Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

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shinimasu
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Post by shinimasu »

The usual formula I see for "blade on a stick" vs "blade all the way down" is that stick blade usually gets a 5ft reach and some kind of penalty in close quarters.
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Post by Koumei »

Yeah, despite being the same length in the case you're putting forward, people still "expect" a polearm to be some kind of reach weapon where the violence is happening on the other end of a stick, whereas they expect swords to be close quarters weapons.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Traditionally, halberd grant bonuses to trips and/or when set against a charge. It's one of those Swiss army polearms.
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Post by hyzmarca »

OgreBattle wrote:In a D&D style low leven dungeon crawler, what would you expect to be the game difference between wielding a 2 meter halberd/poleaxe vs a 2 meter greatsword?


I'm thinking that making them mechanically the same opens up more 'rule of cool' character variety, but there's a lot of people who just NEED a mechanical difference for style differences
That depends. Does your system differentiate slash damage from piercing damage?
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Post by tussock »

A 6' halberd is really short. The norm for 5' infantrymen was 8'. You're talking like the Black Bill or something, which was famous for dominating battles if they could get opposing units disorganised on rough ground, and getting everyone stabbed to death for lack of reach if not.

In real life, reach is a thing you can just step around, one guy with a pike drops it and gets out his backup weapon or dies. They work in groups because you can't step around the whole group. Real people in mine fights used daggers and maces for the lack of room to use anything bigger properly. There's not many examples of military fights in rooms, like D&D posits, but most of them are a few heavily armoured men with long single-handed swords and they just murder everyone.

Anyway, short pole weapons are functionally very much the same as the long swords, the grips available and where the pointy and cutty bits are all work the same, except that you can usually hook and pull things with the pole weapons where you stay more at a distance, where the sword trips are all up-close lever work.

--

So I'd probably give the 2-handed sword +1 shield AC, and the short polearm a bonus on trips/disarms and stuff, with the same damage and something like more common crits for the sword. If I was getting fancy I'd give the polearm free disarms or trips on a crit, instead of the extra damage given to the sword.
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Post by Username17 »

Tussock wrote: There's not many examples of military fights in rooms, like D&D posits
It should surprise no one at this point, but you are in fact wrong. Fortresses have been stormed and infiltrated many times in human history, with the resulting military comflicts being in rooms and hallways. Because fucking obviously.

As it happens, there are actually lots of situations where non-formation soldiers relied on spears. Including, yes, fights inside rooms and hallways. But very importantly, the bayonet is a way to carry a gun and a spear at the same time. And it went out of fashion when guns became automatic and could hold a large number of bullets in their magazines - not when formations went out of fashion forty years earlier.

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Post by OgreBattle »

Seems like Landsknechts used equal length swords and polearms somewhat interchangeably as support to pike blocks and body guards for important persons and places:

http://armoury.co.za/thoughts-on-the-us ... ed-swords/
Image

That article mainly talks about two handed swords but does mention shorter halberds as being used in a similar way to greatswords:
A large two-handed sword and a halberd have a number of advantages over pikes or spears, the weapons with which they often worked. Though the pole weapons are longer, they lack cutting power and are relatively unwieldy; a halberd or two-handed sword can deliver enormous power when swung down, and can change from thrusting to cutting as the course of battle dictates. Pikes and spears will often knock a man from his feet, but will not necessarily kill a person, whereas a downwards swing from sword or halberd as its wielder steps through the line will cause significantly more damage. Such downwards swings are present in modern Japanese koryu, as well as in the montante and spadone manuals.
There's also an interesting hypothesis that it was better guns that replaced greatswords n' short polearms in the "skirmishing badass" role:
Since pikes continued for another 150 years after the sword and halberd disappeared, it would appear that these weapons were replaced by something that obviously did their job better. Firearms fill this gap; they can kill horses, be used to skirmish, and they can fire into opposing infantry blocks and at fallen enemies. As firearms became more common, the need for another killing weapon was reduced, until finally the pike and firearm were merged into the bayonetted musket.
and another article at http://armoury.co.za/the-skirmish-a-rol ... in-battle/

I figure for a tabletop skirmish game I'd have 2m long swors and 2m long polearms just use the same stats. The broad categories would be...

