Alternate Core Documents

[Kkat]

Our flier, Firefly who Viewing Glass plays, took out about 4-5 Griffon mercs there with just called lightning shots to their wings, and most were dead from the fall damage, because GM didn't give them Falling With Style.

But still, the called limb damage means that if you play a flier, you are almost required to take Falling With Style, so in the more than likely case of you taking limb damage in your wings and falling, you don't die.

This is a great example of how retardedly abusable called shots are, especially to wings. One solution is to lessen the impact of crippled wings. My suggestion is that each crippled wing reduces the flyer's effective flight rank by one.

[Viewing_Glass]

Well I'm not sure how much my two cents here will help but I've got an experience from G0

Our flier, Firefly who Viewing Glass plays, took out about 4-5 Griffon mercs there with just called lightning shots to their wings, and most were dead from the fall damage, because GM didn't give them Falling With Style.

But still, the called limb damage means that if you play a flier, you are almost required to take Falling With Style, so in the more than likely case of you taking limb damage in your wings and falling, you don't die.

Indeed. However, for a ground-based character, there has to be a way to negate flight. Otherwise, fliers just straight-up break.

In other examples, I've used limb shots to help negate creatures using hunting rifles, shotguns, etc. Making called shots, to limbs, is a purely tactical decision, Several times, Firefly has missed on her attacks simply because of the penalty (even with melee and unarmed having a reduced penalty).

So, unless we want to completely rework the way called shots work in the PnP (including how to make them)... things have to stay as they are.

I also don't think we should rework the penalties on called shots (even though I absolutely LOVE unarmed and melee characters). It gives PCs a significant risk to choosing combat over diplomacy (when diplomacy is available to them) and negates some of the bonuses of being very heavily irradiated (if you happen to be a ghoul, alicorn, or character with radiation child).

Finally, getting rid of crippled limbs (after combat is over, or even during!) is fairly easy to do with a good medicine skill (and a super resto potion), Wasteland Surgeon, or Bone Mending.

[Viewing_Glass]

Our flier, Firefly who Viewing Glass plays, took out about 4-5 Griffon mercs there with just called lightning shots to their wings, and most were dead from the fall damage, because GM didn't give them Falling With Style.

But still, the called limb damage means that if you play a flier, you are almost required to take Falling With Style, so in the more than likely case of you taking limb damage in your wings and falling, you don't die.

This is a great example of how retardedly abusable called shots are, especially to wings. One solution is to lessen the impact of crippled wings. My suggestion is that each crippled wing reduces the flyer's effective flight rank by one.

Again, I have to say no. Because what is far less fun for everyone is when a flier can sit around and take pot shots in the air all day and characters can do nothing really to stop it.

[Kkat]

So, unless we want to completely rework the way called shots work in the PnP (including how to make them)... things have to stay as they are.

In the very least, crippling wings has to be made less stupidly severe. At most, a crippled wing drops a flier's effective Flight Rank to 1, and having both wings crippled causes the flier to go into freefall... or a controlled fall if the character has Flight Rank 3 or higher. Right now, crippling wings is broken.

I'm also considering adding a spell, pegasus trick and/or armor mod to help give called shot protection.

[Hidden_Fortune]

In relation to the discussion about called shots... We've been chatting about it in the IRC channel and I'd like to bring the suggestions we came up with there to here for others to comment on.

As for called shots against wings, I think that it should be less a matter that crippled wing completely negates the ability to fly, and more than it limits it. Crippling a wing should either drop them a rank of their flight, or drop them to flight rank 1. Crippling the second wind would either negate their ability to fly entirely (causing them to plummet to the ground) or remove their ability to maintain altitude. So they would slowly drift down.

I mean, any character who grew up with wings had to LEARN to fly at some point. They're going to take a few falls in the process, and during that they will learn how to fall correctly. A person doesn't just topple over like a dead weight, we throw our hands out in front of us to try and mitigate the fall. A cyberpony who just got cyberwings though? They'd have no idea HOW to fall properly and take damage... But I think unless the flyer is in the air and KO'd, they'd know how to fall. This would go a big way to mitigating called shot damage to flyers and killing them through fall damage.

