ease of abstraction, but like I said earlier, the table had a blast when they needed to pick pocket a nobleman whom they had previously offended, so they came up with an elaborate stage play where 2 people distracted him and a third came up from behind and snatched his purse. It really blew me away how much effort they had to go through and how much fun we all had when it wasn't relegated to "okay. Roll your sleight of hand check. Alright we're done here." It fleshed out what was originally written to be a throwaway scenario.

>Two undeniable things that ensure this will be the case is first the necessary simplification of physical realities in order to make them into a fun game, and second your own human fallibility.
This is reductio ad absurdum. My game doesn't fall apart if the entire table agrees that a course of action would be the most logical, and it definitely doesn't fall apart when someone brings up why something wouldn't work like that and we all adjust the plans accordingly ahead of time.

>other people's perspective on realism is not going to necessarily line up with yours
This argument is just absurd, because it's making the assumption that we as people cannot look things up if we come to a disagreement. Also, before you make the fallacious argument that we are "constantly" slowing down the game by looking things up, this is not inherently true in concept, nor is it remotely true in practice. The table discusses, the DM listens, then the DM announces his call. That's his job as referee. If there's a breakdown in narrative, then there are other problems present at the table aside from "realism"

>At best, your games are *trying* to be realistic, and failing due the natural consequences of the medium.
Again, this is the same argument that my game fails on the condition that it is not realistic, as opposed to using realism as a guiding judgement. I use realism because I want people in the proper mindset of thinking about problems, not because it's a statement against unrealistic play. If I were to find out retroactively that a call was not realistic, I would shrug my shoulders.

.5e invented the idea of skill points to express competence
>I don't read, I just post arguments: the post
2e incorporated it, and 3.5 popularized it and codified the mentality of it. If you don't understand this much, you're literally not qualified to be discussing it.

Wow dude you went from a slightly weird but interesting GM case to a paranoid crazy in one post that's really impressive.

>My game doesn't fall apart if the entire table agrees that a course of action would be the most logical

>Consensus-based GMing

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.

Back to FATE with you.

I mean I obviously didn't mean DnD's literal "Feats", but I think you understood that part.

Why don't you do the same thing with combat?

Oh really? Tell me why.

>My DM doesn't have full control over the table and ignores everything the players say to him outside of the game?
>YOU'RE A NARRATIVE GM! NARRATIVE GM!
Not an argument.

>Someone calls your notion of realism into question
>You respond
>"But anti-realism autists don't think about this until they have to justify their fetish fuel character." and "Dragons exist therefore it's okay that my loli character is a barbarian with 20 str"

You immediately jumped to strange and unrelated accusations, it was seriously weird.

Something simpler and more unified like PbtA's 2d6 rolls would probably be more ideal.

As it currently stands in Strike!, for something as simple as "I want to lie to this person," you would have to figure out which narrow Skill is applicable, whether to handle it as a Skill Roll or an Opposed Roll, how the target's empathy-oriented Skills would affect a Skill Roll, what a Bonus/Cost/Twist could possibly be, and so on.

Then there is the fact that players are deathly afraid of Twists because how the math rates them as worth "-1" on average; while some Twists may be beneficent, that just means the rest are supposed to be savage, like taking away equipment or throwing the party into battle.

While the combat rolls are not particularly swingy, the noncombat rolls are *insanely* swingy. A one-in-six chance of critical success and a one-in-six chance of critical failure are insane, especially when magnified by Advantage or Disadvantage respectively.

Sometimes, what the GM really needs is a simple and binary "pass/fail," or a slightly more elaborate and ternary "pass/pass with a complication/fail." Playing tea-leaf-reading with many different result types can be grueling.

Never mind that Strike! suffers from the same issue as Fate, only vastly magnified: Strike! gives the PCs extremely potent session-based resources (Action Points and Fallbacks), and the GM has to either awkwardly call for a copious amount of rolls so as to avoid making those resources overpowered (the FAQ even says this!), or have multiple real-world sessions count as a mechanical "session." It is clunky in a system like Fate, and even clunkier in Strike!

Stooges do not help as much as you think; Mudge's Localized Inferno is a disgustingly effective power when it comes to deleting stooges and pinging goons for damage.

Oh, that's because his arguments are strangely reflective of arguments I tend to see in threads where someone posts that one of their players is trying to play an 8 year-old girl barbarian for their character. The arguments tend to boil down to:
>It's not realistic
>What realism in MY D&D? Dragons exist dude, so a lolibarbarian is fine
It was mostly me taking the piss out of him. He never denied it though, so I'm kind of curious about that.