- Handweapon/sideweapon: Something you can carry and draw at your side comfortably, maybe dual wield
- Greatweapon: 100-110% length of wielder, personal skill is important
- Formation weapon: 150%+ longer than the wielder, formation discipline is key

"Polearm & Shield dude" should also fit in there somehow but I'm not 100% sure why you would use that formation instead of two handed pikemen so unsure of gameplay effect.

For a tabletop RPG I'd give greatswords n' poleaxe's some small difference, like D&D3e's crit range and multiplier variance among similar weapons.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Fri Mar 03, 2017 9:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

I would definitely distinguish between a hand weapon that you would use with a shield and a side weapon that an archer might have as a backup.

As to whether a skirmish game should be distinguishing between halberds and greatswords, that depends on how "character centered" you want your game to be. Which is to say that if your units are represented by just three numbers and their equipment, you're probably going to want that equipment to do some heavy lifting and you'll want to differentiate warhammers and broadswords. But if your guys have skills and heroic abilities and shit, then you don't need the equipment to do that much and having just four to six categories of melee weapons would be fine.

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Post by Eikre »

OgreBattle wrote:"Polearm & Shield dude" should also fit in there somehow but I'm not 100% sure why you would use that formation instead of two handed pikemen so unsure of gameplay effect.
Shields help unit moral a lot, and they are good to have if the formation dissolves into a melee. You use them when you cannot have the highest expectations of your men's discipline.

That said, when Phillip II directed the Macedonians to drill with two-handed pikes, they immediately became a terrifying military juggernaut that abruptly subjugated the entire rest of Greece and set up Alexander for an unstoppable march across the world. I figure, if you can make it work, that's the strategy you should go for.
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Post by Username17 »

Two handed pikes have been really good or really bad many times in ancient warfare. There are established ways to defeat them and established things they are strong against. But Macedon's real advantage was that they were a combined arms force with highly disciplined groups of soldiers who were differently equiped. They had shield bearing hypspists to guard the flanks of the vulnerable but powerful pike wielding phalangites and to engage enemy forces while nimble cavalry would deliver decisive strikes from the flanks of the enemy. They had dedicated skirmisher units of peltasts to break up enemy units so that the phalangites could mow through them. And the really important thing is that the Macedonian army would have meetings about which force of the army would take frontal or support roles in any particular battle. Sometimes they'd have heavily armored hoplites take an anvil role while a flanking force provided a hammer, and sometimes they'd use skirmishers to break up enemy formations and then ram into them with a tighter formation. They radically changed their tactics and command structure based on what they thought would work against the enemy of the day. It was the Star Trek: Next Generation of military forces.

As for Pikemen alone, the battle of Falkirk involved unsupported Scottish pikes against longbows and that went very badly for the Scots. You need more than a defensive square. A defensive square just flummoxes cavalry and light infantry charges. If your opponents have ranged superiority or a good wedge of halberdiers, your defensive square will not hold.

Anyway, the key question of whether you want to differentiate a halberd and a greatsword is how invested you are in what any particular dude you have on the table can do. If the only thing you know about a model is that he's a moderate discipline human maceman, then that should be different from a moderate discipline human swordsman. On the other hand, if you are getting special black cloak soldiers and order of the dragon soldiers and shit that all have skills and abilities, then the squads are already differentiated, and they should be armed with maces or swords as your whim dictates based on what one-handed weapons you think look cool.

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Post by Sigil »

As far as players actually wanting some for of rules for fighting with halberds in 2 meter square hallways for the purposes of 'realism', the 3.5 SRD has rules for "squeezing" which imparts a -4 penalty to attack rolls and AC. If you wanted, you could invent a less severe "cramped" condition where all attacks other than piercing attacks (and not piercing AND whatever attacks, just piercing) get a -2 penalty to attack rolls. It's pretty simple and it would shut them up.
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Post by OgreBattle »

I like how the boobies are drawn in Fate/Stay Night, I recently found out there's also an elaborate magic system in there:

http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Magic

Is that based off of World of Darkness magic in any way?
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Post by Mask_De_H »

OgreBattle wrote:I like how the boobies are drawn in Fate/Stay Night, I recently found out there's also an elaborate magic system in there:

http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Magic

Is that based off of World of Darkness magic in any way?
The answer is a resounding shrug.

