Rules questions/clarification

[Abyssal Squid]

I don't wanna fill up the recruit thread with rules chatter so I'll put stuff here.

GEIST KILL ROLL - G CLASS
(On a successful hit)
D20 + [Health] Vs. [Attack Damage] (reduced by Armor)
(Health is a G-Class Geist only stat)
If Roll fails, the Geist is killed.
If roll succeeds, reduce Health by the amount of Attack Damage.

The only way that roll can fail is if Health is less than Attack Damage, in which case the Geist is dead anyway.

[Gravedust]

Yeahp.. Oh jeez that's a really bad sign…

I suddenly remember now why I vowed to properly test things before I tell folks about them. -_-. 
So many of the new rules were just floating in my head and I scribbled them out because I needed them to be in the manual somewhere. So I'm afraid you're going to find a lot of this crud.

I know fo sho there are some things that need adding/fixing in the manual I'm planning on doing review and amendments tonight.

So if you feel up to it keep on looking for dumb  stuff and I'll make a point of fixing it.

But if you'd like to let me save some face, maybe hold off for a bit so I can fix the more glaring problems. -_-

[Abyssal Squid]

Compromise: anything I run into I'll put in a PM, so you don't miss it but at the same time your first draft errors aren't archived for all to see.

[Gravedust]

Sure, sounds good.

[Abyssal Squid]

Either Area Fire isn't fully explained, or the machine guns should have two numbers under Area Fire, the AoE radius and the accuracy penalty. I figure it's either radius 0 or 1, though.

[Gravedust]

Yep yep. Area fire is always radius 1. I'll put that in somewhere.

[Abyssal Squid]

Stowing an item in a vehicle counts as a "pass off" action, right? Even if that's true for enclosed vehicles, it'd make sense if it was just a "drop" action to put stuff in the empty seat of an ATV. I could see an argument either way!

[Gravedust]

Yeah, putting stuff in a vehicle counts as a Pass.

Drop is meant to be 'literally just let it fall on the ground and forget it' and is really there for the purpose of lightening your character for additional movement speed when the shit is hitting the fan, or if you need to carry a guy. The subtext is you are abandoning stuff you Drop, which is why you can dump multiple items at once for 'free'. I am only really planning to track items that are stored in vehicles or caches, for housekeeping purposes, so the downside of a drop is that unless someone scoops it up within the next round or so, it'll disappear.

But, since playing Musical Equipment isn't how I wanted this mission to start really, I think I'll just say: 'you can put whatever and whoever you want in the trucks, and I'll say it takes 3 rounds to get everything fully loaded.'

[Abyssal Squid]

Putting this here because I like keeping topics separate, and inventory management is in the news again.

Rules say it takes an entire action to drop any number of items, but lately it looks like you've been allowing people to take any action and drop no more than one item in the same turn.

I'm not complaining, it makes plenty of sense (imo dropping a second or third item should still take a whole action, as should stripping any number of items), just checking if this was an official rules change.

[Gravedust]

Mar 9, 2017 10:35:30 GMT -8 Abyssal Squid said:

Putting this here because I like keeping topics separate, and inventory management is in the news again.

Rules say it takes an entire action to drop any number of items, but lately it looks like you've been allowing people to take any action and drop no more than one item in the same turn.

I'm not complaining, it makes plenty of sense (imo dropping a second or third item should still take a whole action, as should stripping any number of items), just checking if this was an official rules change.

The letter of the law is still correct, in that dropping or storing an item (or any number of items, in the case of a Drop or Strip) takes a whole action, and that's all you can do. (besides move)

But sometimes I either don't realize that's what is happening while I'm doing the round, or decide I don't want to hold up the round to explain that you can't do that, especially if it's not something critical. (or sometimes I will just not do the thing you asked. )

As with a few other things, the Action system is a bit restrictive on purpose.

[mydad]

I guess I misunderstood the rules. I thought the price you paid for the speed (not using an action) in stripping off items is destroying them and being unable to reclaim them even if you got to the same place again, so it made sense to me that this didn't use an action. I guess I'll have to read the rules more carefully. You should have warned me when I tried to break the rules like that.

