More help needed now

Games Discussion Feng Shui
1

Sorry to keep buging yall but I have some more questions. Me and my GM had a mock battle tonight just to kinda get a dry run at the rules. The problems that we encountered were 1) Stunts, how do you gauge there dificulity? And what is the advantage of using them? 2) When he rolled, his AV equaled my own, what do we do there? 3) How does dodging work? As far as the shot counter goes? Like if I attack on 13 and he cant attack till 10, if he dodges on my attack on 13 does that mean he cant attack till shot 9 then or what? 4) what is the advantages of rolling mutiple positive dice? I know that rolling negatives 6's is a horriable failure but what about positives?

Thats it for now.

Thanks for any help you can give.

2

[color=darkblue]1. Stunts - the rules say stunts should rarely impose more than a -2 AV penalty. They don't have a Difficulty of their own, they just require you to score a point or two more over whatever your Difficulty for the attack normally is. If your stunt affects one opponent, it's generally -1, but if it affects more than one opponent, or is extremely tricky, then it might be -2.

The advantage is that you accomplish more with stunts. For example, shooting at one mook with your gun isn't a stunt, and if you hit, you've just taken out one mook. But, if I declare that I'm, say, shooting the support pole out from under an awning, causing it to swing down and hit four mooks at once who are standing under it, that's a stunt. I may have a -1 or -2 to my Gun AV, but if I hit, the awning smacks four mooks instead of one. That's the advantage.

2. If an attack roll meets or exceeds the Difficulty, it succeeds. So if he attacked you, and tied your Dodge score, you were hit. (I'm assuming this is what you meant by "his AV equaled my own.")

3. Active Dodges set your next action back by one shot. So in your example, if his next act was on shot 10, and you attacked him on shot 13, he could actively dodge, but then his next action wouldn't be until shot 9 instead of 10. (So, you are correct, yes.)

4. The advantage of rolling positive dice is that you succeed better. If I kick you and I roll one positive die and get a 4, but my negative die is a 2, then I've only got +2 total to my martial arts AV score for the attack.

If I roll two positive dice, getting a 6 and a 4, now my -2 on the negative die still leaves me with a +8 total to my AV. Eight is clearly better than two, meaning I have a better chance to hit, and will do more damage when I hit.

3

mmmmm........ We were thinking that the "equation" for damage was damage (which is strength +1 for punches, strength +2 for kicks, like what is on the chart) so Damage - opponents toughness = wound. Is this not right? How is the dice factored in, we were thinking that the dice roll was just to see if you hit or not. like they have a dodge value of 15 I have a AV of 16 I roll a positive 3 and a negative 2, so I hit. Thats when we would do the "equation" above and usually I would hit him only for 7 to 8 pts of damage, (but I was a old master so +6 for the using hands, so I hit him for 13 to 14) So 13 minus his toughness of 6, I hit him for 7. Is this right?

I am sorry we dont understand, but I do appriciate you taking the time to help. I hope you understand.

4

The dice roll also affects damage- so very good hits do more damage. The leftover score (the Outcome) is added to the damage. So if you rolled a 16 against a skill of 14, with a gun with damage 12, the total damage would be:

16 - 14 + 12 = 14

From which you would them subtract Toughness.

Yeah, it makes quite a big difference to the system, especially with high toughness characters...

5

ahhhh, OK, cool. Now I think I understand! We almost had it right just not quite. Thanks, I appriciate that! That was alot of help.

Ill get with my GM later today and see if there is anything else we have questions about. I really appricate the help, thanks again.

6

I would use the rule "get -4 to hit four targets" for that stunt, as stated in the stunt rules.

To be honest, that's the only stunt rule I use in the game. If it doesn't effect a person, then I would try to consult the sample difficulties (which means that I have to look in the book, but I hate to do that, so I decide a difficulty depending on how much difference that stunt would do and if I want the scene to end or not).

7

"I would use the rule "get -4 to hit four targets" for that stunt, as stated in the stunt rules."

[color=darkblue]You can certainly do whatever crackles your Krispies, but I'll just point out that that's not hitting four targets, it's hitting one: the awning pole. You're mislabeling the mooks as the target.

Why should hitting a pole near four people be harder than hitting a pole near one person? The result affects four mooks, but that's not the same as them being the target of the attack. (If it were, there'd be massive penalties to using grenades and explosives, and in fact the more mooks you piled into a room, the more penalties to using a grenade.)

8

The thing is that I give penalties for what the player wants to achieve, not after how the player describes her action. The character can skate up on a wall, do a 360 and then hit a mook with a sword, but I wouldn't give any penalty for that. I mean, after all - that's just the same action as if the player had described it "I want to hit that low life with my sword". If you can do it an easy way (low difficulty), then you can do the same thing in a difficult way - it really doesn't matter. And it's the same the other way around - if you can do it in a difficult way (high difficulty), then you can do it in an easy way.