Nasu is/was a huge TTRPG head and seems like the kind of guy to get into WOD, but he's never said anything one way or another about it, and the concepts he uses are generic enough that you can't pin anything on him definitively. Nasuverse magic, specifically, takes as much from generic contemporary esotericism as it seems to ding MtA; probably means they're drinking from the same well.

E: also, the TM Wiki is screwy; use TMDict.
Last edited by Mask_De_H on Wed Mar 08, 2017 3:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by virgil »

Not sure how much of it is rhetorical, but why are Pathfinder cannons so terrible? A cannon vs a heavy ballista pretty much sees the latter being superior in essentially every way except mobility. This goes double between the bombard vs catapult.

Firearms had accuracy issues and weren't actually all that better than arrows for a super long time so keeping them comparable with bows/crossbows on the PC scale is actually rather easy, but that's a harder narrative to swallow in terms of gunpowder on the siege engine scale - as those actually changed the face of warfare with their real introduction.
Last edited by virgil on Fri Mar 10, 2017 6:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by virgil »

Does the illusion of a torch/light actually generate light by which someone can see by?
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Post by Username17 »

virgil wrote:Does the illusion of a torch/light actually generate light by which someone can see by?
Depends on the illusion. I think you have to get up to the third level versions before you get light and heat out of the deal.
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Post by virgil »

FrankTrollman wrote:
virgil wrote:Does the illusion of a torch/light actually generate light by which someone can see by?
Depends on the illusion. I think you have to get up to the third level versions before you get light and heat out of the deal.
So, here's a hypothetical - there's a torch on a street, the radius of its light not quite intersecting with the others along the street. Could someone cast silent image to cover the real torch and overlay the area beneath it with a 'false front' as if the illumination hadn't changed, permitting someone to walk underneath the torch without being illuminated? It'd sort of be like a D&D equivalent to looping security footage.

ADDENDUM: Related illusion question. Can illusions extend into the darkvision spectrum?
Last edited by virgil on Fri Mar 10, 2017 6:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Pixels »

Light is entirely visual - I can't see why you couldn't use Silent Image as a torch in a pinch, or to block light from a torch by putting an illusory bucket over it. It wouldn't produce its own heat or block the heat from the torch. Somebody who notices the discrepency would get a disbelief save and potentially see through your figment to the light beneath.

Major Image does thermal effects if you want the full torch experience, at the low, low price of a 3rd level spell slot.

Re: darkvision:
[url=http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm wrote:SRD[/url]]Darkvision is the extraordinary ability to see with no light source at all, out to a range specified for the creature. Darkvision is black and white only (colors cannot be discerned). It does not allow characters to see anything that they could not see otherwise—invisible objects are still invisible, and illusions are still visible as what they seem to be. Likewise, darkvision subjects a creature to gaze attacks normally. The presence of light does not spoil darkvision.
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Post by vezidoroga »

Pixels wrote:Light is entirely visual - I can't see why you couldn't use Silent Image as a torch in a pinch, or to block light from a torch by putting an illusory bucket over it.
You sort of can, but you can do the latter much easier and better than the former. There's some subtlety in the description of Silent Image:
SRD wrote:This spell creates the visual illusion of an object, creature, or force, as visualized by you
Silent Image doesn't produce an actual image, in the sense of manipulating light. It produces the impression of that arrangement of light existing. Everyone sees it, but it's not "really" there. That's why when someone realizes it's an illusion they can literally see through it - light is still acting the way it always did in the physical world, everyone else is being given false sensory input by magic.

So you can easily produce the illusion of light shining in the area of effect of the spell, but it can only show you an image you can already visualize. That's fine for the streetlight example, but it won't let you get information you don't already have - e.g. read a book or spot a monster.
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Post by tussock »

For 3e, Silent Image (and so on) is a Figment, so it only shows something that isn't there (and specifically not voids in place of things that are there).

If you want to change or hide a thing that is there, you need a Glamour, which are typically cast on the things to be changed or to be made invisible.

Patterns are then mind-affecting Figments (because other ones aren't), and Shadow is the partly-real ones that can do real damage and even kill you (because other ones can't).


Now, you can cover objects and creatures with Figments, but only if you create a big Figment that hides them completely. Illusory Wall is the standard there, being a simple and permanent Figment that hides things by appearing to be a wall in front of them.