I do find it weird that one line was all it took for you to try to dismiss me as "paranoid crazy", but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. It would be weird outside of Veeky Forums context.

GM who dispenses with tangible rules in favor of whatever their head-canon tells him to be true? Check.

GM who delegates his authority in dispensing information and making consistent rulings to the whims of the players? Check.

GM who is wholly convinced that 3.5e is the spawn of Satan? Check.

Diagnosis: Terminal FATEfaginess. Recommended treatment: One-way ticket on a rocket launched directly into the sun.

>GM who dispenses with tangible rules in favor of whatever their head-canon tells him to be true?
Doesn't FATE run on a system where everything is a roll with "narrative" results? No, really, I haven't played it.

>GM who delegates his authority in dispensing information and making consistent rulings to the whims of the players? Check.
>Talk with players
>Clearly delegation of rules instead of making a rule and a player pointing out that it wouldn't work that way
>You must be narrative
You're witch-hunting, Geralt.

>GM who is wholly convinced that 3.5e is the spawn of Satan? Check.
Is there anyone on this board other than Pathfinder nerds who don't have legitimate complaints about this system? Even Paizo themselves know that the game is broken.

>Diagnosis: Terminal FATEfaginess.
You know, I hate to sound reddit here, but fucking cringe, dude. How old are you, out of curiosity?

Do you think you can list what modifications to the skill system you have playtested, for record's sake?
More importantly, have you tried anything that changes off the base "1/3 of your rolls will be a Critical of some sort"?

I know you've talked about the 2d6 method the book offers and how it weights negative (IIRC it was... that 7-9 is either -1 [twist] or -0.35 [success+cost]?), but have you experimented with changing its results (IE, what rolls map to what result) at all?

>Session-based resources
I actually dislike this concept in games for basically the reasons you said - they become a weird resource that has to be depleted, and that's a weird dynamic to force into the game. It's sort of the "15 minute adventuring day" that DnD gets.
Dunno why games do not just default to having them be persistent session to session and they're used as rewards for whatever (roleplaying flaws, accomplishing goals, whatever the heck you're trying to incentivize). Sounds like Strike could easily swap to this?

>Do you think you can list what modifications to the skill system you have playtested, for record's sake?
They are too scattered and unpredictable to present. In a month's time, I will start up another Strike! campaign with a skill system *entirely* disconnected from Strike!'s, a drastic but perhaps necessary step; I will try to post whatever I come up with then.

>Dunno why games do not just default to having them be persistent session to session and they're used as rewards for whatever (roleplaying flaws, accomplishing goals, whatever the heck you're trying to incentivize). Sounds like Strike could easily swap to this?
This is my thought as well; even in something like Fate, I would prefer refresh 0 and no scene-based pool of GM fate points.

>It was mostly me taking the piss out of him. He never denied it though, so I'm kind of curious about that.

Have you stopped beating your wife?

Sometimes, a question is stupid and biased enough to not be worth further discussion.

I've never had a wife.

It wasn't that hard to say that line, and I'm rewarded with the knowledge of knowing I called you out on your shit and proved you wrong. There's no drawbacks and 100% benefits.

I don't know, the very clear drawback is public embarrassment as pointed out, but you appear too self-absorbed to notice.

>The reason why skill systems thrive is because we haven't undone the damage from 3.5
Fucking what? Ever hear of Traveller or Runequest?

>skill challenges

This Just google the phrase, and you find the general consensus is that skill challenges were good, but poorly explained (and there's a lot of people asking how to use it and having it explained). It's an organizational tool for GMs that turns skills from, "roll something once in a while, I guess," and into a consistent mechanic that provides a forward direction to a scene.

It's one of the things in 4e that 3eaboos didn't understand the value of or purpose behind, so they wrote off the whole edition.

You looking for players for this future test group? I'm interested in seeing if Strike can be salvaged.

>Public embarrassment
>on Veeky Forums
>I'm the one too self-absorbed
Oh no, my internet cred.

No, and neither has anyone else.
Zing. Take that, obscure indie systems from a time forgotten.

My understanding of it at the time was that skill challenges were considered a massive failure, but part of the reason might have been how many people felt like they didn't understand it, so that could be a reason for it's overall failure. However, I have other more game theory related reasons as to why they wind up not working out.

