Recent content by zakael19

That's great.

Sure, I just think phases fit the cinematic/dramatic bit well! Leaders get to do that via their reinforcements and large scale activations to be an absolute pain.

I mean take a look at the Ogre. You have to spend a Fear to spotlight, but when you do you can attack all targets in range. You deal direct damage (no armor). Spend a stress to grab anything nearby and huck it at all targets roughly in front of the ogre with Far. Any time they mark 2 hp, they...

Well I think the issue is that “Solos” aren’t actually designed as such! They’re only 5 points in encounter math where a group of 3 PCs is going to have a budget of 11 points for an encounter. I don’t see why you couldn’t do an encounter deck (if my quick google of “pre generated encounters to...

Yeah, the encounter building guy’s advice was to run solos like that. Even just a second instance of the same Solo with a tweaked ability and some fiction. Solos are… 5pts, -2 to the total budget if you’re using 2 or more solos. For 4 PCs, 3x4+2 =14, 12 if doubling up solos.. add the static +2...

Cool. So Solos are the “big damage” elite that you need to double up to really be a solo encounter (either hiding as a multi-phase or multi-scary enemy thing a la Dark Souls et al), and Leaders are the “beefy but minion reliant” elite. Thinking about some dramatic encounters then like entering...

Read the Fing Manual

As written, are they mostly closer to 4e elites?

was in the middle of posting this and was like “I should scroll down a tad” lol.

are your other fellow players feeling the same issues and concerns? Maybe have one of them broach it instead of the guy who just was DMing and may come off as “you’re not doing it how I like” even if inadvertently.

how have people been finding the encounter building math? Putting together some potential things for the party to deal with and wondering how much I should stick to the guidelines etc. Probably a little under, or avoid leaders/solos for the first couple as we learn the system? I’ve heard that...

At this point I think every single poster in this thread that's even a mild proponent of the concept of Fail Forward in any game has exhaustively explained what it is to him, including a massive variety of examples from at least 5 different games to include running 5e.

FWIW, I've kinda come around a bit on how say Blades encodes this whereas at first I really hated the idea of being all "ok you have trauma now." First, the player picks the Trauma (and in Deep Cuts Harper heard/saw the community liked the idea of them also being able to work through it instead...

Ok, going to actually start working on an Urban Fantasy frame now. I've been batting around the idea of something set in an early 00s Seattle for a while (was drafting a PBTA based on DW at one point), just had some great ideas for how to incorporate a couple of the ancestries (big Japanese...

Thresholds at least let you do balancing without having the “0 damage” outcome that’s pretty common in PBTAs that use a damage die + armor stat. I think that always abrading adversary and player resources on a hit (or a miss for Stress abilities) is a good thing. And it makes abilities that can...