Shatter

Muir

Muir

Fighter
One of the new lines in this particular playtest strikes me as poorly thought out.

. If Shatter is used on an indestructible suit of armor, the armor will still be reduced to 0 points (and thus require a refit before its Armor Points are restored) but the tag will not be destroyed.
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In any other situation where an indestructible item, be it a sword, a shield, a pouch, a pair of pants, or what have you is struck by a Shatter effect, the proper response is 'No effect'.

Why, then would such a spell have any effect on indestructible armor at all? Not to mention that it creates a game situation where the proper response is 'Got it, no effect' yet there is a game effect.
 
Personally, I would love to see "shields and swords be rendered useless until they are repaired", but we do not have a mechanic in the game to fix "broken" weapons and shields. At least this way a Shatter has "some" use against a magic suit of armour.
 
mythic said:
Personally, I would love to see "shields and swords be rendered useless until they are repaired", but we do not have a mechanic in the game to fix "broken" weapons and shields. At least this way a Shatter has "some" use against a magic suit of armour.
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This seems like a mechanic that could be inserted fairly easily. I think it's a fantastic idea!
 
mythic said:
Personally, I would love to see "shields and swords be rendered useless until they are repaired", but we do not have a mechanic in the game to fix "broken" weapons and shields. At least this way a Shatter has "some" use against a magic suit of armour.
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I second this being a very good idea!
 
Honest question. Has, at any point, a weapon or suit of armor being shattered added more fun to the game?

I know it has only ever served to frustrate me, especially in games where there are few or no PC blacksmiths who keep significant stocks, or when I am playing a new or just low-funded character who can't afford to replace their equipment. Hell, I once played at (and nearly walked out of) a Northern Minnesota (now-defunct chapter, no relation to the good folks at SoMN) game wherein the entire playerbase was down to one dagger and a handful of assembled-on-thespot rock reps because it was all brand new characters and a few shatters effectively removed weapons as a resource from the event.

There's a very, very good reason that Render Indestructible is one of the most common ritual effects in the game, and it is because having gear shattered or destroyed is not a fun experience, so players act to mitigate it at first opportunity.
 
I spent years carrying an extra weapon just so none of the PCs would be forced to twiddle their thumbs for the duration of a fight. Usually it would be a newbie whose weapon would get popped, exactly the people who you want to make sure can participate in as much as possible. Fortunately, enough folks now have strengthened and indestructible weapons that it's seldom an issue.
 
Muir said:
Honest question. Has, at any point, a weapon or suit of armor being shattered added more fun to the game?
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Frequently. It's always a "haHA" moment when you get one off on the bad guys and suddenly they become a whole lot easier to fight.
 
Shatter as it stands in 1.3 is a spell that favors PCs in my personal experience. Very rarely do monsters carry rendered or strengthened weapons, making the spell great against weapon wielding foes. Pcs tend to have a lot of indestructible equipment, or shattering their shield/sword is highly resource intensive because it mostly sticks on low level characters. It's not great either way.

The repair Idea is one that has been floated before, but I think I have a way of doing it that is simple and reduces the head calculations that were a major problem of making shatter work against magic items.

Change indestructible to man the following: Indestructible items cannot be destroyed by any means, but their base form may be made unusable by the spell Shatter. Other magic in the rendered object remains and can be accessed, but it cannot be used as a weapon, shield or suit of armor. Concentrating on the Shattered item for a minute repairs the base form.
 
Muir said:
...or when I am playing a new or just low-funded character who can't afford to replace their equipment.
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This was brought up by some of the owners, myself included, and one of the ways that we addressed that was to make lower point armor suits cost significantly less production points to make then they did before.

That won't solve the other issues you had where Plot kept putting out monsters with abilities against characters that couldn't rightly defend against them, though. :p
 
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Zymm said:
Can you elaborate on this? Doesn't rendered armor NOT lose armor points, essentially being the entire reason to render armor?
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What? No.

Rendered Armor is immune to Shatter/Destroy, but still takes damage as normal.

Why the heck would it make sense to make invincible armor?
 
Zymm said:
Can you elaborate on this? Doesn't rendered armor NOT lose armor points, essentially being the entire reason to render armor?
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As @Draven said, Render makes it so that armor cannot be destroyed entirely by Shatter or Destroy. This change to Shatter simply makes it still work on all suits of armor, dropping it to 0 points ("breaching"). A refit will get your armor points back. As it stands in 1.3 a Shatter does absolutely nothing to a Rendered suit of armor.

