oh, uhm, no, I don't think I'm interested in organizations from a game I don't even know
But was it that? Maybe it's my not being a native speaker but explanations have a slightly different meaning in my book. Like, needing to elaborate on something to let someone else understand it.
And that's basically why I was puzzled and I could not remember when I had been asking you something requiring "explanation"
So when I left off last session the players had discovered that the killer stalking the streets is some manner of possessing entity that takes the form of an elegant, eviscerated woman with stars where her stomach should be.
Also: The star-skank possesses middle-aged white office workers who are hiding things from their wives, transports them by mysterious means to out-of-the-way locations, then makes them saw off and eat their own arms (crossposting)
Or it could reveal that there are other contemporary crime waves that appear unrelated except that they all seem motivated by the same emotion: maybe someone else is killing people who abandon puppies, or abuse kids.
Spirit is compelled to kill the summoner's intended victim because of the spell, despite it being unconnected to the spirit's agenda.
But the spell then fails because the spirit isn't the kind that the summoner expected, so the "and now go back from whence you came" bit doesn't stick.
The party finds a newspaper article that says the first killing done in this fashion had a victim who doesn't fit the pattern at all.
That victim is directly connected to the original summoner--in fact, he was probably a prime suspect in her murder until it became a serial killing and he had nothing to do with any of the other victims.
Since the party knows that the killings weren't all done by the same physical person, they have no reason to cross this woman off their list of suspects.
Really she wants: (1) anything where her PC has near-constant access to a helper figure, to talk to and get assistance from and occasionally play in scenes without the main character; (2) a setting/genre I know better than she does (which drives us towards sci-fi).
Right now in our one-on-one I've had a whole gaggle of helpers. Olrun seems to shed them at a prodigious rate. At least most don't, like, die as a result of that.
I need to go dig up my copy of Trollbabe. This is very much a Trollbabe situation. Or, at least, it's worth doing a test session or two in Trollbabe to refine our understanding of what we do and don't want.
@BESW a PC, in the hands of the right player, otherwise an NPC. As a PC, the GM would tell him what's going down in secret, or there'd be a little pre-game scene with the whole group between the PC and Karl.
"Guys, has anyone else noticed that every time Karl has us go kill something it's gotten more and more terrifying?" "Y'know, Gerry, I have." "That kinda worries me." "Frankly I'm starting to wonder why we even have a civilization left, Gerry."
that comment makes me think it'd be possibly pretty hilarious as a cartoon, at least.
He's an infiltrator who can mimic how others look.
So he pretended to be one of the assassins went to kill him, and used a holo projection so he could be two assassins.
Hitched a ride straight back to the base on the assassins' helicopter, but somebody on the helipad noticed the hologram wasn't real.
Now the building's on high alert for the invisible intruder (the holo flickered out), and Trogdor's guy (as the assassin who didn't notice his friend was a chameleon spy) lost a finger and pledged to track down... himself... to restore his honor
(It's a samurai/yakuza security firm.)
However, he's been assigned another samurai to make sure he doesn't screw up again, so he'll have to ditch the buddy before he can sneak into the ultra-high-clearance area he needs to get to...
Aspect "I never miss" and the stunt is "Trickshot: Once a session, When failing an attack with Firearms/Ranged skill you can instead roll to create an advantage at +2"
The idea being - even if you "miss" you actually hit your target. And it trickshots maybe knocks down the chandelier on the bad guy or something
@BESW Yay! I was writing this comment and wondering if there was anything I was missing.
Importantly: 4e NPCs should almost always be modelled as monsters, not as player characters, even if they superficially resemble PCs. This is a huge departure from previous editions. There's a difference between what's fun to use (player powers) and what is fun to have used on you (monster powers). The two follow different rule sets and enjoy different freedoms, and that's pretty important. The system is based on it. For instance: PCs can pretty easily one-hit-kill other PCs if they try; they're really not designed to battle each other. — Jonathan Hobbs57 mins ago
So - since its a combo with an aspect, whenever you are attacking with Firearms/Ranged you can always choose to use a FP to add +2 or reroll because of "I Never Miss" But if you do miss/fail then you can use the stunt to create an advantage instead. (But I think once a session is maybe a bit too limiting)
> 1 year ago Doctor Who. The Doctors name is a word of power, something that was introduced to the series in Moffat's series 3 episode "The Shakespeare Code". What does the Doctor's name do? It unlocks the time war. This is the reason he trusts no one but himself to know his own name. During the ending of "Forest of the Dead" the tenth Doctor also states to river that there could be only one way she could have known his name. This is also the reason why The Silence are terrified of the Doctor's name. And why not? It would release the Daleks and the Timelord from the locked time war. It's sp…
@InbarRose One with the Forest: Because I am in tune with the wild, once per game session I can declare a situation aspect involving plants or animals.