So if you have a wall to walk along, just create an image of that wall out from it a bit, and walk between them. Or crawl, if it's low.
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Post by Aharon »

Not exactly one annoying question, but I figured here's the best place to ask (didn't find anything useful on Dumpshock or Reddit):

What general principles should I keep in mind to get an optimal result in character creation in Shadowrun 3e?
Are there any trap options?
What are some strong choices, what are weaker choices for characters?
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Post by vezidoroga »

tussock wrote:Silent Image (and so on) is a Figment, so it only shows something that isn't there (and specifically not voids in place of things that are there)
That sounds right now that I think about it, because otherwise silent image is much stronger (and adding a fake visual impression is plausibly distinct from suppressing a real visual impression). Did you read the "no voids" somewhere specific? I'd be interested in the explanation.

And what does that mean if the thing you're trying to hide something the audience can't see anyway? In the light example, your rogue puts out a lamp in a hallway, and you project the illusion of a dimly-lit, empty hallway. The guards can't actually see the rogue with or without the image, nor would they be able to see the dark hall. Is that not allowed because you're showing a "void" in place of what's actually there (the rogue), or because you're showing a "void" in place of the darkness (which is a void, but probably not the kind the rules mean)?
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Post by Eikre »

An important point of interest:

"Figments cannot make something seem to be something else."

This is an imperfectly authored clause and I would have been happier if they had said, "Figments cannot invalidate sensations, they can only introduce new ones." This is my preferred interpretation.

An ordinary person gleans no visual sensation from gazing on total darkness, so introducing a complex image like a dimly-lit empty hallway would be permissible. If one of the guards from your example had darkvision and could see down the hallway perfectly, or if the rogue lit a lantern, then the given impression would be a merger of the real and illusory hallways- the rogue would be easily spotted, but any illusory features would also remain believable, as long as their inclusion in the scene wasn't otherwise irreconcilable. On the other hand, if the guards did not have a means of seeing down the real hallway, but the rogue failed his move-silently check, the incongruity of the sound with their visual impression and might be entitle them to a save.

The question is to what extent you can obscure a real sensation by modeling one that is "louder" than it. In general, I think figments should be validated as distractions and misdirection, but not as outright cloaks (which is what glamours are for). The question should not be, "can I see it?" but rather, "do I notice it?" Basically, the dimly lit hallway is always going to offer a visual impression, but so does your nose, which, the vast majority of the time, you do not even parse as being in your field of vision.

So, if you depict a discreet physical object at the mouth of dimly-lit hallway, your viewer is going to get a spot check to realize that their impression of the concealed space is more complete than it should be. Whether this check is even on the RNG or not is up to the circumstances, as well as the viability of the illusion. If, at the mouth of the poorly-lit hallway, you depict a set of wrought-iron bars, a mesh screen, a sheet of glass, or a crowd of people walking past, then a viewer's inclination will be to accept the existence of the object even though they have had a full impression of everything behind it. The strength of this inclination will drop proportional to the impermeability of the object and how much space it occupies in their field of vision. A solid brick wall that completely covers the entry is flatly irreconcilable with the full sight of the hallway behind it, but a viewer might still discard the contradiction and accept that they only saw a wall if their attention was otherwise saturated, if they were zoned out, or if they placed no significance by the difference either way.

EDIT: Also, if a person accepts that a set of real and illusory sensations are not mutually exclusive, but tries to focus on one over the other (for example: trying to pick out a real voice behind the murmur of an illusory crowd, or trying to aim a shot at a target that was partially concealed by illusory cover), that would constitute "close study" and entitle them to a save for disbelief.
Last edited by Eikre on Mon Mar 13, 2017 6:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by virgil »

What's the main/biggest RPG that uses the resolution system where you roll multiple dice, but only keep the highest; against a difficulty that does the same thing (rather than a fixed TN)? It's not a proper dice pool, like Shadowrun, since you're not counting hits. It's not Deadlands or Savage Worlds, since that's a fixed TN.
Last edited by virgil on Tue Mar 14, 2017 9:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

virgil wrote:What's the main/biggest RPG that uses the resolution system where you roll multiple dice, but only keep the highest; against a difficulty that does the same thing (rather than a fixed TN)? It's not a proper dice pool, like Shadowrun, since you're not counting hits. It's not Deadlands or Savage Worlds, since that's a fixed TN.
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