Blasphemous Polyhedral Weapons Table

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Of course they don't subtract damage. Did you think the TFT rocks at 1d-4 were for healing?

I expressed myself poorly. What I meant is that most weapons on my charts do not have negative modifiers to their damage die.

Sha-ken are odd. Rolling d4 for them seems humorously appropriate since d4 are also little annoying spikey things.

Heh.

The main problem I have with sha ken though is that they do too much damage against unarmored people for what they are (and their zero minST) especially when thrown in a handful (12 sha-ken hits average 20 damage against armor 0, 12 damage against armor 1), and also especially if a GM allows something to increase their damage - e.g. fine sha-ken. Yeah it's at -8 DX plus range to hit with 12 at once, but my main objection is the damage to unarmored people for what they are, and it isn't impossible to get over the DX penalty, especially with halfling madness - a halfling can start with DX 18, 21 with thrown weapons, and some GMs would let them also take Thrown Weapons, for a starting character with adjDX 23 to throw. Then there's the Aid spell... and the 20 average damage might not be so hard to achieve after all. I'd probably limit sha-ken damage (especially when thrown more than one at a time) to 2 points max final damage per sha-ken.

I wouldn’t use them unless I was running an explicitly chopsocki/cinematic campaign.

You could roll a d2 for damage. That would give you the maximum of 2 points of damage you’re looking for.

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by Jim Kane

LOL! You too!! Did you have the Enter the Dragon or Game of Death pair with the ball-bearing speed-swivel from Asian World of Martial Arts? ;-)

Yep, had a couple of pairs of handmade ones, then bought the ball-bearing swivel model from a knife/martial arts weapon store in our mall. Gosh, forgot about those. And throwing stars by the dozen.

I still have a 3 sectional staff...that I nearly killed myself with.

I get the distinct impression that on-the-whole the TFT combat is supposed to be Cinematic by design. Your thoughts on that?

You know, I don’t think so, at least not initially. I think Steve tried to design a reasonably realistic combat systems. But some of the peculiar weapons very clearly belong in a cinematic game.

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by JLV

That reminds me of a story -- a friend of mine in El Paso, Texas was big into Korean and Japanese martial arts (I mean BIG) and his father never quite understood his enthusiasm. My friend would frequently try to explain just how cool he thought all this was, especially some of the Okinawan weapons; and one day he was given a set of nun-chucks for his first day of training. That evening he returned home and his father saw the huge bruises on his arms, chest and back from his first day of learning. He looked at his son for a minute and then said; "NOW I see why those are such great weapons! You just had them to your opponent and say; 'Here, use these!' and you've won the fight!" ;-)

My uncle was equally unimpressed. After seeing me twirl my nunchucks, he said “couldn’t you do the same thing with a few feet of water hose with weights in the ends?”

[JLV]

I was more into Chinese arts -- T'ai Chi and Wing Tsun mostly. They were fun.

[Jim Kane]

Ty, JLV;

I cannot believe how much the three of us have in common.

Were you two guys also big in to Shaw Bros. movies? Specifically: The Venom Mob, from the 5 Deadly Venoms movie (i.e. Kuo Chui, Chiang Sheng, Lo Meng, etc, etc,)?

We ran a few Venom Mob flavored TFT adventures more than once, what a blast wiping up the place with UCI-V; but we really LOVED Kung-Fu 2100 with the "Terminators". We had to make our own copy by xeroxing the game out of TSG, and we played it until our home-made counters were so smudged they were unreadable LOL!

[Chris Rice]

BOTTOM LINE If it can't be scaled and balanced on the NUMBERS side, you have to scale and balance it on the PLAY side.

Frankly, I would much rather see SJ apply more "Weapons Handling Rules" to the weapons to TFT, rather than the math; so that each weapon really FEELS different in PLAY from the next; even if a _____ does the same damage as a ____; because now we are talking Strategy & Tactics and Cinema!

Amen to that.

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by Jim Kane

Ty, JLV;

I cannot believe how much the three of us have in common.

Were you two guys also big in to Shaw Bros. movies? Specifically: The Venom Mob, from the 5 Deadly Venoms movie (i.e. Kuo Chui, Chiang Sheng, Lo Meng, etc, etc,)?

