Toning down the grue

[tbone]

Originally Posted by martinl

Remember to bring vials of blessed cheese sauce!

Broclins – and their wan demonic cousins, the peshkaliflower – are gustatory devilspawn. Douse them in Hellandaise sauce and roast them where they stand.

Speaking of violence: For foes that do bleed and shriek, there have been many suggestions to replace the more graphic hit locations with generic "critical location" targets. This sounds very good for going low-grue.

With a side benefit, perhaps: The expensive Physiology skill kind of runs up against the fact that, for so many monsters, the neck or eyes or whatever is already an obvious target. By making critical targets non-specific, Physiology rolls could become important for pretty much any monster, giving the "monster expert" PCs more spotlight. Without the GM having to invent specific secret weak points every time.

The same with "And Stay Down!": Heavy use of these options would allow more opportunities to employ the expensive Psychology skill. Even if the GM hasn't given a monster interesting mental weaknesses for the skill to detect, a roll could always be useful in predicting what sort of injury (or other trigger) will provoke what "And Stay Down!" reaction ("cower, play dead, flee, or surrender"). The idea, of course, is that players could shoot for just enough violence to achieve that result, instead of instinctively going for the 9d-9 Ice Dagger to the vitals.

(Along those lines, I suppose a GM who uses the explicit categories of fodder, worthy, and boss could use Physiology/Psychology rolls to tell players which category a new monster belongs to. I haven't played this way, but maybe it'd be fun for players who are used to video games that have categories like this.)