>obscure indie systems
>have been continuously in production for 40 years
I feel that this is bait.

He's that guy whose shown up in a number of threads who keeps insisting that D&D and PF are the only good systems because they're the most popular.

I'm not going to buy your headcanon, Satan. Proof or get the fuck out, this is a board of science.

Your post is all the proof.

>There is literally no difference in Strike between a master thief lockpicking a door and a random street urchin as long as they both have the same "Lockpick" skill. It's ridiculous

That's not really a mortal sin of game design, depending on the action it's trying to facilitate. Not every idiom needs to differentiate between levels of skill, in some approaches proficiency can be synonymous with mastery and you can call it good.

If you're trying to emulate a fantasy novel, say The Gentleman Bastards series, then yeah, it's pretty important that the rules support a distinction between Locke's and Jean's skill at lockpicking, pick-pocketing, and whatever manner of sleight of hand.

If you're going for something more "dumb action movie", it's not that important. You can keep the granularity of the skills down and make characters in broad strokes like "expert marksman", "expert getaway driver", "expert cat burglar", and hit the ground rolling.

What kind of approach is this game trying to emulate, then?

>Something simpler and more unified like PbtA's 2d6 rolls would probably be more ideal.

Those slot in rather nicely, actually.

>for something as simple as "I want to lie to this person," you would have to figure out which narrow Skill is applicable

Well, this is where talking over what skills you have helps (I have found players would rather decide what to do based on their skills than try to stretch like that), or using a predefined skill list where that's not a problem.

>whether to handle it as a Skill Roll or an Opposed Roll,

I don't think the game expects you to ever do opposed rolls vs NPCs. If in the example play knocking guards out was not an opposed roll, I have no idea how lying could be one.

>what a Bonus/Cost/Twist could possibly be

PbtA games define this better, but I think the book provides adequate ideas for what's possible for each. You still need to improvise.

>swingy stuff

Yeah, use 2d6 and don1t use the more brutal stuff. Entering a battle (using the submodule) on a twist is dumb, but getting into a barfight (just using skills normally) is fine probably.

>session resource

Yeah, it's a bit clunky. If you have no tolerance for it, it's probably best to tie it into in-universe recharges (when possible).

If Opposed Rolls are never to be used against NPCs, then the Gunslinger Kit's base, the Psychic's False Mind advance, the Twist function of the Psychic's Mind Rend advance, and the Who? Mini-kit's Underestimated advance are all useless in anything but PvP.

Kits are badly designed, news at 11!

....

Jokes aside, I mostly ignore Kits, so I did not remember that they had Opposed Rolls. Personally, I'd just rather rewrite those advances in some way if possible, than have to judge when to do an opposed roll.

So, been rolling over in my head the idea of homebrewing an equipment system based on the vulnerability wheel optional rule.

The idea is to have one weapon type/defense type and then have them sorta RPS each other in a way that makes sense.

My "idea nugget" is heavy weapons/armor > light weapons/armor > offensive/defensive spells.

Heavy armor/weapons protect from the attacks of lighter weapons, and tear through light armor easily, but they can't dodge spells as well, and their bigger weapons are more easily stopped by defensive spells.

Light weapons can slip past magical defenses (which rely on the casters' attention to direct them), and dodge the singular effects of spells, but have a hard time getting past armor and dodging the relentless attacks from heavy weapons, which they are not well protected against.

Spells can kill you no matter how armored you are, and can protect you from weapons, but only if you hit with them and only if you know where the strikes are coming from.

I was also considering damage dice and then tinkering with the "preferred range" of each, with Heavy weapons being best at close, light weapons being average at both ranges, and spells being the long range archetype.

Of course you'd have the option to allow refluffing (for example, a combat form for the druid could fit well with both heavy and light weapons) or mixing (an arcane trickster who dodges attacks but uses spells for offense), and feat into knowing extra offense or defense styles.

Oh right, what I forgot was that I want to expand on this adding offensive curses/defensive blessings, just to cover everything, but I'm not sure how it'd modify the wheel.

Possibly do something like make Light "average", and modify the wheel to

Heavy>curses>spells

Heavy beats curses/blesses because they come from divine/infernal/fae sources, and as it happens, large quantities of iron is good against all of those.

Curses also attack the body directly (being essentially magical illnesses), which, makes them bad against buff fighter dude and good against wimpy wizard dude, while blessings protect against magicks but do little against an iron sword.