As for unicorn horns? I think called shots against them are pretty balanced as is. You're at a -30% for shooting at the head, plus an addition -20% for shooting at the horn specifically. So rather than nerf called shots in that regard, we should increase the resilience of the horn. It's supposed to be an intrinsic magical part of their body. Rather than letting it just get cracked off at the first bullet, make it first drain their strain, or get an armor bonus based on potency. This means that a unicorn who is adept at magic and uses it as their primary weapon/etc (IE: Has dropped all their stats into their horn) will have a MUCH harder horn than a unicorn who acts like an earth pony with TK and hasn't specialized in their magic at all.

Just food for thought.

[Kkat]

Called shots to horns and wings are a major issue. These options essentially allow one character to wipe out significant portions of another character's entire build, including most of their perks, far too easily.

Consider this: in the Stalliongrad game, there is nothing in the rules that prevented me as a GM from constantly having everyone target Night Light's and Viewing Glass's horns. How much would that have made the game suck? I didn't do it because it would be super-sucky... even though I had a player who was using the same tactics, and wouldn't have been above using them on other PCs. But clearly there needs to be rules in place to prevent that abuse.

As for called shots against wings, I think that it should be less a matter that crippled wing completely negates the ability to fly, and more than it limits it. Crippling a wing should either drop them a rank of their flight, or drop them to flight rank 1. Crippling the second wind would either negate their ability to fly entirely (causing them to plummet to the ground) or remove their ability to maintain altitude. So they would slowly drift down.

I very much agree with this. I am inclined to say that whether it causes them to plummet or allows a controlled fall should be based on their flight rank. Or maybe that's just what Falling With Style should be for?

As for unicorn horns? I think called shots against them are pretty balanced as is. You're at a -30% for shooting at the head, plus an addition -20% for shooting at the horn specifically. So rather than nerf called shots in that regard, we should increase the resilience of the horn. It's supposed to be an intrinsic magical part of their body. Rather than letting it just get cracked off at the first bullet, make it first drain their strain, or get an armor bonus based on potency.

I really like this too.

Since strain fluctuates so much, I would be inclined to give it additional armor, or possibly actual damage reduction, equal to the unicorn's Potency.

[TyrannisUmbra]

I agree with Viewing Glass that crippled limbs and called shots should probably stay where they are for the most part. However, I'd probably say that you should need both wings to be crippled to be rendered completely unable to fly (or at the least, flying with crippled wings should require an END check with a serious penalty). With one crippled wing, your Flight Rank should probably be reduced to 1, and attempting to remain flying should require some dice rolls or something. This would at least give flyers an opportunity to try to make it safely to the ground before they just splat.

I'd also like to suggest maybe a perk called something like "Pain Tolerance", which lessens the penalties from crippled limbs a bit.

EDIT: Maybe even a perk to increase limb HP by a bit, maybe even something specifically for flyers/hornheads. When I was working on my own ruleset way back when Sunrise hadn't even finished, those were some of the first perks I made. Ironwing and Ironhorn.

Since strain fluctuates so much, I would be inclined to give it additional armor, or possibly actual damage reduction, equal to the unicorn's Potency.

This is sounding like the makings of an interesting perk.

[Ragebrew]

Giving a horn natural DT equal to Potency*2 would work.

I run crippled horns as: -30 to spell casting, spells that normally don't require a casting roll now do, double strain costs.

Making it so both wings need to be crippled before they lose fight would work, and even then don't make it that they fall instantly. They corkscrew down. They take fall damage, up to a maximum amount. So even if a flier gets their wings crippled at 300 feet up, they aren't going to be red pasted regardless of their perks.

[NitoKa]

Ahem, I'd like to point something out with the Unicorn things.

What about the Jousting Unicorns.

While yes, some unicorns don't focus on any magic except TK to hold their stuff up, what about the ones who barely use magic and fight with their horn literally? Goring enemies on it and raising the ability through the Jousting perks. If they don't focus on their magic by that idea, their horn is much weaker than their magic using brethren, even though it's going through more physical strain.

[Ragebrew]

Giving the jousting perks a bonus to DT for the horn wouldn't be too much, would it? Only applies to the horn, after all, and it would make sense if they are using their horns to punch through kevlar or metal plates.