We ran a few Venom Mob flavored TFT adventures more than once, what a blast wiping up the place with UCI-V; but we really LOVED Kung-Fu 2100 with the "Terminators". We had to make our own copy by xeroxing the game out of TSG, and we played it until our home-made counters were so smudged they were unreadable LOL!

We didn’t have access to great (?) esoteric cinema in the late70s/early 80s. So it was a steady diet of old Bruce Lee movies, Chuck Norris, various ripoffs (Bruce Li; Bruce Le), some blaxploitation crossovers (Black Belt Jones) and Jackie Chan in the classic Big Brawl (aka Battlecreek Brawl). I ran a couple of martial arts TFT campaigns inspired by Circle of Iron.

I had 8 years of Tae Kwon Do (Moo Duk Kwan) and was assistant instructor in our dojang (Korean for dojo), so I of course wrote a TFT martial arts supplement. I’ll see if I can find it; it worked though I suspect it would be horrible by today’s standards. Basically, there was a menu of techniques that martial artists could learn (front kick, side kick, roundhouse kick, jab, roundhouse, etc.) and use. Kicks did more damage but had DX penalties; that kind of stuff. At higher IQ levels, you got some AD&D monk abilities.

Didn’t really care for the Kung Fu 2100 game, but set a Traveller Adventure on a Kung Fu 2100 inspired planet.

[Jim Kane]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

We didn’t have access to great (?) esoteric cinema in the late70s/early 80s. So it was a steady diet of old Bruce Lee movies, Chuck Norris, various ripoffs (Bruce Li; Bruce Le), some blaxploitation crossovers (Black Belt Jones) and Jackie Chan in the classic Big Brawl (aka Battlecreek Brawl). I ran a couple of martial arts TFT campaigns inspired by Circle of Iron.

I had 8 years of Tae Keon Do (Moo Duk Kwan) and was assistant instructor in our dojang (Korean for dojo), so I of course wrote a TFT martial arts supplement. I’ll see if I can find it; it worked though I suspect it would be horrible by today’s standards. Basically, there was a menu of techniques that martial artists could learn (front kick, side kick, roundhouse kick, jab, roundhouse, etc.) and use. Kicks did more damage but had DX penalties; that kind of stuff. At higher IQ levels, you got some AD&D monk abilities.

Didn’t really care for the Kung Fu 2100 game, but set a Traveller Adventure on a Kung Fu 2100 inspired planet.

Wow, I swear we must be brothers from different mothers LOL! I won't even bother to give my cv in that department, as this so eerie. Anyway if you haven't watched The Five Deadly Venons, check it out on YouTube, it's like no other Kung-Fu Flick, and started a crazy of about (10?) films from those guys.

Yes, I would love to see your old Martial Arts supplement for TFT, please post it if you like.

Sorry you didn't think KF2100 wasn't much fun; we thought it was a hoot! LOL!

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by JLV

I was more into Chinese arts -- T'ai Chi and Wing Tsun mostly. They were fun.

Tae Kwon Do exploded in popularity in the 1970s and East Texas was no exception. There were no credentialed Chinese martial arts schools in my area. A Shotokan school opened in 1981, a generic kickboxing school had been around since the early 1970s and in 1982, an Isshin Ryu school opened.

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by Jim Kane

Wow, I swear we must be brothers from different mothers LOL! I won't even bother to give my cv in that department, as this so eerie. Anyway if you haven't watched The Five Deadly Venons, check it out on YouTube, it's like no other Kung-Fu Flick, and started a crazy of about (10?) films from those guys.

Yes, I would love to see your old Martial Arts supplement for TFT, please post it if you like.

Yeah, I'm now curious about it myself. I'll run it down.

I did create a martial arts RPG in about 1984 called Chopsocki. It used a d100 to resolve tasks. The key was to accumulate situational bonuses to do ridiculous things. If you tore your shirt off, you got all hit points nack (once per day). Blind men got a to hit bonus. And blind old men were fearsome. Things like that.

Sorry you didn't think KF2100 wasn't much fun; we thought it was a hoot! LOL!

Well, I only played it once and I recall it being a decent design. You may recall that it was the winning entry to a contest in the Space Gamer. But my board wargaming in those days tended towards SPI titles like The Next War, NATO Division Commander, Firefight and Mechwar. And AH titles like Squad Leader. My sci-fi gaming was Star Fleet Battles, Ogre/GEV, Starship Troopers and numerous sci-fi Microgames. So Kung Fu 2100 just wasn't on the radar for me.