Does this sound good/reasonable?

Alright, so how does this change making a Tactical Combat Character? What am I assigning to what? Give a quick example.

Do I make a character (say, a Magician) to and then choose to be specialized in eg Offensive Spells and then Heavy Armor and then all my powers are refluffed [and typed] to be as appropriate, and if I fight a guy that chose to be whatever else, we wholly RPS each other as appropriate?

I'm not really sure what you mean with the damage dice and tinkering with preferred ranges. That sounds like the most dubious thing, here. Can you explain more? So if you're a Heavy Weapons Guy and you want to be long-distance, you...are bad? So no long-range guys with cannons, machine guns, long-range firebolts, etc, unless you want to be penalized?

The RPS wheel works so that if you hit the weakness of the enemy, you deal 1 extra damage IIRC.

So you'd make a character, select a what combination you want (such as the offensive spells+heavy armor), and fluff your attacks in a way that makes sense. If an attack hits what you are good against (in this case, heavy armor), you deal an extra damage. If you get hit with an attack that's good against you (spells) you take an extra damage.

>I'm not really sure what you mean with the damage dice and tinkering with preferred ranges. That sounds like the most dubious thing, here. Can you explain more? So if you're a Heavy Weapons Guy and you want to be long-distance, you...are bad? So no long-range guys with cannons, machine guns, long-range firebolts, etc, unless you want to be penalized?

Those things you list would be spells, as I didn't consider guns/cannons as a thing, and by their mechanics (single big, long range attack that ignores armor), they fit there better. Refluffing goes both ways. Alternatively, you'd shell out a feat to be able to switch between "heavy weapons" and "offensive spells" and be good at both ranges.

The combat stuff is pretty solid and enjoyable. The out of combat stuff is absolute horse shit and should be ignored entirely.

RWBY-ump

You do the other characters?

Yeah, sure

Friendly reminder that Backstabber rogue/striker is super overpowered.

Especially with savage striker, yeah.

Both of those deserve to be reeled in a bit, independent of one another.

In general, the game hands out damage a bit too freely.

And the last one.

Also some team strats:

So the team works like this:

Weiss can reposition freely, as well as lock down an enemy and nudge it around for ideal positioning if it tries to start some shit. She also has access to a bunch of minor effects that make her extremely versatile at supporting the others.

Yang can choose between using her power to punch enemies into the way of the others, or she can take advantage of enemies near walls/flanking to smash them to pulp. Also, marking and grappling to grab/lock them down. And then if they try to attack her to get away, she can tank it guaranteed and retaliate with savage AF attacks.

Blake has a lot of stance configurations and can fill in for everything. She's basically second best at everything + the best at sneaking and unimpeded movement (forgot to mention, because MA operates with basic attacks as well, she can also charge; but that's a "mere" 12 movement instead of 20).

Ruby is a crimson reaper on the battlefield, swiftly disposing of enemies by the dozens when the others set her attacks up (or there are enemy minions/swarms involved), but is the least good at assisting the team. Still, she'll probably get most of the kills (but who's counting?).

>In general, the game hands out damage a bit too freely.

This aligns with my experiences with the game mentioned in .

We explicitly house ruled away the rogue (backstabber)/striker, the magician (blood mage)/striker, the summoner/controller with Trooper, and similar sources of easy cheese. We *still* found the absolute best combat tactic to be to alpha strike enemies with overwhelming damage via Fast Reactions. The following is not an exaggeration: for two battles in a row at level 3, we *killed all enemies before they could even act*.

Strike!'s classes and roles badly need to be revised so as to not hand out extra damage like candy.

I'd say that'd be easily counterbalanced by just adding more HP to the monsters (which is trivial, considering it's straight based off level) but then we might run into "then other people suck" problems. It'd be easier than nerfing +damage gain, wouldn't it?
The thing is, if you banned all those and were still alpha striking, it doesn't seem like they'll be behind.
And it's still an eh way to counter the situation.

Also, were your maps not-shit?

Adding flat HP to monsters (or Rally) prolongs combats for anyone other than alpha striking parties, and it still makes "deal plenty of damage" the prime combat tactic.

This is more of an issue with Strike!'s class and role design than anything else.

>Also, were your maps not-shit?

We were using Paizo maps and the terrain therein, for good or for ill.

Right, but didn't you ban the actually potent alpha-striking builds? What were you left with? Why wouldn't any player party do the same thing as you did, if you banned the cheese?

