FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1109796137[/unixtime]]
As to not being able to make someone who is good at fighting Wizards - try someone with high Intelligence and Agility - you hit most of the time against everyone and are rarely hit by anyone. You don't do a huge amount of damage against anyone - but that's just like your write-up of a "Mage Slayer" except that he doesn't completely suck when fighting anyone who isn't a mage.
Well here's the thing, you're supposed to suck against certain character types. That's really how I want to design the system. Only if all your stats are the same should you function equally against everyone. Otherwise there should be some counter system in place.
Absolutely. But you want that part of the game to be under DM control, not Player Control. It's fine to have people get Favored Enemy Bonuses or specific Energy Types so that certain characters and teams can shine against particular enemies. But making a setup in which players themselves make good or bad characters is just a bad idea all around. When you assign your stats to fit your vision, a min/maxer should not be able to take one look at it and tell you that your build suxxorz and be right.
You're judging this from seeing less than half the game. You're being the guy in D&D right now who goes down the fighter's character sheet, sees his massive BaB and HP and then looks at the wizard's shitty BaB and saves and instantly concludes fighters roxxorz and wizards suxxorz.
That's like the fighter player saying to the wizard "well if you never cast a single spell and the rogue never used any of his class abiliities, I'd totally dominate."
To which most sane people are going to reply "who gives a fuck you still suck."
My system is set up so defensive character use their abilities better, since abilities are based off of the three defenses. This is why the offenses can have a slight edge and I'm not too worried about it. The hulk obviously is going to be less skill oriented, and that's ok, because he's a dumb brute. And he better have an edge at smashing stuff because he's at a disadvantage for doing almost everything else.
Then you can have a batman style character, who is awesome at outwitting his foes and doing other cool stuff like that. And he really shouldn't be physically as tough as the hulk, because his strengths lie in getting a tactical upper hand to counteract his normal disadvantages in a straight up fight.
And in monsters we certainly know that we are definitely going to have big dumb barbarians who think like the hulk, and we're going to have crafty wizards who think like batman, and we're probably going to have people inbetween those extremes.
And I don't find any problem with allowing people to have a numerical edge in a straight up fight. Because if you're one of those people, that's how you want to fight, and you should be good at it. However, it also means you'll have a disadvantage in the crafty combat arena, and so you can still be beaten.
The illusionist doesn't beat the evoker in a stand up fight, that'd be stupid. If he matched blasting spell for blasting spell, the illusionist would get trashed, as he should. If he's going to win, He should be trying to prevent that straight up fight.
And really, what's wrong with that?
Rc, how is it so hard in Frank#s system to build a mage slayer? Put half of your stats in magic defenses and put the other half in some type of offense. Magic offense means you are the mage who kills other mages, physical offense means you do it like Conan.
Well here's the thing, Frank's system doesn't have different offenses, and I can understand his reasoning for that, beacuse different offenses just hose people who want to use different attacks.
What his system does is merge defenses and offenses into one stat.
His two stat system: Red/blue has physical versus magic, where physical is physical attack/defese and magic is magic attack/defense.
His four stat system is essentially each color split into AC/attack and soak/DR, but since +1 to hit and +1 to damage are the same thing in his damage system, they are more or less the same. So I'll use red/blue because it's simpler to describe a point. If you want to convert red/blue to 4 stat, simply accept that red = the sum of the two physical stats and blue = the sum of the two magic stats. Since +1 attack= +1 damage, it doesn't really matter numerically how you divide them..
Now, Lets take your typical wizard Blue 4.
Now you want to make a mage killer. You suggested Red 2/ Blue 2.
This means you attack him at +2, he attacks you at +2. You're not especially good at killing wizards at all. You're even.
If you go Red 4, then your'e +4 to hit him, he's +4 against you. Again, you've really gained nothing. Now the Red 4 character is a better mage killing assassin, but he better have the element of surprise or he's totally screwed.
All you're basically choosing is how much of a role you'd like surprise to play against wizards. If you go even, then you prefer a drawn out slugging match. If you put it all to red, then basically its more of an assassins duel. But that's it, you aren't in any fashion better suited to kill wizards than the guy who went Blue 4 or Red 4.
And that's actually a feature of the system in that your choices are pretty much meaningless as far as one on one matchups are concerned. You can be given an opponent A, and all other opponents regardless of how they assigned their stats will be 50/50 against A, assuming they're the same level of course.
Basically here, there are no truly meaningful choices in a one on one battle. Your only tactics actually enter into the equation when you have more people, where your tactics are clearly to focus fire your Blue to attack their red first and vice versa. Even this tends to be an odd paradox when you have the same range as your enemies.