System feedback

[Day_Dreamer]

Spellborn is a tactics system designed to make awesome action set-pieces, with easy but interesting character creation and impactful moment to moment decisions. After years of on again, off again work, I've gotten it into a place where I'm happy with it. Most of what's left is just filling out the remaining content (and then balancing it), along with tightening up some language.

I would love any feedback people have. If someone reads this and wants to actually run it, that would be super special awesome.

The doc can be found here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r5wNciAafoY0toGPvtCdDTUuAZcvh-TwJ3JvtTWnTrc/edit#heading=h.qo0cqdgzsdw).

[Day_Dreamer]

Bump. I've done some readability edits and added some examples, if anyone was previously turned off by a lack of such things.

[avr]

Stealth looks kind of odd. You have a difficulty to enter stealth based on lighting & cover, but then the perception roll to spot you is what you rolled on the stealth - so darkness or cover don't actually make you harder to spot. Possibly easier if you allocated enough dice to reach the difficulty, but no more. Is that exactly intended?

Is there any problem with using a ranged weapon while engaged? I couldn't see one, but it's commonly considered difficult or even impossible in other games I've played. I did notice an ability which negates a penalty for firing into an engagement, but I couldn't find the actual penalty anywhere.

Can you use the same dice pool multiple ways in a turn? e.g. Perception at the initiative roll to spot stuff, then investigate on your turn to spot again, then aim to bypass armour?

[Day_Dreamer]

Stealth looks kind of odd. You have a difficulty to enter stealth based on lighting & cover, but then the perception roll to spot you is what you rolled on the stealth - so darkness or cover don't actually make you harder to spot. Possibly easier if you allocated enough dice to reach the difficulty, but no more. Is that exactly intended?

Is there any problem with using a ranged weapon while engaged? I couldn't see one, but it's commonly considered difficult or even impossible in other games I've played. I did notice an ability which negates a penalty for firing into an engagement, but I couldn't find the actual penalty anywhere.

Can you use the same dice pool multiple ways in a turn? e.g. Perception at the initiative roll to spot stuff, then investigate on your turn to spot again, then aim to bypass armour?
Re: stealth
working as intended. It reads kind of weird, but it makes a lot more sense in play, since low light gives penalties to perception rolls (including detect stealth). Cover is kind of a weird abstraction, since it represents a pretty wide range of possible features, some of which really shouldn't help preventing stealth detection. I'll add a note that GMs may impose circumstantial penalties to the detect roll based on type and availability of cover.

Re: ranged weapons in melee
No attack penalties, but you can't parry with Ranged Weapons and they have non-trivial defense penalties overall. I'll rephrase the Scoundrel Trait you're thinking of to be more clear that its about defense.

Re: Actions
Pretty sure I explicitly say that only 1 Action can be taken per Action Pool during your Turn. Yup

When it is a given character’s turn, they may put Dice into Action Pools and then undertake various Actions, described in the Action Section (Page XXX). Players may only use a given Action Pool for a single roll during their turn, unless specified otherwise by a Trait.

Any other feedback?

[Day_Dreamer]

Antagonists:

I recently wrote up the rules for antagonists in Spellborn, and am curious for feedback.

A brief summary: Each character in Spellborn needs to balance offense, defense, mobility, perception, and a few other possible Actions based on the context. Characters have a finite pool of Dice that they can spend on each possible Action, so focusing on one comes at the cost of another. This works well for players, since they're controlling one (or maybe two, if they have a pet of summon) characters at a time: it gives them interesting and impactful choices on a moment-to-moment basis.

It would also makes it prohibitively annoying for the GM, if NPC Antagonists worked the same way. Representing a group of ten attacking enemies would require tracking ten different Dice Pools. The more special abilities and special features a given enemy had, the more of a pain this would be.

I had a few different ideas for how to 'fix' this problem, and most revolved around treating a mass of enemies as a single Character for the function of Dice allocations. A group of ten mostly identical mutants would all draw from the same Action Pool for each roll, attacking or retreating as one. Any special characters would have a distinct Dice Pool, allowing a mutant chief to stand back and rally her soldiers while they focus on fighting.

There were a few possibilities of how to handle Damage/Wounds and Guard Breaks, but I ultimately went with the simple solution of giving masses of enemies only a single Wound each, and treating any Guard Break or attack on their Dice Pool as a stunning effect that makes them skip a turn.

The result, at least from the playtest I just ran, was a reasonably easy to run Encounter with some interesting counterplay and a cool and entirely unexpected strategy on the part of the players where they would catch isolated enemies and force me to choose between effective retaliation and being able to get more guys into the fight.

Thoughts?