New OOTS products from CafePress
New OOTS t-shirts, ornaments, mugs, bags, and more
Page 4 of 9 FirstFirst 123456789 LastLast
Results 91 to 120 of 266
  1. - Top - End - #91
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Daemons. The cranky "you woke/summoned me up for this?!?!" tear-your-face-off funny guys.

    The lesser incarnate daemon is level 2 threat. "Almost impossible to kill by normal means", yeah no, they go down easy. "Presents a deadly threat", yeah still no, maybe to lightly armed civilians but not to 3 or 4 people with automatic weapons. All attributes are at 3 except fellowship and intelligence at 1. Perception 1, arcana 2, brawl 3. Speed 6, size/resilience 4s, static defense 17 (10 - 2*size + 3*dex + 3*wis -> 10-8+9+9 = 20), 9 HP, armor 3/all from the daemonic tag. No feats, no gear, just claws and teeth at 5k3 doing 5k2 rending tearing and no penetration. Daemonic gives them +3 armor and HP, dark sight, fear 1 (dc 15 willpower to not be spooked when one appears), and 7 essence type resource points.

    So get this, regular troops, 28% success rate on the fear save, full auto at under 30m is 7k3 vs 20 for 89% hit rate with 60% getting 1 raise and 38% getting two raises, daemon dodge is two throws of 2k2 (dex 3, untrained acrobatics) for about 8 which reduces the hit rates by about 10% each, damage is 3k2 + 1k0 per raise & -3 for armor, averaging about 11/13/15 or 2 or 3 wounds. Down rounding for possible melee and remembering that the daemon can only dodge twice a round. 25% fear * ([first two]20%(3w) + 45%(2w)) & ([3rd+]35%(3w) + 50%(2w)), first two shooters contribute 1.5 wounds each, after that each shooter gives 2 wounds, we get 5 shooters to run it out of HP, playing with statistics I think on average another 5 shots to crit it down. So about 40 regular troops should be able to one round kill a lesser incarnate daemon during which time it might give someone a nasty scratch.

    I went and, for my game, gave them the daemonhost exalt powers and two points of spell school from one of 5 schools (1d5 randomize). That's an extra 5 armor except against silver and magic, one more resource point, plus the option to spend a resource point to enhance their spell casting for a turn. It makes them actually dangerous and slightly unpredictable since you don't know what kind of caster they are.

    The greater incarnate daemon is what you get when you put a lesser through a cheese grater. Right? No? Oh, it's just bigger. Eh. Really barely a level 4 threat as printed. Again, I give these a 4 power stat and all the daemonhost exalt powers, plus a random spell school (9 magic schools, so 1d10 randomize and 10 = roll twice).

    Attributers, strength and constitution go up to 6, willpower up to 5, intelligence up to 3. Brawling goes up to 4. Speed 10, size/resilience 8/7, static defense 14 (12 correct?), 17 HP, armor 6. Feats are frenzy and swift attack. fear 2, resource 14. Attacks become 8k4 claw/bite for 8k3 rending tearing, and warp fire which is a 50m 4k3 flamer attack (dc 20 save). They're tough, mostly from having a big pile of HP. They're reasonably dangerous in melee and at least possess a ranged attack. But a level 2 daemonhost exalt with power armor and a good quality flamer is likely much nastier.

    Animals are animals. Not generally a real threat to PCs. Mostly just background noise in a fight so these are sort of generic templates. Still, someone might possibly get kicked by a mule (2k1 attack for 5k2 impact damage). Beast of burden is the aforementioned mule. Size 8 (ok, more like an oxen at this size), resilience 1, static defense 4, 6 HP, we're not following any of the derived attribute formulas here. Ferocious creature is a random predator. Speed 12, size/resilience 4, static defense 22, stwp aside, dark sight, keen sense, and a 6k3 damage bite. Flying creature, a big predatory bird apparently. Size 3, static defense 29, fly 14m, 4 HP, swift attack, claws for 3k1 damage. Slithering creature, similar to the flyer but static defense 24, crawler at 3m, single 4k2 toxic bite. Walking creature, primitive humanoids like gorillas. Brawl 4, speed 7, size/resilience 6/5, static defense 13, 6 HP, 4k2 fist.

    For robots we have a combat servitor and an industrial welder bot. Combat bot has strength 5, dexterity 4, constitution 6, composure 3, willpower 2, else 1s. Brawl, craft, and tech use at 1s, ballistics 3. Speed 9, resilience 6, static defense 18 (really 13?), and 14 HP. Armor 6 from machine toughness, the machine type/tag, a claw with 6k2 impact damage that snares, and a multilas 80m of s/8 3k2 reliable energy damage. As a level 3 thing it's throwing 6k3 on single shots and 8k4 for autofire. The industrial servitor is a level 2 version with worse stats, no ballistics skill, and an arc welder as a 10m 3k3 damage flamer (dc 10).

    Next time some real threats, dragons and liches.

  2. - Top - End - #92
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    "Giant killing machines made of scales, wings, and fire. They're also smarter than you, centuries old, and with more magic in their fingernail than the typical wizard has in his entire body. The stats presented here are only representative of a fairly small and young dragon." Sucker's still a legitimate level 5 threat for being "small".

    Attributes run from 7 strength through 5s for intelligence, wisdom, and willpower, to 3 fellowship. Yeah, that single 3 is the lowest attribute, probably the arrogance from them being better than you. They have 15 skills. Arcana 4, ballistics 3, brawl 4, weaponry 3, perception 3, acrobatics 2, command 5, intimidation 5, plus 7 more. Speed 11, fly 22, size 12, resilience 10, static defense 6 (should be 15? 6 is if you 2x the dex+wis), 22 HP, armor 10/all.

    Attacks are listed as a 9k4 claws & teeth doing 10k3 rending tearing (thus the base claw & bite damage is 3k3), and a flamer style breath weapon at dc 20 dexterity save for 6k3 burnination out to an 80m range. Plus they have a 5 intelligence so they might consider it worthwhile to buy a las cannon or heavy bolter. Although they aren't technically proficient with them so the attack rolls suffer a bit. If you care their dodge is at 6k4.

    Feats and abilities include immunity to surprise, perfect memory, iron jaw (at 6k6 mostly immune to stunning), power attack, powerful charge, string minded (I forget, reroll failed mental saves?), unnatural toughness (that's the huge hit points), see in the dark, fear 2 (dc 20 willpower save if you're in melee range and it makes an all out attack or charges), caster: evocation 3 and divination 4.

    If you want to power them up you can add more casting, add a sword school, or throw an exaltation on them for resource points, the dragony exaltation from book 2 works well. But they actually earn that level 5 rating being tough, smart, and being able to throw a 9k5 unluck spell at you in the same round that they power attack at 5k4 for 10k5 damage. Do note that playing them as a dumb animal in a confined area pretty much destroys the danger. I threw an unintelligent version without casting at my players as a sort of mutant lightning lizard thing in an organic cave-like setting and they slaughtered it at level 2. It hit a couple people, but they slaughtered it.

    Lichdom is an old sorcerer answer to non-exalted immortality. It's a hideous, nasty, undead, murder-your-beloved-to-get-there, sort of immortality but it's still immortality. Any ways they're a level 4 threat.

    Physical attributers are 2 & 3s, fellowship 1 (lousy to share a beer with), charisma and intelligence 5s, everything else 4s. They only have 13 skills. Arcana 5, brawl 4, charm 3, command 5, scrutiny 4, stuff like that. No ballistics or weaponry skills though. Speed 5, resilience 5, static defense 17 (I can't come up with that number, I get 23, high wisdom effect), 7 HP, no armor, just the basic unarmed brawling attack at 8k4 for 3k1 impact & fatigue. Gear is listed as expensive robes, a staff, and some old fashioned fancy jewelry.

    Feat wise they get all the wizard traditions and all the magic school specializations (1/scene reroll a magic test from that school), plus tested. The wizard traditions are a grab bag of effects based on the school of the spell being cast. Let's see, tally them up and we get: enemies within 5m of an illusion effect are dazzled for a round when you cast it, if you cast an abjuration spell you get aura 8 until the start of your next turn, they have an extra +0 bonus to initiative (no divination school), targets of your enchantment spells (neve rmind, no enchantment either) get -2 static defense even if the spell doesn't affect them, evocations do +4 damage to all and one target of the spell effectively has -8 against it.

    They are undead, with the associated immunities, and see in the dark. Casting of evocation 4, illusion, abjuration, & conjuration at 3. No necromancy, transmutation, or divination. Honestly they're mostly a blaster mage with invisibility, minor illusions, some defenses, and a bit of teleportation.

    The phylactery is worded in an interesting manner. It's a "they've hidden their death" in it sort of thing. They can't be killed while it exists. Literally nothing else. So run that as you like, the D&D killed->reforms, just flat out doesn't die, immune to death crits, whatever. Undead makes them immune to biology, bleeding, and stunning. Interestingly not fatigue, although that could possibly fall under biology I suppose, and apparently they still heal normally. This was not especially well thought out.

    I personally go with adding the rest of the mage line spell schools, switching the highest school around, and trading all but one or two of the wizard traditions for 3 or 4 actually useful feats. Maybe switching some of the brawling out for ballistics and/or weaponry. If you don't run them as a paranoid genius who abuses the porte spell, has custom combo spells, or piles of minions, then they're pretty weak as it doesn't take too much to blow off enough limbs that they aren't a threat. After 35 damage blows through their HP a 15 damage called shot to the head with a bolt pistol puts a complete stop to them. Once the head and arms are off you can just tie them up, stick them in wet concrete, and call it a day.

    After this are aboleth and mind flayers. After that I think I'll mostly throw out one or two sentence comments on most of the rest of the monsters.

  3. - Top - End - #93
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Ah, on to the tentacle hentai brain screw monsters. Weirdly enough in my game they're reasonable, fair, generally inoffensive as long as you stay out of their territory, and making subtle but effective in-roads on undermining everybody else's societies.

    Mind flayers, level 3 brain suckers. Attributes are all 2s and 3s until you get to the mentals, composure 4 intelligence, wisdom, and willpower 5s. 10 skills, arcana and brawl at 4, forbidden lore and scrutiny at 5. speed 5, size/resilience 3/4, static defense 19 (28? again it's like using 2x dexterity plus wisdom instead of 3x, there must have been an edit after the monsters were written), 7 HP. Immune to surprise, perfect memory recall, 1/scene reroll a willpower save vs magic, see in the dark. No armor and no weapon or armor proficiencies. Their only gear is some creepy/slimy robes.

    Their attacks are tentacles at 7k4 for 2k2 impact damage and a snare effect, mind blast as a half action 60m (wait, that says 60' which is feet notation, maybe 20m is intended?) cone willpower save vs dc 25 or be stunned for a round, and "eat your g**d***ed brain" which is... in a grapple the tentacle attacks automatically hit the head and gain the tearing property.

    They cast divination, enchantment, and illusion at 3 each. So divination and illusion are at 8k5, while enchantment gets 6k3 because it runs off charisma which they have a 3 in.

    They are absolutely glass cannons, and not very strong against people with resource points because of the un-stun ability. 6k3 averages 25 which means they can only cast dominate person about half the time unless they over-channel. Swap fellowship and composure stats to make them live up to the terror a bit. Also, don't grapple the melee and dex-whore characters, it doesn't really work. The dexterity characters can nearly always escape as a half action and the melee characters usually throw 4+ strength against the mind flayer's 2 strength. These guys have to be run as genius level psychopaths that use illusions and divinations (disguise, invisibility, detect thoughts, luck) to get close and enspell or strike from concealment. Also, I have no idea why they don't at least carry a couple grenades.

    Aboleth are a level 4 complete terror. My players have never killed one even though they've fought at least two. Strength 5, dexterity 3, constitution, charisma, composure 4s, fellowship 1, intelligence and willpower 6, wisdom 5. They have exactly the same skills as mind flayers. Speed 4, size/resilience 8/7, static defense 9 (18 by the standard calculation), 10 HP. Immune to surprise, perfect memory, strong minded, swift attack so they can double melee attack if they want to sacrifice their reaction for it, see in the dark, amphibious, crawler (ignore difficult terrain), and armor plating 3. Their gear is listed as 'slime'.

    For a special ability they have "mindslaver" which lets them concentrate on enchantment spells as free actions and targets don't get extra dice/bonuses to resist the effects of enchantments due to the orders given. They effectively ignore the concentration requirement on enchantment spells (stunning would still break it though, no actions) and you don't get a bonus to resist when they tell you to kill yourself.

    They have the same casting as mind flayers except at 4 instead of 3. That gives them unluck and forsee (spell based dodge) at 9k5, mirror image and mislead at 10k6, and encore (keep repeating your last action for 4 rounds) at 8k8. Oh, they have a melee attack, tentacles at 8k4 for 4k2 impact damage plus snare & toxic.

    Seriously, make use of their aquatic nature, invisibility, and the luck spell. With the average luck spell they can add 5 rolled dice on a jump which is already at 7k5, thus 10k6 jumping which will 62% of the time get them an 11m leap from a standing start.

    Lets do a couple more quick ones.

    Elementals are a level 2 critter, mostly 2s and 3s for attributes with 1s in charisma and intelligence. Perception, brawling, size 6, 13 static defense (correct for once), 6 HP, 6k3 damage slam attack. They're amorphous and have stuff of nightmares to give them some appropriate immunities. Each type gets a different thing, earth gets 6/all armor, air gets phasing, water gets regeneration 1, fire does energy damage and people within melee range have to save constitution dc 15 each round to take a level of fatigue from heat stroke.

    Zombies are a level 1 threat. Attributes 2s, strength 3, zilch for socials and intelligence. Brawling and perception, speed 5, size 4, static defense 12 (should be 14), 4 HP. They're mindless and undead of course, one brawling attack at 3k2 doing 3k1 rending damage. Tremendously unimpressive and only really useful in hordes which are a pain to run unless you use the minion rules. Hilarious if you make a tougher custom zombie and stick them in among the mooks though.

    Ghosts, level 2 thingys. DtD40k7e doesn't really do ghosts well by this write up, you'll want to come up with your own version. Strength 3 (???)m charisma 4, fellowship 1, else 2s. Brawl & perception 2, arcana 3, resilience 4, 4 HP, undead, fly 10m, phasing, fear 1 (dc 15), emulate the dominate spell through an arcana + charisma check. PCs can, and will, just shoot the thing to dead-death. Make up something else to use.

    Fire warrior is a level 2 soldier with a tau paint job. Flak armor (not legs though), knife, pulse rifle.

    Ratling is a level 1 halfling pickpocket type npc. Common lore & larceny 3, deceive 2, no stealth (probably a mistake, I'd give it 3). 3 resilience, 21 static defense (dude, 24), 5 HP, leather armor (no helmet), knife, autopistol.

    Squat is a near naked dwarf warrior, level 2. Weaponry 3, resilience 5, static defense 14 (16!), iron jaw (save vs stunning), 12 HP (using the PCs calculation of 2x the constitution + willpower, unlike the other npcs), equipped with an axe (hand weapon) and a frag grenade.

    Living ancestor, the dwarf version of a mortal hero, level 3. 20 HP, power armor, chain axe, plasma pistol.

    Talon of tiamat, dragonborn version of the level 2 soldier, comes with a built in 1/fight flamer. Wears flak, no helmet, fencing sword and a pump shotgun.

    Dragonfire adept, level 3 very offensive caster. Strength, constitution, composure, willpower 4s, charisma 5, otherwise 2s and 3s. Weaponry & ballistics 3, some other skills at 2. resilience 5, static defense 15 (18!), flak jacket, no helmet, fencing sword, meltagun, 2/fight flame breath, evocation caster 3 (fireball at 8k5 doing 6k3 damage).

    Tinkerer, weird random gnome npc, level 2. Attributes 1 to 3, has a bathc of skills, lousy with weapons, has drive & piloting, low resilience, high static defense, 4 HP, blind fighting, fearless, evasion, mesh vest (body only), laspistol, web pistol, katar, no armor or weapon feats listed. Has a pile of tech gear. It lists the gnome racial ability, which I suppose is supposed to account in the place of the weapon and armor proficiency. I have no clue what this npc is supposed to represent.

  4. - Top - End - #94
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Ork freeboota, level 2, ork version of a standard soldier. Standouts are 4 strength, weaponry 3, ballistics 1, have leathers for armor, an autogun with 3 extra clips (all the other solders have 2), a full hand weapon instead of a knife, and feats: cleave, crushing blow, power attack, and fearless. Spray full auto or charge into melee. Also it's a bit tougher in resilience & HP than the usual soldiers.

    Ork nob is the elite soldier version of an ork, level 3. Stronger, tougher, more combat skill (ballistics 3), command skill 4 and charisma 4 for leadership, size is cranked up to 6, has a 'big choppa' great weapon and an 'autogun' which is a typo as it has the stats of a SAW. Huh, the equipment lists both a SAW and an autogun, with 3 belts of ammo for the SAW.

    Aspect warrior, the eldarian solders, a sort of base template, level 3. The fluff intimates that you should maybe customize this one a bit, perhaps a sword school or something. Constitution 2, everything else is 3s & 4s with dexterity and wisdom being 4s. 10 skills including acrobatics 3, perception 3, weaponry 4. resilience 4, static defense 24 (should be 28), 5 HP (glass cannon / dodge tanking). blademaster (melee reroll 1/round), blind fighting, swift attack, some mobility feats. Mesh overcoat for 4/all armor, a fencing sword and a syrneth lightning gun, 3 flash grenades, and a silk suit. Plus they have the eldarin warp step 2/scene. Good in melee for all they they're fragile. When fighting them use explosions.

    Eldarin farseer, a level 3 caster soldier. Changes from the aspect warrior are a few stats dropping from 3s to 2s, arcana 4, combat skills 2s, should have 3 less static defense, oddly has 1 more hit point (oh, willpower and wisdom went from 3 & 4 to 4 & 3, that explains the defense and HP). Gets common sense, danger sense, spell might, spell penetration, couple other feats. Equipped with a fencing sword and leather armor, no helmet. Racial warp step, casting divination 4, illusion 3, enchantment and evocation 2. So, technically a level 4 character-ish? Certainly under equipped. Give them a hunting rifle and they could get scary with luck and precognition to boost to-hit rolls and invisibility for extra stealth.

    Space marine, supposedly assimar, also a level 3 threat. 5s for strength , constitution, and wisdom, rest are 3s & 4s. General combaty skills at 2s and 3s (ballistics & weaponry), speed 8, size & resilience 6, defense 13 (lowest I can get is 15, power armor), 12 HP. Combat master (never outnumbered), 3x sound constitution, all armor and weapon proficiencies. Chain sword, boltgun, power armor. I think that either it's missing a point of resilience form the power armor or the enemies in this section weren't updated from an earlier version of the document. That would explain all the static defense errors and odd 'is the power armor factored in or not?' questions. Plus I think maybe power armor increased your size in an earlier version instead of your strength and resilience, some of the calculations in here would actually work out that way. Eh, they fighty & have good equipment but that's about it.

    Grey knight, level 4 buffed space marine. Strength & other attributes get +1s, skills all get +1s, resilience same but +3 HP. Add blind fighting, danger sense, luck, and strong minded. No other changes. It's a +1 space marine.

    Chaos marine, space marine with the species swapped from assimar to tiefling. -1 ballistics, +1 weaponry, +1 dexterity, no other significant changes. Mainly a palette swap.

    Obliterator, level 4 mutated chaos marine. More physical attributes, less mental attributes, size 8, resilience 7, 15 HP, frenzy feat, no gear as apparently everything melted into one big mutant. Armor 10/all, MP lascannon, heavy bolter, and a 6k3 damage fist. Gets the tiefling ability to reroll 1s on damage, can morph it's two weapons into anything else on the main weapon equipment (not primitive, syrneth, launchers, or grenades though) lists as a full action, has infinite ammo for everything. Autostabilized and machine traits. Shoots full auto as a half action, never needs to brace, has a pile of immunities.... TWF with twin heavy bolters?

    Dark eldarin raider, level 3 drow soldier/sniper. Dexterity 5, constitution 2, generally 3s otherwise. Acrobat 3, ballistics 2, deceive 4, weaponry 4, resilience 4, static defense 29 (um, 28?), 5 HP. Fragile and dodgy melee type. blademaster, decadence, sneak attack, proficiencies, mesh overcoat for 4/all armor, officer cutlass, needle gun, 3 smoke grenades, and the racial darkness ability 2/scene.

    And that finishes our antagonists. I really really feel like they didn't get updated from a very slightly different previous version where static defense and power armor worked slightly differently. Next up is minions and then I have to decide if I want to do a full treatment of the setting or just blarf out a paragraph or two about it and go on to the second book.

  5. - Top - End - #95
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Minion squads! For when you don't want to run that 500 peasant mob one body at a time. It's noted that some things just aren't real dangers to exalts as individuals, this is a way to handle that.

    They come in groups of six because "its hard to get more people than that to attack a single person at once". As a bonus if your players just can't play without a battle mat you can use d6s to represent them. You have lots of d6 don't you?

    They have the number of people in them, a threat rating, and a damage rating. If you want to make things even easier for yourself you can have the threat rating equal the damage rating. Threat rating goes from 1 to 5, with 1 being peasants or hobos, 3 being pirates or soldiers, 5 being "lusty vampire bitches" (that's a direct quote, don't blame me for that one) or ninja assassins (the inverse law of ninjas is apparently a universal constant here). All the minion squad rolls will be [members]k[threat rating], so your 6 ninjas have 6k5 to attack, dodge, parry, juggle grenades, etc., with a reminder that you can't keep more dice than you roll. Yeah, you whack 4 of them and they're down to 2k2.

    Minion squad static defense is threat rating x5, every hit kills a member of the squad, every raise on the hit kills another. It gets silly sometimes with a really good single pistol shot offing 5 or 6 mooks, but I'm sure you can come up with something like they were all standing in a line or there was a barrel of fuel to explode. Blast weapons just kill a number of minions in the squad equal to the blast rating. Yes, fireball is the ultimate mook killer. However they forgot the flame weapons. I just have the squad try a dodge against the flamer dc and kill a member on failure plus another per fail-by-5. It works fine.

    The damage rating is supposed to go from 1 to 4. The minions do rating x5 damage on a hit with another +5 damage per raise. If the minions have ranged attacks then the effective range of those attacks is the damage rating x10 in meters. Occasionally the dice gods will favor the GM and a 5k2 dr:2 zombie squad will roll a 40-something to hit someone and do 35 damage.

