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Messages - CuRoi

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DFRPG / Re: Toughness Stress Boxes / Catches
« on: September 17, 2012, 03:40:35 PM »
Thanks for the quick run-down!

As far as not knowing the enemy for the first time - I've seen that and it usually goes down that way with the first fight being a beating. The PCs ran into some ghouls recently and took some serious hits before they realized what was going on. However, that depends a lot on the campaign. If you have mostly random bad guys every session, then yeah, they can't ever "be prepared" but we've got a vampire intensive story arc spinning up so that rules out the surprise them all the time technique.

You are correct though, the first fight and being preparded as they were, should have been a slaughter. However, now they are getting some heat from the Red Court and it has really set an appropriate tone for the current arc IMO. Instead of, "Oh, more vampires - CLEAVE." it is "Holy S! More vampires!" So I can't say I dislike that :) But yeah, I'll need to fall back to toughness rules that make more sense from a RAW perspective as you explained them (and maybe downgrade some consequences taken in the fight - in fact, even though it wasn't a cake walk, only one of them really got torn up badly in that).

I like moving away from an inventory intensive "catch" bag though and the idea of spending FP that you suggest seems on the right track. However, once a PC says they have an "Iron Sword / Blessed Sword" etc. it's hard to tell them they need to spend FP to use it. That starts breaking down into details I think the FATE system was trying to avoid, but IMO the catch system leads you in that direction. I definitely prefer declarations and FP (and really think the enchanted item slots and stuff are going in the wrong direction) and want to find ways to keep that going.

Maybe I'll switch them to have an aspect of "Blessed Bullets" which had free tags on the first fight and then require spending FP for them, or declarations to renew it for future fights. Works great for Ammo, not so great for swords though.

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DFRPG / Toughness Stress Boxes / Catches
« on: September 17, 2012, 02:30:55 PM »
First - I've been surfing the boards a bit for an answer to this and haven't seen a good one yet - this feels like a FAQ question, so sorry if I'm being blind and overlooking something. Could someone either point me to a previous post or provide an example of Toughness where a catch is satisfied - maybe two exchanges worth.

I've seen a few different ways people are doing it. One seems to be to have additional boxes, restarting at a value of 1; the others seem to be adding the boxes and continuing the stress box count (i.e. 5-6-7-8). The book just says "additional stress boxes", points to p.201 which talks about stress (but nothing about stress and powers). If there is a clear example in there how this works, I can't seem to find it.

I had a fellow GM run a scenario and in his, we killed the Vamp in essentially one-shot. We both agreed it seemed very anti-climactic so I started runnign toughness differently to see how it would work. I was allowing toughness stress boxes to be fillable even when "the catch" was used - it was simply unrecoverable damage. Turned the player's next vampire fight into a difficult, memorable slugfest (as I think it should be) instead of a one-shot affair. Which leads to my next question --

Secondly - I'm unclear on how catches that work off of physical items should best be handled in a mostly inventory-free game. If a character says "I buy/make/locate a cold iron sword" I suppose now that character can satisfy the catch for a Fey (or soem other critters) at any time. It sort of takes the wind out of the "catch" system IMO.

I recall reading the books, Harry would always have some unique way of overcoming a catch - I mean something like sunshine in a handkerchief is a pretty interesting way of pulling off bypassing a vampire's catch. It's cool if handled that way because it makes the catches not able to be overcome for the rest of the campaign by a single trip to Wal-Mart or the nearest church.

Now, for the RC vampire weaknesses they did their due-diligence, It was a slow gathering of info. They had some marginal lore rolls and then over several sessions got hooked up with the St. Giles guys who were happy to spread the wor don how to kill RC vamps. Next they tapped their party Champion of God's resources / contacts for some Holy Water and Blessed Bullets. Sounds cool, but now that the flood gates are open, so to speak, most vamps should be a total push-over.

Anyway, I owe them a rules explanation and maybe a consequence reduction from their first fight with a red-court vamp (which should maybe have been an unmemorable fight  :-\). The way I was running it worked, made things more challenging, but now I have a player interested in adding toughness to a PC so the fuzzy "unrecoverable" stuff I was using for the NPCs, wont really work.

Thanks in adavnce!

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