new monster rules
{ March 24th, 2009 }
I just emailed these to Darcy, figured I’d post ‘em here too.
1) Give monsters more hit points. I haven’t figured out exactly how
many more, but more. For 3 players, maybe 1 more (or maybe it’s fine
as is). For 4-5 players, maybe double the current number? For 6-7,
maybe triple it? Something like that.
2) When a monster attacks, you no longer declare which PC it’s
attacking. Instead, by default, a monster’s attack hits everyone
within its reach with a lower defense. When you create a monster you
can choose this option (per attack ability): this attack hits the one
person within its reach with the lowest defense.
3) Same with special abilities: its special abilities hit everyone
within reach with white+red less than its white+green. You can choose
the same option, if you want: this special move hits the one person
within its reach with the lowest attack.
4) When you create a monster, you no longer buy its x-number of
attacks per turn. Instead, every attack ability you give it gives it
its own attack roll, its own set of red dice. Same with special moves.
So 2-4 taken together, for instance:
The monster has attack: rend, attack: burn, strangle and mesmerize.
You roll white dice, red for rend, separate red for burn, green for
knock down, separate green for mesmerize.
- It rends everyone whose defense is less than its rend attack.
- It burns everyone whose defense is less than its burn attack.
- It knocks down everyone whose attack is less than its knock down.
- It mesmerizes everyone whose attack is less than its mesmerize.
Make sense?
5) Currently, a 1-XV monster gets 3 abilities. Instead, a 1-XV monster
gets a number of abilities equal to the number of PCs.
6) 2-3 make the current swarm ability obsolete. Here’s the new swarm ability:
The monster’s not one monster, but a whole swarm of smaller monsters.
Attacking it means attacking its members, not attacking it directly
(there’s no there, there). Consequently, the most damage any single
character’s single attack can do is 3.
Improved: for an additional XV, the most damage any single character’s
single attack can do is 2. For 2 more additional XV, 1.
Categories: manuscript ~ ~ Trackback
March 25th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
I love the new Swarm. I wanted to point out, though, that i think i’ve played, maybe, one session where i knew how many players i was up against? So i’ve pretty much been making the monsters really, really powerful, and then just checking off what abilities/special moves they use. If only two guys show up, then i don’t check some off. If i have eight, then i might check them all and say there’s two. It takes away from the balance, but makes it more flexible for unknown attendees. Also love the new Attack/Defend rules. So far i was building my monsters so they could do that. So that’s going to work a lot better. Awesome. Thanks for this game (it rocks).
March 28th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Stipulating that, as you say, it’s your job to make the best game you can and our job to decide if we want to play it, I’ll hesitantly say that the new attack rules turn me off the game. I’ll try to specify: The elevator pitch includes “high-color gamism,” right? I think the new attack rules work against that because you’re now at a higher level of abstraction. I no longer have the clear mental picture of a Monster Rending that guy there. I have either a Tasmanian-Devil blur of universal Rending (all the players dealing with a Rend attack every round) or no picture at all. Either of which is, IMHO, a big change, and a big comedown, from the experience of play I had before. I realize that abstract, party-level “damage” goes all the way back to Tunnels & Trolls - you’ve got a noble pedigree here. But it’s a material reduction in the concreteness of the action.
March 29th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
You might need to adjust the Frighten rules a bit for this one. After three con games (one with 2 players, one with 5 players, one with 4) and a big bad with Frighten: 4, at least one player was completely wiped out of white dice. Fright + hit everybody is quite a bit more powerful than Fright + hit one person.
I support not having to declare for the monsters, though. While there was some interesting strategy to use (take out the guy rolling 6 command to rally, for example), it was a hiccup every round where I had to try to both fair and effective with the monster.
March 30th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I agree that monsters need more health and more attacks, but the universal omni-attack is not, in my opinion, a good solution. How about a fixed number of extra attacks? Perhaps based on the number of characters the creature will be facing?
