12-26-2018, 11:47 PM | #31 | ||
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
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Yeah, I completely agree that weapons are designed to kill, so lethality makes sense. On the other hand, high-level fights (in 3rd Edition more specifically, but it still happened to some extent in other editions) would often turn into a race to win initiative and fire off an attack and had little (if anything) to do with player choice or tactics. On the other side of the coin, I've been in campaigns where PCs become virtually immune to the world around them. This manifested into some weird things at the table -differing depending upon the nature of the edition being played. (I'm willing to elaborate on that more, but I feel as though doing so here would turn into so much of a discussion about other games that it would move away from Dungeon Fantasy as a topic.) Quote:
I'm okay with PCs being obviously above the average person in a game world. I'm even okay with PCs being able to reliably slay a handful of low-level threats. But, for my own personal tastes, there's a limit to what I want to buy into as a baseline assumption. I find it more interesting when high-level heroes are leading armies rather than fighting them. 4-6 Dungeon Fantasy characters fighting a horde of goblins in a hallway and having a viable chance of success... I'm good with that. 4-6 characters versus a nation's army in a pitched battle and regularly winning... I don't think that's what I want. I have not been a player in a Dungeon Fantasy game (or run one) long enough to see if similar things occur. |
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12-27-2018, 12:25 AM | #32 | ||
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
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Hmmm. Maybe 5 Vryces could do it if really prepped properly. * I do however have a 250 point Character ('Barbarian' Ogress Wrestler) that can easily do the former and has a slim chance (if outfitted just right) at doing the later... but she's not built to a Template and really gives the system a good "bend till it almost breaks" workout. |
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12-27-2018, 02:17 AM | #33 | |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
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A lot of it is feel, so it's hard to quantify, but I'll try. Off the top of my head... Somewhere in the general ballpark the Daredevil Hallway Fight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B66feInucFY), Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris fighting members of a street gang, Conan hacking through a group of nameless mooks, or The Avengers fighting a group of the bad guy's lackeys seems about right for "normal." Idealized portrayals of the "300" Spartans also fit because they at least have some vague grounding in plausibility due to tactics, skill, leadership, terrain, and etc being on their side. I can also buy into the goblin fight from the newer Hobbit movies; even in that, the characters realized they needed to make a run for it before the numbers became too overwhelming. In contrast, the PCs scything through things as though they're Sauron clubbing through squads of men and elves with a single blow (during the opening of Lord of The Rings) is beyond what I want for the baseline assumption of PC power level. (Though, even that pales in comparison -by far- to what some of the D&D campaigns I've participated in have been like. That's not to say they were badwrongfun, just different than what I want from what I desire from my next lengthy experience.) Hmm... Maybe my thoughts on Thor Ragnarok are helpful. I thought the fight on the bridge was cool. Marvel Movie Thor is (I would guess) several levels above where Dungeon Fantasy characters are in terms of power. Even so, there is still at least some vague sense that the bridge is limiting the impact of the enemy's numbers, and that the heroes are still required to work for the victory. In contrast, there is a scene earlier in the movie during which Hela* literally single-handedly defeats everyone. Yet, part of the plot revolves around her going through the effort of awakening an undead army. It's difficult to understand why she would have any use at all for the army being that she's capable of defeating an entire army by herself. *Which, coincidentally, made the end of the bridge scene and the movie make sense. Thor comments to his friends that there's no viable way to fight Hela, so they just leave. I'm not sure how useful that is in terms of giving some context. To expand on that, I will also add that I'm willing to accept some things in movies because I'm also conscious of a movie (as an artform) making choices which make sense in the context of making a movie in which events are scripted to go a specific way, but perhaps don't make as much sense for an interactive game built upon dice rolls and the idea that player choice and experience interacts with the game world and shared narrative. I like dungeon crawling, but I still want to be able to have the occasional castle siege, high seas battle between ships, or something like that without the abilities of PCs regularly eclipsing the seriousness of such an encounter. |
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12-27-2018, 10:34 AM | #34 | ||||||
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
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He mops up the floor with them, but took hits and walked away bloody (probably at some point between 0 and -1xHP). Quote:
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Though, if you're only using DFRPG Spells, then they've been mostly tamed. Mostly. |
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12-27-2018, 01:59 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Feb 2009
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
Given that national armies number in the thousands I don't think 4-6 guys can take one in a pitched battle. There's enough guys crits will tell eventually
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12-28-2018, 01:03 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Sep 2018
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
For reference last week we did a larger battle with 15 Goblins, 5 Hobgoblins and an Ork. We had 4 heroes and 4 hirelings that largely absorbed burning oil and kept goblins from getting behind us. Our tactics didn't work. We all took wounds and one of us went into negatives, three of our hirelings died!, our priest exhausted his power item. There was a very good feeling of "We are managing this but it could kill us". If our plan to sneak into the ruins and open the barricade covertly worked, twice as many goblins would have been an easy fight. If they didn't have high walls and burning oil we could have probably handled another dozen Goblins in the fight. 21 Goblins would have taken away some of the more solid wounding hits we got from the Ork. 21 Orks would probably have been the death of one or more of us. It's all fairly circumstantial what makes a hoard viable.
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12-28-2018, 05:01 PM | #37 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
The usual for an army against PCs is that the army tends to be slow and unstealthy, so it's very hard to force an engagement under terms that favor the army.
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01-04-2019, 09:14 AM | #38 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Does DF ever suffer from "rocket tag"?
If they get to attack. My experience with the kinds of PCs who like to fight armies is that they never offer the army a target to roll to hit. They annihilate armies with some combination of shots from concealment, traps, indirect fire, disposable minions, and dirty tricks (like poison in the water supply). Think of it as the fantasy equivalent of using snipers 1,000 yards away, landmines, artillery, drones, and dirty tricks (which are pretty much universal) in lieu of ordinary line infantry.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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