Paralyze and Death Curse functionality

I'm not forgetting slays and assassinates, they just don't make up enough of the total number of swings to really be particularly impactful in my opinion. As for NPC damage, fights will be lasting longer overall, so I think it necessarily has to decrease, otherwise even the vastly increased healing won't be able to keep up over the long haul.

This change would also make weakness less useful for low level characters and increase its value for high level characters, which seems in conflict with the stated concerns of a number of folks.
 
Point noted on Slays/Assassinates.

I'm not sure I'm following your second point on extended combat? NPCs are supposed to have less Body to go along with decreased PC weapon damage, but PCs are looking at having more Body and armor, which would seem to suggest that NPC damage should either stay about the same or go up slightly to compensate; my understanding of the intent behind the changes was that fights would take about the same amount of time overall. It may be due to the fact that I'm running on two hours of sleep and work wore me out on top of that, but I'm not really following you on this one... I'll come back to it tomorrow if you don't feel like dumbing it down and walking me through it.

Yeah, that change feels significantly more powerful than Weakness is now to high-level players, which is why I feel it should be moved up to level 4 (or maybe 5?) if that change is going to be seriously considered. A.Mungo can probably offer more insight to why he thinks it should stay at 3 if it halves all damage, but my personal opinion is it should be level 4 or 5, so by the time a Scholar gets it it's not too weak to be worth memorizing but will also continue to be useful going forward.

I don't actually think Weakness needs to be changed, because it's a great overall spell for 3rd level against anything not immune to Curses, but the change A.Mungo presented is an interesting one (to me, anyway). I also feel like I inadvertently derailed the thread by posting my thoughts on it, though? If so, I'm sorry, just ignore me and my ramblings.
 
Did weakness get an official change in the new rules to this effect? As it currently functions, the spell seems way stronger for NPCs to have in 2.0 than for PCs.

As far as I know, it's still -5 damage. Given that I don't expect any characters that use a 1-h weapon to swing above 10, this is going to be a highly effective spell because at 50% reduction (for PC's) it is significantly stronger against lower levels and people who aren't melee.

If you only swing 5's (say, as a Templar), all of that build (63) you spent on 3 profs (assuming baseline 2 weapon) is wasted/nullified for 10 minutes and you're left to lean on your significantly smaller number of special melee attacks, and your puny spell tree. That's a 100% damage reduction from a level 3 spell on anyone not swinging 6 or more. That seems highly punitive for a skill with an ever-increasing scaling cost that just gets shut down by significantly cheaper character skills.

I think Tony saw that which is why he suggested giving it a percent-based reduction because then its effectiveness scales with level instead of being a static amount that screws over...well...most things, including NPC's that will have to deal with this effect as well.

This would bring all curses in line with each other and cut out exceptions. You know, simplifying things. Assuming that is still a goal of 2.0.

While it has been a while since I have done so (maybe 0.8 or 0.7), I counted more exceptions in 2.0 than currently exist in 1.3. "Cleanse fixes all Curse effects! Except Death." is just one glaring example. In fact, I think it would just be better to put Life in the Curse effect group as well - I curse you with Life! is just a cool incant...come on! Alternatively, put Death in healing which would make just as much sense as it does being in Curse.
 
Remember that Paralysis prevents the use of Magic Augmented spells / abilities since you still need to be able to move your head for it which you can't do while paralyzed. Paralysis has value outside of just being compared to Confine.
 
I'm not sure I'm following your second point on extended combat? NPCs are supposed to have less Body to go along with decreased PC weapon damage, but PCs are looking at having more Body and armor, which would seem to suggest that NPC damage should either stay about the same or go up slightly to compensate; my understanding of the intent behind the changes was that fights would take about the same amount of time overall. It may be due to the fact that I'm running on two hours of sleep and work wore me out on top of that, but I'm not really following you on this one... I'll come back to it tomorrow if you don't feel like dumbing it down and walking me through it.

I think it's probably a lesser point compared to the high/low level concern, but for what it's worth my thoughts are thus (and backed up somewhat, but not extensively, via playtest, as well as time as a head of plot and monster designer):
1. There is a practical floor for NPC body. That is to say, yes it should be going down across the board, but there's only so far down it can go and still deliver meaningful combat. I don't think it will end up being proportional to the loss of damage on the PC side.

2. The game tends to play best when combat is largely symmetrical. In other words, when the skills and numbers look roughly the same on both sides of a given battle it gives a nice organic 'baseline' feel that an encounter designer can build upon to make a given combat more interesting or engaging. When damage and body are too unbalanced that becomes the thing, and it's hard to make the combat design about anything other than overcoming that deficit. That can be fun sometimes, but gets old fast.