    Minions can team up with and help non-minions. You just add the threat rating to the result of whatever roll the non-minion is making. There's a bit about not benefiting form more minions than your fellowship attribute, I'm not sure what that's about. If someone targets the teamed up minions the minions go down normally. I guess that means the character's fellowship is the number bodies in of the minion squad that they can have helping them.

    There are a few 'sample' minion stats, like: Space pirates, threat rating 3, damage rating 3 rending (knives), damage rating 3 impact (guns).

    I've used random piles of dice out of the dice bucket for big huge crowds, whatever side the die landed on was the number of people in the squad. I've used d12s for a gibberling horde and d8s for some soldier squads (protip: pull out your dice before the game if you need a specific type or more than 4 or 5 of them). I've also treated the squads as a unit for ganging up bonuses, so having 3 minion squads surrounding you in melee gives them that +2k0 to hit bonus. I do not give them blast weapons or flamers, I don't think there's a good/easy way to run that. Maybe grenades as a sort of special attack that... nah. Maybe later or something. But full auto weapons work out quite well. Go ahead and embrace recombining busted squads into whole ones, it just makes life easier and prevents the players from leaving a bunch of 1 and 2 member squads laying around to clutter up the melee environment.

    That's it for minions. They're quick and dirty, work pretty well, and a 30d6 army-ish of soldiers lets you make even high level exalts worry a little bit.

    The next section is an "example of play". Skip it. It isn't exactly great prose and I didn't figure anything more out about the system from reading it. Plus the color coding to each person is annoying to read (for me), especially the mid-range green and the yellow-tan colors.

    Oh, yeah, the setting chapter. Well I'll do a quick cover of it and leave it up to you guys if you want me to cover it in any more depth before I head into the second book.

    The chapter obviously enough describes the setting. I've actually found it fairly useful. It does a description of a number of crystal spheres, some locations and people within it, a picture or five, and some possible adventure seeds. It begins with a history section: 'war in heaven' 40k years ago, Syrne appear, C'tan appear, eladrin orks dragons modrons created, fight, ends when unknown great devourers appear. Dragon empire 10k years ago, Sigil discovered, dragonborn created, Bahamut vs Tiamat ends it all. more war 7k years ago, eldarin unseal Pandemonium and release aboleth on accident, assimar and tiefling created, Pandemonium resealed. Eldarin piss off 5k years ago, go decadent, create Slaanesh, Abyss created, elf gods all die but Correlleon, dark eldarin take up with Loth. Stuff 1000 years ago, council and factions formed in Sigil, nothing got done. Current, humans showed up, everyone says 'what the heck?' then go back to fighting and stuff.

    Crystal spheres poof about in astral sea, Sigil is a weird torus in the middle. Astral sea takes decades/centuries to cross between spheres, Syrne portal network allows safe entry into the Warp that cuts travel down to weeks/months, Sigil is some sort of beacon used for navigation in the warp. Sorcery uses the Warp, spelljammers mix magic and technology, need a navigator to get through the Warp and special shields to survive it. Umbra stuff, two paragraphs, meh.

    Sigil, Lady of Pain, no gods allowed or else god and all followers everywhere get flayed alive and souls destroyed, giant space innertube floating in the astral sea, super-metropolis city on the inside walls. Lots of faction junk the players probably won't read at all so they can't tell the difference between rent-a-cops and Harmonium enforcers.

    Crystal spheres: Abyss(nasty daemons), aborea(elfy tourist trap), arcadia(creepy farm), acheron(orks on cubes), baator(stuff, mutations), beastlands(tyrannid stuff), bytopia(mining & megacorps), carceri(nesting doll weirdness), commorragh(not a crystal sphere, Loth nest), elysium(eldarin exeniphobes), gehenna(dark eldarin slum), grey waste(greyscale war zone), mechanus(modrons), mount celestia(stuck up godlings & assimar enforcers), pandemonium(windy caves & death).

    There. Ok, book 2 or does everyone have an absolutely burning need for more setting stuff?

  6. - Top - End - #96
    Ogre in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2017

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    I wasn't terribly interested in the setting. For your game, did you bring out any of the homebrew others have made for the system?
    My posting may be slowed due to new job.

  7. - Top - End - #97
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by QuadraticGish View Post
    I wasn't terribly interested in the setting. For your game, did you bring out any of the homebrew others have made for the system?
    I admit to being completely unwilling to slog through it all to fond the good stuff. I scanned some, but...

    An update without spellcheck!

    Dungeons the Dragoning 40,0000 7th Edition, Book 2: For a Few Subtitles More

    The cover is how someone with a hero point and a warped sense of humor reacts to being caught in an orbital bombardment.

    Checking the index... 4 races, 2 exaltations, <error: null value> classes, some feats, new spells that we already covered, the gun katas also already covered, vehicles, spelljammers, more alignment details, finally some new equipment options for weapons bionics and drugs.

    The chapter intermissions are all a pastiche of Wrath of Kahn. I won't bother mentioning them again.

    The intorduction talks about a few of the things in the book. It also makes it clear that this is an unfinished work. I presume that if it were ever finished then that sentence would be taken out.

    Races/Species.
    Thri-Kreen: live fast, die young, 50 year life span, live in hives, mysterious, don't sleep.
    +1 dexterity or wisdom, +1 acrobatics and perception, size 4 (human/tau).
    The smaller pair of can ready an action as a free action once a round and let them reload weapons in half the time. Ah, ok. I had to look up the ready action. It's draw/sheathe weapons, dig something out of a bag, apply bandages or poison, that sort of stuff. Nice, not too much and not too fiddly.
    Physicals: the whole praying mantis thing, egg layers, sweet tooth, and apprently it's really easy to tell gender if you can smell pheremones. I bet there's a auspex app for that.
    Playing them: act but not rashly, like cutting edge tech, prefer performance over reliability, tend to adopt things from other cultures, don't really bother with saftey protocols... Sooo... sort of a race of player characters?

    There's definitely less integration with the game setting in this book. No mechanics associated with the whole 'no sleep thing', interesting. I wonder what they think about being knocked unconsious?

    Kenku: pioneers of space flight, explorers, great magical talent, like owning small maneuverable ships, too individual to be a societal presence.
    +1 intelligence or wisdom, +1 performance and pilot, size 3 (dwarf/elf/gnome).
    +2k0 to acrobatics checks and can glide, 2m down and horizontally equal to speed each round. They even instinctiviely try to do it if they fall while unconsious.
    Physical: bird people hexapods with arms-legs-wings, light for their size, no body fat and eat more, good memory, bad smell, can't taste spicy.
    Playing them: flighty, mild clausterphobia, strongly independedent but generally helpful.

    I can see a tendency towards dexterity & dodging characters. Nice to have you're own built in hang glider.

    Kobold: xenephobic, like dragonborn but created as miners, reproduce quickly.
    +1 charisma or dexterity, +1 arcana and stealth, size 2 (halflings).
    Once a round as a free action they can sacrifice 2 HP to get a resource point that is immedately spent and does not count towards the per-round resource point limit.
    Physicals: tiny dragonborn, weak, fragile, scrawny, tend to wear armor all the time, adapted to toxic gasses and high atmospheric pressures.
    Playing them: cunning bloody-minded survivors. Xenephobic vermin or socially not-too-mal-adapted short people. Practical and don't do charity or manners.

    Charisma? Arcana? The racial power is nice, good trade off there. No actual in-game stuff for the whole toxic gasses thing.

    Dryad: plant people, "mono-gendered" faux female, long lived, need large natural areas to spawn.
    +1 fellowship or willpower, +1 animal ken and scrutiny, size 4 (human/tau).
    Mind control pollen! Psychoactive tree semen! Ahem... Charm person as the spell using level + fellowship in place of the magic test. I do seem to recall that the pollen comes from the male plants. Also, I have questions about air filtration systems and people that don't breathe/smell.
    Physical: green-brown plant ladies, "mating" magically templates stored seeds and doesn't require a gender, eventually turn into trees & spawn, then turn into treants after spawning.
    Playing them: 1000 year lifespan, like unspoiled winderness & elves, not luddites though. I forsee dryad oriented security companies that use magitach to allow them to run security murder-bots in their tree stage.

    So, a weirdly sex oriented plant species. That pollen man...

    The exalts

    Wraiths: wierd ghosts, use ectoplamic energy to make shells, recharge in the umbra.
    Powers... Start off referencing their resource stat. Let's see.
    Resource stat is "Plasm", amount equal to power stat plus resolve, resolve being composure + willpower. Lose 1 resource per day unless they 'wrap themselves in the trappings of death', regain 2/hour in the umbra.
    Fine, now the powers:
    * Dematerialize - as a half action spend a resource point and gain the phasing monster ability for rounds = resolve or just zoom off into the umbra, your personal stuff goes with you. If you went umbral you can't be incorporeal/phasing and it takes another half action and resource point to return to the real world.
    * Second Death - get the undead traits, if you would take damage instead lose resource points... equal to wounds I assume. At zero resource points they get kicked back into the umbra but leave their gear behind this time. It takes a day to create a new real world shell and they don't regain... they don't regain resource points during this time. Doesn't that mean they just get zapped back into the umbra again? Oh, they wait until they regain resource points then spend the 24 hours rebuilding the shell. If they would take any damage during this time they prema-die. Right, note to self: never ever run out of resource points as one of these.
    * Deathsight - always see the umbra, see "leftover" magical auras, spend a resource point to see what a corpse was seeing when they got made a corpse.
    * Ghost Dice - ...

    Take this outside and beat it with a shovel.

    Fine. When spending resource points to get more rolled dice keep them separate. Any 1s and something bad happens. Any 10s and something good happens. No mention of what happens if you have both. There's a lousy example.

    Power stat is "Synergy" that has something to do about looking different as it goes up.
    * level 1 whispers - May use the augury spell rolling power stat + wisdom for the casting roll.
    * level 2 poltergiset - Spend a resource point to gain telekinesis. Range 3m per point of power stat, functional strength is willpower, can't be used for fine enough manipulation to attack with things until pwer stat 4. No opportunity attacks.
    * level 3 curse - As a half action pick a target within 3m per point of power stat. That person rolls on the psychic phenomina table, if it would go to perils of the warp reroll unless you spend 3 resource points. You are unaffected by any results of this power. Which is interesting when it summons a greater daemon. How does that work?
    * level 4 shroud - Gain armor equal to your resolve, does not stack with anything. If you're incorporeal it turns into aura instead. I wonder if the phasing power is supposed to make you immune to normal weapons and damage? Ah, I am reminded: magic, magic weapons, and power weapons. So that daiklaive will chop you right up.
    * level 5 ectoplamic form - 1/session gain the Amorphious trait, instead of doubling HP get temporary HP equal to your current resource points. Lasts one scene. Temp HP are temp. Meh?

    Huh, that's it. No playing one, no DMing for one, no adaptations, no tells, no advice. Just rules text. Well, first thing as soon as you run out of hit points you should go umbral. Most forms of 'lessen the crit' and 'ignore the crit effect' won't help you. Hmmm, incorporeal spellcaster is a decent option. You have zero methods of regaining resource points except by resting except by spending a resource point to go umbral and waiting. Then it costs a resource point to come back. Healing? Unknown. Well you're going to want to start with 5s in willpower and composure, that's for sure. Weird.

    Dragon Blooded: draconic ancestery, born with it, natrually tough, natural magic ability. Let's see.
    Powers:
    * Draconic aura - your exalt tell does damage. Once you've spent 2-3 reasource points in a scene it does 2k1 energy damage to everything within a radius of power stat meters every minute. Yourself and your gear are excluded from this. At the 4-5 points per scene level it happens every round. At 6+ points in a scene it cranks up to 3k2 damage. Of course it pretty much lasts the whole scene. Right, no spending resource when you ride in the car, I like the upholstery.
    * Hot blooded - when hit with energy damage spend resource points to reduce it at a 1:1 ratio. At power stat 3 you get a 2:1 ratio in your favor.
    * Claws - talons or retractable, your choice. 1k1 rending melee brawling either way.
    * Blood quickenting - your dragon type. Air, earth, fire, water, wood. Get a +1 to an attribute, your claws get a bennie like balanced/+1k0 damage/penetration/etc., get something for spending a reource point except for wood who gets to walk through plant based difficult terrain and can do the healing surge thing as a free action.

    Power stat is "Aspect". That's it.

    Resource points are "Breath", equal to double your level and completely refreshed after 5 minutes of rest. That's possibly the least amount of resource points of anyone but it's a really really easy & fast rechage.

    * level 1 mind - see in the dark and +1k0 to focus power spell casting rolls.
    * level 2 wings - get wing based flight, x2 your land speed, at power stat 4 it doubles up to x4 your land speed.
    * level 3 heart - get the flamer templated breath weapon, costs 2 resource points to use.
    * level 4 skin - get armor AND aura equal to your power stat. Oh, well the armor is 'meh' but the 4 aura is nice.
    * level 5 maxium dragoning - 1/session use of the dragon form spell. No casting roll required.

    Well you're slightly pushed towards melee capability with the claw bennies. Very few resource points compared to other exalts, you'll need to carefully conserve them in combat. Which will suck if you want to dodge, parry, or multiattack more than once in a round. The wings are nice, although I think it would make armor a bit inconvinent. It also makes the lack of carrying capacity rules a possible nuisance point too. I'm unimpressed with the flamer breath because of the limited resource points. After every fight expect this exalt to heal up if they have an hour long break. Possibly everyone in the party gets to heal up if they can cast a healing spell. You're really hard on the scenery if you spend 4+ resource points, but you're a horrible monster in a grapple. Flammable/delicate environments are not your friend, heck you can trash... Ok, 2k1 hits a 15 about 12% of the time but 3k2 gets to 20 about 21% of the time. You can trash cars just by cathing on fire while you try to dodge pedestrians.

  8. - Top - End - #98
    Troll in the Playground
    Join Date
    Mar 2015

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Thri-Kreen: […] Playing them: act but not rashly, like cutting edge tech, prefer performance over reliability, tend to adopt things from other cultures, don't really bother with saftey protocols... Sooo... sort of a race of player characters?
    I think it is the first part that separates them from player characters: "act but not rashly". PC have of course have two subspecies: those that act rashly without thinking and those that plan for hours an never act until acted upon.

    So, a weirdly sex oriented plant species. That pollen man...
    Yeah for some reason that just happens when you get an "all female" race.


    Anyways still enjoying the posts, did my best to chip in.

  9. - Top - End - #99
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    I
    Yeah for some reason that just happens when you get an "all female" race.


    Anyways still enjoying the posts, did my best to chip in.
    I googled, as a species I think dryads are "monoecious". Not that the author looked it up or anything.

    I'm glad you like this. It gets pretty quite in here except for my nattering along.

    No update today, but a tool. I converted my statistical die roller for DtD40k7e into html & javascript. This is the one that produces percentages and ranges, not individual die rolls (although it did serve as the basis for that code and isn't hard to modify).

    Use instructions are pretty simple: Copy the posted code into a text file and save it as a html file. (open your preferred text editor notepad/vim/emacs/gedit, select code here, ctrl-c here, ctrl-p in the editor, "save as", type in "bob.html") Then you should be able to either just double click it or you can open it with you web browser. It uses bootstrap and javascript, which in turn means it uses jquery. That probably won't be an issue but if the page doesn't seem to work right try turning off or making an exception in your ad blocker rules, . I tested in Firefox, it should work fine in other browsers, if you're using IE and having problems go get a modern browser. I have to support that piece of crud in my job, I'm not doing that as a hobby. GITP uses jquery, so that's probably not going to be an issue and bootstrap is relatively common on the web so I'd be surprised it that had any problems.

    Output looks like
    Code:
    2k1r1x9-5
    C: 0.111 | T: 1 
    --------11%--------
    C: 0.136 | T: 2 
    --------24%--------
    C: 0.161 | T: 3 
    --------40%--------
    C: 0.019 | T: 6 
    --------42%--------
    C: 0.040 | T: 7 
    C: 0.041 | T: 8 
    --------50%--------
    C: 0.042 | T: 9 
    C: 0.044 | T: 10 
    C: 0.045 | T: 11 
    --------63%--------
    C: 0.046 | T: 12 
    C: 0.023 | T: 13 
    --------70%--------
    C: 0.003 | T: 15
    C is the percentages, 0.63 + 0.046 + 0.023 = 0.699, that's the jump from 63% to 70%. T is the rolled number. This tells us that for roll 2, keep 1, reroll 1s, explode on 9 & 10, then subtract 5, 50% of your results will be in the 1 - 8 range.

    So here's the code
    Spoiler
    Show
    Code:
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
    	<head>
    		<meta charset="utf-8">
    		<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=11" />
    		<title>Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition Die Roller</title>
    	</head>
    <!--
       DtDroller.html
       
       Copyright 2020 Telok <telok@Spleen-9825> [email protected]
       
       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
       it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
       the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
       (at your option) any later version.
       
       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
       but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
       MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
       GNU General Public License for more details.
       
       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
       along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
       Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston,
       MA 02110-1301, USA.   
    -->
    	<body>
    		<h3><label>Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition Die Roller</label></h1>
    		<br/>
    		<div class="col-sm-1"></div>
    		<div class="col-sm-11">
    			<div title="Instructions">
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Format WkXrYxZ[+ or -]N</label></div></div>
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Required: W = rolled d10s, X = kept dice</label></div></div>
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Optional: Y = reroll numbers <= this number on a die</label></div></div>	
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Optional: Z = explode on numbers >= this number on a die</label></div></div>
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Optional: N = add this much to the final tally</label></div></div>
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Limitation: W, X, and N are limited to one or two digits</label></div></div>
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Limitation: Y and Z are limited to the number 1 through 9</label></div></div>
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Limitation: +N absolutely must come last</label></div></div>
    				<div class="row"><div class="col-sm-12"><label>Examples: 7k4 or 4k2-5 or 4k2r2 or 5k3x9 or 7k4r1x9+10</label></div></div>
    			</div>
    			<div class="row form-group">
    				<div class="col-sm-3" title="Data Entry">
    					<input type="text" class="form-control" id="computationText" placeholder="7k4r1x9+10" ></input>
    				</div>
    				<div class="col-sm-3" title="Execute Computation Button">
    					<button type="button" class="btn" onclick="computeRoll()">Compute</button>
    				</div>
    			</div>
    		</div>
    		<div class="row">
    			<div class="col-sm-1"></div>
    			<div class="col-sm-10" title="Results Display"><textarea rows=25 style="overflow: hidden; overflow-y: auto; width:40%" id="outputTextArea"></textarea></div>		
    		</div>
    	</body>
    </html>
    
    
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css">
    <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
    
    <script>
    	var maximum = 1000000;
    	
    	function computeRoll(){
    		var firstArray = [];
    		var dice = document.getElementById("computationText").value;
    		if (dice.length <= 0){
    			dice = "7k4r1x9+10";
    		}
    		
    		for (i = 0; i < maximum; i++){
    			var tArray = rollXkY(dice);
    			var temp = parseInt(tArray[0]);
    			
                if(temp < 0){temp = 0;}
                firstArray.push(temp);          
    		}
    		
    		firstArray.sort(function(a, b){return a-b});
    
    		var statSize = firstArray[maximum-1] - firstArray[0];
            var statArray = [0];
            var countArray = [0];
            for (j = 0; j < statSize+1; j++){statArray.push(0);countArray.push(0);} 
            var pointer = 0;
    
            for(k = 0; k < maximum; k++)
            {
                var temp = firstArray[k];
                if(temp == statArray[pointer]){
                    countArray[pointer]++;
                }
                else if(temp > statArray[pointer]){
                    pointer++;
                    statArray[pointer] = temp;
                    countArray[pointer]++;
                }
                else{
                    //error -- reset
                    for(m = 0; m < statArray.length; m++){
                        if(statArray[m] > temp){
                            // stop here
                            statArray[m] = temp;
                            countArray[m]++;
                            pointer = m;
                        }
                        else if(statArray[m] == temp){
                            // also stop here
                            countArray[m]++;
                            pointer = m;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
            
            var fractional = 0.0;
            var fracCount = 1;
            var setText = "";
    
            for(n = 0; n < statSize; n++){
                if(statArray[n] > 0){
    				var percentage = parseInt(countArray[n]) / parseInt(maximum);
    				fractional = fractional + percentage;
    				// System.out.printf("C: %.3f | T: %d %n", percentage, statArray[i]);
    				setText = setText + "C: %.3f | T: %d \n";
    				setText = setText.replace("%.3f", percentage.toFixed(3));
    				setText = setText.replace("%d", statArray[n]);
    				if(fractional > (0.1 * fracCount))
    					{
    						fracCount++;
    						// System.out.printf("--------%3.0f%%--------%n", fractional*100);
    						setText = setText + "--------%3.0f%%--------\n";
    						setText = setText.replace("%3.0f%", parseInt(fractional*100));
    					}
                }
            }
            setText = dice + "\n" + setText + "\n" + dice + "\n";
            document.getElementById("outputTextArea").value = setText;
    		
