Epic Precision

Ideas and suggestions for game mechanics and rules.
HEEGZ
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by HEEGZ »

I can confirm that having a rogue for the random dungeons was pretty much essential. I'm looking forward to using the random dungeons as a DM, and I'll try to make a point to include rogue-ish style of content outside of combats as well. I don't know anything about EP in order to comment on the OP...
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Brokenbone
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by Brokenbone »

The idea that your random dungeon system is trappy, and suicide absent a rogue, is a good news item for rogues! All these new trap systems and unless you have both the rarity of (a) a DM and (b) DM happens to be comfortable with all those new traps... you don't see them. Idea they're actually out there in spades, if you enter a DMless random dungeon, is great stuff.

Still, hiding loot (even if via systems other than phatloot) was a tip from a wicked old adventure builder (Wolfgang Baur) article... http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp? ... /20060908a
Hidden and Buried Treasures

Players invest in Search ranks for their characters for a reason: treasures are often hidden. So any DM who wants to make an adventure interesting will hide at least 20% of the treasures to be had, and possibly much more. Yes, a dragon likely sleeps on a big pile of coins and gems -- but it might hide the rubies and sapphires it values most. Likewise, the commander of a garrison of hobgoblins probably keeps his treasure locked up -- and possibly keeps it sealed in a chest at the bottom of a well, except on payday.

Hiding and burying treasure poses two problems in gameplay. The first is that PCs need to have enough ranks in Search to make the DC checks (which should probably not run much higher than 10 plus average character level, since only the rogue is likely to have maximum ranks in Search, and maybe not even him).

The bigger problem is that of hiding things too well: no one wants to spend an entire gaming session saying, "Okay, we dig up that floor, and poke around the attic under the eaves," for every room they search. This is where roleplaying encounters and documents can help. If the party is smart enough to capture a minion, he might well offer to reveal the location of hidden or buried treasure in exchange for mercy. Documents can help as well, but most people don't write out "I buried the treasure here," no matter what pirate movies might have you believe. They hide the information in code, they draw maps that only make sense to themselves, and they general obfuscate the issue. That's fine if you have the inclination to make up similar puzzles for your players, but they can eat a lot of prep time. To get around that, I recommend allowing uses of Decipher Script and the dwarven stonework racial ability to help guide them to the loot. A clever use of a locate object spell could help too. If the PCs learn (from a minion, for example) what one item of the larger hoard is, they can use that with locate object to find the entire treasure. Let them figure that connection out for themselves.

If you bury a treasure, make sure you create at least one or two paths for the party to find it. They don't have to be easy paths, and they'll have a greater sense of satisfaction if they do a little deduction than if you had just hand the treasure to them by saying "It's right there in the middle of the room."
I didn't know that the Random Dungeons deal was that the boss was kind of the holding tank for loot... again I guess that's another good reason to bring a balanced party, because guess what, the treasure isn't going to be found in a cleverly hidden chest behind the boss's unholy throne or altar, it's in his pockets and your warrior type buddies are going to have to be around to bash his brains out.
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kid
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by kid »

HEEGZ wrote: I don't know anything about EP in order to comment on the OP...
Ep means rogues will do half of their sneak damage against sneak immune creatures. That's all there is to know.
The rest is your assumption is applying something like that (in one of a few of the suggested offers) will be good or bad for AFLA play.
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kid
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by kid »

Brokenbone wrote:The idea that your random dungeon system is trappy, and suicide absent a rogue, is a good news item for rogues!
Not sure that the case. the traps seem to use an attack role?
I think a fighter of equal level might not even get hit (best trap AB i've seen was +3).
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SwordSaintMusashi
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by SwordSaintMusashi »

Some traps use an attack roll (such as darts).

Others use saving throws (explosion trap).

Nothing different from the normal there.
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kid
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by kid »

SwordSaintMusashi wrote:Some traps use an attack roll (such as darts).

Others use saving throws (explosion trap).

Nothing different from the normal there.
Oh, you saw also exploding ones in the dungeons? Well, didn't do those a lot, may have missed em.
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Zelknolf
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by Zelknolf »

The current set of exploding traps in the random dungeons are bounding mines (aka "bouncing betties") -- they don't trigger unless they think they can blow up at least two people. So they can be safely crossed by just crossing one at a time.

The spike traps totally make attack rolls; you can safely cross them by parking a tank on top until it runs out of ammo.



Still working on adding stuff like touch attack/ predictable energy types/ single-shot horrible death, so you have stuff that's best defeated by monks/ mages/ summons if you lack a rogue.

It all comes back to "bring a balanced party; I'm pointedly adding a lot of variety to these things because I want everybody who attends to have a chance to shine."
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dergon darkhelm
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by dergon darkhelm »

Having been essentially combat impotent with a high level rogue for the last 3 years due the predominant use of undead and constructs I would love to something to make rogues a bit more effective.


But it's still fun just stealthing a fight around watching tanks bleed too :)
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kid
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by kid »

dergon darkhelm wrote:Having been essentially combat impotent with a high level rogue for the last 3 years due the predominant use of undead and constructs I would love to something to make rogues a bit more effective
I think that's a pretty accurate description on how being a rogue in ALFA is, especially at higher levels.
Rebuilding our servers completely, and/or asking out DM's to not use the big bad evil guys that DnD has to offer doesn't seem like a viable option , nor is limiting our rogues to only out of combat activities such as traps.
When you're DMing a group there's a limit to how much 1on1 attention you can grant.