And for the grenade - that's just a (for me) silly and but most of all an easy way to solve a problem, so I would smack that person with a high difficulty; mostly depending on how many opponents the grenade affects. For me, it's like rolling for contacts or sorcery. If the players wants to find a specific person, then it's +5 on the difficulty (or +10, I don't have the book here). And in sorcery; if the player wants to use a spell that are ruining the plot, raise the difficulty by five. It's all in the book.

The more the players will accomplice, the harder will the dice roll be. I prefer if the broke down their action into tiny bits. Otherwise there would be no fighting (a good example of breaking things into tiny bits - in two ways), just one dice roll for all the fight.

As in the support pole example, I would GM it something like this:
Player: "I want to hit all four mooks."
GM: "Roll it. I already told you that their AV is 7, so that's a +4 which brings us to 11".
Player: "Whoa! I rolled 17."
GM: "More then 5 over difficulty. So, how do you take out those mooks?"
Player: "Uhm... There's a support pole there..."
GM: "Now there is."
Player: "...so I try to shoot it down to knock out the mooks."
GM: "Cool idea."

It has never happened, but if they can't explain their action, then I wouldn't let them achieve what they were aiming for.

Roll it, then describe it - not vice versa.

9

"Roll it, then describe it - not vice versa."

[color=darkblue]Yeah, other groups doing this as well. In my group, we describe it, then roll, with rolls based on description. It seems to me that with our style of play, rolling afterwards makes more sense, and with your style, rolling before works better.

Again, whatever makes people happy is fine by me. It just sounds like taking out mooks is slightly harder in your campaign than in mine, but that's cool.

10

Doesn't that to some extent undercut the Carnival of Carnage Schtick? (If I'm thinking of the right one, rather than 10,000 Bullets)

11

Doesn't that to some extent undercut the Carnival of Carnage Schtick?

[color=darkblue]Well, I dunno. Let's take a look...

(For the record, nobody in my group ever uses CoC, so the issue's never come up. Perhaps I'm just treating it more lightly than others of you who use it often.)

Sensei gets out his trusty rulebook...

OK, lessee here...the Carnage schtick has to do with shot costs, and it's based on attacking Unnamed NPCs, of any quantity.

So, here's the deal. Any of my players in my game using CoC would have to attack the mooks separately to get the benefits of the schtick's speed. (In addition, since they're only attacking one NPC at a time, they don't have the penalties for stunting against more than one opponent at a time.)

So it just means that a PC with the schtick should use it on individual targets rather than stunting against more than one mook. Especially with the benefit mentioned above of not having a stunt penalty, I wouldn't consider that undercutting the schtick.

If I've missed something, please point it out. As I said, we don't use this schtick, so I may be overlooking something just sitting here thinking about it hypothetically. :wink:

12

D'oh. I may be confusing it with another schtick - possibly "10,000 Bullets" from Golden Comeback.

Yep (having quickly checked my Sent Items for the list of Gun Schticks I mailed one of my players - being "at work" makes it harder to reach my rulebooks), it was "10,000 Bullets" I was thinking of.

"Carnival of Carnage" reduces the shot cost of attacking mooks. As I play that the number of mooks attacked (above 1) is the penalty (that being the intended outcome of the attack, if not the specific target), it can still be used to reduce the shot cost of attacking multiple mooks with a single spray etc.
"10,000 Bullets" means that you can attack 2 mook targets with no penalty (or 3 targets if you pick it twice) - the example given points out that with several schticks in both "CoC" and "10,000 Bullets", characters should be able to mow down an army of mooks in a single round. Watch out for slipping on all that spent brass ...

So, the way I read the rules, an un-schtuck character attacking two mooks in the same attack would use a 3-shot action, with a +2 penalty.
With "Carnival", it would be a 2-shot action, with a +2 penalty.
With "10,000 Bullets", there would be no penalty, but it would take 3 shots.
With two schticks in "Carnival" and two in "10,000 Bullets", you could take on three mooks as part of the same attack, with no penalty, and as a 1-shot action. Of course, you'd still use a bullet per mook, and you'd have used four schtick picks without getting anything useful for taking down named characters, but that could be your choice.

I think it could stem from my reading of the rules being that the penalty for taking out multiple mooks is based on the end effect of the stunt, rather than the number of actual targets you're using rounds on. The fact that you can take out four mooks with one bullet should be its own budgetary recompense. I'm probably rambling now, and should do some work now I've finished my coffee.