    	}
    	
    	function rollXkY(dice){
    		// pass in XkY+N as a string (the "+N" is optional), returns a 2x11 int array
    		var diceToRoll = 0;
            var diceToKeep = 0;
            var amountToAdd = 0;
            var rerollOn = 0;
            var explodeOn = 10;
            
            var kIndex = dice.indexOf("k");
            var pIndex = dice.indexOf("+");
            var xIndex = dice.indexOf("x");
            var rIndex = dice.indexOf("r");
            var negativeAdd = false;
            var haveKeptNumber = false;
            
            if(pIndex < 1 && dice.indexOf("-") > 0){
                pIndex = dice.indexOf("-");
                negativeAdd = true;
            }
    
            if(kIndex == 1){
                diceToRoll = parseInt(dice.substring(0, 1));
            }
            else if(kIndex == 2){
                diceToRoll = parseInt(dice.substring(0, 2));
            }
            else{
    			var retArr = [-1];
                return retArr;
            }
            
            if(rIndex > 0){ // we have a reroll number, kept is between k & r
                diceToKeep = parseInt(dice.substring(kIndex+1, rIndex));
                rerollOn = parseInt(dice.substring(rIndex+1, rIndex+2));
                haveKeptNumber = true;
            }
            
            if(xIndex > 0 && haveKeptNumber){ // have reroll & explode numbers, already got k
                explodeOn = parseInt(dice.substring(xIndex+1, xIndex+2));
            }
            else if (xIndex > 0){ // we have an explode number, kept is between k & x
                diceToKeep = parseInt(dice.substring(kIndex+1, xIndex));
                explodeOn = parseInt(dice.substring(xIndex+1, xIndex+2));
                haveKeptNumber = true;
            }
            
            if(pIndex > 0 && haveKeptNumber == false){
                diceToKeep = parseInt(dice.substring(kIndex+1, pIndex));
                amountToAdd = parseInt(dice.substring(pIndex+1));
            }
            else if (pIndex <= 0 && haveKeptNumber == false){
                diceToKeep = parseInt(dice.substring(kIndex+1));
            }
            else if (pIndex > 0){
                amountToAdd = parseInt(dice.substring(pIndex+1));
            }       
    
            if(diceToRoll <= 0 || diceToKeep <= 0){
                var retArr = [-1];
                return retArr;
            }
            
            var rollArray = [];
            
            for(p = 0; p < diceToRoll; p++){
                rollArray.push(rollD10(0, rerollOn, explodeOn));
            }        
    
            rollArray.sort(function(a, b){return a-b});
            
            var sum = 0;
            var counter = diceToRoll-1;
            for(q = diceToKeep; q > 0; q--){
                sum = sum + rollArray[counter];
                counter--;
            }
            
            var returnArray = [0];
            if(negativeAdd){
                returnArray[0] = sum - amountToAdd;
            }
            else{
                returnArray[0] = sum + amountToAdd;
            }
            
            for(r = 0; r < diceToKeep; r++){
                returnArray.push(rollArray[r]);
            }
            
            return returnArray;
    	}
    	
    	function rollD10(incomming, reroll, explode){
    		var current = 0;
    		var limit = 100;
    		
    		while (current <= reroll && limit > 0){
    			current = roll1d();
    			limit--;
    		}
    		
    		incomming = incomming + current;
    	
    		if (current >= explode){
    			incomming = rollD10(incomming, reroll, explode);
    		}
    		return incomming;
    	}
    	
    	function roll1d(){		
    		return Math.floor(Math.random() * 10)+1;
    	}
    	
    </script>

  10. - Top - End - #100
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    The classes in this book are organized in a really annoying manner. By level, then alphabetically. The class tracks are as follows:

    courtier: negotiator -> courtier -> diplomat -> legate -> emissary
    monk: -> brother -> disciple -> monk -> immaculate master -> grand master of flowers
    druid: ovate -> oak-knower -> druid -> archdruid -> patriarch
    arcane knight: spellsword -> swordmage -> runeblade -> arcane kight -> sorcerer-swordsman
    magitek gunman: spellshooter -> riflemancer -> gunmage-> bulletwizard -> witch-sniper
    sheriff: -> deputy -> sheriff -> constable -> marshal -> judge
    heavy: big shot -> crazy ivan -> heavy weapons guy -> walking gunshow -> living fortress
    operator: hunter -> marksman -> sniper -> quickscope -> targetmaster
    tech-priest: mech-wright -> enginseer -> tech-priest -> technomancer -> magos

    If you're trying to follow a track then you'll be doing lots of scrolling around. Every time I reference these classes it annoys me. AD&D did it's spells this way, and that was fine since the spell level was a big deal and the spell lists weren't too large. But for these short, five item groups, it's a terrible way to do it. Grrr. The class tracks aren't even in alphabetical order. Plus there are a number of classes that aren't in the class tracks, they're all spaceship oriented and start as level 2s. They do have a sort of track structure since they're mostly chains of 2 to 3 levels of classes, but they're just mixed into the jumbled mess here.

    I'm going to follow the tracks, since that makes sense to me, but not in any particular order, just as they show up in the book as the levels go. I'll do the starship classes last.

    Big shot. Ok, starting with the heavy weapons guy/gal class track.
    Prerequisite skills are ballistics and brawl. Attribute advancements charisma, constitution, and strength. Skills athletics, ballistics, brawl, intimidation, tech-use. They get access to the crisis zone gun kata and a +1 HP for completing a level in the track.
    Feats:
    * 1: Gives light armor, +1 HP, ordinary weapons, optional any weapon proficiency, storm of iron (full auto ROF gets +1), unarmed warrior (+1k0 unarmed damage).
    * 2: Requires storm of iron. Gives medium armor, +1 HP, las weapon proficiency, optional any weapon proficiency, hardy, steel rain (your full auto attacks can't be dodged).
    * 3: Requires steel rain. Gives heavy armor proficiency, +1 HP, bolt weapon proficiency, nerves of steel, bear hug (your grapples are a little harder to escape).
    * 4: Requires nerves of steel. Gives extreme armor proficiency, +1 HP, optional any weapon proficiency, death before defeat, rock and roll (get +5 to hit every continuing round of full auto fire, walk your shots to the target), crushing bear (automatic unarmed damage when grappling in addition to normal effects).
    * 5: Requires rock and roll. Gives power armor proficiency, +1 HP, any weapon proficiency, fearless, iron jaw (constitution save vs. stunning), optional iron curtain (personal forcefield, spend hero point to ignore damage for a round).

    You get minor bonuses in unarmed combat and grappling, +10 HP over the whole track, and you love automatic weapons. Like, really, really love automatic weapons. A quick re-scan of the crisis zone gun kata tells me that you're taking the first rank of the gun kata (don't need to brace heavy weapons) but you really wanted the point blank gun kata that works with full auto attacks.

    Lets see, level 4, ballistics 4, take a focus on say the SAW, base full auto is 10k5r1 (no dodge) and you fire 11 rounds. Hits 45 about 50-ish% of the time, but since it's a full auto we care about exceeding the target's defense, since most don't go past 25 call it 5 raises on average, that gives 7k2 damage. Hm. Second round of full auto gets a +5 to hit, that just puts us at 8k2 damage... Looks about average 20 damage a turn, slowly increasing until you hit 9 rounds of autofire and have to stop to reload.

    It's interesting that the biggest boost to your attacks comes at level 2 in the form of the steel rain feat. This class really wants the point blank gun kata and can't really do much other than fight and play around with the tech-use skill.

    Brother. Right, the monk track.
    Prerequisite skills are brawling, athletics, and acrobatics. Attribute advancements are wisdom, willpower, and dexterity. Skills are academic and common lore, the prereqs, scrutiny, stealth, and weaponry. I'd suggest starting with some ballistics skill then, guns are nice to have. Sword schools of setting sun, shadow hand. and diamond mind. Completing a level nets you a +1 armor while you wear no armor, eventually you too can bounce small caliber firearms off your pecs.
    Feats:
    * 1: Gives unarmed warrior (+1k0 damage), catfall, fleet of foot (could just buy a nice cyber-leg), wholeness of body (+armor = wisdom when unarmored, doen not require consiousness), optional skill focus on athletics and unarmed weapon proficiency. Not really sure why your combat proficiency is optional... Wait, I do, it's just to use the unarmed category of weapons. Power fist, you know you want it.
    * 2: Requires unarmed warrior, which means you can enter from that first level of heavy weapons frood so there's your gunnery skill. Gives improvisational warrior (+1k0 damage using improvised weapons), ki strike (unarmed is magic weapon), evasion, meditation (1/session meditate for an hour to regain a spent hero point), combat sense (replace dex with wis for dodge and for level on aimed attacks), and optionally strong minded.
    * 3: Requires ki strike. Gives stunning fist (spend a hero point to give your unarmed attacks the shocking quality for a round, terrible), diamond body (+4 armor while not wearing armor, not vs. magic weapons), improvisational master (+2 penetration for improvised weapons), defensive mobility, and an option for skill focus in acrobatics.
    * 4: Requires stunning fist. Gives unarmed master (+0k1 unarmed damage), perfect self (gain aura = wisdom and meditate for an hour to ignore eating, drinking, sleeping for a day), improvisational savant (gain an appropriate special quality for improvised weapons, trashcan lid -> defensive as an example), and optionally swift attack (double attack) and wall of steel (free parry). You want wall of steel and swift attack, really, you do.
    * 5: Requires unarmed master. Gives iron fist (+4 penetration for unarmed attacks), feather step (walk on any surface including liquids), counter attack (free riposte on successful parry), step aside (free dodge).

    Reasonably kung-fu with a good splash of Jackie Chan improv. In theory you can end up with 14 armor (10 vs magic weapons) and 5 aura while naked (+1 for a very few specific exalts that can get stats to 6). Oddly good for the unarmored swordsman trope too, the unarmed specific feats won't do you much good but nothing stops you from using any weapons. Well, lack of proficiency I suppose. A couple lores and stealth are nice in a 'you can try not to be a total combat hound' sort of way.

    Stunning fist is just trash. Change it to a resource point and it won't completely suck. Do something about that terrible DC of 15 or perhaps give the triple attack feat at the 5th level to try to force lots of saves.

    However it is about 24+ feats and three skills at 5 to complete this class, not including three sword schools, attributes, and your power stat. Plus you'll need the academy feat at character generation to use anything but unarmed weapons. This is not going to be a fast class track to advance through. It does however lend itself to stunting with the mobility skills and improvised weapon usage. Interesting to note that combat sense actually lets you bypass the non-proficient issues with weapons as long as you take an aim action. Well, not flamers sonce they don't take an attack roll, but all the others. I still think you want that ballistics skill, if you can justify 4 additional feats taking the big shot class first isn't a bad idea. I suppose you could completely swap out the first levels and just accept the loss of your immaterial armor until it exceeded light armor. Which would be about level 4 anyways wouldn't it?

  11. - Top - End - #101
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    druid: ovate -> oak-knower -> druid -> archdruid -> patriarch
    courtier: negotiator -> courtier -> diplomat -> legate -> emissary

    Going to do these two next. They both share a couple interesting things, advancement, class completion bonuses, feats.

    Negotiator, an actual non-(physical)combat class track. I actually suggest skipping the first level and getting in through another class, there are several that work. Prerequisite skills are persuasion and scrutiny. Attribute advancements are charisma, fellowship, and composure. 17 skills out of the 27 total, missing acrana, physicals except stealth, technicals except craft, and the combat skills. Class completion bonus is +1 resolve.

    Feats:
    * 1: Gives Courtier's Privilege (+1 to certain backgrounds, max at 5), any peer, research (auto-know about local rulers, politics, & trivia stuff if it isn't totally unreasonable to know the things), skill focus in charm, optionally eidetic memory and a skill focus in anything.
    * 2: Requires Peer(Any), a really easy requirement in addition to persuasion 3 and scrutiny 2. Gives protocol (like common sense but more socially angled and uses common lore + intelligence DC 15), courtier's privilege (AGAIN), good reputation (social bonus with a peer group), decadence (vs. drugs & stuff), optionally chem geld (+10 mental defense against seduction & pleasure temptations) and another open skill focus.
    * 3: Requires protocol. Gives courtier's privilege (AGAIN), master of disguise (fast disguise without penalties and always assumed to have/scrounge the supplies to pull it off), meditation (one hour downtime to regain hero point 1/session), optionally another peer and skill focus.
    * 4: Requires master of disguise. Gives courtier's privilege (AGAIN), just as planned (hero point to have retroactively planned/done something in the last 10 minutes that happens/comes up now), optionally another good reputation and skill focus.
    * 5: Requires just as planned. Gives courtier's privilege (AGAIN), air of authority (does not exist error), armor of contempt (prevent anti-alignment results of social combat), optionally another peer and skill focus.

    Editing error, the feat air of authority doesn't exist. I'd suggest replacing it with another social feat like foresight or an asset like education or linguist.

    So, enter through the beginning no-requirements mercenary class (it has peer(merc unit) in it) and skip into courtier. That gets you weapon and armor skills/proficiencies while you lose research, skill focus in charm, and one instance of courtier's privilege. Or you could be a gnome daemonhost/atlantean, start with an armor proficiency and rely on evocation or conjuration in combat, you could also start with ballistics 3 and the academy feat. Why is this potentially so nice (aside from the courtier's privilege)? It takes 15 feats to power through the whole class track. Compare that to a monks' 24 feats. If you assume the same level of spending xp on attributes, skills, sword/magic schools, and your power stat then the courtier track is 900+ less xp to complete. You even get to level 5 with just 11 feats. And level is a cap or bonus to so many things. Buying up a magic school from 1 to 5 (atalantean or daemonhost) costs as much as 10 feats, 1000xp.

    Oh, courtier's privilege, the list is: allies, backing, contacts, fame, followers, and status. Sink your starting backgrounds into wealth and toys, or holdings if you really want a spelljammer without hijacking one. Just as planned is totally abusable in a good player's hands, in a good way. Calling the ship to arrange a teleport or orbital bombardment is just the start.

    Oh, hey, think of two human paragons with just as planned blowing all their hero points to out plan each other. Remind anyone of something?

    Druid, the hippy tree-hugger class right? Take note, wraithbone power armor is not made of metal. Just saying it's an option. Prerequisite skills are animal ken and brawling. Attribute advancements are wisdom, willpower, and composure (should we assume that the composure boosts come from dried herb smoking?). Skills are animal ken, brawl, common lore, craft, forbidden lore, medic and scrutiny. They get three spell schools, divination, transmutation, and healing. The bonus for completion of a class in this track is interesting, the feat Improved Animal Companion.
    Feats:
    * 1: Animal companion (get a single threat 1, damage 1 minion, simple ritual up to 1/day to re-summon), light armor proficiency, druid's oath (as long as you don't wear metal armor and "at least attempt to respect nature" 1/round reroll warp crap from healing & transmutation spells), heightened senses (any), and an option to take ordinary weapon proficiency.
    * 2: Requires druid's oath. Gives heightened senses, wild empathy (use social skills on animals), wild shape (at will, no duration, turn into animal, shift one physical attribute point, gain one of quadruped amphibious or crawler), mana generator (allowed to aid another with spell casting rolls), and an option for light sleeper.
    * 3: Requires wild empathy. Gives heightened senses, nature sense (know all animals & natural hazards within 10m), nekomimi mode (partially humanoid wildshape retains equipment & use, lasts 5 rounds, no wildshape for the next hour), and options to take unremarkable and spell specialization in transmutation.
    * 4: Requires nekomimi. Gives heightened senses, danger sense, expert tracker (dc for tracking is reduced by 5), optionally virgil's guidance.
    * 5: Requires expert tracker. Gives heightened senses, optionally you can take beastmaster (get an additional minion), improved wild shape (move another attribute point, gain another trait from armor2, aura2, dark sight, flyer), and naturalize (screw with nearby technology).

    The improved animal companion feat adds 1 to your companion's threat or damage ratings. This has an unfortunate side effect in that you'll end up at 5th level with a minion squad of 2 critters, threat 2, damage 4, rolling 2k2 dice. For 4 levels your minion is at 1k1 because there's only 1 minion. For my game it's house ruled that improved animal companion gives one of the +1s or another minion, to a max of 5 ratings or minions. That at least gets you to 3 minions at 3k2 or 3k3, not great but at least potentially relevant.

    Don't ask how improved wildshape is supposed to stack flyer on top of the wildshape trait. Well, it's fantasy so I suppose flying snakes, flying fish, and stuff like griffons is reasonable.

    Right, it takes 15 feats to power through the whole class. The only thing you lose for violating the druid oath is a warp crap reroll. Although an atlantean druid with a wraithbone bionic heart would get basically 4 rolls and be able to choose 1 or 2 of them, at least with transmutation and healing spells. That's really good odds of landing a completely trivial warp effect. You'll be a heck of a shapeshifter and a brawler when it's all done, but you'll want to start with decent physical attributes for that. It isn't a tremendously focused class, but it isn't weak or shut down by not being in a wilderness setting either.

  12. - Top - End - #102
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Deputy, lawman of the spheres. Lets see how this goes. Lone Ranger? A John Wayne western? I don't htink that Clint Eastwood did any westerns where he was 'lawful'? Any others? More recent perhaps? Well, the prerequisite skills are ballistics, command, and intimidation. Attributes are constitution, dexterity, and charisma. Skills are athletics, ballistics, brawl, command, intimidation, perception, scrutiny. Huh, sounds like a D&D fighter skill list. Gets three gun kata, clay pigeon, tin star, and point blank. The class completion bonus is +1 backing (law enforcement) to a maximum of 5. I think we're assuming that the player actually interacts with law enforcement beyond shooting at it and running away.
    Feats:
    * 1: Gives light armor proficiency, ordinary wepon proficiency, common sense, peer (law enforcement), improvisational warrior, and optionally any weapon proficiency. Pretty basic starting skill set, no special perks.
    * 2: Requires peer (law enforcement). Gives laz weapon proficiency, paranoia (+2 initatice & DM may secret check for hidden threats for you), jaded, hardy (faster natural healing), optionally blind fighting and sound constitution.
    * 3: Requires jaded and paranoia. Gives good reputation (law enforcement), double tap, armor of contempt, improvisational master and an option to take bolter weapon proficiency if you want it. Double attack, what's normally a high level social combat defense, and better able to use beer mugs and chairs in bar fights.
    * 4: Requires good reputation (law enforcement). Gives crack shot (+2 damage, pfft), combat master (never outnumbered), death before defeat (hero point to ignore effects of a non-killing critical), two weapon fighting, an an optional proficiency in exotic weapons.
    * 5: Requires crack shot and good reputation (law enforcement). Gives fan the hammer (shoot up to 6 times), hip shooting (take a shot when double moving), true grit (halve crit damage), and an option to take sound constitution again.

    Oddly I'm not tremendously impressed. It's a sort of general shooty class with a little touch of brawling and embedded law enforcement social stuff. The guardsman track from the first book is probably a better shooter barring the gun katas. Being stuck at light armor argues for a high dexterity & wisdom.

    Hunter, with prerequisite skills at ballistics 3 and stealth 1 I think this is another sniper class. Attributes are intelligence, wisdom, and dexterity. Skills are ballistics, decieve, disguise, larceny, perception, scrutiny, stealth, and tech-use. I guess you're relying on someone else to drive the getaway car. Two gun kata, clay pigeon and silent scope. Class completion bonus is +2 to stealth checks while remaining still. Definitely a sniper class.
    Feats:
    * 1: Gives catfall, lead fingers (work buttons, levers etc. by shooting them), ordinary weapon proficiency, any weapon focus, and trance (stay still & aware for days = constitution, instant exit).
    * 2: Requires lead fingers. Gives far shot (removes distance penalties), laz weapon proficiency, any weapon specialization, zen shooting (use perception in place of ballistics skill), and the options to take skill focus in perception and heightened senses with sight.
    * 3: Requires far shot, meaning there are a couple other classes you use to get into this one. Gives deadeye shot (halve the called shot penalty), raven's eye (automatic spot someone in a crowd, disguises still work though), exotic weapon proficiency, any weapon specialization, and the option to take skill focus for scrutiny.
    * 4: Requires raven's eye. Gives crack shot, foresight (10 min examination allows +5 next intelligence check), combat sense (swap out wisdom for dexterity dodge and for level in aimed shots), and options for skill focus in stealth and another weapon specialization.
    * 5: Requires crack shot and raven's eye. Gives pinball wizard (manipulate electronics at short range with guns), sharpshooter (no penalty for called shots), sneak attack (halve armor of unaware targets), defensive mobility (+5 defense against opportunity attacks), and an option to take weapon proficiency with syrneth weapons.

    Og shoot good.

    Well at least lead fingers, zen shooting, and pinball wizard are reasonably interesting. Raven's eye and all the preception stuff is on theme. Trance and foresight are a little odd. Sneak attack, combat sense, and defensive mobility are stupidly late. This really wants to be a on-shot-sniper class but I'm not seeing it. If you could grab danger sense early hopping into the level 2 rogue class and then levels 3+ on the assassin track would probably be a better sniper, gun kata not included.

    I'll have to look into the cross track advancement possibilities between the two books. It would be really nice to be able to switch around at second/third levels.

  13. - Top - End - #103
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    arcane knight: spellsword -> swordmage -> runeblade -> arcane kight -> sorcerer-swordsman
    magitek gunman: spellshooter -> riflemancer -> gunmage-> bulletwizard -> witch-sniper

    Well well well. There are two different versions of the second book floating around out there. I have one version on my phone and the second on my home computer. I hadn't noticed since I barely get to turn on my home computer once or twice a week. Versions 2.1 versus 2.2, and now I need to do a quick comparison... Ok, Looks like the classes got ordered and the Air of Authority feat showed up. Nothing else that I glanced at looked any different. Needless to say the version on my phone has now been replaced. Oh, air of authority just makes your social combat moves to influence people affect everyone who hears you and is paying attention.

    Right, so arcane knight. Required skills are arcana and weaponry. Attribute raises are charisma, strength, and dexterity. Class skills are arcana, academic lore, acrobatics, athletics, command, performer, weaponry. Class completion bonus is that the spellcasting focus power check DCs are reduced by 1 when you use an implement. Or say it as when you cast a spell the DC to cast is -1 as long as you use an implement. This is very much not the same as +1 to cast because that would affect the saving throw DCs of your spells.

    Feats:
    * 1: Gives arcane blade (all weaponry attacks count as magic), arcane mark (on a weapon hit plus arcana check mark someone to generally track, negate them ganging up on you, and +5 to hit them), tested, basic weapon proficiency, plus the options to take light armor proficiency and extracurricular study (gain a rank in any sword or magic school, up to half your level rounded up, you will always take this feat).
    * 2: Requires arcane blade. Gives iron tower (use melee weapons as implements), mana generator (aid another with spellcasting checks), danger sense (never surprised), any weapon focus, options to take the melee 2 weapon proficiency and extracurricular study again.
    * 3: Requires mana generator, meaning you can skip in from level 2 druid. Gives spell parry (spend a hero point to parry a single target spell affecting you, DC = casting check), any weapon specialization, options for melee 3 weapon proficiency, medium armor proficiency, and extracurricular study again.
    * 4: Requires spell parry. Gives swift attack (double attack), sword beam (), daggerspell stance (casting doesn't provoke opportunity attacks), options to take melee 1 weapon proficiency and extracurricular study again.
    * 5: Requires sword beam. Gives blademaster (one weaponry reroll a round), spell shield (as long as once hand is free gain a bonus to aura equal to your arcana, so it stacks), optional heavy armor proficiency, optional and weapon proficiency, and optional extracurricular study again.