Even a milder version of EP would do a lot to help a rogue fella want to take part in some high level adventuring.
Anything to simply move the rogue from "useless" to just "not very effective".
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Zelknolf
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by Zelknolf »

If the answer is build, presumably part of the answer is also "use more things that are vulnerable to sneak attack."

Variety of challenges is usually how you make a party feel good about what they've done, and that doesn't necessarily mean a lot of one on one time-- it does mean parts where there's an obvious "correct" person to do a thing, but then hopefully the rest of the party is involved because they have to handle the failure case. "If the rogue is spotted before he can disable the winch for that gate, we'll need to hold this ground somehow." sorts of business.

The "big evil bad guy" is surely part of that equation. Some builds are just good at fighting, and we shouldn't be here having a conversation about how they never get a chance to do anything cool either. It's only really a problem when "spawning homogenous blobs of stuff and then bragging about how dangerous it was (like that's some sort of accomplishment)" is all that a DM does.
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kid
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by kid »

Well, good luck then.
This approach just means we'll meet here in a couple of years and have this discussion again, and again come to the same futile conclusion.

Saying "DMs should do this and that" is pretty much like saying "techies should work on this and that".
It doesn't work.

Expecting things that have not changed in a era to change is kinda silly...
But I suppose that's just as silly on my part... expecting stubborn old ALFAns to to change their views. :D
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Zelknolf
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by Zelknolf »

To be clear, my position continues to be to ask the HDMs what they want to do, if they want to do anything.

If they'd rather change their build and train their teams, I say good luck and mean it genuinely. That's probably a richer world for us if it works. I'd remain skeptical, of course-- DMs are not beautiful or unique snowflakes; they are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else.

I will maintain that the path to success will be to make it easier to do the better thing instead of just expecting these normal people on their hobby time to become better, but that's at least half of what I'm doing when I make a DM tool (the rate of hacked-up 50-con goblins dropped dramatically when we acquired zSpawn; the number of illegal items in play dropped dramatically when we got the autopricer; the DM who just DMs for the power trip is pretty rare and most will do better if we give them achievable and discoverable means).



We get into pretty weird bits of world-management philosophy there, though. To the problem at hand: we're talking about content. Get the people responsible for content in here if you actually want change.
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Brokenbone
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by Brokenbone »

Back to the idea of the E.P. feat... so that'd mean sneak immunity becomes half-useful vs. anyone with this feat.

What are the main SA-immune foes we see anyhow? I'd tend to say undead whether with or without a DM from my own experiences. However, absent a DM I am pretty sure I've mostly seen low level undead mobs, stuff like skeletons and zombies, although some (annoyingly) with class levels. Rarely you'll see more jacked up mobs but still relatively low CR. Of course if you go poking around in the right tombs and such, you might rarely pull a lich or something similarly horrendous. Now the funny thing is, I haven't got a major objection to being able to take care of mooks faster... but it's especially the higher CR undead where they've got a long list of strengths and immunities and you really end up needing to plan for that. Thinking vampires and liches, those can be the BBEG, the fact they're immune to crits as well as SA is all just a part of the wow factor.

Second most common thing I'd see in play, and it's not common at all... constructs. Very rarely ran into golems in DM plots only, though I'm aware there's some dungeons you can go into DMless with a lot of animated weapons and suits of armor and whatnot. Golem-lite I guess. Again, maybe I find myself saying the mook stuff, who cares if we let some reduced form of SA through on them. It's over to the big guys where again, you start to question how one of the major benefits big boss constructs get is that not only are they crit and sneak immune, they often have high DR/adamantine too. If you ended up with a rogue stabbing them for "half damage" sneak, you might quickly find them exceeding the DR and managing to nibble away at hitpoints in ways that plain old fighters lack too... if the fighters lack the right tools for the job. I think a lot of the constructs I've seen IG do have at least a little DR, usually adamantine to bypass it though.

I guess call it mixed emotions on this one! Not sure how to hit a sweet spot where yeah, sure, Rogues maybe can carve up rank and file critters but still face the same long list of challenges as others do on the mid / high CR things? Still, it may be that current rogues (rare as they are) faced with high CR DM situations (rare as those are too) are stuck picking their noses waiting for everyone else to hack and slash and throw spells at an immune-to-sneak boss type.
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causk
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Re: Epic Precision

Post by causk »

As a point of reference, the Pathfinder pnp rules (unoffical 3,75 dnd that it is) has allowed crits and sneak attacks on almost everything. From what i gather rogues are still considered one of the worst classes in terms of combat usefullness. As sneak attack is hard to set up, i doubt it makes much of a difference for rogues running about alone, but theyll be significantly more usefull in groups that can set up those conditions. Thats something that should always be encouraged.
Im sceptical half sneak attack damage on immune critter will allow a rogue to catch up to your average twohanding power attacking fighter/barbarian before a level range thats outside alfa's usual level range. Even if it were to surpass fighters, im not sure thats so terrible either. Pure martial classes get alot more bab, hence iterative attacks much sooner, and will do their full potential damage all the time. If there are concerns about str rogues or multiclass rogues, maybe the ability could be tied to light armor or weaponfiness. But frankly if we are concerned relative power of different pc classes, there are many other places to start fiddling with before i considered rogues sneak attacking undead and constructs a concern(cleric and wizard buffs for meele come to mind immediately).
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