Our party is a magician/leader, a summoner/controller without Trooper cheese, a berserker (battle trance)/lurker, and a duelist (find an opening)/defender.

All party members have Fast Reactions, and the duelist has Danger Sense from a Kit atop that. We all have Minor Blaster, except for the duelist, who has Distant Defender.

Battles start with all of us acting first and deploying Come and Get It and Battlefield Repositioning. We then unload with Minor Blaster and as many sources of extra damage we can muster, like Hit 'Em! and a Daemon of Wrath.

Furz's Undeniable Command + Minor Blaster, in particular, is a good way to overload enemies with damage.

"Deal lots of damage" will always be a potent tactic in every single game where damage is the method you end fights with (i.e. you don't have bullshit spells that effectively end the encounter).

I feel like giving (select) monsters Rally works well enough to prevent alpha striking. Yes, it will impede non-alpha compositions as well, but they will be less impeded because they don't rely on taking out monsters with HP damage and (probably) have an assortment of buffs/debuffs/other effects that pay off in longer fights better.

The way I see the math, +1 turn for an alpha striker team means a 100% more turns (i.e. 100% more resources needed, and like 1000% higher chance for the opponent to get off an attack), while for a party with consistent damage it's just like... 25% more. I think it's a trade-off that's worth it if it's that big of a problem (that said, yeah, also reel in some of the more obvious stupid damage like trooper+controller and Archer, and put some limit/nerf on fast reactions).

>don't solely rely on taking out monsters with HP damage *before they can act

I mean, the same isn't necessarily true for alpha, but it's more likely to be true.

The problem here is probably Battlefield Repositioning and Come and Get It being incredibly efficient for requiring no attack rolls/allowing no saves, and also your ability to just decide who goes when because of Fast reactions. Stacking all the minor blasters without that would be less of a problem.

There's also of course the whole "free action attack as an effect/role action" being goddamn ludicrously strong, and the equivalent of at least 3 extra damage, if not 4+ when you got a good team composition set up (such as basically every at-will the berserker has). Combined with the multiplicative effects of Blast attacks, this is just unreasonable.

I think nerfing Fast Reactions to just be +1 to your init roll would be more than fair, considering how strong going first is. Not sure what to do about the rest, if anything.

good night bump

>It wasn't that hard to say that line
But it was pointless, everyone could already tell that you've never had a wife.

As far as burns go, it would have been a 5/10 for the most expected line in history, but your timing is also hours late AND not the first reply. I give it a 2/10.

Stating facts is not a burn.

>This assflustered retard GM is still clinging to his ego in a Tibetan sand painting forum

>This assflustered retard GM is still clinging to his ego in a Tibetan sand painting forum like half a day after the fact

Oh, I have thread watcher on. You should take a look at Veeky Forums settings, my new friend. I'm not even in the thread 90% of the time.

I think his point is that you are unironically still stirring the shitpot despite basically everyone thinking you're being dumb and serving no purpose in the thread except be inflammatory when you could just as easily not take the bait and post without bothering to defend yourself.

I wish you at least bumped if you were shitposting.

Any other requests?

I like making these. Although I'll go ahead and note that Strike! is not great at 1:1 reproducing already existing characters... ironically while it'd be great for making a new MOBA character, reproducing an existing one would be harder without homebreweing (which, on the other hand, is pretty easy).

Have you made any mechanical homebrew?

Nothing big, at least nothing big that saw play. Did hexes and fiddled with movement for a mech game. Did that very simple 2d6 variant skill system above.

I had been rolling ideas over in my head, but I only get to play/run oneshots, and the players don't have requests I have to finalize brewing.

Reaper

Doesn't that same logic apply to you though? I mean half of the posts that have responded to me, such as and Have responded to me well after was necessary to any discussion, and yet you're trying to tell me not to respond as well? Shouldn't you be the ones not responding to me in the first place if you don't like my ideas?

I don't think I've been all too inflammatory at all, quite frankly. I've been discussing my ideas and philosophy on using skill systems, and the first post that started turning it into a "shit show" (which I still don't believe this is at all) were people responding to the fact that I implement realism in my games. The worst thing I've said so far is mocking someone who was attacking me, but I made sure to make my ideas known to begin with.

Also, I don't understand why you think I'm stirring the shitpot. Does Veeky Forums just assume all arguments = bad? I thought Veeky Forums was a place for discussion?