    Technically it's a 15 feat class track. You probably want the armor feats, or at least one of them, another weapon proficiency or two, and all the extracurricular study chances. Just buying a daemonhost or atlantean magic school from 1 to 3 is... Ok, that's 300 but only because you started with a free point in it. it's basically a half price first or third rank in a sword/spell school. Although if you're only in this class track there are no magic or sword schools in your classes, so they'd be double cost to buy during free study.

    I'm pretty sure you're expected to take evocation, it's charisma based. Honestly there's not much here outside of combat stuff and any non-combat spells you pick up. Charisma, command, and perform. Not that you can't have other stuff, just that the classes aren't providing easy access to it.

    Magitek gunman. Requires arcana and ballistics. Attributes to raise are charisma, dexterity, and wisdom. A few more skills, acrobat, arcana, athlete, ballistics, charm, academic and forbidden lore, perception. Class completion bonus is being allowed to use the elemental shot feats additional times per session (shot 1 at 1st & 2nd, shot 2 at 3rd & 4th, shot 3 at 5th). Two gun katas and two magic schools, elemental gearbolt, point blank, evocation, and conjuration.
    Feats:
    * 1: Gives light armor proficiency, basic weapon proficiency, gun blessing (DC 20 arcana check to unjam, count as magic and improve gun quality one step (no stacking)), elemental shot 1, and an option to take any ranged or throwing weapon proficiency.
    * 2: Requires elemental shot 1. Gives minor magic (learn any one magic school), ranged 2 weapon proficiency, evasion (move a little on a successful dodge), elemental shot 1 again, and optionally any weapon proficiency.
    * 3: Requires 2x elemental shot 1. Gives obtain familiar (meh?), ranged 1 weapon proficiency, decadence (unaffected by drugs/alcohol), meditation (1/session regain a hero point), elemental shot 2.
    * 4: Requires elemental shot 2. Gives strong minded (1/scene reroll willpower vs a spell), throwing weapon proficiency, combat insight (swap in intelligence for dexterity on dodge or for level on aimed shots), and elemental shot 2 again.
    * 5: Requires 2x elemental shot 2. Gives double tap, spell bullet (prep an ammo shot with a spell), sharpshooter, and elemental shot 3.

    Elemental shots are 1/session half actions that add a rider effect to your next shot (sets the damage type too). You choose an effect from a list when you take the feat. It's pretty limited and the use of this class track exclusive feat prevents any cross classing into the track. Shot 1 is incendiary & energy damage, snare and impact damage, shocking and energy damage. Shot 2 is move hit targets 10m & impact damage, reroll 1s & 2s on damage and do rending damage, on hit knock prone (flying targets immune) & impact damage. Shot 3 sets damage to explosive type and either "roll psychic phenomena with exploding dice" or the weapon gets tearing and targets get 1 less resilience for taking wounds.

    Once again the combat <foo> feat that swaps an attribute in for dodge/aimed shots comes silly late and on the wrong class attributes. Charisma, charm, and two lore skills at least wave at giving you things to do outside of combat.

    Tech-priest class track, for all your "I wanna cyborg" needs. Interestingly it really is completely compatible with the promethian exalt. Weirdly it even works with the werewolf exalt as cybernetics meld with shapeshifts. Required skills are tech-use (starts at 3), academic lore, and craft. Attributes for the class are intelligence, wisdom, and constitution. Class skills are tech-use, common and academic lore, weaponry, ballistics, drive, pilot, craft, medicae. I'll admit that I find it a bit odd how few classes get driving and piloting as skills, even though they do represent more the stunt/combat versions rather than civilian applications. Class completion bonus is getting the feat Upgraded, which gives you a bit of cyberwear based on the rarity rating. It starts at rare for the 1st level mech-wright and 2nd level enginseer, then very rare, mythic rare, and finally an artifact bionic. That's a fairly strong incentive to see these classes through to the end.
    Feats:
    * 1: Gives any weapon proficiency, ANY armor proficiency. sound constitution (+1 HP), jaded (immune non-supernatural fear), mechanus implants (+1k1 vs. air toxins and gas weapons, datajack, fluff stuff), lumen charge (charge batteries & power electrical stuff by taking fatigue).
    * 2: Requires mechanus implants. Gives mechadendrite use (may take and use mechadendrite bionic implants), ferric lure (full action force pull unsecured metal item willpower in kg, 20m range), chem geld (+10 mental defense against seduction and pleasure temptations), another set of any weapon and armor proficiencies.
    * 3: Requires mehadendrite use. Gives binary chatter (make 56k modem sounds, +2k0 all tech rolls with computers), sound constitution, eidetic memory (perfect memory), another set of any weapon and armor proficiencies.
    * 4: Requires binary chatter. Gives lumen blast (inherent [willpower]k2 energy blast with shocking & 10m range, constitution save or gain fatigue), iron jaw (constitution save vs. stunning), miracle worker (improve starship combat emergency repair action), another set of any weapon and armor proficiencies.
    * 5: Requires lumen blast. Gives ferric summons (double distance & weight of ferric lure), strong minded, sound constitution, another set of any weapon and armor proficiencies.

    There are no optional feats here. There are good feats here. It is 26 feats to complete this class track and, personally, I think it would be quite worth it. Hilariously this is sort of the 'duplicate Darth Vader' class track. However for 6 feats and having tech-use 3, lore and craft at 2, you can get power armor proficiency on anyone plus some other decent stuff before topping it off with a rare bionic implant. You have good non-combat options built into the class though I will say, this isn't intrinsically a social combat class track.

  14. - Top - End - #104
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Suddenly, spelljammer officer classes! With a heavy dose of ST:TNG in them.

    Level 2 operations officer & level 3 chief of engineering.
    OpOff requires tech-use 2 and crafts 1, CoE wants tech-use 4, crafts 3 and the miracle worker feat. A tech-priest can skip OpOff then. Ability raises are intelligence, wisdom, and willpower. Class skills are academic and common lore, command, craft, pilot, and tech-use. Class completion bonus is +1 shield regen for any ship where they're serving as the chief engineer. Let me just check... Ok, that's a really minor boost. Don't worry about it.
    Feats:
    * 2: Offers miracle worker (emergency repairs can happen on two things at once), bodge together (your ship can make an extra extended repairs between resupplying at civilization), hardy (always count as lightly wounded for healing times), jack of all trades (may attempt untrained advanced skills and get +1k0 for untrained basic skills), and an optional skill focus.
    * 3: Offers jerry rig (+1 hull point when doing emergency hull repairs in combat), engineering team leader (you get 1 additional crew for engineering actions), sound constitution, one required skill focus and one optional skill focus.

    I suppose that some information on the space combat system is relevant. Other than, obviously, hull points and shield points a fairly important factor is you crew number and quality. Basically the crew numbers from about 10 to about 25, each representing anywhere from (if I recall correctly) 5 to 100 people, crew quality runs from 1 to 5. For ship actions in combat you allocate crew to various things and then roll [allocated crew] keep [crew quality]. It's pretty well balanced, although you want one of the useful skills (several socials, arcana, ballistics, weaponry, tech-use, pilot) if you're running a low quality crew. See, if a PC acts as an officer they can substitute their skill ranks for crew quality. The emergency engineering actions to do stuff like extra regen shields and repair hull damage rolls against a static DC and gets extra points by how many raises past the DC you get.

    So miracle worker means you don't have to split your allocated engineering crew into two pools to do two repairs at once. Team leader is basically +1k0 to an engineering action roll. Jerry rig and the class completion bonuses are really pretty minor. Bodge can be important if the PCs can't just hop back to a nearly civilized port for repairs. I'm not sure that I'd ever really consider taking the chief of engineering class. Most class tracks lock in the 4th level with a usually exclusive feat from their 3rd level (or a combo that would be annoying to get elsewhere), so you're delaying a level up. On the other hand it is just 400xp total for either class, which isn't too big of a hill to climb.

    Level 2 science officer & level 3 chief arcana officer.
    Starfinder, Pazio's faux-scifi version of Pathfinder had the issue where non-engineering & non-computer spellcasters got kicked in the balls when it came to space combat because there weren't any allowable actions for them to take that involved their main skills (and none for spell casting anyways). They patched that several years in, but they could have just not screwed up in the first place. DtD uses the arcana skill for several important things like sensors, navigation, and the magitech computers (many spells aren't useful in space combat, but they aren't disallowed either).
    SciOff requires acrana 2, academic lore 2, and forbidden lore 1, while CAO requires the detailed analysis feat, arcana 4, forbidden lore and academic lore 3. Ability raises are intelligence, wisdom, and composure. Class skills are academic lore, arcana, animal ken?, command, forbidden lore, medic, and tech-use. A good spread, although animal ken is really quite "what the heck?". Class completion bonuses are +1 sensors for the ship where the character is acting as the arcana officer.

    It occurs to me that there isn't anything preventing you from doubling up on the officer positions. In fact it's pretty... I think it's explicit in at least the gunnery officer position. It is explicitly excluded from the captain position, I don't remember if the piloting bit is exclusively one officer. Mind it would be unusual to do many different actions, if only because splitting the crew into ever smaller dice pools can cut your success rates down.

    Any ways, the sensors bonus affects basically some opposed tests and navigation, which is really minor, plus the ship's combat initiative. Since initiative is 1d10 + sensors + maneuverability this is actually a decent boost.
    Feats:
    * 2: Detailed analysis (+5 to active scanning rolls), gain access (+1k0 to tech-use hacking and all forms of jamming), eidetic memory, optional speak language and skill focus.
    * 3: Tachyon beam (1/session in ship stuff use arcana for any other action using technobabble), rotate shield frequency (1/session arcana check DC 20 to remove shield disruption [disruption reduces shield regeneration]), minor magic (gain first rank in any magic school), optional speak language and foresight.

    Well each one is only 3 required feats, so that's a plus. SciOff can probably justify a fair bit of non-combat and non-space use for it's feats. I'd probably only take CAO if I really wanted minor magic though. Just because 1/session is a little low for a campaign with lots of spelljammer action, and that's when you'd likely take these classes.

    Level 2 tactical officer & level 3 chief of security.
    We're giving the melee centric PCs who have no useful non-combat skills something to do, boarding actions and repelling boarders. It actually comes up relatively often and gets pretty useful. TacOff requires weaponry and ballistics 1, this is really low hanging fruit. CoS requires weaponry and ballistcs 3, plus worf barrage. Attributes to raise are strength, constitution, and composure. Skills for the classes are athletics, ballistics, brawl, command, pilot, weaponry. Class completion bonus is +1 crew quality for resisting boarding actions, which is important because boarding action resistance is primarily based on crew quality.
    Feats:
    * 2: Master of bombardment (reduces DC of orbital bombardment to 20, allows reroll of missed shot scattering), worf barrage (1/scene reroll a space combat critical damage that you inflicted), unremarkable (hard to pick out in a crowd), light armor proficiency, and an option for any weapon proficiency.
    * 3: Worf effect (if an enemy can target you they have to until they make a DC 15 intelligence test), match frequency (1/session after an active scan double the disruption of your weapons on one enemy ship for an undefined amount of time), guardian (use the parry action to take a hit for someone), any weapon focus (+2k0 to hit), option to take any weapon proficiency and medium armor proficiency.

    Combat stuff. Still, command and piloting for those who are desperate. I suppose you could take them for the armor and weapon proficiencies and/or skills if your regular class track never offered them. Pretty sure you'll only take CoS if you're happy tanking hits, although I think maybe the doubled shield disruption would last the whole fight.

    Boarding actions are the attacker sends X crew over and then you make opposed rolls: Attacker = of X keep (highest of crew quality, weaponry, brawling) vs. Defender = (crew quality) keep (crew quality). Winner inflicts crew casualties on the loser. So, yeah, cranking a quality 3 (average) crew up to 5k5 (or 7k6 with ship servitor murder-bots) because you sank 700xp-800xp into these two classes might not be a bad idea in some games. Plus you're pretty good at orbital bombardment, and everyone likes orbital bombardment.

    Level 3 captain, and level 4 commodore.
    Captain requires command 3, politics 2, and persuasion 2. Commodore requires command 4, politics 3, and persuasion 2. With moderate investment in social skills you can grab either one and ignore the other. Attributes to raise are fellowship, charisma, and composure. Skill list is the socials, not animal ken this time, plus pilot and perception. Class completion bonus is a free specialty in a social skill, so skill focus.
    Feats:
    * 3: Acceptable losses (1/turn give +1k0 to a ship action and lose a crew at the end of the turn, generally bad), lend expertise (do the picard speech action and if you have 3 ranks in the appropriate skill get +2 crew quality for actions using that skill for the round), luck, strong minded, and an option to take common sense.
    * 4: Hailing frequencies (even if you aren't captain if you hail the other ship they must answer and you drop out of space combat into social combat), redshirt shield (when the ship is in port 1/session the first time you would take damage a crew member appears and red shirts it, saving you the hit), peer(any), virgil's guidance (1/2 price devotion), and the option to take any skill focus.

    This is a strong set of classes, just not a primarily combat set. Acceptable losses is acceptable because there's a medical triage action available in space combat that can undo last round's crew casualties. The picard speech captain action increases your crew quality by 1 for the round, it's a sort of default "I don't know what to do" captain charisma check action. Doubling it for say, gunnery checks, can be pretty good if your party topped out at 3 or 4 ballistics skill. Considering that your party probably topped out at 3 tech-use (and that's apparently you) instead that might be a better option. Redshirt shield is just hilarious and, amazingly, will absorb any amount of damage. 4k2+30 car bomb going off next to you? Redshirt shield.

    Hailing frequencies is something that you, as the DM, need to be prepared for. This isn't a game where random encounters to drain resources is a thing. you can do that if you want, but the game isn't built to support it. If nothing else at least figure out a reason for the other ship(s) to be attacking and a few appropriate insults to throw around. It should buy the PCs at least a round or two of breathing room to put out fires or set something up.

  15. - Top - End - #105
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Right, that's the classes done. Feats, assets, and the exaltation thingys are up now. As before I'll skip most of the feats since they're mostly covered in the class descriptions.

    Animal Companion: Seriously underpowered and/or just janked. It gives you ONE threat 1, rating 1, minion. That's a 1k1 roll for 5+(5*raises) damage and it has static defense 5. It dies when someone sneezes in it's general direction. Problem is if you replaced it with obtain familiar you would have to find something else to give druids for the class completion bonuses. I do NOT suggest giving them obtain familiar every time, having a necromancer PC with several zombies was annoying enough when the player wouldn't use a dice roller. Thought: Replace this with the obtain familiar feat and then make the improved companion feat give +1 to a stat and a skill, or +1 size & level.

    Arcane mark: Questions about if it's detectable, how detectable and/or visible, dispellable, how it interacts with the Umbra and characters that go in there, stuff like that.

    Combat sense: Replacing dexterity with wisdom on dodges and level with wisdom on aimed attacks sounds neat. And it would be if you didn't get this at level 4 on classes that have dexterity as a class attribute and light or no armor.

    Courtier's privilege: +1 to a background. Really good. Also tends to tie PCs more into the setting & story. Not a nameless, orphan, murder-hobo feat.

    Daggerspell stance: Raises questions about the few spells that you are supposed to cast in melee. Good feat tho.

    Druid's oath: Loose enough not to annoy players and it gives a bonus for acting in a certain way, not a penalty for acting another way. Well designed. Plus wraithbone power armor isn't metal.

    Elemental shot: I'd like some clarity as to how it's supposed to stack, especially considering the class completion bonus of 'use more often'. And once a session is just annoying. So at the 3rd level of the class you've taken ES1 twice and have two extra uses. So can you use the feat 3 or 4 times a session and do you have to use both elements at least once? Thought: Option 1 = Change it to per day & 1+extra uses. Option 2 = Go with 1 use per feat +extra uses and don't care about which element gets used, but cut it down to a reaction instead of a half action just to be nice.

    Expert tracker: Sure would help if there were any rules or examples for tracking. Also I'd explicitly make it any sort of tracking, because it currently implies the natural surroundings 'follow the footprints' sort of tracking.

    Gun blessing: Seriously quite useful. The quality increase is a subtle but significant bonus for some weapons.

    Improved animal companion: See animal companion.

    Lead fingers: Leaves a lot up to the DM. Encourages PCs to shoot up the scenery. No mention of doing or not doing damage to the lever, switch, or button that you shoot. Wait a sec, this is just a regular 1 die stunt. Replace!

    Lumen charge: Exchanges powering stuff for fatigue. What to do about promethians and others who are immune to fatigue? Change to resource points?

    Mechadendtite use & mechanus implants: Not a fan. Exists solely to lock particular bionics behind certain class levels and doesn't really do anything else. You could make the mechadendrites require the mechanus implants and free up a feat. The implants themselves either need to have more explanation and do something beyond +1k1 vs. gasses or be an actual bionic implant, go ahead and make it mythic rare for a poor quality one if you want to restrict it a bit. The implants feat takes half a page and other than enabling mechadendrites and the vs. gasses thing I'm not sure what it should do.

    Naturalize: I'd like duration info. Permanent? Session? Day? Scene? Rounds? Fine other than that.

    Pinball Wizard: "and anything else the SM deems dramatically appropriate." Personally I like a little more than two extremely vague and bare-bones examples.

    Redshirt shield: Hilarious. Love it.

    Spell bullet: Just a little more info would be nice. I think this is supposed to be functionally replacing the spell range with the gun range in addition to the regular shooting bit. Unsure about self-only spells, bullet prep time (downtime? half action? just cast the spell?), illusions... I think you can have other people shoot it. Probably.

    Spell shield: Just says 'one hand free'. I'd presume that you need to be conscious and capable of moving the hand. In fact I'd think that you would need to be continually making the shielding gestures. Just says 'one hand free'. Expect a rules lawyer argument at some point.

    Steel rain: Rocking feat. Flat out negating dodge on full auto is strong.

    Stunning fist: Weak. Change to using a resource point... Of course non-exalt npcs couldn't use it then. Also that save DC is lousy. I dunno. Needs fixing.

    Zen shooting: Swap perception for ballistics skill with proficient weapons. Comes on a class that requires ballistics to level up. You'll have 3 or 4 ballistics when you get the feat already. Seriously, weapon focus would give you more. This is on the wrong class.

    Racial feats: Something for everyone.
    Ace pilot, kenku, +5 maneuverability to all spelljammers and vehicles you pilot. Pretty big bonus.
    Ancestral recall, eldarin, +1k0 all magic tests and +10 all warp crap rolls. Slightly better at casting for a better chance of killing yourself. Although it is a die that you can drop if it rolls a 10.
    Beneficial mutation, tiefling, +2 to your lowest attribute and -1 to any other. Technically lacking the 'minimum 1' language.
    Developed wings, kenku, gain a fly speed equal to your normal speed. Hmm, they're hexapods basically but the hit location tables don't account for that. No mention of bionic wings either.
    Elder wyrm fire, dragonborn, breath weapon does +1k1 damage.
    Escape artist, halfling, immune to immobilization.
    Explorer, gnome, you have a map to 'an exciting place' and you get a new map when you get there. Plot hook feat anyone?
    K'garblepoop, kobold, gain the paranoia feat and other kobolds won't attack you until you attack them.
    K'garblemorepoop, reduce the DC of wealth tests by 5 and increase location item rarity availability by 5. Potentially an issue as the wealth system works all right as it is. Unsure.
    Legal miner, kobold, D&D dwarf stonecunning, reduce trap & stuff notice it DCs by 10.
    Lightning bug, thri-kreen, you can glow your butt and you get the lumen blast feat.
    Made of mettle, assimar, +1 to your lowest characteristic.
    Mandibles, thri-kreen, gain a bite attack 1k1 rending, melee, toxic.
    Matron, dryad, you're a treant. -1 dexterity and fellowship, +1 strength, -pheromones, +2 size, +2 natural armor (not stacking), +2k0 brawling damage.
    Mixed heritage, human, at least one of your ancestors tried to breed with anything... and succeeded. Pick a race and you can take their racial feats.
    Noisy cricket, thri-kreen, gain an athletics specialty in jumping and every raise (+5) counts as three (+15).
    No one tougher, squat, replace dexterity with constitution for calculating static defense. Nice, really nice for daemonhosts and werewolves. Dump dexterity.
    Photosynthetic, dryad, don't eat as long as you get 2+ hours of direct sunlight a day, also heal 1 HP per hour of direct sunlight, vampire dryads don't get this they just lose the sunlight weakness. Um, promethian dryads just get to be weird?
    Precise technique, elf, 1/session use elven accuracy with any skill check.
    Recluse, dark eldarin, immune to all poisons and toxic weapons, when using a toxic weapon 'roll damage form the toxic quality twice and take the better value'. Ok, except that toxic is a save vs. an extra wound. +5 to the save DC?
    Silent arcana, tau, when casting spells increase the casting DC by 10 to replace the verbal, somatic, and material components of the spell with the subtle keyword. Recalling that subtle just means 'not during combat'.
    Teacher, kenku, 1/session let anyone you can talk to use one of our skill specialties. Explicitly works over telecomm systems.
    Trapmaster, kobold, gain specailites in craft & tech-use for traps. Possibly a trap if the DM doesn't play along with you building traps everywhere.
    Treestrider, dryad, as a full action enter a large vegetable, exit anywhere within 1km/level, only need to know general direction and distance. No other limits or info.
    Whagh, ork, when you gang up on an enemy allies in the gang up get +1k0 damage.

    Whoof. Ok, next time the exalt feats. Already did the spells and gun katas. Then we're at the vehicle rules. I'll probably do the general usage and combat rules first, then another post for the vehicle building rules and maybe some comments about the vehicle weapons tables. There are exactly three example vehicles, I may bonus and throw down the generic civilian vehicles that I built for my exploding scenery purposes.

  16. - Top - End - #106
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Exalt featy assety things.
    Also I rechecked because I didn't fully remember, you can take the racial feats at any time for 100xp a pop. The assets are taken at character generation and you can only have one exalt asset unless you're a paragin.

    For the dragonblooded there are 5, pick 1 or none at character generation.
    Adamic dragon: replace your blood quickening/element ability with something more powerful from the following list. Metal, +1 willpower, +1 resilience, spend a resource point to get aura equal to your power stat for a round, and your claws are +4 penetration and gain the power field ability (pretty much like always having a power fist). Void, +1 composure, don't need to breathe, unaffected by hard vaccuum, wounds for your claws can't be healed by magic or spending resource points only time can heal them. Heart, +1 fellowship, spend a resource point to treat any one die rolled on a social attack or skill as a 10, your claws make those hit with them roll for warp crap (this could backfire).