Trickshot: (Requires aspect "I never miss") Once per encounter, if you fail a shoot attack, you can create a situational aspect using your shoot skill's rank.
Aspects only have "scores" when they're defended vs an Overcome to remove them, and that's either a passive difficulty set by the GM or an active skill roll by a character.
Trickshot: (Requires aspect "I never miss") Once per encounter, if you fail a shoot attack, you can create a situational aspect with one free invocation.
I thought that if someone created an advantage at, say, +4, you'd have to roll +4 or higher on your overcome roll to overcome the aspect that was created.
Shouldn't there be some limitation on the kind of aspect I can create with this stunt though? (I mean, its pretty obvious what the intention is, but the wording is not clear)
@InbarRose Her Overwhelmed and Unprepared trouble is because she was awoken for a major purpose, but feels ill-equipped to deal with it. Nevertheless, she was woken up for it, and she trusts there's a reason for it and she's not just marching to her death.
A Light in Dark Places is about how she's (a) a guardian, (b) there to defeat The Shadows, and (c) phosphoresces. (and it's about each of those individually)
It's just that my understand so far is that although the wording of an aspect is totally freeform - those are more abstract than I thought aspects should be.
I read a lot about aspects - they should be both good and bad (for compels and interesting game/story) and they should be clear on how they can be used, and preferably also relate externally to something in the game...
Like how the aspect "second best fighter in the village" is better than "good fighter"
@InbarRose This was my first FAE character and first FAE game, so definitely don't take this as an expert guideline on what makes a good aspect. It was for the FAE game BESW ran in the Fate Game Room, and that was very early on in his learning of the system too. They might be bad.
> An aspect's value is based on the group's understanding of its meaning in context, rather than the objective meaning of the words making up the aspect.
So, @JonathanHobbs' aspects weren't perfect, but if I may paraphrase my mother's thesis advisor, "There are perfect aspects, and there are finished aspects."
I've been struggling with learning "let it ride" as a GM.
Year of D&D taught me that I should ask for rolls any time someone did something that related to a skill.
So when Trogdor rolled to have his hologram pretend to be his partner, I didn't want to keep rolling Notice every time someone new showed up to look at it.
Instead, I just figured that he'd succeeded on the roll the first time, so unless something really unusual happened another roll shouldn't destroy the effect.
....I just offered him a compel for someone to notice that his partner was an illusion.
This led to an absolutely hilarious sequence in which his character, pretending to be an assassin, was as astonished as everyone else that his partner had been a chameleon who turned invisible when discovered!
Boy, that guy must be good. He took out both my partners and fooled me into thinking he was one of my partners! And now he's loose in the building. Please let me track him down, to make up for my error in not spotting him in the first place?
His cover story lost him a finger (the Yakuza security megacorp does not take failure lightly).
But now I think the plan is to make it look like "the intruder" is breaking into the high-security lab Trogdor's character needs to get into... so that they'll give him clearance to go into it.
@lisardggY You've seen Almost Human, right? I bring it up because it's the most prominent example of cyberpunk-ish science fiction on US network TV in years. In its first season right now. Also Android: Netrunner?
I think a core part of the original cyberpunk ethos is that giving new technology to the establishment won't make the establishment any better. Basically every new tool you develop just becomes a way to dig class inequality deeper. And the heroes of the genre are all about turning that around.
In some ways, though, it's okay if cyberpunk has "grown up." I mean, Almost Human shows us a society that very much has most of modern-day America's problems, plus a bunch of new ones. The law is clearly super messed up, and social order isn't handling technological change very well. But the protagonists are still cops.
@AlexP I hate when the protagonists is defaultly a cop.. just because there is an obsession with cops nowadays and it seems that they have a way to just "do anything they want" and shrug it off as "i'm a cop"
There are many, many, ways to have characters who have daily tribulations
Not every "bad thing" has to be a murder or a robery....
There are plenty of heroic acts and cool stories to be had without them.
Does it make the bad guy more dangerous because he can pick up a gun and shoot it?
Isn't a really driven business man who is systematically taking over every family business in a neighborhood and driving the people to poverty so he can then buy their homes for cheap and build some condos a much more sophisticated and interesting bad guy?
He could do all of it without murder, or threats.
But still be a bad guy
And that Counselor at the troubled teens home could be a hero for figuring out a way to stop him
In a cop show - it would end with the cop killing some goons and arresting the bad guy for something... but its not always that easy, and that's not even interesting.
Well, yes, if you don't want consistent danger/violence, it broadens the stuff you can cover. But most action-drama fiction wants danger and violence, which is why they stick with cops.