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:49 am
Jim,
Maybe instead of thinking of the attack roll as a fortune in the end “does it hit or not” kind of roll, you should think of it as a fortune in the middle “Bob got hit, now we narrate that the monster attacked bob” sort of thing. The players declare actions and then succeed or fail, the monsters succeed or fail and then ex post facto declare actions.
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:28 am
kingtonC: To paraphrase a popular web tagline, “I am aware of all RPG tradistions.” I’m not saying I don’t recognize FITM when I see it; I’m saying that for this specific purpose in this specific game, I’m agin’ it, for the reasons I stated above. FITM isn’t magic, right? it’s just one among a very large number of techniques one can employ to different ends. But since I’ve already said why I don’t like this particular change for this particular part of this particular game, I don’t want to belabor my complaint.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:35 am
I think this is the approach Meg used when we played on Saturday. I like it because it drives home that old-school D&D “protect the spellcaster” approach and encourages players to look for tactical features to exploit.
If I’m a target every round no matter what, I’m looking for a big boulder to give me some blue dice before I fire off some lightnings.
April 12th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I played yesterday with these rules and a monster with Strangle. It was a slaughter but on the wrong side. I wiped them out in three rolls. Strangle is a death spiral generator.
April 12th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Ahem.
You wiped us out, yes, TPK, in three rolls, yes… but also: twice in a row!
Awesome!
April 15th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Do I understand this correctly?
1) The GM rolls attack. The GM’s roll beats two players defense rolls.
2) The monster has one attack, rend. The GM can choose to attack one player or the other, but cannot attack both at the same time. If the monster had two attacks, rend and bite, the monster could attack both characters.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:52 am
As I read the revision text in the blog entry
the default is, the rend attack in your hypothetical damages everyone whose defense roll it beats. If you the GM want, you can downscale that to damaging the lowest defense roll it beats only. Unfortunately . . .
a) It’s not clear why one would do that - it doesn’t give you more XV to spend elsewhere on the monster, frex;
b) Say it has Rend and Bite and you take the target-downscaling option on both. Since there’s only one defense roll per player, both the Rend and Bite will damage the same PC whenever they both beat anyone in the same round.
If you’re asking about the PDF text, in the PDF text, if the monster has Rend and Bite, the GM chooses a specific target for each attack. He can choose a different target for each attack, or the same target. When I ran it at a meetup, a high-defense player used a special move to draw a disproportionate number of the Big-Bad’s attacks to him. (”I’ll get its attention!”)
April 21st, 2009 at 12:46 am
“Instead, by default, a monster’s attack hits everyone
within its reach”
Question:
How do you determine who is “within its reach”?
Is it A) an old-school style, “whatever makes most sense, GM decides” kind of thing, or B) “within reach/out of reach” is a tactical constraint, determined by the dice play? For instance, for B), you might use your setup to “get outside the monster’s reach”, where, if your Effort beats its Attack, you’ve successfully moved away?
(And, if that last case is it, does that last for just one round or until someone unless tries to change that situation?)
Thanks! I want to play this again.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:02 pm
My entirely half-assed half-baked random idea for scaling the system for more or fewer players:
If you have fewer players than normal, it’s easier to hit and harder to miss. Maybe only 1’s and 2’s are misses.
If you have more players than normal, it’s harder to hit and easier to miss. Maybe only 5’s and 6’s are hits.
Will try to test this if I have the chance.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I’m glad i’m not the only one considering the shifting target number, too.
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I’m pretty skeptical about this approach–after all, it has to work with the existing rules for Endurance/hits, spell-casting, etc, and it’s going to change the effects of Setup rolls dramatically, as well.
That said, I’ve been thinking about changing the likelihood of a hit a bit as a way of reducing the number of dice in play. There MAY be some potential there. But then again, maybe not.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:17 am
Posting this here because it looks like the most active thread: I dropped a playtest writeup here:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=28142.0
August 7th, 2009 at 4:16 am
That’s a nice writeup of your playtest.
What’s the status of StWT? There hasn’t been an update in a while. I hope Vincent hasn’t abandoned the project.
August 12th, 2009 at 3:05 am
Yes. I’d also like to know the status of StWT.