    Blood of bahamut: Your claws and your power stat 3 breath weapon do +1k1 damage and change to explosive type damage.

    Blood of io: spend a full action gulping down a handful of precious metals and gems to regain 2 resource points.

    Blood of tiamat: 1/day do an hour long ritual that changes your blood quickening/element ability. Well some recalculations will be annoying, but maximum flexability there.

    Double dragon: pick a second blood quickening/element ability and get everything but the attribute boosts from it.

    Interesting. Adamic is a straight up power boost, as is bahamut. Double is a lateral power increase instead of just adding stuff. Tiamat is for those who can't decide. Io is the only way for a dragonblooded to regain breath during combat and it's really only tempting because this exalt has so freaking few resource points.

    I wonder what a maximum resilience character looks like. Power armor, metal adamic dragon, size, level, there's a bionic in this book that adds 1 (there are tradeoffs), the asset sturdy adds 1, level 4 stone dragon on earth or rock is +1, level 5 transmutation spell dragon form is +3 size but you lose at least one of the gear bonuses, level 5 healing spell divine power is +1, level 2 transmutation spell enlarge is +1 size. So dwarf size 4 or a size 5 race, probably using tech-priest to nab PA prof at level 1, metal adamic dragon, machinator array, sturdy, and power armor get us to L1=8, L2=9 (enlarge kicks in), L3=10 or 9 (dwarf gets 10, enlarge doesn't benefit the size 5 race here), L4=11(stone dragon kicks in), L5=13 or 12 (divine power kicked in but enlarge doesn't benefit the size 5 race here). So, dwarf dragonblooded(adamic:metal) with a machinator array and wearing power armor is 8,9,9,10,10 with enlarge adding +1 at level 3 & 5, stone dragon adding +1 at levels 4 & 5, divine power adding +1 at level 5. Probably tech-priest 1 / druid 5 before taking a class with access to stone dragon then. A size 5 race with enlarge is the same as a dwarf without enlarge. Yeah tough. You could trade dragonblooded exaltation for daemonhost which swaps 1 resilience for constitution + power stat additional stacking armor (not vs. silver & spells).

    Wraith assets. They're a named "Children of <thing>" so I'll skip typing that again.
    Ash: Spend two resource points to make someone roll on the shock table (in the insanity section).
    Dust: Cast the Rot spell using power stat + intelligence.
    Salt: Oh, interesting. Opponents in melee range of you have to declare their actions (I presume their turn of actions, not including reactions?) at the start of the round and can't change them. If the action becomes impossible or suicidal they can opt to take no actions on their turn. Like the old AD&D days but only for your enemies in melee. Harsh. Double harsh if you include reactions.
    Silence: Spend a resource point to animate a recently killed corpse as a single minion, threat 1, damage 1. Limited to your power stat in minions at one time. Ah, pretty much suffers the same issue as the druid animal companion. At absolute best, 5th level, you have a 5 minion squad that rolls 5k1, has 5 static defense, and does 5+raises damage. That's really freaking sad. It's better to just give them the regular zombies, and those are so weak that's saying something.
    Void: Spend a resource point and a half action (so what action cost are the others?) to have a target make a willpower save vs. DC 10 + 3x(your power stat) or only be able to take a single half action on their next turn. So that DC starts at a nice hard 25 and goes 40, 55, 70, 85 as you increase your power stat. Which it better be hard to resist because your basically trading half actions, using yours to negate theirs. Still undefined: range limit, line of effect requirement or not, reactions and free actions one their next turn (probably not?), can you tag someone across the umbra with this.

    It feels like these are rather less well developed and probably completely untested. Ash and dust are ok, get a new effect in exchange for resource points or warp crap risk. Salt is quite interesting but melee combat is risky for wraiths due to resource recharge issues and their potential to be kicked out of the fight more easily than most. Silence is sad. Possibly fix that by having it be quality & damage equal to half the number of minions, round down initially to check the use of it since you can always change that to rounding up later. You could also have it be minion squads equal to the power stat, since it will still take 6 resource points to get a 6k1 squad of trash. Void just wants a little more definition in it's limits I think.

    Next up is dogfighting jets, racing cars, and blowing stuff up with mecha. The vehicle rules.

    Vehicles got stats. Could you have guessed?
    Acceleration: normally you can change your momentumn by your acceleration once a round.

    Momentum: from 0 to 10, you move speed * drive rating * momentum each round and get a bonus to static defense based on momentum and speed (1-5 add speed to static defense, 6-9 add double speed, 10+ add triple your speed).

    Hit points, if it loses hit points it rolls on the critical chart, +1 to the roll for each lost HP past the first.

    Maneuver: a bonus or penalty to all driving and piloting checks, also "lowered by your current momentum", affects static defense as well.

    Size: HP and resilience are based on size, also a slight change to the size -> meters long/tall equivelency, 1-10 size = .5 to 5 meters (.5m per size), 11-20 size = 7 to 25 meters (+2m per size past 10), 21-30 = 35 to 125 meters (10m per size post 20). Anything bigger should be a spaceship. Personally I like the following better: 1-10 = .5m/size, 11-20 = previous + 2m/size, 21-30 = previous + 5m/size (30m-75m), 31-40 = previous + 10m/size (85m-175m). Because I've tried and could barely make a size 30 unarmed and pretty much unarmored shuttle that could get to orbit and back once before refueling and needing 10+ hours of hanger time. As a side note, it's not mentioned until the bit on building a vehicle but the size = HP = resilience (occasional modifiers may apply).

    Speed: it's a rating, affects how far you move each round. Oddly references 'squares' as a distance. That's the only mention of mat/grid based movement that I've ever found.

    Static defense: 10 + maneuver - (2x size) + speed bonus. With the note that at momentum 0 static defense is 0. I don't put a lower limit on it and go ahead and go negative. It doesn't really matter, somethings are so big that you can't miss them if you're actually trying to hit them.

    Vehicles in combat.
    Oh, I was mistaken. Well that's what careful re-readings get you. A second mention of squares as distance. Then a movement calculation example. Normal car (wheeled drive x5), speed 4, going all out at momentum 10, results in 160m per round and about 120kph. Yay math errors? Or are these 'squares' wonky? I get 4*5*10=200... 0.8m/square to get 160m from 200 squares of movement? Yeah, no, not doing that. Let's go straight to meters. 200m per round gets 2km a minute at 6 second rounds gets 120kph, just about 74.5mph. So, not a high end car there. In fact kind of weak sauce since an efficency tin can compact I had 15 years ago got to 90mph without any issue and could have easily gone higher if I'd pushed the engine a bit. Actually I suppose that just means that speed 4 is fairly underpowered for modern cars.

    Drivers/pilots take actions, the first one really should be Maintain Control although it helpfully suggests being unconsious, putting out a fire, or eating a pie as reasons not to. Control checks are rolled using drive (2d moving and/or ground effect sort of vehicles) or pilot (3d moving vehicles and starships) plus the higher of intelligence or dexterity. Untrained drive/pilot is addressed elsewhere but I'll say it here, the maintain control action goes form taking a half action to taking a full action and uses the lesser of you intelligence or dexterity. That's a change from the default skill rules which would indicate a straight dexterity or intelligence roll at -1 die. Considering I've seen the dexterity 5 intelligence 1 characters try to drive things... Well it could make a difference. Use whichever way makes sense for the circumstances I guess.

    This is long enough. We'll do the actual actions, crashing, ramming, and stuff next time.

    Plus I was wrong, there are 4 example vehicles. The first one is just really easy to over look.

  17. - Top - End - #107
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Building vehicles. Yeah, not going into ton of detail here because that would be a heck of a long post. Let's see what we can do in a reasonable chunk.

    Stop 0: Budget (or concept).
    You use 'vehicle points' to calculate a cost/wealth check for the vehicle. It starts at 50 vp for an uncommon wealth check, goes up in 50 point steps to 200 for a mythic rare vehicle, then 250 to 450 are holdings 1 to 5 backgrounds. In my use of the system regular civilian vehicles came to uncommon & a few rare, an AT-ST ended up in the rare range too I think, the AT-AT ended up being holdings 4. I'd have to go look at my spreadsheets (not available on my phone right now) to get the surface to orbit shuttle details.

    Improving vehicles. If there's space in the vehicle after you bought it you can improve it later. <WARNING> Canny players may go for high wealth and a point or two of holdings to nab a powerful, if basic, vehicle with extra space in it with the intention of buying parts and upgrades.<WARNING> The wealth test to buy the part is DC 15+ 1/10th the VP of the part. That's cheap (you can get the best armor micronized down to one size slot for 160 vp or a 31 wealth check, or a 23 check for the 80 vp 2 slot version). Then it's about a day to install. There's nothing actually about replacing or upgrading parts, so at least that's at DM discretion. Honestly when someone mentions after-market parts for vehicles just give them a look and say "Don't be an ass.", that should weed out most of the trouble.

    Step 1: Base stats.
    Acceleration from 0 to 5, costs 0/5/10/25/50/100. If the vehicle has 0 acceleration you have to use Punch It to speed up or slow down.

    Size, a biggie. Since size is HP & resilience & space for stuff it costs more as it goes up. 1-10 is 1x size, 11-20 is 2x, and 21-30 is 5x. So 60 vp just for a size 30 empty frame.

    Speed is 1 to 15 with the cost and size varying by the acceleration. 1-10 speed costs 1x-10x acceleration of vp, with 1-5 taking no slots, 6-9 taking 1 slot, and 10 taking 2 slots. It cranks up from there to 4 slots and 40x acceleration of vp for 15 speed.

    Maneuverability from -10 to +10, cost varies by size but has no slot requirements. They all cost vp of base 10+maneuverability with 1-10 having a 1x multiplier, 11-20 having a 2x, and 21-30 having a 5x.

    Step 2: Install required components.
    Choose your control system and drivetrain. You want a control system, really, even though it's technically optional. The vehicle needs more than just a 'start' button... Now I want a racing challenge involving sealing teams inside fast vehicles that don't have control systems. Naturally the race would be through an obstacle course.

    Anyway, the drives. They're free. No cost, no slots. Just trade offs. Each one multiplies the speed rating for final movement distances.
    Naval: wet drive, speed x3, crashes if it tries to leave the water, the vp cost for size is halved as long as this is the only drivetrain for the vehicle.
    Tracked: speed x3, ignores the movement penalty for difficult terrain, can turn in place at zero momentum, and gets +4 HP.
    Walker: leggy, speed x4, impassible terrain is treated as difficult terrain, if they tip over they can right themselves with a half action (as long as the didn't also blow up).
    Wheeled: speed x5, no special abilities.
    Hover: speed x5, not slowed by difficult terrain that it can hover above, can drive over water, but whenever it takes damage you have to make a control check with a DC of the damage roll or it goes out of control and rolls on the chart of the same name.
    VTOL: speed x6 & flying, no special abilities other than the general flying & falling stuff.
    Aerospace: needs to have wings, x10 & flying, if momentum falls below 3 it stalls and rolls on the out of control chart, also halve it's HP (yes, even if it has multiple different drives).
    Scramjet: screamy speed x20 & flying, stalls and goes out of control if momentum is below 5, may not turn as part of the maintain control action (you have to use Punch It and roll dice to turn).
    Runways - Aerospace and scramjets need runways, speed x100 and speed x250 meters in length, respectively. Attempts to land in difficult or impossible terrain or on a too short runway are treated as crashes.

    And of course you can have multiple drives. There's a cost associated that gets detailed later. On switching the new drive takes over at the start of the next turn.

    Armor, still part of the "base stats" bit but also sort of an accessory. Well, the standard crap armor is 1 slot and 5 vp for armor(2) up to 4 slots and cost 20 for armor(10). Skip it. There's hardened with higher cost for higher armor ratings (light at armor(5) to heavy at armor(20)), ferro-fibrous for the same cost as standard but taking more space and the same higher ratings as hardened, and hexagrammatic wards for aura (the heavy aura(20) is costly but mostly immune to magic).

    Cargo space is a 1:1 ratio depending on size. 1 vp & 1 size for 0.5, 1, or 5 cubic meters based on the 10/20/30 size categories.

    Passenger space is a doubling. Start at 2 vp & 2 size for 1 person and double the passengers for every additional 2 slots & 2 vp. Luxury passenger space is 5 slots and 10 vp per passenger, no doubling here.

    Hidden compartment is actually an odd little add-on. You add it to any other component of the vehicle for 1 slot and 5 vp. That component is simply missing or looks like something else from external scans & inspections. Pretty nice way to run it though. You'll have to get on board to check for hidden bits.

    Step 3: Accessories. The book doesn't actually say step 3, it just keeps on going through all the various bits and never gets to another step. But these are definitely all add-ons.
    Afterburners, composite frame, ECM, ejector seats, environmental seals, "features" (misc. stuff not otherwise defined), jump jets, arms, orgone antenna, partial wing, reinforced frame, sensors, active camo, void shields, and weapon mounts. Generally what they say on the label. The orgone antenna allows you to cast spells on or out of the vehicle from inside, better versions add oomph to the spells. Partial wing offsets the momentum penalty to the maneuver stat. Camo is literally 'you can make stealth rolls pretty much anywhere'. Sensors are actually pretty powerful and long range, they autodetect stuff at 10km to 20km and give +5 to +10 for perception checks. Void shields flat out "nope" ranged weapons that have a penetration of less than the void shield rating or come form another vehicle that lacks a void shield of it's own. They come in 10, 15, and 20 versions and are pretty expensive. Weapon mounts are personnel for 1 slot & 5 vp, by weapon, and +5 vp for an omni mount that allows you to swap out weapons in a hour. Arms are 3 slots and 15 vp, they start at strength 6 and can go up to 10 for 1 slot & 5 vp per +1 strength.

    Control systems. The basic cockpit is 4 slots & 5 vp, basic equipment (air conditioning, radios, seat belts, etc.) is another 3 vp and hilarious when the player figures out that they have to manually roll down a window of their mecha and shout to talk to the rest of the team, copilots are 2 slots & 15 vp each, alternate cockpit control setups are another 1 slot and 10 vp but change the control skill from drive/pilot to any of arcana, acrobatics, athletics, animal ken (the controls are made out of tribbles?), performer (yes, DDR, interprative mime dance, or guitar hero is apparently a legit control method), or tech-use.

    There's a "mobile trace system" that lets you use sword school and gun kata moves with vehicle weapons. A 'Coffin' system for direct mind-to-machine control and variations there of. A remote control system is no slots and 5 vp, but they have to be added on to an existing control system, plus it's apparently a little clunky to use. There's a whole big 'build an AI to help or run it' chunk, where spending enough (a rather lot of) vp and slots can get you something better than a person piloting the vehicle. And the ever lovable 1 slot & 10 vp berserker system, when just everything needs to die at the hands of a murder-bot. Technically the berserker system only goes on when the pilot gets KOed... unless there isn't a pilot.

    Reactors, engine add-ons. Overcharged lets you trade 25% of the vehicle's full HP for instantly going to momentum 10. Super solenoid engines add to speed, maneuver, and acceleration when turned on. They also cause rolls on the warp crap tables, with +# on the roll for higher rated engines. XL engines go from level 1 at 2 slots & 10 vp to level 5 at 10 slots and 50 vp, but they add directly to the vehicles speed rating at all times.

    Modifications. Diver down is a no-cost upgrade that requires environmental seals but allows for underground or underwater travel. Living vehicles cost 4 slots and 5 vp but are technically alive and use the healing rules like PCs, possibly in addition to the repair rules. That's up to the DM. Open topped, no cost and you can shoot personal weapons out but people can shoot right in at you too. Variable drive is what lets you use multiple drivetrains, 2 slots and 10 vp per additional drive. The magnetic coupling option for 1 slot and 10 vp changes it from a half action to change drives down to a reaction to change drives. Macronized/miniaturized lets you alter components by doubling the cost for halving (round up) the slots, or halve the cost (round up) for doubling the slots. Somethings are really cost effective for that and somethings aren't, and you can crank it as far as you want in either direction (can't get lower than 1 on cost or slots though).

    Flaws let you reduce the overall cost of the vehicle by 10 vp each. External power (beamed, electrified rails, extension cord), feedback (on damage pilot(s) check athletics + constitution vs. DC 15 or take fatigue), fragile (75% final HP), hanger queen (more downtime between uses, minimum 8 hours), inefficent control (needs an extra half or reaction each time you do Maintain Control), junker (roll twice and take the worse on the crit chart), overheats (loses 1 HP for Push It or momentum > 6), unstable (2x momentum penalty to maneuver).

    Weapons... Ok, this is long enough. Weapons next time.

  18. - Top - End - #108
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Lizardfolk

    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    I just want to thank you for doing such a thorough breakdown of the game. It is nice to get a really in depth perspective.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Vibranium: If it was on the periodic table, its chemical symbol would be "Bs".

  19. - Top - End - #109
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    OrcBarbarianGuy

    Join Date
    Jan 2017

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Do you have tips on how to design fights? I've looked at running the system, but I have trouble working out what a reasonable challenge looks like for the the party as they start out (or even later).
    My one piece of homebrew: The Shaman. A Druid replacement with more powerlevel control.
    The bargain bin- malfunctioning, missing, and broken magic items.
    Spirit Barbarian: The Barbarian, with heavy elements from the Shaman. Complete up to level 17.
    The Priest: A cleric reword which ran out of steam. Still a fun prestige class suitable for E6.
    The Coward: Not every hero can fight.

  20. - Top - End - #110
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
    I just want to thank you for doing such a thorough breakdown of the game. It is nice to get a really in depth perspective.
    Thanks. It's always nice to know that I'm not just muttering to myself in here.

    Quote Originally Posted by aimlessPolymath View Post
    Do you have tips on how to design fights? I've looked at running the system, but I have trouble working out what a reasonable challenge looks like for the the party as they start out (or even later).
    Well lets see. The very first fight we ever did with the system was about 6 minion squads and a gang lord npc I cobbled together. I use a spreadsheet for easy column & row formatting of stuff, not sure how well it'll translate to here.
    Spoiler: First fight
    Show
    Started on a beach at about 200m with a surprise called shot to the head with a frag missile from hiding. Shooting & running. Ended with three PCs ganging up on the leader in melee and ending him with a chain axe head crit that threw the head 2d10 meters and covered everyone in blood. A few people had less than half HP but none of the PCs had any crits.

    Misc gangers, threat 2. → Def 10, atk (gangers)k2, damage 10 + (5/r)

    Gang Lord: All stats @ 3

    Acrobatics 3, Athletics 2, Ballistics 2,
    Common Lore 3, Deceive 2,
    Perception 3, Scrutiny 2, Weaponry 4
    Speed 6
    Size/Resilience 4/5
    Static Defense 23
    HP 6
    Armor 4 (all)
    Feats
    Blademaster – 1/r free reroll melee attk
    Blind Fighting, Defensive Mobility - +5 def v OppAtt
    Swift Attack – spend reaction to make extra melee attk
    Step Aside – 1/r free dodge
    Wall of Steel – 1/r free parry
    Attacks
    rocket, 4k2 x, pen 5, blast 6, 200m
    sword, 5k2 r + shock, +1k0 parry
    Shoot = 5k2
    Dodge = 6k3
    Gear
    Mesh Overcoat, silk suit. Missile launcher, 2 frag missiles. Officer's sword.
    Missile Launcher,200m, clip 1, Full reload, Rare
    Frag Missile, dmg 4k2 X, pen 5, UnCom, Blast (6m)
    Officer's Cutlass, 2k2 R, pen 0, Rare, Balanced +1k0 parry & Shocking con v 15 → 1r stun


    Remember, none of us has run this before except that I'd already written my dice roll calculator and found a dice roller app that would do the basic XkY rolls (I had to enter formulas for all the die combos I needed, that was annoying, I didn't put absolutely everything in, it wouldn't reroll 1s). So these were truly novice type characters, one guy took high dexterity using the D&D assumption that dexterity was a ranged attack stat.

    Second fight I was trying out the vehicle rules. They were on a boat, expecting to try for a fish about half the length of the boat. They got a fish slightly longer than the boat. Literally I grabbed a metal (hollow) fish sculpture about 20" long and worked out sizes & battle mat area from there.
    Spoiler: Second fight
    Show

    It went pretty well. One rook was pretty trashed another was half trashed, the PCs worked together to keep Ikky grappled, someone's machine gun jammed, one guy had a mecha that took a decent hit, Ikky almost broke three grapples in a single round with a stunt and made them all nervous, they eventually got enough fatigue from crits and tranq juice to KO it. Took about six rounds of combat. Ikky ran out of resource points during round 5.