3. My playtest experience so far has been tilted towards longer fights. I don't know the exact cause (lower damage is some but not all of it), but even the smaller minions seem to stay alive longer and drop more hits on the players.

4. One of the major sources of healing is about to vanish completely. Skill healing is increasing, but is that enough to compensate for the loss of magic item healing, increased PC body, *and* increased damage over the course of a game? This question isn't really answerable right now, but no encounter designer wants to end up on the wrong side of it.

All this combined says to me that lower average NPC damage numbers should be more common once we reach a stable equilibrium, and thus boosting the value of a flat rate weakness over a percentage reduction.

Yeah, that change feels significantly more powerful than Weakness is now to high-level players, which is why I feel it should be moved up to level 4 (or maybe 5?) if that change is going to be seriously considered. A.Mungo can probably offer more insight to why he thinks it should stay at 3 if it halves all damage, but my personal opinion is it should be level 4 or 5, so by the time a Scholar gets it it's not too weak to be worth memorizing but will also continue to be useful going forward.

My concern is more for the loss of utility to low level characters than for the gain to high. Minus 5 damage can mean the world to a low level character, whereas half may only be 2 or 3 points instead. Moving it up in level just exacerbates that, because it's now less useful *and* less available.
 
I said this on some thread before, but it is worth repeating. While the writers decided to describe the Cleanse / Death relationship as an exception, it isn't really one. Death is not an ongoing effect. It is an instant effect (like damage). Instant effects cannot be removed in our game, by definition, thus no exception should be mentioned.

However, in the case of Death there is a secondary reason that it can't be removed by Cleanse. By definition, when a character dies, all effects (with the exception Amnesia and Enslavement, if memory serves) are removed. The reason Death can't be removed by Cleanse is that the character's state has changed to dead, which means that even if it could be removed, it was already removed by dying. Heck, if you cast every curse (other than Cleanse) on a character in order, Cleanse would not remove any of those curses if cast afterward, because they already would have been removed by death.

-MS
 
Remember that Paralysis prevents the use of Magic Augmented spells / abilities since you still need to be able to move your head for it which you can't do while paralyzed. Paralysis has value outside of just being compared to Confine.
This is one of those things that seems confusing to me, and perhaps we should clean up in 2.0. The fact that the criteria to use Magic Augmented spells / abilities / items being contingent on your head being able to move vs speaking or some other criteria seems really confusing. How does moving you head activate a magic item?
 
This is one of those things that seems confusing to me, and perhaps we should clean up in 2.0. The fact that the criteria to use Magic Augmented spells / abilities / items being contingent on your head being able to move vs speaking or some other criteria seems really confusing. How does moving you head activate a magic item?

Per the ARB, activating a magic item requires that you have the ability to vocalize. It's not moving the head so much as moving the mouth, which is the difference between Confine and Paralysis/Prison.
 
Ah, okay, got it. That makes sense. Thanks! :)

My concern is more for the loss of utility to low level characters than for the gain to high. Minus 5 damage can mean the world to a low level character, whereas half may only be 2 or 3 points instead. Moving it up in level just exacerbates that, because it's now less useful *and* less available.
Yeah, totally agree that Weakness feels comfortable right where it is and doing what it does; half damage just isn't worth it to a character only facing things swinging for 3, but it's also too strong to only be 3rd level once you get to higher levels and things are swinging for over 10.

Although, given that your train of thought leads you to consider it most probable that NPC damage will be lower overall in the long run, do you think that maybe -5 might be too strong?
 
As a note, it was just someone's assumption that NPC damage was not going down. NPC damage has gone down almost across the board. Of the 255 characters in the 2.0 Monster database only ~5 that will swing more than 10 damage. Again it is my assumption that your local plot teams will just write their own cards, due to the extremely varied cards I have run into in my travels already (500+ body goblins, full tree channels, 1000+ body 15 massive swinging 20 defenses standard extra planar beasts, etc.) there is nothing like that in the fresh 2.0 database, so to make conjecture at this point, just look at how your team stats now, if they use takeouts in 2.0 expect a much more extreme amount of character turnover.
 
That said, rules should never be looked at as what can a standard PC do. Plot teams are using these same effects. Scaling down damage while increasing body and armor, but maintaining takeouts effectiveness is going to see teams turning to high defenses to resist takeouts, and high amounts of takeouts to combat burst damage. I see the standard BBG becoming much bigger and far more deadly in 2.0 Just based off game theory and time based engagements. (Under the current 2.0 system with no paragons a rogue can drop 1k damage in seconds.
 
For the math a level 16 rogue with 5 assassinates/Improved assassinates playing under Flurry rules can do 450 in one series from behind with little warning, combine a destruction and you are looking at 900 from one character spending the cost of one additional backstab.

