Wise Turtle Publishing

Hey guys, new owner of the game here, and I wanted some advice. Specifically, if I wanted the PCs to be essentially people with the special ability to call forth fancy weapons out of thin air along with a living mechanical beast that can fight for them sometimes, how would you go about doing that? I'm sort of leaning heavily on My-Hime for inspiration here, heh.

Dax wrote:Hey guys, new owner of the game here, and I wanted some advice. Specifically, if I wanted the PCs to be essentially people with the special ability to call forth fancy weapons out of thin air

A character is able to make up any attack that is appropriate pretty much at any time. If 'pulling weapons out of thin air' fits the character concept, then that's all that you really need.

It's a good idea to jot down a few basic attacks so you know what the character would normally do, but you are able to generate a new attack at will. Note you don't actually need the "Attack" Ability to do so, but Attack allows your attacks to do more base damage, so it's a good one to pick up.

You probably can still use the Weapon flaw, as you would be holding a weapon that could be disarmed. You might want to use Affinity. Affinities just provides a descriptor of the type of attack, usually something like Fire or Psychic. So something like Summonable or Null/Subspace could help.

Dax wrote:along with a living mechanical beast that can fight for them sometimes, how would you go about doing that? I'm sort of leaning heavily on My-Hime for inspiration here, heh.

Just use the Companion Ability. Look at Karis or Yuu sample characters for ideas. If the companion is summonable, that would mostly be handled with description of the companion instead of any mechanics. If you wanted to limit it, Limited Uses could be useful.

Thanks for the advice. That makes a lot of sense. But I had a question about the Companion ability:

He or she has a total of Abilities and Weaknesses equivalent to your Level in Companion.

What exactly does this mean?

Long story short, if you have +5 in Companion, your companion has 5 levels in any applicable ability to utilize.

Dax wrote:He or she has a total of Abilities and Weaknesses equivalent to your Level in Companion.

It's basically the Base Zero rule, except instead of having the 5 point difference Player Characters get in character creation, the difference is limited by the Level of the Companion Ability.

So if you have Companion +1, then the Companion's total Abilities and Weaknesses have to be no greater than 1 point. If you have Companion +5, then the total difference can be up to 5 points.

For example, Karis has Companion +2, Arasuni. Arasuni has +14 total Abilities, and -12 total Weaknesses. The difference is 2, equal to Karis' level in Companion. Yuu has Companion +4, Fenrir. Fenrir's total Abilities is +13, and total Weaknesses is -9, a difference of 4 points. Regardless of the level of Companion, the Companion character is considered a 'secondary' character, with a base 20 Health and 20 Endurance

The Minions Ability is different in that no matter how many Minions you have, based on your level of Minion, their stats will always be either difference of +1 (for two Extra minions per level, with a base 10 Heath and 10 Endurance) or +2 (for one Secondary minion per level, with a base 20 Health and 20 Endurance).

Ahhh. Alrighty then, thanks for explaining that to me. A lot of stuff that I was struggling with is starting to make sense, now, too.

Sorry to double post but I just ran across something else that has me scratching my head:

For calculating threat values for characters, it says add up attack roll, defense roll, damage multiplier, any levels in armored, and Levels of any Abilities or Weaknesses that modify Health and Endurance.

My question is, which attack roll and damage multiplier do you use? They can be different depending on how you build the character's attacks.

And also, this:

To create a balanced encounter, combine the TVs of all PCs, choose a difficulty below, and use the multiplier to generate a rough estimate of your opposition’s TV.

After combining the TV, do I pick the difficulty and multiply it by the listed TV?

Dax wrote:For calculating threat values for characters, it says add up attack roll, defense roll, damage multiplier, any levels in armored, and Levels of any Abilities or Weaknesses that modify Health and Endurance.

My question is, which attack roll and damage multiplier do you use? They can be different depending on how you build the character's attacks.

TV can be a tricky thing to calculate. I believe you use the Attack Roll and Damage Multiplier you get from the Abilities, and not the 'tweaked' versions after adding Perks and Flaws (since Perks and Flaws work off each other to make each type of attack different, but they all base off your modified Abilities).

Dax wrote:To create a balanced encounter, combine the TVs of all PCs, choose a difficulty below, and use the multiplier to generate a rough estimate of your opposition’s TV.

After combining the TV, do I pick the difficulty and multiply it by the listed TV?

Basically, yes. So if your groups total Threat Value is 30, for a Moderate Challenge to your group, it'd be 30 x 1/2 (or 30/2) for the enemies Threat Value, the end result being 15.

Honestly, TVs can get a bit wonky, and I haven't tinkered with them that much (especially when I start playing around with My Unique Monstrous Abilities), so I kind of ignore them.

Thank again. I can see how TV's can get wonky. I might just ignore them for the most part and try to structure encounters how I see fit. Here's hoping that works.