    Tensquare – 185m x 185m raft
    HP 30, resilience 30, defense -55, acceleration 1, speed 3, naval drive 3, maneuver -5, size 30
    8 crew, 8 passengers, 4 weeks supplies, basic controls, radio, advanced sonar, quonset huts
    Open topped (huts are sheet metal, cover AP 6). 2 meter high 'rim' with a door every 20 meters
    Overheats → 1 HP damage per round at momentum > 6
    Inefficient controls → requires an additional ½ or reaction to control

    Shack & huts generally in the middle, shack can move on an embedded rail grid. One rook at each corner of the ship. Main shi

    The Shack – 13m x 8m x 8m mobile tower w/ fishing gear
    HP 18, resilience 15, defense -13, acceleration 2, speed 3, tracked drive 3, maneuver -8, size 15
    1 crew, 1 passenger (standing), 2km cable reel, line launcher, basic controls, local radio
    Magnetic couplers (stabilize & lock down), external power, unstable, 2 m^3 tranq tanks (12)
    Manipulator arm: strength 6, 7k2+10 damage, 0 penetration, length 20m
    Hook line & sinker: strength 6, 3k3 damage (once then grapple), 5 penetration, tranq injector

    Rooks – 10m x6m x6m fish wrangling towers
    HP 15, resilience 15, defense -30, immobile, basic controls
    1 crew, 1 passenger (standing), external power, remote control (Tensquare control room)
    Long manipulator arm: strength 6, 7k2+10 damage, 0 penetration, reach (60m)
    Harpoon gun: strength 4, 3k2 damage, penetration 5, range 100m, 3 round rewind (reaction start)
    Machine gun: 3k2 damage, 5 penetration, full-auto only x10, clip 10, range 150m, reload – full

    Ikky
    Str 7, might tail slap
    Dex 4, quick turns
    Con 6, indefatigable
    Cha 3
    Fel 1
    Cmp 2
    Int 1
    Wis 4, keen hearing
    Wil 5, fearless
    Brawl 4, bitey
    Stealth 4, from the depths
    Perception 2
    HP 38
    Resilience 13
    Defense -6, mental def. 15
    Size 20
    Speed 11, 22 swim
    Armor 5
    -10 all damage but magic & silver
    1 per round free dodge
    Resource 16, 4/round, Regain 1/wound by biting
    Fear 1 & again on all-out attacks
    No critical effects but death
    never outnumbered
    Dodge – roll Dex & ½ add to defense (reaction)
    Multiattack – spend reaction to tail & bite
    Tail slap 7k3 & unarmed
    Bite 8k4, pen 3
    All out attack → full round attk @ +2k0 but no reactions until next turn
    Bull rush → melee ½ action, opposed str & move 2m + 2m/raise
    Run → full action provokes 6x speed, ranged attacks v move @ -2k0, melee +2k0
    Grapple: ½ action Brawl to start grapple. Full action Brawl to maintain & take one option:
    * Attack w/ weapon: Roll dmg, unarmed or wpn as normal, not 2-handed
    * Throw Down: Prone grapplee
    * Push: As bull rush, pusher chooses to move or not
    * Stand: One or both parties
    * Ready: Ready own equip or may grab opponent item
    * Use Item: Use readied item
    As grapplee: ½ action grapple attempt then take one option:
    * Break Free: Opposed strength, on success may take another ½ action.
    * Slip Free: Dexterity v. 15 & on success take another ½ action.
    * Take Control: On success become grappler & take any grapple option.


    Then we tried spaceship combat, they did a boarding action that we ended up running. That was when I started using modified historic WWII battleship deckplans for spaceships. They were attacked by gnomish marine biologist space raiders. They killed most of the ship crew during the normal space combat so I needed to populate the ship with something. First combat was a in a large mess hall against a light recon tank and a bunch of zombie minion squads.
    Spoiler: Third fight
    Show

    The tank was open topped and had active camo. Amazingly the PCs all screwed their perception rolls so it got a surprise round. Soon 2 PCs jumped in (open topped) and blasted the crew. I think there were 4 zombie squads, one got a really high roll and did like 6 wounds to someone in heavy armor. But they really enjoyed mowing through three & four zombies per attack.

    gnome zombie squad
    Threat 3 Def 15 atk [5]k3 melee biting Dmg 15 R +1/raise

    TANK
    cost 148 very rare, wealth test 25
    Defense -10 + speed bonus Moves 15*momentum meters, may turn in place @ Mom 0
    .at Mom 1-5, 1x Speed subtract momentum from maneuver for tests
    .at Mom 6-9, 2x Speed 5m long open topped scouting tank, ignores merely difficult terrain
    .at Mom 10+, 3x Speed radar, thermo-vision, optical camo (you have to duck)
    HP: 7 Resilience: 10, Armor 10
    multilas 5k2+10, pen 5, single/auto 4, 120m, reliable
    machinegun 3k2, pen 5, auto 10, 120m, ammo 100
    Take 3 hp dmg to zoom to 10 momentum as ½ act
    It loses 1 HP every round in which its Momentum is above 6 or the driver uses the Push It action.


    About half way through the ship I dropped the swordmaster on them, he killed the lights and started stabbing away. As soon as he was wounded he switched to defensive fighting. I took them like 8 rounds to off a level 3 fight guy. No serious damage though, he spread attacks around for about 2 wounds to every PC.
    Spoiler: Swordmaster
    Show

    halfling swordmaster (L3 fight guy), Stats: phys 4, ment 3, soci 2
    Size 2, speed 8, BLINDFIGHTING, NEVER SURPRISED
    Def: 30 Ac:4, Resil: 4, Hp: 12, Melee 4 (+3), brawl 1, ballistics 2, athletics 3
    Counter attack: On success parry riposte @ -2k0, mesh armors 4, (not legs)
    Fight Defensive: -1k0 attack, +1k0 parry & dodge, fencing sword 2k2, +1k0 parry
    Wall of steel: 1 free parry / round , weapon focus: +2k0 attack w/ fencing, maneuver+6 pen
    Fight def = 8k4 melee, 5k2 dmg, 6 pen, 2/round parry @ 10k4 div2, add to def & riposte @ 6k4


    Then they finally faced the captain in his quarters. A gnome vampire necromancer, and few regular (non-minion) zombies, and the cyber-yeti bodyguard hopped up on combat drugs.
    Spoiler: I'm-a stop talking after this
    Show

    This finally ran pretty much everyone out of resource points and wounds. Left a ork in power armor and a warform werewolf in crit 4 territory with broken ribs & fatigue galore (they fought the bodyguard). The vamp burned resource to do 5 actions a round a couple times spell-move-aim-sword-grenade. They initially ignored the little guy with a silly big sword, by the end they seriously respected him. The zombies were barely speed bumps.

    Walking dead – stats: Str 3, else 2 or null, skills: Brawl 2, Perception 2
    Speed 5, resil 4, hp 4, atk 3k2 → 3k1 R, Undead & mindless

    cyber yeti (L2 thing), stats: str 6, dex 3, con 5, else 2
    Size 8, speed 9
    Def: 9, Ac: 9, Resil: 6, Hp: 12
    Arms +1k0 str tests, giz – fleet of foot, legs +2k0 jumps, full life support, +2k0 vs. blind/deaf/pain
    injector rig – ignore crit effects less than death, Flak armor 5, all, AC 10 vs blast/explode
    Powerfist – 8k5, 10k4 impact, pen 4, power field (on parry 4+ to break opp, not v natural, artifact, pow)
    If all-out-atk (full rnd, +2k0, no reactions) wounds, repeat attack once.

    gnome vampire necromancer, stats: phys 2, ment 4, soci 3
    Size 3, speed 4, CANNOT DIE UNLESS X, E, SILVER, MAGIC DMG. SEE IN DARK
    blood power 3, resource vitae: 15 (3/round), 1 resource = 1 more ½ action
    Def: 18, Ac:9, Resil: 4, Hp:12/15, NO STUN, NO BLEED
    +5 to test result for spell effect & resist 1/scene reroll any necro spell & reroll any fail Drain Touch
    Forsee: reaction TN 15, 6k4 as 'parry', Animate dead: full act TN 25, 8k4 => walking dead
    Command: ½ act TN 15, 5k4 vs Arcana+Will save, one word → force next round action
    Drain Touch (may reroll): ½ act TN 20, 8k4 & touch (brawl 5k2) dmg 2k2 magic & get vitae = wounds
    Torment: ½ act TN 25, 8k4 vs Arcana+Con save or lose ½ remain hp, range 10m (caster too, 8k4+5)
    Defenestrate: full act TN 20, 6k4 & targ w/in 5m of wall, thrown, vict & wall 4k2 impact, AP < 15 break
    False Life: ½ act TN 15, 8k4 → 1 temp HP + 1 per 2 raise (25,35,45…)
    Bite: 5k2, 3k1 R, 0 pen, regain 1 vitae, Grand Diaklaive: 5k2, 6k3 R, 2 pen, no parrying
    Best quality plate armor – AC9, max Dex 3, all, 2x krak grenades, 4k2, 4k3 X, pen 10, 6m rng


    Four or five first level PCs handled all of that. Not all in one day, but about over a week and a half covering 2 sessions. They had no magic healing at that point and were 3 paragons, a werewolf, atlantean (only showed up for the first two fights before flaking out), and a chosen (weird build, shield, mace, light armor, low dexterity & strength, healing 1 (boon), no ranged skill, I think it may have supposed to be a D&D style cleric? rerolled after these fights into a gnome vamp necro character).

    By the time people were late-high 3rd level I was comfortable throwing 32 monodrones, 8 duodrones, and 2 tridrones at them and considering it a middle-low difficulty fight. A chaos marine and eight combat servitors were a decent middle-to-upper-middle difficulty fight at second level. At 2nd level they also faced a mind flayer, aboleth, and 16 green soldiers fighting on catwalks above huge algae vats with pipes all over the place (the aboleth escaped with wounds). I threw about 40d12 worth of gibbering threat & damage 4 minions at them once, that was a fairly threatening fight. A greater daemon with conjuration 3 or 4 (mostly blink, teleport & jaunt) and the level 4 daemonhost abilities added was a very serious threat to two PCs (a couple people missed game that day) with both sides retreating badly wounded.

  21. - Top - End - #111
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Vehicle weapons, they're typed like the main weapon tables in the first book (ordinary, las, syrneth, bolter, etc.) so we'll start at the top with the ordinary ones. Autocannons, big gunz! They're, um, vehicle size guns. AC2, AC5, AC10, AC15, AC20, just like BattleTech. From 2 slots & 10 vp up to 8 slots & 25 vp, damage from 3k1+10 to 6k4+10, all penetration 5, ranges drop from 250m base for the AC5 to 50m base for the AC20.

    Something to note is that ammo for vehicle weapons is never discussed anywhere. So kinda, sorta, you assume that they have infinite ammo? But that gets weird as some guns and missiles have optional ammo types and that for 50vp you can mount the biggest missile launcher in a civilian truck like a Ford F-150 or something. Another note is that while all the vehicle weapons have the same categories as the regular weapons, the proficiencies to use them are never addressed. I presume that the proficiencies carry over and that jams happen for vehicle weapons like they happen for personal weapons. There is also no option for higher or lower quality vehicle weapons like there is with personal weapons.

    Back to the autocannons, you can pay another slot or two and a few more vp for special ammo. LBX halves the range and gives you the scatter weapon quality (at point blank 2 raises to hit adds +1k0 damage & double armor at long+ range, terrible). HV doubles the base range. Ultra ammo changes the guns from single shot to -/2, like double barreled, which means they always fire full-auto at +2k1 to hit and can get +1k0 damage if they hit by a raise. Considering how lackluster and expensive the autocannon stuff is you could let all the ammo boosts stack and it still wouldn't be all that good.

    Gattling cannons are sort of like SMG versions of hte sutocannons. Light & heacy, 3k2+10 & 4k3+10 damage, no penetration, RoF -/10 & -/8, range 100m & 80m, cost about like AC5s and AC10s.

    Railguns are where it's at for the ordinary weapons though. Light, heavy, HAG. Light & heavy are 4k3+10 & 5k4+10 damage, 10 penetration, base range 500m & 300m, single shots, 5 slots & 20 vp or 10 slots & 30 vp. A bit expensive but the light is reliable and accurate while the heavy is just accurate, that's an extra +1k0 when aiming and +1k1 damage for every 2 raises on the hit. A good aimed shot will hammer a low static defense vehicle. The HAG has most of the stats of the light railgun, the cost of the heavy rail gun, and only a 50m base range. It trades accurate for scatter and I just can't justify using it in any way.

    Under las weapons there's the multilas, blazer, and bombast. Multilas is 5k2+10 damage, penetration 5, RoF S/4, base range 120m, reliable, 2 slots and 5 vp. The budget conscious energy gun. The blazer is the multilas with +1k0 damage, single shot only, 100m base range, and doubles the cost. In exchange it gets the twin linked quality, one of the new weapon qualities from the end section of this book. Twin linked is +1k0 to hit for single shost and +2k0 damage if you get two raises on the hit roll. Not horrid but I question the doubles cost since the multilas can autofire for +2k1 to hit and get a maximum of 9k2+10 damage compared to 7k2+10. The bombast is the blazer with a few changes, 4k3+10 damage, costs 5 slots and 12 vp, and loses the twin linked property. Dig into the details to find that it has two firing modes, standard as listed and a sort of overcharged mode that adds the recharge property (fire every other round) in exchange for upping the damage to 6k4+10.

    Compare an AC20 with ultra ammo for the same damage & range for 9 slots & 30 vp against two bombasts for 10 slots & 24 vp. You can mini one of the bombasts to get to 8 slots & 36 vp. Miniaturize everything to drop the AC20 to 5 slots & 55 vp, the 2x bombasts to 6 slots & 48 vp. Having 2 bombasts means a single critical hit can't take out what's probably your biggest gun on the vehicle.

    One plasma weapon, the plasma destroyer. 5k4+10, penetration 15, single shot, 120m, 5 slots & 20 vp, recharge & overheats. Tempting buy you aren't taking it (wait until the exotics). Remember overheats means you take the weapon damage if you roll a 9 on your damage dice, and mounted weapons can't be free action dropped.

    One melta weapon, multi-melta. Like the plasma destroyer but one less kept damage die, 50m range, 5 vp cheaper, no properties. 40% range, -4 damage (37 -> 33), cheaper, shoots every round, won't wreck the vehicle.

    Two bolt weapons, vulcan mega bolter and hurricane bolter. VMB is 6k2+10, penetration 10, -/6 rof, 150m, 5 slots, 15 vp, tearing. Hurricane is 4k1+10, penetration 5, -/10 rof, 100m, slots 6, 12 vp, tearing & storm (another new one, get +2k0 per hit raise). So the VMB throws a max of 10k3+10 on a def+30 hit, and the hurricane throws (24 -> 14/2=7 ->) 10k8+10 on a def+50 hit (a def+30 hit is 10k4+10). The hurricane is better if you can tag +25 over static defense (the -5 pen keeps the break point above +20 over unless you shot very light armor).

    Well that's half the list. Do the rest next time.

  22. - Top - End - #112
    Troll in the Playground
    Join Date
    Mar 2015

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Druid's oath: Loose enough not to annoy players and it gives a bonus for acting in a certain way, not a penalty for acting another way. Well designed. Plus wraithbone power armor isn't metal.
    That last sentence. That feels like it encompasses so much of the feel of this system.

  23. - Top - End - #113
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Holy criminy! I skipped a section. Had it all written up and missed posting it. I'm amazed nobody noticed. Shame on you guys!

    ************************************************** ******

    How do you control this thing?!?! More vehicle stuff.

    The standard thing to do is the half action Maintain Control. Choose one of: accelerate or decelerate by the vehicle acceleration rating, minimum 0, maximum 10, ground vehicles and mecha can go backwards at half speed. Turn 90 degrees if your maneuver is a 0 or higher (momentum is a penalty to maneuver). If you don't do a maintain control and the vehicle isn't at a dead stop you roll on the out of control table. Maintaining control doesn't require a control test, so the untrained don't have to worry too much about their normal drive to work every day. I presume that drugs and alcohol force checks.

    Out of control: 1-4 continue in a straight line. 5-7 swerve randomly (hmm, should aircraft swerve down sometimes?). 8-9 swerve plus change momentum, randomly determine +/- and adjust momentum by the acceleration rating. 10 turn over, also "find a way to submit to the harsh mistress of gravity" for those who are airborne, lose HP equal to momentum, flip over, and momentum is reduced to zero.

    Crashing is the same as rolling a 10 on the out of control chart.

    The Punch It action is pushing the vehicle to do something extra, it's a half action. Choose from: 1) Speed up, DC 5+(2x momentum), you increase the momentum by 1, if that takes you over 10 the extra is lost at the end of your turn. 2) Turning, this allows you to use the maintain control action to speed up or slow down and still turn at the same time. Uses the same DC but modified by the maneuver rating, which in turn is modified by the momentum. So, DC 5+(2x momentum) + maneuver - momentum. Any way, do a 90 degree turn. I suppose that means you can u-turn or bootlegger reverse by using maintain control to turn and punch it to turn again.

    Fire Mounted Weapon, half action. You shoot, or use a vehicle melee weapon if you happen to have one. You use the usual rolls but feats and miscellaneous bonuses (presumably class completion stuff mostly) don't apply. You can fire a mounted weapon on full-auto as a half action but then you can't do evasive maneuvers until next turn.

    Evasive maneuvers, reaction. Works pretty much like normal dodging. Momentum must be at least 1 (stationary buses don't get to dodge) and you lose a momentum at the end. Standard control test roll+maneuver-momentum, apply half of the result to the vehicle's static defense.

    Ramming... It's a free action. Ok. When a vehicle hits something they both take XkY damage. X is half size (max 10) and Y is 1/3 momentum. So by the book we're looking at a 125 meter scramjet shuttle with an oversize engine screaming along at escape velocity (it has to hit something like momentum 13 or 15 or something, on top of the speed rating) doing 10k4 damage. Then, assuming everything is still working and the pilot is still conscious, roll drive/pilot plus your choice of constitution or composure against a DC equal to the damage roll. Success is -2 momentum, failure is -2 momentum and an out of control roll, not even getting to roll is just an out of control roll. Weak. Pathetic. Sad. I have some house rules written down somewhere, I'll dig them up later.

    Difficult terrain, go half speed. If... if the current acceleration is more than 5 make a control test? Ok, I think that's supposed to be momentum. If current momentum is more than 5 make the usual control text at DC normal, or 5+(2x momentum). Failure goes out of control. Really difficult terrain might have a lower momentum threshold to start rolling or a higher DC.

    Impossible terrain, go in and you crash.

    Flying, if a flying vehicle loses HP or goes out of control it starts to fall. By round it falls 10m, 20m, 50m, 100m, and 100m is apparently terminal velocity as far as we care. If you hit something like the ground treat it as a ramming attack at 10x momentum. Pulling out of the fall is a maintain control action and a DC 15 control check.

    Optional extra chase and dogfighting rules. For when the vehicles are roughly evenly matched.... Ok, it's a 'Chase' maneuver, takes a half action. Replaces the usual maintain control action, has the same effects plus... you can try a trick. Choose your DC and roll a standard control check, the opponents get rolls to counter it as the same DC, anyone who fails goes out of control. Ok, that's interesting, set your own DCs is a good way to try to get PCs to stunt with this because stunting gets you extra dice. Lets see the tricks.
    Drift, move any direction without changing facing.
    Handbrake turn, at the end of your turn end up facing any direction that you want.
    Vault the curb, ignore impossible terrain for one round.
    Slip by, move through occupied spaces without hitting anything for the rest of the turn.
    Barrel roll, +5 static defense until the start of your next turn.
    Puchilev's cobra (wha?), immediately lose up to 5 momentum and areospace vehicles don't stall from this if they go below minimum flight speed (apparently scramjets will still stall out on this).

    Oh, Puchilev's cobra is a real maneuver. Interesting, there are youtube videos of it. Well that's a nice set of moves and it still leaves you a half action to blast someone. I think I'd let people try these any time but with a static DC maybe? 10+(3x momentum)? Perhaps add a 'not in a chase' option to the tricks with varying DCs and possibly varying results based on raises/checks.

    Vehicles on their backs, flipping them upright is a straight strength check against DC 2x size, multiple people may want to combine strengths to do it. Flipped over flying vehicles take a half action control check against DC of the vehicle's size, unless they're already on the ground.

    Untrained piloting and driving, covered that earlier. Use the worse of dexterity or intelligence and maintain control is a full action.

    Taking damage. Well we get a contradiction. This says that if a vehicle takes a single point of damage its a glancing blow that doesn't roll on the crit chart. Earlier it said any damage. Two or more points of damage is a penetrating blow and rolls on the crit chart. Nothing about adding to the roll for more damage. I think maybe we should go with this version, just because the crit chart tops out at 10 and tearing weapons are a thing.

    Repairing damage. Takes 1 person hours equal to vehicle size to repair one HP. Doubling the people reduces the vehicle size for this by 1, to a minimum of half size. Or 1 HP repaired in size hours by one person and -1 hour per doubling of the repair crew to a minimum of half the time. Damaged weapons and systems are counted as 1 HP per 'slot'. Vehicles have slots equal to size, so each system basically has a 'size' equal to it's slots. Nothing about needing any particular skills or tools to do repairs. I guess you'll just have to try for common sense or ask a mechanic (I ask, one of my group is an auto mechanic, makes it easy).

    The vehicle crit chart.
    1 - ruined the paint job.
    2 - reduce momentum by 1.
    3 - pilot shaken, only a half action next turn. Bad if you're untrained.
    4 - roll on the out of control table.
    5 - drive hit, lose 3 current momentum and maximum momentum is reduced by 1 until repairs are made.
    6 - pilot hit, lose 1k1 HP. Ouch, that's not 1d10, it's 1k1.
    7 - a random system (but not the control system) is wrecked and useless until repaired.
    8 - crash.
    9 - cockpit hit, lose environmental seals & pilot loses 3k1 HP.
    10 - roll twice, rerolling 10s.

    So far it's feeling like it needs another editing pass and maybe some playtesting. I'd put in a few notes about higher and lower gravity, maybe atmosphere density too, for the flying bits. Definitely need better ramming rules, they don't even consider people trying to dodge or stunt stop the vehicle (PCs can temporarily get to size 8+ and have power fists). Plus there's a question of precisely when things move, it did actually come up when we were playing and really trying out the vehicle rules for the first time. On the pilot's initiative I presume, but three or four words to clarify would be nice because it matters if it's beginning/middle/end of turn and/or on particular maneuvers. There's also the issue that control tests/checks sort of say that +maneuver-momentum is baked into the check, but then there's this inconsistent wording applying maneuver as a bonus sometimes but not always.

    Next is the vehicle building rules. But I'll throw in two of the example vehicles first.

    Basic ground vehicle: Acceleration 2, speed 5, size 8, maneuver 0, wheeled drive, cockpit, 1 passenger, 2 cubic meters of cargo, basic amenities, cost 50.

    Translation: Size 8 (4m long), HP 8, resilience 8, static defense per momentum level 0(-6)/0(-1)/4/9, uncommon wealth check to buy, wheels are x5 so goes 25m per momentum each round, has stuff like air conditioning radio seat belts power windows.

    Scorpion tank: acceleration 2, speed 5, size 12, maneuver -7, tracked drive, cockpit, copilot, medium hardened armor, ac/5, personnel weapon mount, flaw: overheating, cost 100.