[Abyssal Squid]

Alright, so that change wasn't intentional, then. I'm definitely not going to fully burden all of my soldiers next mission!

[Gravedust]

Mar 9, 2017 13:28:19 GMT -8 mydad said:

I guess I misunderstood the rules. I thought the price you paid for the speed (not using an action) in stripping off items is destroying them and being unable to reclaim them even if you got to the same place again, so it made sense to me that this didn't use an action.

Sooo.. In light of recent revelations, do you want to change your orders? Presently you have Tobias dropping all his stuff (which costs an action) which means he will be unable to pick up H until next round.

[mydad]

Yeah, I'll change my orders.

[Abyssal Squid]

Mar 20, 2017 13:48:20 GMT -8 Gravedust said:

(( For what it's worth, I'm houseruling that dead G-class count as half-cover, and along with abandoned or destroyed vehicles, can be traversed at the rate of 1 square per round. ))

I've been meaning to ask, what do full and half cover do, mechanically? They're not mentioned in the rules, except that being inside a building grants +3 to evasion against attacks made from outside.

I'm guessing full cover blocks LOS and prevents attacking altogether, while half-cover grants a modest evasion bonus?

[Gravedust]

I'm guessing full cover blocks LOS and prevents attacking altogether, while half-cover grants a modest evasion bonus?

Yep! After this mission I'm going to go over the rules doc and rewrite/add a bunch of stuff. So hopefully a lot of this missing material will be explained. -_-

[Abyssal Squid]

Does the Stunned condition clear up at the end of players' turn, or does​ it last until the start of next turn? And does the -5 apply to Evasion and Defense, or only active rolls? I suppose Evasion isn't involved in any player rolls now that I think of it, whoops.

[Gravedust]

May 2, 2017 4:03:54 GMT -8 Abyssal Squid said:

Does the Stunned condition clear up at the end of players' turn, or does​ it last until the start of next turn? And does the -5 apply to Evasion and Defense, or only active rolls? I suppose Evasion isn't involved in any player rolls now that I think of it, whoops.

Currently Stunned wears off at the end of the players' turn, so it doesn't effect Defense rolls, just movement and shooting/any other thing that requires a roll.

[Abyssal Squid]

Since I just noticed the cliff in the map, I've got some questions about cliffs and terrain. Defining a cliff here as "a boundary between two squares that differ in height by more than 1 (Cliff Height is the difference in height minus 1)."

Are geist unable to make melee attacks across a cliff? If so, does that prevent goliaths from using their claw attack across a Height 1 cliff, and if it doesn't then could they still claw attack across a Height 5 cliff?

I think the most elegant way to handle it would be to say that attacking uphill (regardless of steepness of slope) incurs a penalty of (defender height advantage)-1 to maximum range. I like the mental image of a goliath standing on its tippy-toes at the base of a small cliff and scything people at the top, or standing at the base of a slightly higher cliff and hopping futily, and this rule makes that possible without making a qualitative distinction between melee reach attacks and short-range ranged attacks. It also doesn't result in weird effects where shooting at a cliff is somehow harder than shooting from the same distance up an equally tall hill. It also provides a modest advantage to holding high ground without actually affecting the math much.

Considering how much I rely on the Grenade Launcher I'm tempted to suggest that the height advantage work in both directions (extending maximum range) but that seems a bit cheesy, especially for the scoped rifles. It'd also mess up the math and cause the rule come up far more, but I still wouldn't complain as a player! :{}


Other main thing, the LoS rule is the same as in BATTLEPOD, right? That is, you have LoS as long as there isn't any terrain between you and your target that's higher than both of you. Sitting in a crater doesn't give you any cover except from enemies who are also in craters.


Last thing, about intervening cover. Do "rocks" squares provide a cover penalty if you're shooting through them, or only shooting into them? Does a Buffalo still provide cover if it's in a valley and I'm shooting over it, from hilltop to hilltop?