Rending will very much still be worth it with a change like this, but it will not grant you total immunity against Shatter effects.
 
There may be a communication issue here: in previous editions of the game, a breached suit of armor would lose 2 points off of its MAXIMUM value each time it was breached. Rendering armor prevented this depreciation of maximum value. This consequence of breaching has been out of the game for a while now, but trust me, the consequences of this rule are something you don't forget.

The change to Shatter is to allow it to affect a suit of armor and reduce its current armor points value directly to zero, even if it is a Rendered Suit. The concern was that if a Rendered Suit could not lose armor points to shatter, there was a chance that some people would interpret that to mean it couldn't lose armor points at all. You may laugh, but the history of the game tells us that people can make incredible leaps of reasoning in the absence of context. We felt the simplest solution was to eliminate any circumstances where armor points would not be lost when one effect said they should and another said they should not.
 
Or you can simply state in the rdi scrolls that rdi armor will be no effect to shatter and destroy. This is another example of us changing the rules because we think some one will interpret a spell wrong. Remember that rdi is a ritual with a scroll. The description is on the scroll. Don't need to worry about bogging down the rulebook with "extras"
 
Sorry as I am a bit late to the party here.

I have major concerns about the balance of shatter, especially spell delivered shatter in the new rules set, both before and even more so after changes from v 0.8. As has been mentioned previously in the thread, shatter is most effective against new players. I appreciate the fact that the production costs of armor have been reduced, but the cost is still significant, and devastating to a new player who gets hit with it.

Should a 3rd level spell be able to effectively deliver up to 62 points of damage (compared to a 9th level celestial damage spell which does 45 damage), render you largely useless for the remainder of the encounter, and also cost 4 gp (200 cp production cost x 2) to recoup? Even if your armor is rendered you're still taking up to 62 points of damage from a 3rd level spell. Furthermore shatter is in the eldritch force school which very few things are immune to, and with cloak/bane on magic items going away, the only real defense against it becomes spell shield, spell parry, resist magic, or dodge. In what world does this seem balanced compared to other damaging effects in the game?

With the new armor rules, it's going to be extremely easy for everyone to have armor values up to their class maximum, and armor values will be going up across the board. Shatter effectively becomes a must take spell because it is so much better than anything else at its level. It has the potential to be the highest damage spell in the game against heavily armored fighters, and it's only a 3rd level spell! And it specifically hurts new players. Shatter and destroy worked fine as they were, they did not need to be combined or buffed. Once again I feel that this is one of those rules that was just change for the sake of change that didn't really consider how unbalanced it would be.
 
Thorgrim said:
Sorry as I am a bit late to the party here.

I have major concerns about the balance of shatter, especially spell delivered shatter in the new rules set, both before and even more so after changes from v 0.8. As has been mentioned previously in the thread, shatter is most effective against new players. I appreciate the fact that the production costs of armor have been reduced, but the cost is still significant, and devastating to a new player who gets hit with it.

Should a 3rd level spell be able to effectively deliver up to 62 points of damage (compared to a 9th level celestial damage spell which does 45 damage), render you largely useless for the remainder of the encounter, and also cost 4 gp (200 cp production cost x 2) to recoup? Even if your armor is rendered you're still taking up to 62 points of damage from a 3rd level spell. Furthermore shatter is in the eldritch force school which very few things are immune to, and with cloak/bane on magic items going away, the only real defense against it becomes spell shield, spell parry, resist magic, or dodge. In what world does this seem balanced compared to other damaging effects in the game?

With the new armor rules, it's going to be extremely easy for everyone to have armor values up to their class maximum, and armor values will be going up across the board. Shatter effectively becomes a must take spell because it is so much better than anything else at its level. It has the potential to be the highest damage spell in the game against heavily armored fighters, and it's only a 3rd level spell! And it specifically hurts new players. Shatter and destroy worked fine as they were, they did not need to be combined or buffed. Once again I feel that this is one of those rules that was just change for the sake of change that didn't really consider how unbalanced it would be.
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I don't have an issue with the 62 points of damage portion. It's a niche effect, meaning that it'll be extremely effective in some situations, and nearly useless in others.

Putting a new character out of a bunch of gold right off the bat for a 3rd level spell does seem a bit harsh, but I think it's also necessary to make Blacksmithing more viable as a production skill.
 
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