    Translation: Size 12 (9m long), HP 16, armor 10, resilience 12, static defense per momentum level 0(-31)/0(-26)/0(-21)/0(-16), rare wealth check to buy (it's a really light tank), pilot and copilot can both make any rolls, tracks are x3 (plus ignore the speed reduction of difficult terrain and can turn in place at momentum 0 and +4 HP) so goes 15m per momentum per round, overheating: takes 1 HP damage every turn it goes over momentum 6 or the driver uses a Push It maneuver, totally lacks stuff like air conditioning radios seat belts power windows. Mounts one personal weapon with no restrictions so an MP las cannon, a bola, one grenade, or a power fist are all OK. You may ROFL now. Also the ac/5 stats as: damage 3k1+10, penetration 5, single shot, 250m base range, size 2, cost 10. I don't think any space or cost was reserved for any special autocannon ammo so that's the basic slug. I will note that 3k1 comes out to a 27% change of 10+ on the chart I have (every time I've checked the roller I made it matches the chart to within less than 1%).

  24. - Top - End - #114
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Ok, back on course now.

    Two syrneth weapons. The wave motion cannon, noted in the description that it's one of the only vehicle weapons that can damage a starship. 6k3+30, 20 penetration, single shot, 500m base range, 10 slots & 30 vp, has the recharge property. Then the D-cannon, 4k2+10, penetration 20, RoF S/3, range 40m, 3 slots & 20 vp, nothing else. So, that "basic ground vehicle" back there? Ditch the 4x 0.5 cu.m. of cargo space and the passenger, add a single flaw, and you can cram in a micronized wave motion gun with the hidden compartment option on it. That kicks the vp cost from 50 to (50-6-10+5+60=99) 99 and just moves us into the rare wealth test. From some scanning of the DtD40k7e dedicated forum (there is one, rule 34b: ", and a forum too") "BFG on a cart" is a known issue with these rules.

    Exotic weapons are the PPC and mega particle cannon. PPC is 6k3+10, 10 penetration, single shot, 200m range, 4 slots & 15 vp, and carries the shocking property. An efficient heavy hitter, compares as flat out better than the AC/10 (slightly better damage, penetration, range, ans slots) although I have no idea how you'd apply shocking to a vehicle. The MPC is 6k2+30, penetration 20, single shot, 250m range, 8 slots & 20 vp, has the recharge property. It's a budget wave motion cannon.

    The only flame weapon is the inferno cannon, 6k2+10, no penetration, single ****, 40m range, 2 slots & 5 vp, flame property. So it autohits a 40m long, 30 degree wide cone, with a dexterity save to dodge based on the shooter's dexterity. Again, I'm not quite sure how well this translates from the personal scale weapons to the vehicle weapons because of the dexterity save and catching fire.

    Primitive weapons get a call out here too, ballista and catapult. Stick them on your Mad Max post-apoc planet or, as I did, on the bus sized zombie insects used as troop transports on Athas. Catapult, then ballista: 4k2+10 & 3k2+10, no penetration, single shots, 50m & 100m, slots 5 & vp 5 for both, no specials. Yeah, there's no 'indirect' or anything on the catapult and it's short range plus fast reload is a bit puzzling.

    Missile launchers, three types from BattleTech, special ammo for each. Again no indication of how to handle ammo concerns. In addition we've got the "homing" weapon special property that isn't covered anywhere, one of the more problematic errors in the book. LRM, long range missiles, can't be shot at targets in the short (half base) range. 3k2+10, 5 penetration, RoF -/5 (full auto fire only), 500m range, 3 slots & 10 vp, homing (undefined). Two special ammos for a slot & 5 vp each, inferno adds "burning" (not an actual weapon property) and swarm changes them to a single shot blast[5] attack that will hit a 10m diameter area. SRMs do 4k2+10, penetration 5, RoF -/5, 100m range, 2 slots & 5 vp, homing again. The two special ammos for this one are inferno (again, same) and tandem charge warheads that "have all their Glancing Blows upgraded to Penetrating hits", meaning that all hits causing wounds call for rolls on the vehicle critical charts. The Arrow IV launcher is rocket artillery, and called out ad the only missile system that can even threaten to damage a starship at all. 6k1+30 (most of the spread is concentrated in the 39-46 damage range), penetration 10, single shot, 500m range, 10 slots & 25 vp,no specials. Two ammo types for it are cluster (blast 15m radius) and homing (still lacking any data) for 2 slots & 10 vp each.

    Yeah, the missile systems raise questions about how the ammo thing is supposed to work.

    Vehicle close quarter combat weapons are defined a 1k2+10, no penetration, no range, 2 slots & 10 vp. Then down in the descriptions you get the spread of options that make them interesting. No, ah, requirement for the vehicle having arms is mentioned and nothing about what the vehicle strength should be if there aren't arms. Basically ramming prows and such are distinctly "I dunno". Categories: ordinary is +1k1 damage, parrying is +5 penetration (wut?), cavalry gets reach (distance unknown), flail gets flexible, fencing gets balanced, two handed gets +0k2 damage and unweildly (no using it to parry), syrneth is +2k0 damage, chain gets tearing, a shield gets defensive (issue with the +2 armor to the limb), and unarmed gets +1k0 damage plus 2 penetration.

    So obviously the melee combat system for vehicles is supposed to mirror personal scale melee, and it should work fairly well although there are some questions involved about things like parrying mecha weapons with a knife. Most of the other weapons are OK, they just mostly want another editing pass any perhaps some balancing or play-testing. The ammo questions and missing weapon properties are an issue as well. There's also a question of if static defense should go negative or not. It makes a difference when full auto and accurate weapons. This is definitely a beta-test system.

    Here's the rest of the sample vehicles from the books.

    Spoiler
    Show
    Bio-Titan: Accel 3, Speed 9, Size 24, Maneuver 0
    Walker Drive, Ejector Seat, Environmental Seals, Manipulator Arms, Void Shield 10, Cockpit, Coffin, Remote Uplink System, Berserker System, S2 Engine 1, Living Vehicle, Vehicle CQC Weapon (Parrying) [Omni Mount], L. Punisher Gatling Cannon [Omni Mount], Light Hardened Armor, Composite Frame, Basic Equipment, Flawed: External Power, Feedback, Hangar Queen, Total: 350.

    I have no idea how that thing is supposed to work. External power supply, if it's beamed then it has to maintain LoS to the generator at all times, it has 1d10 half actions available for as long as it's cut off. It's worse if it uses a cable power supply. Composite frame reduces HP by 3 in exchange for +3 maneuver, OK but the light hardened armor is only 5 points and the void shield only stops ranged attacks with a penetration of 9 or less. With a static defense of 0-48+0=0 at best... Say someone shoots at 6k3 with a vulcan mega bolter... well penetration 10 so it ignores all the defenses, we can assume about 6 raises for 10k3+10 damage or roughly a 24% chance of 2 wounds per attack. A railgun is normally about 5 raises, 40% chance of 60+ raises, has about a 33% chance of 2 wounds. Almost the entirety of it's "defense" is the resilience based on size.

    Air Superiority Jet: Size 17, Accel 3, Speed 11, Maneuver +5
    Aerospace Drive, Cockpit, Copilot, Afterburners, Partial Wing 4, Sensor System, LRM [Omni Mount], Environmental Seals, Composite Frame, Flawed: Hangar Queen, Total: 200. Straight up fighter jet. Replace the LRM & omni point with the same and cost size D-Cannon and you can work through that bio-titan. Static defense though, you'll only have 5 @ momentum 6-9 and 16 at momentum 10. Naturally you're hoping it sticks around in range to be shot at, momentum 10 puts it at 1100m moved every round and the pilot dodges at a grand total of -1 to the roll. For an additional 30 vp you could stick a micronized railgun on it and off the bio-titan from beyond it's retaliation range. It only has 9 HP though.

    Variable Man-Machine: Size 17, Accel 3, Speed 11, Maneuver +5
    Aerospace Drive, Cockpit, Variable (walker) [Magnetic Couplers], Manipulator Arms, Sensor System, SRM, Environmental Seals, L. Punisher Gatling Cannon [Omni Mount], Flawed: Hangar Queen, TOTAL: 200. Veritech fighter. Unfortunately it has slightly worse maneuverability at high speeds, no copilot, and the same static defense & HP as the jet fighter.

    And a few vehicles I worked up.

    Spoiler
    Show
    Car, Uncommon
    Accel 2, Speed 5, Size 8, Maneuver 0, Moves 25 x momentum meters per round
    Wheeled Drive, Defense -6, -1, 4, 9
    Cockpit, Passenger Space x1, Cargo Space x2, Driver & passenger + 1 cu.m
    Basic Equipment, radio, AC, heat, cup holders, power windows, lights
    Total Cost: 50

    Truck, Uncommon
    Accel 2, Speed 4, Size 10, Maneuver -2, Moves 20 x momentum meters per round
    Wheeled Drive, Defense -12, -8, -4, -0
    Cockpit, Passenger Space x1, Cargo Space x4, Driver & passenger + 4 cu.m
    Basic Equipment, radio, AC, heat, cup holders, power windows, lights
    Total Cost: 52

    Van, Uncommon
    Accel 1, Speed 3, Size 12, Maneuver -2, Moves 15 x momentum meters per round
    Wheeled Drive$$Defense -16, -13, -10, -7
    Cockpit, Passenger Space x3, Cargo Space x2, Driver + 2 cu.m. + 4 passengers
    Basic Equipment$$radio, AC, heat, cup holders, power windows, lights
    Total Cost: 64

    Cargo Truck, Uncommon
    Accel 1, Speed 3, size 14, maneuver -4, Moves 15 x momentum meters per round
    Wheeled Drive, Defense -22, -19, -16, -13
    Cockpit, Passenger Space x1, Cargo Space x6, Driver & passenger + 16 cu.m
    Basic Equipment, radio, AC, heat, cup holders, power windows, lights
    Total Cost: 64

    Motorcycle, Common
    Accel 3, speed 5, size 5, maneuver 2 Moves 25 x momentum meters per round
    Wheeled Drive, Defense 2, 7, 13, 18
    Cockpit, Cargo Space x1, Driver + 0.5 cu.m
    Open Topped, Fragile, Unstable, 4 HP, x2 momentum penalty
    Total Cost: 33

    Giant Bug Busses
    Accel 2 (5), spd 4 (8), man 0 (50), walker (impass → diff & ½ act stand up), armor 10 (4&20), alt control necro spell
    (1&10), beserker sys (1&10, 6k3), open top living (4&5), 2x ballista (10&10, 100m, 3k2+10), 8x people (8 & 8, 128)
    Sz 28 (140) –
    Sz 28 (30m long), hp 28 , resil 28, armor 10, def -46, 8m*momentum, carry 128 people, 2 ballista, pilot by necromancy
    beserker sys = 6k3 & 2 ½ act, ballista = 100m range, single shot, full reload, 3k2+10 dmg, pen -
    Last edited by Telok; 2020-08-24 at 10:27 AM.

  25. - Top - End - #115
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    RangerGuy

    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Location
    Craig, Co
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    The bio-titan is riff on Neon Genesis Evagelion which is an anime I enjoyed watching, but cannot actually recommend to people. Although, they seem to have missed the mark on recreating them. Which is kind of a bad thing when you use it as one of your examples.
    Spoiler
    Show


    Warforged Upgrades
    Blade Lord Vestige
    Soulforged PrC
    Transformers RPG Now Updated as PDFs on Google Drive.

  26. - Top - End - #116
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by lightningcat View Post
    The bio-titan is riff on Neon Genesis Evagelion which is an anime I enjoyed watching, but cannot actually recommend to people. Although, they seem to have missed the mark on recreating them. Which is kind of a bad thing when you use it as one of your examples.
    Ah, no wonder I didn't recognize it. I think I saw about 2 episodes over a decade ago and there wasn't much screen time for the evas in them. That wiki is a nuisance to use on a phone.

    For a beta system that wants to encompass that, battletech, and several other systems it isn't bad. I'll try to dig up my at-at & at-st builds, those came out pretty well. As did some static gun emplacements, jet packs, and robots. It may be the author just didn't build the vehicle very well.

    There are definite issues with "gun on a cart", ammo, some balancing (cargo space cost, autocannons as trash), and strength /melee without arms. You can try building the thing yourself, see how close you can get.

  27. - Top - End - #117
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Right, so, the starship/spelljammer section starts with building a ship. I'm going to skip ahead to the actual play rules first and then come back to the ship building.

    Ship combat.
    "It's inevitable that at some point, two ships are going to start shooting at one another. What's the point of having a battleship if you can't liberate a few planets of their wealth?"

    Rounds in space. Time taken is fungible. Ten minutes? A few seconds? Depends on what's happening and how far apart everything is. Apparently you're not supposed to sweat it.

    Distance is in void units (VU), another fungible. I think the default is something like a million kilometers or some such. It'll come up somewhere.

    Overview.
    Surprise. Those surprised lose their first round turns.
    Initiative. Sensors + Acceleration + 1d10, no personal scale modifiers used.
    Taking turns. Go on your turn, take a maneuver action and any other actions that you want to.
    Round ends. Rinse and repeat.

    Actions.
    You're required each turn to take a maneuver action, something about inertia. This is assuming that you're already moving and that emergency lithobraking hasn't occurred. After that you can take tactical (shooty), engineering (repairing/boosting), arcana (scanning/jamming), and command (yelling at your crew) actions.

    When you're rolling you roll [crew assigned] keep {crew quality], splitting your crew between actions. Crew quality 2 is average, 1 is the gutter sweepings and misc. refugees you recruited because you can't actually pay real wages, really legendary ships might have a 5.

    If you have bridge officers (PCs) they can use their skill in place of the crew quality for a test. you still need to actually assign crew.

    Maneuver actions: Using the pilot skill to replace crew quality if there's an officer (PC).
    Move - half or full speed with up to a 90 degree turn at the end. Does not normally require a test.
    Adjust speed - (assigned)k(quality) + acceleration vs. DC 20 to go half or full speed +/- 1+1/raise.
    Adjust heading - (assigned)k(quality) vs DC 15 or 25 to go half or full speed and turn either before (15) or before and after (25) moving.
    Evasive maneuvers - You'll do this one a lot. Normal DC to hit a ship is crew quality * 3 + maneuver. With this roll (assigned)k(quality) and make a half move, the DC to hit you is not that roll + maneuver.

    Tactical actions: Often using the ballistics skill for officers.
    Shoot - (assigned)k(quality) +/- any gun/torpedo modifiers vs. the DC of the target.
    Boarding party - If your ship is within 1 VU you can launch a boarding party (or 3 VU is you have the assault shuttles upgrade, or 5 VU if you have a teleportarium and their shields are down). Roll (assigned)k(quality) using a melee skill for the officer, if any, against the opposing (quality)k(quality). If the attacker wins the defender loses 2 crew +1/raise. If the defender wins the attacker loses half the crew they sent over.
    Target subsystem - if you've scanned the target you can shoot any specific console/upgrade that you've identified on them. Shoot them at -1k0 to hit and the upgrade/console is disabled until it's repaired at a DC equal to the damage you did. Ah, that means that you're going to have to down their shields first... I think.
    Ramming - If you're within 1 VU and facing the other ship you can make a pilot test... possibly using the tactical officer's piloting? the assigned piloting crew or tactical crew?... (assigned)k(quality) + maneuverability vs. their defense. Damage is based on ship size, escorts do 1k1, destroyers do 2k1, cruisers do 2k2, battleships do 3k3, plus half your speed. This ignores shields and your ship also takes half the rolled damage. Then everyone has to roll on the ship critical damage chart. An example combat involving a ramming action would help.

    Engineering actions: Mostly tech-use.
    Boost weapons - Next turn your shields don't regenerate and you can only do a half move. Roll (assigned)k(quality) vs DC 15 and do +1k0 plus +1k0 per +10 over the DC in damage for all weapons on their next attack. huh, I hadn't noticed that before. It's the weapons next attack, not on the next round.
    Boost shields - Next turn you can only do a half move and your weapons do -1k0 damage. roll (assigned)k(quality) vs. DC 15 and immediately regenerate the shields plus another 1d10 points per +10 over the DC that you get.
    Boost engines - Next turn you shields don't regenerate and your weapons all do -1k0 damage. Do the usual roll vs. 15 and n your next maneuver action (next turn since that's apparently the first thing you do) you get an extra half move of distance plus another +1 per +10 over the DC.
    Boost sensors - next turn your shields don't regenerate, your weapons do -1k0 damage, and you can only do a half move. Usual roll, usual DC, +1k0 to the next arcana check and another +1k0 per +10 over the DC.
    Emergency repair - Usual roll and usual DC unless something else specifies a DC (individual consoles to repair, etc.). Success gets you 1k1 hull points back, +1k0 more per +10 over the DC. Cannot repair more than half the damage done since the ship's previous turn. Do this last if you ram somebody, that way the ramming damage is 'since the previous turn'.

    Command actions: Doesn't use assigned crew or crew quality, usually charisma + command skill from the captain alone. This would mean that your personal boosts and feats will work with it.
    Brace for impact - Roll vs. DC 30-(5*crew quality) to reduce crew losses from critical damage by 1 (minimum 0) for the next round.
    Hail - initiate social combat with the opposing captain/commander. If they're listening and want to talk to or taunt you.
    Picard speech - Roll vs. DC 20 and your crew quality goes up by 1 for the rest of the round. Do this at the beginning of your turn.
    Micromanage - As long as you have at least 1 dot in the relevant skill for a roll you can add +1k0 to that roll. You do this once, one roll, so no taking one dot in 4 skills and adding to everyone's rolls.

    Arcana actions - Usually arcana skill.
    Active augury - (assigned)k(quality) vs. DC 10. Gets you one info bit plus another per raise on the roll. Target hull, crew, shield, console, or weapon.
    Jam comms - Roll and until your next turn everyone has to beat your jamming roll to send messages.
    Triage - (assigned)k(quality) and you use medicae for this, not arcana, if you want to sub in the officer skill. Against DC 15 and restore 1 lost crew + 1/raise up to half of what you lost since your last turn. This includes losses from boarding actions.

    A ship with a fighter bay can launch fighters! Great! There's nothing else anywhere about fighter bays! Yay! Missing rules! Needs more editing! When do I run out of exclamation marks! Never!

    Ok, ok. Fighters run as minions. Sort of. Assign some crew. If anyone want's the be the bridge officer for them the relevant skill is piloting. Each round use attack mode or support mode. In attack mode they work like a weapon. Roll (assigned)k(quality) to hit and (crew quality)k(half crew quality and round up) for damage, range is 2*crew quality, they don't have any other modifiers. In support mode they ward off boarding actions. Impose a -(quality)k0 penalty to any boarding actions. Also in support mode, once each round, you can have 1 crew worth of fighters takes a hit for the ship. That kills off the crew, but apparently you may have no issues with running out of fighter ships. If someone wants to shoot at the fighters they have a static defense of (3*crew quality) +10, and probably use the standard minion rules for taking damage.

    Right, fighter rules are definitely unfinished test material.

    Shooting & damage.
    There are three weapon types, lance, torpedo, and arrays. Lance weapons you have to fire individually and assign crew to them individually. Same with torpedoes. Arrays you can link together, as long as a target is within range and firing arc. All the guns in the array use one set of assigned crew and one attack roll. They all hit or miss on that one roll, but they do damage separately. So assign some crew to your lance weapons, some more crew to your torpedo shots, and a bunch to the array weapons that are all firing at one target. If you want to split the arrays and shoot at two targets you have to treat them as different shots/weapons, assigning different crew to each one.

    Ships are usually 3*crew quality to hit. So 3, 6, 9, 12, or 15. The Picard speech thingy only applies to rolls, not to this sort of thing. Generally unless you only assigned 2 crew or the opponent is doing evasive maneuvers you'll hit.

    If the target has shields then the shields take the damage. Weapons have a disruption rating, the next shield regen is reduced by the disruption rating. Disruption stacks, I'm pretty sure on that, but it clears out after the next shield regen. If the shields run out the rest of the damage goes to the hull and the shields are "collapsed", they can't be restored or regenerated until combat is over. Any hull damage calls for a roll on the crit chart. Weapons have a critical modifier, you're rolling 1d10 +/- the weapon crit modifier on the chart. That does mean that some weapons will go negative and not inflict crits.

    Apply the effects of the crits. If you run out of hull points the ship explodes killing everyone who didn't get into a shuttle or escape pod. This is where you make people burn hero points to ret-con that they were actually in the boarding party and set up a running fight on the enemy ship for the next session.

    All in all this is another unfinished part of the system. I think it actually works a bit better than the vehicle rules so far. Dealing with space stations and ships moving to/from stationary is an issue (my PCs forgot to assign anyone to piloting and rammed an asteroid by accident one time). It really also sounds like velocity tracking was part of the rules at some point, but was dropped for the speed & half speed simplification. It probably wouldn't be too hard to work out a variant to do that if you really wanted to. What you really want first, after clarifications and fighter bays, is space stations and space kaiju. I've used spaceships as a basis for them, 3 - 5 of the biggest ships for a small-medium space station and a single ship with some hand waving for the kaiju.

    Actually the space kaiju worked really well. I decided they had a sort of virtual crew amount of X for particular systems and always ran as crew quality 4 or 5. So piloting was Xk5, all weapon attacks were at Xk5, melee attacks were like ramming but the kaiju didn't take damage from them, they had Xk5 engineering and arcana actions, parasites or grubs/spawn worked for Xk5 boarding actions and fighters. No command actions obviously. Then you build them like a regular ship, give them a special attack, and describe them totally not like a ship. For taking damage you just ignore the effects that kill off crew, unless you want to let it shut down an ability or weapon. That's sort of hand wavy and specific to a kaiju or situation. I will note that the PCs never tried to do a boarding action on a kaiju on their own initative.

    Next time: The crit chart, orbital bombardment, repairs, upgrades, silent running, and warp travel.

  28. - Top - End - #118
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Hey-o crit chart!
    <1 - armor scuffing
    1 - attacker chooses a console on the target which is disabled until at DC 15 emergency repair is made.
    2 - because surge protectors don't exist in the grim darkness of the far future a power surge kills off 1 crew
    3 - sensors at -20 until repaired, DC 15
    4 - hot plasma vents in a bad way, take 1 hull point of damage each turn until emergency repairs, DC 15
    5 - bridge hit, kill 1 crew and no command actions until emergency repairs, DC 15
    6 - thrusters, until a DC 20 repair cannot use adjust heading or evasive maneuvers actions
    7 - take 1d10 hull point damage and lose 2 crew
    8 - radiation leaks kill 1 crew a round until repaired, DC 20
    9 - weapons offline until repaired, DC 20
    10 - as #1 but the DC is 25 and you lose two crew as well
    11 - vacuum sucks, lose 1d10 crew and all crit rolls are at +2 until a DC 15 repair is made
    12 - engines out, drift in a straight line at half speed until two DC 20 repair checks are made, no piloting actions are available at all
    13+ - lose 1d10 hull and 1d10 crew and roll again at the same modifier as this roll

    Yes folks, in theory if you could get a +12 modifier on the crit roll you would blow up any ship as soon as you got through the shields. Keep that in mind if you make a space-kaiju special attack that adds a crit modifier to the next roll.