Personally I know for a fact that at least 9 people posting on this very thread have characters over level 30. So I dont even accept the high level characters are outliers argument. In 2.0 when build becomes the new magic item, I conjecture that we will see "the race to 20" happen far more often.

I can see Paralysis staying at 8 with more effectiveness, but keeping it partially limited and moving to 7. I also think that with the addition of the specialist paragon path it potentially makes a non "healbot" (I hate that term) earth caster an extremely useful teamate. As someone who will likely be playing a high level rogue come 2.0 (with the hope that dodge will get me through the first major rewrite) I will be looking specifically for an earth caster or two whom can get a destruction off. Just my two cents looking at it from both sides of the line as it were.
 
(I don't have any knowledge of a planned rewrite, but based upon the feedback I have received in my travels, having been through a game rules overhaul in two other major larp systems, and just the fact that the system being proposed was engineered by a group of owners over 6 years ago with major changes in ownership (see the entire west coast) in that time, I conjecture that after a year of 2.0 a number of customer service changes will be voted in)
 
For the math a level 16 rogue with 5 assassinates/Improved assassinates playing under Flurry rules can do 450 in one series from behind with little warning, combine a destruction and you are looking at 900 from one character spending the cost of one additional backstab.

There is a lot to unpack in your last few posts, but this one stood out to me more than any other. Under the current rules, a roughly level 16 rogue (might have to be 17 due to slight differences in qualifying for assassinates in current rules vs. 2.0) can deal 110 damage with each backstab and has the same five backstabs. So, with the same little warning, a 16th level (17th?) rogue can deal 330 damage with three swings. And since flurry doesn't limit them, can potentially deal 550 damage before an enemy can respond. Combined with destruction, that is 660 or 1100 damage.

My point is that the rules changes don't meaningfully change the amount of times / day burst damage that a character can do. When you want to burn times per day resources, you can deal damage that is well within excess of just about every NPC statted for the weekend. That has always been the way the game worked and these rules don't really meaningfully change that. Heck, since a Terminate basically deals unlimited damage, why even bother using assassinates?

But you don't base standard stat blocks on the exceptions. That trick you described can be done on a single opponent exactly one per day (a second time per day at 2/3rds efficiency). That is a wonderful "Rule of Cool" moment, but if I had to guess, I'd say the average PC fights about 50 NPCs per logistics period. Just because I can turbomurder one or two, that doesn't mean they should all be able to resist hundreds of points of damage.

Sure, weekend bosses will be uber statted, but that has always been the case since day one (first weekend of HQ, filled with nothing but 1st level characters, had a fully statted lich walking around... second weekend had a dragon mage).

TLDR: You can't use burst damage as the base line. A 4 column caster doesn't throw a prison with every spell, a fighter doesn't eviscerate with every swing, and a rogue doesn't terminate with every swing. The base line is significantly lower and mostly importantly (IMO) more consistent in 2.0. That consistency makes scaling easier to manage and, once everyone is familiar with the new rules, should result in faster battles overall.

-MS
 
TLDR: You can't use burst damage as the base line... The base line is significantly lower and mostly importantly (IMO) more consistent in 2.0. That consistency makes scaling easier to manage and, once everyone is familiar with the new rules, should result in faster battles overall.

-MS


Mike, on the average an NPC who could nearly deal with this level of threat has had their body reduced roughly 50%. In your example our current characters are only doing 3/4 of the damage our future characters can burst out. The two games are not supposed to be comparitive. This presents a major swing, and as I mentioned previously will drive the custom card system. That makes "mods" faster, but it doesnt make battles faster overall. What happens when your plot team stats a card for these major bursts and then characters choose to use them on something else? What about when they stat for them not using them? This is not me trying to be rude, but is your expectation that characters should be pigeon holed as to when to use their skills or everyone else suffers? Because your expectation is how I have seen that turn in my experiences.

I am willing to agree that the new system makes baseline damage overall more consistent, but that isnt the thing that dictates the speed of battle. It doesnt matter how familiar people get with a system, its number of calls on the field that dictate the pace. I can write a 1 hour scenario right now in either system by litterally just writing "respawn for one hour". The thing that changes the "speed" of battle that you are talking about (again IMO) is the removal of per day magic items, though the proliferation of per day effects (new magic items, new skills, meditate, alternative carriers, higher reliance on effects than damage, etc.) I think will quickly take their place and cause a similar number of holds/pacing issues. Again, just my opinion based on what I have seen so far ( I'd be happy to be wrong!).

That being said, I think my case being made is to accept burst damage in the new system, make the curse school more powerful by changing it up just a tiny bit, and free the earth casters from feeling like they are being forced to play healers or else. My proposal drops destruction and paralysis by a level each, making someone who really wants to go for curses able to really focus those higher level slots towards the purpose of being a support class character who isn't primarily a healer/necromancer.
 
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