Hello,
I ran a single shot adventure for my old group and they really like the dice system, but in their opinion, the Critical Injury/Hit d100% table is completely not in the place for such narrative system. I don't like it, but I can live with it, but I am interested if perhaps anyone came up with some alternative?
I always liked the crit charts in SpaceMaster. I bought them PDF recently and was planning on tinkering and integrating them at some point with the existing one.
You might want to look at the crit system in Warhammer 3rd edition. There are special cards with crtis, dealt randomly after a crit hit occurs. However, this way you can't control the severity of the crit, although I guess to somewhat remedy this you might have 3 stacks of cards - light, medium and heavy crits.
Hello,
I ran a single shot adventure for my old group and they really like the dice system, but in their opinion, the Critical Injury/Hit d100% table is completely not in the place for such narrative system. I don't like it, but I can live with it, but I am interested if perhaps anyone came up with some alternative?
If you've got either the EotE or AoR Beginner Box sets, you could adopt the critical injury system used there. It's a lot faster and cleaner than the base game's critical injury system, and Long Arm of the Hutt (for EotE BegBox) has an NPC with Lethal Blows so you can get an idea of how to adjust traits that add to the critical injury roll to fit with the BegBox's simplified system.
Hello,
I ran a single shot adventure for my old group and they really like the dice system, but in their opinion, the Critical Injury/Hit d100% table is completely not in the place for such narrative system. I don't like it, but I can live with it, but I am interested if perhaps anyone came up with some alternative?
If you've got either the EotE or AoR Beginner Box sets, you could adopt the critical injury system used there. It's a lot faster and cleaner than the base game's critical injury system, and Long Arm of the Hutt (for EotE BegBox) has an NPC with Lethal Blows so you can get an idea of how to adjust traits that add to the critical injury roll to fit with the BegBox's simplified system.
Yeees, I was just thinking about it before I read your post.
Currently a player is immortal until the 4th Critical Wound. My idea based on the Beginner's Box is:
Results are cumulative, all until healed, those from 5th Critical Wounds can be permanent.
Also, a players losses conscious when he suffers more Critical Wounds than his Brawn rating.
Anyway still interested if someone made his own house rule about it 
.
Currently a player is immortal until the 4th Critical Wound.
They're really not. Particularly as they start facing opponents with more dangerous talent and gear loadouts. Honestly if you're only going by the starter set I think you're prematurely judging the potential lethality of the system, though you are right to an extent that it is supposed to be easier to render someone hors de combat than it is to kill them outright.
You might want to look at the crit system in Warhammer 3rd edition. There are special cards with crtis, dealt randomly after a crit hit occurs. However, this way you can't control the severity of the crit, although I guess to somewhat remedy this you might have 3 stacks of cards - light, medium and heavy crits.
If you adopt this system, rather than splitting crits out (which defeats the purpose - the OP is decrying that it's hard to get 1-hit kills initially), let characters who deal more severe crits draw two (or three, or four) and then decide which one gets inflicted on the target. The WH Swordmaster handles crit severity this way and it can be very lethal.
Currently a player is immortal until the 4th Critical Wound.
Hah, I wish. Last session I had one of my players, a Gand Marauder, one-shot a Nemesis melee opponent. He has two or three ranks in Lethal Blows, a vibrosword with Monomolecular Edge, and he rolled something like 9 Advantage. The result was a Critical Injury with +120, reduced to +90 with three ranks in Durable. My NPC was dead before he hit the deck. Criticals are dangerous, don't let anyone tell you different.
Currently a player is immortal until the 4th Critical Wound.
Hah, I wish. Last session I had one of my players, a Gand Marauder, one-shot a Nemesis melee opponent. He has two or three ranks in Lethal Blows, a vibrosword with Monomolecular Edge, and he rolled something like 9 Advantage. The result was a Critical Injury with +120, reduced to +90 with three ranks in Durable. My NPC was dead before he hit the deck. Criticals are dangerous, don't let anyone tell you different.
Easily fixed with multiple ranks of Durable.
Easily fixed with multiple ranks of Durable.Hah, I wish. Last session I had one of my players, a Gand Marauder, one-shot a Nemesis melee opponent. He has two or three ranks in Lethal Blows, a vibrosword with Monomolecular Edge, and he rolled something like 9 Advantage. The result was a Critical Injury with +120, reduced to +90 with three ranks in Durable. My NPC was dead before he hit the deck. Criticals are dangerous, don't let anyone tell you different.
Re-read what Krieger22 posted -- the Nemesis already had three ranks of Durable. Of course, as GM, you can pile on as many ranks of Durable as you like, but as you get much above three it becomes more and more ... well, just plain silly.
For PCs, the situation is different. Durable is a hard talent to get, and it takes a lot of work just to get one or two ranks in it.
For my own part, I did warn my GM about this problem. Starting with Vibro-axes, adding both Mono-Molecular Edge and Serrated Edge, and then Lethal Blows is much easier to get than Durable.
In fact, I was trying to avoid spending all those XP on all those ranks of Lethal Blows that I was going to be forced to get in order to get the things I did want, and that's why I was warning the GM -- if he let me skip them, then the game would be less likely to be unbalanced by all my bonuses to my crit rolls.
How is gauging your players skills and talents and then balancing the Nemesis to provide them a legitimate challenge silly precisely? What's silly is one shotting a Nemesis.
A GM in preparing a legitimate challenge for players should look at those skills, talents and gear they have. You tell me a player has +60 on crits before they roll the dice if your Nemesis doesn't have at least 6 ranks of Durable you aren't planning appropriately to provide an appropriate gaming challenge imo. Frankly if they are +60 on crits I'd probably take a stab at what their average uncancelled Advantages are and add that to the Durable as well to provide a real challenge.
There is no rule written in this book that tells people they can't use their imaginations when they GM. There is a rule that says "..more powerful; this is necessary to ensure that they are able to pose a threat to an entire party". Every adversary can't be pre-generated by the Devs and scaled for what each player might put together for a character. That requires GMs to step out of the specific written items in the book and use their brains.
Edited by 2P51A GM in preparing a legitimate challenge for players should look at those skills, talents and gear they have. You tell me a player has +60 on crits before they roll the dice if your Nemesis doesn't have at least 6 ranks of Durable you aren't planning appropriately to provide an appropriate gaming challenge imo. Frankly if they are +60 on crits I'd probably take a stab at what their average uncancelled Advantages are and add that to the Durable as well to provide a real challenge.
So, every Nemesis that exists has to have at least twelve ranks of Durable, otherwise he's not a Nemesis?
Every Nemesis has to be able to completely and totally neutralize every single skill, talent, and attribute that each and every person has in the party?
Do we throw Darth Vader and the Emporer at the party for each and every encounter?
I think the point here is that there are some game imbalance issues that can quickly get out of hand, if you're not careful. And throwing more imbalance into the game to try to counteract that doesn't actually solve any part of the underlying problem.
This is supposed to be a game based on the Narrative, and you're just throwing in bigger and badder crunchy "solutions". I see no evidence that you are actually trying to help resolve the underlying problem, or come up with any viable alternatives.
There is no imbalance issue at all. Every Nemesis is supposed to present a challenge to the entire party, per the RAW in the book. A fight with a Nemesis being killed in one shot is not even close to meeting the guidelines in the book for the challenge level one is supposed to provide a party.
Those presented in the book are the beginning, not the end. The book is structured to allow play to begin. Those Nemeses as written are to present a beginning party a real challenge. Not a party that has advanced to the point of multiple ranks of Lethal Blows, skill levels past beginning levels, mods on gear raising it even further.
I don't get your perspective at all, RPGs have always been about bigger and badder opponents. If players are advancing their lethality I would like to hear precisely why opponents shouldn't.
Edited by 2P51There is no imbalance issue at all. Every Nemesis is supposed to present a challenge to the entire party, per the RAW in the book. A fight with a Nemesis being killed in one shot is not even close to meeting the guidelines in the book for the challenge level one is supposed to provide a party.
Every fight has the chance that someone will get a whole heck of a lot of Triumphs (or Despairs), and do something totally and completely unexpected with the results. You can't build all your encounters around assuming all the possible things that could potentially go wrong and then make sure that the Big Bad is big enough and bad enough that he can take anything that could possibly be thrown at him, because he might just find that he is at Ground Zero of one planet impacting another one.
More importantly, if that Big Bad has been designed to survive one planet impacting another one, then he's almost certainly going to be way too tough for any PC party that might wander along.
I don't get your perspective at all, RPGs have always been about bigger and badder opponents. If players are advancing their lethality I would like to hear precisely why opponents shouldn't.
I agree that the Adversaries need to scale with the PCs. No problem there. That is, so long as things remain at sane levels, on both sides.
The problem I have is with your solution to the issue where the PCs start getting up into Silly Scale levels, due to a weirdness in the way the rules work. IMO, you're much better off actually fixing the quirk in the rules that lets this happen in the first place, or at least trying to find some sort of alternative solution that will let you side-step the problem.
[ Edit: for grammar ]
Edited by bradknowlesI don't want to see boss fights get to the level they are in the WH40K games. If a Nemesis has to have Soak 10, WT 50/ST 50 and Durable 10 just to be a challenge to the whole party, then perhaps it's better if he's not a challenge to the whole party by himself.
Currently a player is immortal until the 4th Critical Wound.
Hah, I wish. Last session I had one of my players, a Gand Marauder, one-shot a Nemesis melee opponent. He has two or three ranks in Lethal Blows, a vibrosword with Monomolecular Edge, and he rolled something like 9 Advantage. The result was a Critical Injury with +120, reduced to +90 with three ranks in Durable. My NPC was dead before he hit the deck. Criticals are dangerous, don't let anyone tell you different.
Right, I forgot about this talent.
For the alternative Critical Injury rule I would need to change these two talents (Lethal Blows and Durable).
Where's all this Durable coming from? I understand NPCs get created however the GM wants but it's a rare Talent for PCs - seems a little unfair if the GM throws it around too freely.
Explorer: Fringer, Archaeologist
Hired Gun: Bodyguard, Enforcer, Heavy
(all 1 rank each)
Edited by Col. OrangeI actually find myself agreeing with both sides of the argument here.
First, I agree with 2P51 that multiple ranks of Durable will indeed fix this problem. And don't get me wrong, if this NPC had been a major villain the party had to face alone, he would most certainly have had 10 ranks of Durable specifically to avoid this sort of situation. But the Nemesis in this case was meant to be a Nemesis for that PC, personally, not the whole group (there were several other NPCs in the fight, two more of them Nemeses). And while it's frustrating to have an NPC go down that easy when you're hoping for a bit of a challenge, it was a legitimate roll and I don't see any harm in letting that player have his moment of awesome.
However, bradknowles also has a point; piling ranks of Durable on top of one another does smell a bit of cheese. And while I've never player Warhammer 40K roleplaying, only the tabletop, I agree with HappyDaze that NPCs should be kept at least somewhat realistic in their talents and abilities.
But yes, if I really need a Nemesis to give the group a challenge, he will have 10+ ranks in Durable. In addition to the above Marauder I also have a Technician with a blaster pistol that crits on 1 Advantage, and a Smuggler with a disruptor pistol. So yes, high criticals is a very realisitic possibility at my table, and I'll counter them by whatever means I deem necessary to keep the encounter exciting and challenging. But I'd prefer not to do it too often, and if that means the occasional lucky shot, so be it.