    Orbital bombardment, because nuking things from orbit is always on the table as a solution.
    1) Move into low orbit with a DC 25 maneuver check. Problem: there's a ship console that allows you to fly around in the atmosphere and land on planets.
    2) Shoot at something the size/area of a city block, DC 30. On a miss scatter by 1k1+1k0/check kilometers.
    3) Stuff blows up.
    3a) A lance weapon vaporizes everything in "a few hundred meters" of the shot. Everything else within a kilometer takes 10k5 energy damage.
    3b) An array weapon nails an area of 10 sq. km. (just a shred more than 3 km by 3 km or a circle about 3.6 km diameter) around the target point and everything in there takes 8k4 damage. Remember to link all your array weapons so you do bunches of 8k4 damages. Also, no damage type mentioned, just keep using energy.
    3c. Torpedoes act like a lance weapon but do 10k4 out to 3 km from the impact point. Also, no damage type mentioned, just keep using energy.

    10k5 comes in a hair under 45 average damage. 10k4 somewhere between 35 and 40, call it 38 or so. 8k4 is just under 35, probably at 34 average damage. So, in theory, a fair bit may well survive. Plasteel and bulkheads, from the book 1 cover examples, have an armor rating of 32. Meaning that hardened buildings (like reinforced concrete backed by plasteel armor plating) may survive effectively unscathed. Size 25 vehicles with 20 armor can expect to be unaffected by a near miss with a lance weapon about half the time, and likely won't take more than a single point of damage since getting to 60 is only a 10% chance on 10k5 and you'd need 70 to do 2 points of damage. Undefined is how void shields affect this, as you can mount a low end void shield in a single vehicle slot for 60 vp. Also an elite soldier (carapace armor, resilience 5, 8 HP) will have 1 HP left after the average 10k5 (barely, you need 7+[5*8]=47 to bring them to 0 HP), an ork nob will still probably be shuffling around ([0.9*3]+[6*8]=51 to 48), and space marines will just be ticked off (armor 12, 6 resilience, 15 HP, 12+[6*15]=102).

    Another issue is that the actual weapon used doesn't make a difference. A 1k1 turret is still a lance weapon and the mighty 8k8 rift torpedo are technically almost the same. Ok, house rule: Add the spaceship weapon damage rating to the damage rating in the orbital bombardment rules. Also the blast radius for lance and torpedoes is a base, halve the damage for each increment until it drops below 10 damage. Well the 1k1 turret is now a 10k6 and the rift torpedo is... 10k10+30... average 60+30, 90 to 3 km, 45 to 6km, 22 to 9 km, 11 to 12 km... Mayhap a bit high? Try weapon kept dice added as rolled dice. 1k1 -> 10k5, rift as 8k8 -> 18k4 -> 10k8 -> avg 56-ish, so 56 to 3km, 28 to 6km, 14 to 9 km. Right, quite useable that way and doesn't just autokill PCs for a single strike (arrays of 3+ weapons will though, but hero points).

    Any ways, a functional baseline if imperfect.

    Silent running. Yes, stealth in space doesn't really work in RL and hard SF. Thankfully we're not doing hard SF here and this for sure isn't RL.
    When silent running you make maneuver checks against +10 DCs and your ship's speed value is halved. You have to do an space-arcana check every round and the result is the DC to find you with an active augury check. Another functional baseline.

    Repairs & resupply.
    In port:
    By Wealth - repair 1d10 hull points and recruit 1 crew each week, while doing this you can't use your wealth for anything else. 1 week to generally resupply the rest of the misc. stuff for the ship. Torpedoes have to be bought separately.
    By Backing - If it's your backer's port you get 1d10 hull & 1 crew a week plus all you reloads as fast as you can file the paperwork. Otherwise you have to wait for your backers to send guns, money, and lawyers. That's 1d10 weeks for the paperwork to go through and get back to you. If approved you're at the hull, crew, and victuals repair every week, otherwise you have to use back channels and favors and takes 2 weeks for each iteration. Torpedoes depend on if it's a 'friendly' port, if yes then it's a week per cost of the torpedoes with the cheap ones getting shipped in first, then going up the list. If it's a 'hostile' port you have to revert to wealth to resupply torpedoes.
    By Followers - Your minions repair your command skill in hull points each week and your bar hopping recruits 1 crew from the locals in the same amount of time. It takes your followers 1d10 weeks to gather up the rest of the supplies. you have to use wealth to get torpedoes.

    There's, ah, nothing about multiple characters trying multiple avenues. Nor anything about crew quality, minimum amount of crew or followers, or anything else. Also I'm just now realizing that there's nothing anywhere about your followers being the crew, given that you can do followers 3 & holdings 3 to get and run a decent ship. Hmmm...

    Extended repairs, for when there isn't a port to limp to. A ship can make 1 (there's a console for more) repair effort from it's stores between port side resupplies. Find a safe spot to lay up, captain decided how many weeks to spend on repair efforts, the crew makes a DC 25 engineering space-action check, regain 1d10 hull points +1 per raise and all console & critical damage effects are repaired. Uh, so what's with the weeks thing? Also, ships don't exactly have small crews, you may end up seeing the party throw something like 20k2 -> 10k7 at this. This part needs work.

    Upgrading your ship.
    Outside of a port it's the DMs call if you can even find anything, and you can't install it. So, in port. Wealth test to acquire is DC 10 + 2/build point (that's back in the ship building section that we'll get to next time) and a day per build point to install. Since stuff tops out at 25 bp you're looking at a max of DC 23 (I round this one up) wealth tests, which won't put any strain risks on a wealth 5 character. Personally I think that a DC of 5+bp is better, simpler, and makes them think twice about happily nabbing the most expensive stuff as soon as they can make time for it.

    Warp travel, getting from one place to another in less than a couple centuries.
    You will need:
    1) A spelljamming helm for movement (apparently they just come with the ship, no special effort needed).
    2) A Geller Field for protection from warp STDs (comes with the ship too, still no special effort needed).
    3) A navigator, being someone with at least one rank in divination magic. If you don't have a PC, ally, special follower, whatever, then the ship comes with one with attributes and skills at dots equal to crew quality. Suddenly I strongly suggest at least one PC investing in divination magic and the arcana skill, or at least a rank or two of the ally background.

    Travel happens in 4 steps:
    1) Go into the warp... Generally considered a bad idea on a good day. If you're at a working, active, syrenth portal relay then no sweat, you don't even need to roll. Otherwise a ship arcana action at DC 15+ is needed. The presence of modrons or "dampening fields" is noted as kicking it up to 20 and it's 25+ where space is "thick", whatever that means.

    2) Locate the Sigil beacon and use it to plot a course. The navigator rolls arcana + wisdom + ship's sensors against DC 20. Failure and step 3 is at -10, succeed and you get +5/raise in step 3.

    3) Travel. Make a ship maneuver check against DC <check a chart> 10 to 25, based on distance, the condition of the DMs large intestine, any your bonus/penalty from step 2. If no portal relay was used double the time taken. Success means you roll on the warp encounter chart and for every +10 over the DC halve the travel time. Failure is roll twice on the warp encounter chart and if you get -10 under the DC you're off course and end up wherever the DM thinks is funny.

    4) Exit the warp. The navigator does another arcana + wisdom + ship's sensors against DC 20. Success and you exit somewhere safe. Failure and you exit somewhere dangerous, more dangerous and more immediate the worse you fail.

    So remember back up there where I said the players will throw the whole crew at a single roll and go 20k2 -> 10k7? Same issue. Take a 60 day trip across a "sector" at DC 20 in a low end "endurance class support ship" with 14 crew and crew quality 1. Step 1 ship arcana action 14k1+0 -> 10k3 -> average roll of 30, and a 97% chance of making 20. Step 2 trash navigator roll of 1k1+0 -> average roll about 7, and about a 1% chance at that 20. Step 3 14k1-10 -> 10k3-10 -> average roll of 20, 19% chance at 30, and a ~95% chance of getting 11+. So a 50/50 chance between 1 or 2 warp rolls, a 1/5 chance of it taking 60 days instead of 120, and about a 1/20 or less chance of going off course. Granted step 4 is going to be hairy coming in at -10 or -15 under the DC, but you can have everyone back at piloting for 10k3 to avoid hitting anything. Now think about using a battleship with 24 crew on this, getting 10k8 and having a 55% chance of getting 55 or a 39% chance of 60. Cut that 120 days down to 15 days.

    That's the big flaw with the spaceship rules, throwing a full crew at a single task at a time causes issues. Even in combat if you just split out between piloting and gunnery on an average quality 2 crew with a picard speech you start looking at evasive maneuvers of 10k4 and gunnery of 10k4, averaging in the upper 30s on each before the equipment mods. If you're hitting you opponent you shift more crew to piloting and get even harder to hit. If you're willing to take a hit and are close enough you can try boarding actions with 22k3 -> 10k9 vs. the absolute best of 7k6 (quality 5 crew and the defensive murder servitors) thus 62% to 55 vs. 51% to 40 making the defenders lose 3 to 5 crew.

    Well, think about it. I haven't hit on a really good solution yet other than artificially restricting the rolls to using 1/3 max ship crew, but that's ultra harsh on the small ships with 12 crew.

    Warp encounter table, the one you always roll on every trip. You're rolling a 1d10, possibly with modifiers.
    <3 - boring & safe.
    3 - dreams & hallucinations. No rules, no guidance.
    4 - lost time, possibly years and years pass while you spend 3 days in the warp. No rules, no guidance.
    5 - ghosts & shades. No rules, no guidance.
    6 - corridors warp & gravity shifts. Redraw the ship floorplan with a randomizer? No rules, no guidance.
    7 - ghost ship, sensors detect a phantom ship just at the edge of their range. The PCs will ignore it, wimps.
    8 - general madness in the crew, PCs have to do something or else chaos. No rules, no guidance.
    9 - a daemonic entity shows up onboard. Anything from instant attack to lurking in the vents for years. No rules, no guidance.
    10 - a warp storm throws you off course, the navigator has to re-plot the course. Well, that's my interpretation because... You guessed it! No rules, no guidance.
    11+ - Geller field failure, do emergency repairs or do an emergency crash out into astral space. Or just die in the warp I guess. Same old, same old. No rules, no guidance.

    Yeah, do building ships next time. For now... They're a decent baseline but obviously unfinished. Guess what isn't mentioned at all? The crystal spheres that separate normal places from astral space. Where syrneth portals are located. Navigation without the Sigil beacon. Sensor ranges and sensitivity outside of combat. What happens when you fail entering or exiting the warp (free rerolling just means the rules don't do anything). Really, port-to-port while skipping the travel stuff in between and blowing stuff up once in a while is about what they cover. If you skip the actual traveling they work out ok.

  29. - Top - End - #119
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Ha! Found them!

    I'd wondered where my vehicle additions and house rules went. They went into my cheat sheets.

    FALLING:
    Take 1 wound per 2 meters. Dex+Athletics v. 15 = -1 wound & another -1 per raise
    Alternate: Damage of 2k1 per 2 meters, no cap. Same dex+athletics.

    Ramming:
    Free action on move into: control test V. defense -> damage [size]k[1/2 momentum], both vehicles damaged
    Then roll (drive or pilot) + (composure or constitution) v. rolled damage
    Success = stay in control, Fail = out of control, Both: & reduce momentum by 2
    Personal dodge: dex + acrobat V. momentum x speed
    Personal brute stop: [strength + size]k[size] V. size+momentum+damage, still takes ½ damage

    Spoiler: Blue Chain-Saw Cyber-hexapod-Bear: L3 Cocaine Wizard guild meeting door prize
    Show

    Blue Chain-Saw Cyber-hexapod-Bear: L3 Cocaine Wizard guild meeting door prize
    Str5, dex2, con4, cha1, fel1, cmp2, int1, wis3, wil3
    perception2 stealth1 brawl5 acrobat2 athletic4
    triple attack, wp focus, wp spec, fearless
    fleet of foot – x2 run dist, + fatigue > 1 rnd
    Speed 7, run 98, Size 7
    Def 11, ac 6 (8 giz&legs), resil 7, hp 14
    sneak 3k2, sense 6k4, dodge 4k2, parry 8k5
    Cybersenses – thermo vision
    Cyberheart – ignore first gizzard crit
    Cyberlimbs – no blood loss crits
    Chainsword legs – dude!
    IMMUNE: poison disease eat drink :: int+craft to repair (15,20,25) :: only death on giz crits
    Resource: pyros (9max3, 1/hour)
    Immune fear & pinning, roll Will v 15 to stop fighting
    chainsword legs: 10k5, 10k2 R, pen 4, tearing :: has 6 of them


    This means I have a number of things, mostly vehicles, floating around in my hand written notes that I need to enter into my sheets.

  30. - Top - End - #120
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    61.2° N, 149.9° W
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    How to build a spaceship.
    1: Build a giant tube with a cone on the top, some chairs in the cone, and a valve on the bottom.
    2: Fill the giant tube with a lot of really volatile chemicals under really high pressure.
    3: Put some people in the chairs.
    4: Point it up.
    5: Light a fire under the valve.
    6: Have someone go in and turn the valve to 'open'.
    7: Did you do lots of complicated math, engineering, and chemistry?
    7a: Yes? The people in the chairs might go to space today.
    7b: No? The people in the chairs are having a very bad day.
    7c: Either way you're going to have to find another shmuck to open the valve on the next one.

    Oh, build different spaceships? DtD40k7e spaceships? Well we can go over that too.

    I'm gonna be honest and renumber the steps a bit.
    Step 0 or 5: Determine build points
    Step 1: Choose a hull.
    Step 2: Outfit the hull.
    Step 3: Buy guns.
    Step 4: Finishing Touches.
    Step 5 or 6: Go blow something up.

    Build points are a scale from 0 to 230 in odd increments. They map from 0 holdings to 5 holdings. So without a holdings background your character doesn't come with a ship. This will also inform you of roughly how much in the way of other backgrounds you'll need to maintain and run the thing. Unfortunately nowhere in either book does it talk about someone with holdings or such but not enough of the other backgrounds they needed for upkeep.

    Choose a hull as the basis of your ship. Hulls got stats.
    Class: Size -> escort, destroyer, cruiser, battleship. Affects ramming damage.
    Cost: In build points (bp).
    Crew: Amount of crew at maximum capacity. This is the total number of dice a ship can roll each round in combat, thus it is very important. However it's not a set number of warm bodies and doesn't cover passengers. Population count is noted as being about 10/crew on escorts up to about 50/crew on battleships. This would mean that the biggest spelljammers, kilometer long force-of-destruction battleships, have about 1200 people on them. For my game I've upped the in game length measurement by about 1.5 and the body/crew ration by about 2.5, to give a bit grander scale to things. Also I actually looked at RL ships & crews as comparison points.
    Hull strength: Ship hit points. Hull points. Whatever you run out of in order to blow up.
    Maneuverability, acceleration, speed, sensors: You should be able to guess, they're numbers that modify other numbers except speed is a maximum. Although speed mentions that a void unit of distance is normally about 6 million meters. I'm not doing the searches to figure out what that maps to. Probably some light second count or something.
    Consoles: Console is a term for the general ship equipment, upgrades, modules, addons, and what have you. Consoles are you customized bling. Each console has a type and they go in the appropriately types console slot. Except universal consoles. A universal console can go in any slot and any kind of console slot can hold a universal console.
    Weapons: Yo guns.
    ...And not mentioned are shields. Editing error? Shields are kinda important what with all the shooting going on.

    A sampling of the ship hulls:
    * Steamboat - escort, 10 bp, 12 crew, 40 hull, speed 6, 2 universal consoles, guns 1 forward & 1 rear. This is your smallest and cheapest possible ship.
    * Sultana - escort, 20 bp, 14 crew, 45 hull, +5 maneuver, +10 acceleration, speed 12, 1 tactical & 1 universal console, 2 forward guns, 1 aft gun.
    * Thresher - destroyer, 30 bp, 16 crew, 60 hull, maneuver +5, accel +10, speed 10, sensors +5, console 1 each of arcana, command, engineering, universal, 2 taticial consoles, 3 forward guns, 2 aft guns.
    * Cole - destroyer, 40 bp, 18 crew, 55 hull, +5 maneuver accel and sensors, speed 9, consoles are 2 arcana, 1 command, 3 tactical, 1 universal, 2 guns each fore and aft.
    * Borealis - cruiser, 50 bp, 20 crew, 70 hull, +5 accel and sensors, speed 9, 2 of each type of console except no universals, 2 guns each fore and aft.
    * Belle - battleship, 75 bp, 24 crew, 90 hull, -5 maneuver and accel, speed 4, 1 arcana, 2 command, 1 engineering, 3 tactical, 1 universal, 4 forward guns, 3 aft guns.

    Total of 14 hulls, Steamboat is the least and Belle is pretty much the most (there's another battleship, 100 hull and jiggles a few bits around).

    Crew quality, from 1 to 5. 1 costs -5 bp, 2 costs 0 bp, 5 costs 30 bp. Remember that crew quality is by default your kept dice on ship checks.

    Shields: MK1 to MK4 costing 10 bp to 25 bp in 5 point increments. More is better. They come in 5 types.
    * Standard starts with 60 max & 15 regen, ends with 120 max & 20 regen.
    * Covariant starts with 80 max & 5 regen, ends with 160 max & 10 regen.
    * Regenerating start with 50 max, 25 regen, ends with 100 max, 35 regen.
    * Resilient starts with 60 max & 5 regen. ends with 120 max & 10 regen. These never reduce their regen for disruption.
    * Multi-over-complicated-how-does-this-work starts with two max 20 & regen 10 shields, ends with SEVEN max 20 & 10 regen shields. It says these shields are layered have to be targeted and brought down separately. The only way I've gotten them to work is that they ALL regen until ALL of the layers are down. Which is a bit of a nuisance to keep track of in combat. Another way that I haven't tried yet is to have the targeted ship decide which shield gets hit by any one shot and ignore all the 'layer' talk.

    All weapons have a disruption rating. Disruption reduces shield regeneration for the next turn and each hit stacks. It seems like an interesting set of trade offs, and I've thrown ships with every type of shield at my PCs. They all seem to shake out about even in practice, but my PCs may have a fairly balanced weapon load out. I've taken to just using the resilient on all NPC ships because it's easier for me to track. And by track I mean just ignore disruption. The players haven't caught on yet.

    Weapons are mounted bow or aft. There are 4 firing arcs: front, back, left, right. Narrow weapons can only fire in their mounted arc, they're also the biggest hitters. Normal weapons can fire into the side arcs as well. Wide weapons can fire into any arc at all and don't care where they're mounted, they also do the least damage.

    Lance weapons, you have to assign crew to each one individually.
    * heavy cannon, 6k4 damage, 5 disruption, -10 accuracy, +3 criticals, 20 range, narrow arc, 15 bp.
    * cannon, 4k3 damage, 4 disruption, -5 accuracy, +2 criticals, 10 range, normal arc, 10 bp.
    * turret, 3k2 damage, 3 disruption, +0 accuracy, +0 criticals, 5 range, wide arc, 10 bp.

    Array weapons, you can link these to shoot at a target and they all share set of crew and one attack roll then.
    * heavy beam, 4k2 damage, 2 disruption, +5 accuracy, +1 criticals, 15 range, narrow arc, 15 bp.
    * beam array, 2k1 damage, 2 disruption, +10 accuracy, -1 criticals, 10 range, normal arc, 10 bp.

    There are no wide arc arrays. If you absolutely needed them you can follow the pattern of knocking them down a peg in every category except cost.

    Then you get the weapon type options to modify each one with. These adjust the base numbers and everything is a trade-off. Las is the default type with the stats given above. Melta, +1k0 damage, -2 dis, half range, -5 bp. Plasma, +1k0 damage, +2 dis, -5 accuracy, +5 bp. Orgone, -1k0 damage, +2 dis, +5 accuracy, -2 crits. Mass driver, -2 dis, +5 accuracy, +2 crits, half range. Positron, -5 accuracy, +2 crits, double range, +5 bp. Antimeson, -1k0 damage, -2 crit, double range, -5 bp.

    Or for 5 bp you can mount a torpedo tube with 5 torpedoes somewhere. Pretty much everything is by torpedo type and there's a console to extend the ammo magazine. Almost all torpedoes have a special thingy, but you have to buy them separate. They cost a few points to start off with, after the initial set you're down to buying them individually(or stealing, my players started a war by knocking over a small depot-base for some torpedoes).
    * micro, 4k4, dis 2, crit +2, acc +5, range 25, normal arc, smaller and less damaging in orbital bombardment, 1 bp.
    * photon, 6k6, dis 3, crit +3, acc+0, range 20, narrow arc, nothing special, 2 bp.
    * monopole, 6k4, dis 10, crit +0, acc +0, range 20, narrow arc, hit ships take -10 to maneuver & accelerate for 1d10 rounds (no stacking), 2 bp.
    * quath, 4k4, dis 0, crit +8, acc +0, range 20 narrow arc, they ignore shields but lose the +8 to crits if the ship has any shields, 2 bp.
    * cruise, 6k6, dis 3, crit +3, acc +0, range 50 narrow arc, teh ship doesn't have to get to a stable orbit before initating orbital bombardment, 3 bp.
    * high accuracy, 6k6, dis 3, ctiy +3, acc +10, range 20, wide arc, if orbital bombardment misses you can reroll the scatter and choose which one to use, 3 bp.
    * rift, 8k8, dis 4, crit +4, acc -5, range 30, narrow arc, ships that lose hull on a hit also lose 1d10 crew, the damage radius for orbital bombardments is doubled, leaves daemons behind, 5 bp.

    Eh, detail the bingy options next time. This is all pretty battle mat oriented. I'd appreciate something a bit more capable of managing non-gridded combat out of the box. But that's at least partially personal preference co sidering how closely some of this maps to the Starfinder space combat.

Tags for this Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •