----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2000 5:39 AM
Subject: [BNW] Bombers and moans from my
players (Long)
I got some good news Friday. The players in my
campaign have decided to put the game on hold until there are a few more books
out. They are unhappy with the following things:
Bombers
Unclear ruling on how many powers a Gadgeteer can put
into an item
Improving their characters.
Right onto the first one.
Bombers.
I have said this before. Bombers are obscenely
hard. Yeah, they get two arms and then think about running. My
bomber just blows himself up and is now complaining that DP are sending really
tough people after him.
Anyway, that part I can deal with. What I am
getting at is that no matter what part of the body he blows up, he multiplies
it by his size.
His arm is not size 7. For a full torso
explosion, sure, I'll let him have size, but not an arm. There is an
example of a bomber in the book who blows up in Patriots face. I tell
you this, unless Patriot was some sort of invulnerable hero with 4 delta
points and armour on, he was at least going down. Even with a pretty
poor damage roll, multiplying by size can do a lot of damage to
someone.
Most character types are size 5 wearing some sort of
armour (5 / - ). Average strength of 3 is 3 wounds.
Bomber rolls 2D6+2xSize for an arm (think it is
right, can't find book). Say he rolls 4. +2 is 6 times size (use
my bomber as example Size 7 - really hefty) is a total of 42.
Minus 5 armour is 37 divided by size (5) is 7 wounds
massive. That is dead or at least KO'd by spending delta points.
If the poor smuck is laying there and someone survives the bomber blows
another arm and splat! No more bad guys.
In my game, the bomber did this at the end of the
ripper scenario. The other players felt cheated as he blew one arm, then
blew the other (rolled a 6 and spent delta points) to stop what happened next
- I threw something extra at them :).
I don't know if anyone else has used bombers yet, but
they are a tad OTT IMHO.
What I am suggesting is that they get double damage
for an arm / leg and possibly size plus one for full body boom. Sure,
blowing totally is a huge amount of damage, but he reforms an hour
later...trapped under tonnes of rubble and no one knows he is there!!
Muhahahahaha.
That leads me onto the player complaining that he
can't see where he can take his character. "All I can do is blow
up."
that really ragged on me. I told them all that
they can come up with new tricks. I suggested that as the bomber (chief
complainer) reforms a limb after an hour that he could do a trick where he
could regenerate somehow. He would need 2 successes on a healing roll to
heal an extra wound level.
He instead got shaped charge, touched a location on a
target and smiled and told me that it is applied to all locations. I was
not amused. I've now ruled that shaped charge is to a single location
when touching. He wanted me to see what you guys thought of it.
Hopefully I can get some back up from Matt on this.
They all want to be able to gain additional packages
and somehow improve their characters. I just told them to thing about
tricks they could do with what they got. Then there is the moan that the
tricks are a little restrictive. Bombers and blasters are damage
freaks. Why can't they do other things? I was fighting a losing
battle with them, plus they wanted more info on what was going on, so we
shelved the game until crescent city comes out.
I'll get onto the Gadgeteer now. He has 3 items
with 5 powers in them. Only one is offensive - a powered down energy
blast, but the rest are saying that he is able to build more gadgets in the
future and he has no restrictions on how much he can put in them. See
the gadgeteers description in the main rules - they can do that.
None of what he asked for was OTT, but he has 15
different things he can do - levitate, go invisible, track, blaster, a medical
kit to give a +5 healing bonus to name but a few.
Sure he spends a lot of time maintaining things, but
he is a jack of all trades. If I say one gets damaged in a fight or
stops working, I feel like I am taking away his creativity.
I still think that gadgeteers need their own
sourcebook, possibly with some refined rules, incorporating the rules from
Delta Prime (which are great) and giving additional gadgets, some of which may
be available to DP and some to the defiance. Some help here on putting
some restrictions would be good, even if it is just to preserve my
sanity.
Anyway, we are having a discussion Tuesday night on
what they feel is a problem (they had a meeting and decided to tell me after
they had a decision to put it on hold for a while) and then I will be putting
it all out here for discussion and assistance.
Overall, they really loved playing, but there were
similarities with Deadlands when it first came out - great system, too many
holes that needed filling in. We will be back playing the game, have no
doubts there, but players will be players!
Thanks for taking time in reading, suggestions and
help would be good.
Mark