[Gravedust]

Yep, it basically works the way it did in Battlepod, except Battlepod had some additional rules that dealt with defilades (i.e. someone on a high building shooting at someone else that's behind a lower building. The standard rules say that shot works, logic dictates otherwise so we introduced a 'dead zone', etc.) that we probably won't need here since the terrain won't be as irregular and you can't get on top of buildings, etc.)

The best way to think about Full Cover vehicles is to treat them like they're essentially mobile terrain that sticks up 1-height higher than whatever they're on. (though when they shoot they do so from their ground level) so in your example, (height 1, shooting over a Buffalo at Height 0 at a Height 1 target,) should have LOS.

Rocks provide cover if the line of a shot passes through any square with rocks in it, ignoring any rocks in the square you occupy. (but if you are shooting from rocks you want to do some from the edge closest to your target, ideally.)

A weird exception that I was noticing earlier though is that if you are shooting 'upwards' (i.e. you are height 0, shooting at height 1 with a rock field at height 0 between you and the target, or a repeat of your earlier Buffalo question but substituting a rock field for a buffalo in the low point) you aren't really shooting 'through' the rock field so much as over the top of it, so in that situation I would consider not giving the cover bonus to the target.

Sooooo. We haven't got into it just yet, but terrain height corresponds to Altitude, which is something that flying units deal with. The way I was going to deal with Altitude/height are basically just to treat them identically as vertical distance, which would be added to the range.

Which is nice and simple for flying vehicle movement and range calculation, (as a flier you use movement points for horizontal AND vertical movement) but causes some dumb things to happen when it comes to attacks: The first deals with short ranged attacks across slopes, since by the letter of the law a range:1 attack means a Geist couldn't actually hit anyone across even a 1 height difference... (1horizontal + 1vertical = 2) : / But then they also have the magical ability to hit diagonal squares with Range:1 so maybe this enchantment also applies in this case as well

Another is that according to the letter of the law, shots going downward are penalized in the same way as shots going upward. It's easy enough to say that only shots going upwards count the extra distance, but I need to make sure that doesn't make flyers too difficult to hit, especially if they can punch down across that distance with no penalty. (this can maybe be countered by just giving them -evasion, but really there's a lot about flyers I just haven't really worked out in detail yet, though I'm closing in on doing that.

But anyway, I wasn't going to get into messing with of height stuff until I've had time to make sure flying units slot into the rules correctly.

[Abyssal Squid]

Oh right, flying is (planned to be) a thing. Feeling pretty good about my idea that height should only affect maximum range, then, though I've got some additions to it:

When attacking upward, maximum range is reduced by 1 for each point of altitude difference past the first (no range penalty for an altitude difference of 1).
When attacking downward, maximum range is reduced by 1 for each point of altitude difference past the fifth (no range penalty if the altitude difference is 5 or less).
Exception: When attacking downward, ballistic weapons have their maximum range increased by 1 for every two points of altitude difference (rounded down). This increase cannot exceed the weapon's drift value.

Yes, it would be more parsimonious to ignore the Pythagorean theorem in the Z axis too, but there's a bunch of reasons why it makes sense not to. Probably most importantly, it's represented differently, with the numbers already given to you instead of having to count them out (or use a visual aid :V ), and generally works with different systems than X and Y. Second, vertical distance is almost always going to be negligible compared to horizontal distance, with a similarly negligible Pythagorean impact. Third, gravity impacts movement along the Z axis but not along X or Y.

This doesn't address geist punching soldiers from 20 feet above, but just don't give fliers melee attacks and that shouldn't be an issue. It also gives a use for ludicrously long ranges on direct-fire weapons, prevents fliers from going arbitrarily high to cheese the range advantage (the net advantage caps out at +4), is something you can apply just by looking without having to delve into The Caverns of Crunch, and in any case should rarely be an issue for ground fighters. The ballistic weapons tweak is a ~MY VERISIMILITUDE~ thing but really, you should be able to throw grenades further downhill, and shoot artillery further too. >:{}