Difference between revisions of "Sons Of The Seventh Legion/HOUSE RULES"

Revision as of 15:28, 7 October 2005

PERSONAL HOUSE RULES

As the name suggests, these are the house rules being used:

FOR THE COWARD THERE IS NO LIFE, FOR THE HERO THERE IS NO DEATH

The truly great - whether villain or hero - are hard to kill. Attacks that would have killed lesser men might maim or drive them into blessed unconsciousness but not these few: they can be driven down, but not out, until a final coup-de-grace.

MECHANICS: Exalts and important NPCs are protected from ignoble deaths: regardless of the cause, any damage that would cause the person to die instead puts him at Incapacitated - these people must take additional damage to drive them past death's door, shielding them from accidental deaths and giving room for a dramatic rescue or recovery.

UNBENDING WILL OF THE GREAT

The will of the true villains and heroes of the world are similarly hard to bend, though not impossible. While the social charms of the Chosen can aid this greatly, there are those whose wills are so impossibly strong that a truly heroic effort - even for an Exalt - is needed.

MECHANICS: Exalts and important NPCs have stronger wills than normal and aren't easily turned. Whenever a social roll is applied to bend the will of these characters, the target gets to roll his Permanent Willpower. The successes on this roll will be deducted from the user's social roll results. In addition, the user of the social power will have to roll against an added difficulty equal to the Virtue that he is trying to invoke an emotion against (e.g. invoking cowardice adds a difficulty equal to the target's Valour). This makes important characters substantially more difficult to turn, yet not impossible.

A NOTE ON STUNTS

Played by the book, stunts would all require lots of rolling (make a brilliant acrobatic roll through the legs of the giant wood spider and you'd have to roll athletics to see if you succeed, splitting your dice as you do) - but not here. Instead, we'll be following that common house rule where there's no need to split dice/roll for the additional stunt action as long as the stunt does not result in a mechanical advantage except for the extra dice, of course.

For example:

Cloaked by the night, Reia drops down from the roof soundlessly, her blades gleaming with the firelight. She seems to barely move , somehow appearing behind the pair of guards where only a moment earlier she had landed before them. Silently, she straightened from her crouch and turned her head partways back to see the two corpses, dead before they knew it, collapse on the ground, their faces a picture of peace.

In this case, Reia would have to split her dice pool. Why? Because if she didn't she would have gained a mechanical advantage in addition to the bonus dice on her attack i.e. she would have killed two people with one attack. The consolation here is that the bonus dice for her stunt applies to both of those split-dice attacks, a worthy consideration.

CHARM MASTERY / REVISED COMBOS

The existing combo rules aren't too friendly to casual players; I didn't think my players would appreciate having to sift through numerous charm prerequisites when trying to have their characters make cool charm-combinations so I'm going to test drive this idea instead.

CHARM MASTERY (SPEED)

What is Charm Mastery? When a character has spent so much time and training perfecting their use of a particular charm, it becomes second nature to them, allowing them to use it with an almost casual thought. Using a mastered power like this costs the usual amount of essence, but takes no time and little effort.

MECHANICS: An ambitious character can master a Charm by spending Experience on it - to master a given Charm, one needs to spend Experience equal to [2x the Ability requisite]+[the Essence requisite]. It costs 2 Experience points less to master a Charm from any ability that is Favoured.

You don't have to pay the total experience needed at one go; to make things easier, you can 'hire purchase' it and pay 1 xp everytime you use the particular Charm and still get the benefits of Charm Mastery. Once you have paid the necessary amount, you can get the benefits of Charm Mastery without needing to pay any more xp.

The benefits of achieving Charm Mastery are that the Charm can be invoked reflexively (i.e. it requires no time to invoke), even if it normally requires the entire turn's actions. Additionally, it is not counted against the character's use of charms (normally characters should only be able to use 1 Charm per turn, but since a mastered Charm is not counted, they can theoretically use more provided they have many mastered charms).

There are some limitations on speed mastery of course:

• Simple charms and Extra-action charms are activated reflexively but can only be used during or anytime after the user's initiative

• Supplemental charms still require the actions that they boost

For example:

Hiroshi has mastered the parry Charm Heavenly Guardian Defence. Usually, against stronger opponents he would reserve his Charm action for the turn for defence just in case he makes a mistake; this also means Hiroshi doesn't use his offensive powers much.

However, because he is now a master, he can instead use his offensive powers without worrying too much about his defence because in addition to his normal 1 Charm action, he can use Heavenly Guardian Defence without taking up the Charm action.

REVISED COMBOS

Revised combos are a higher-level form of Charm Mastery (Speed).

With Charm Mastery, a character mastering a number of charms from the same ability (e.g. Archery) will be able to combo them. The difference between plain mastery and combos is this: a charm master can use the charm without taking time but he still cannot combine its effects (a master of Excellent Strike and Hungry Tiger Technique can use either of them to boost his attacks, but not both). On the other hand, comboing allows a charm master to combine the effects of multiple charms (using both Excellent Strike and Hungry Tiger Technique together to great effect).

MECHANICS: Combos follow several easy rules:-

• A combo must be declared when the character uses his Charms.

• Once declared, the character must spend 1 willpower in addition to the normal Charm costs.

• Only charms using the same ability can stack their effects, Archery Charms stack with other Archery Charms only and Performance Charms stack with other Performance Charms. Charms explicitly described as stacking with other Charms outside their type are exceptions to this rule (e.g. The Athletics Charm Thunderbolt Attack Prana, which works with other Abilities).

• Any Charms in the combo must not be explicitly barred from combos.

• Only one Extra-action Charm can exist in a combo.

• Sorcery and Necromancy cannot be part of a combo.

• Any Charms in the combo that are not completely mastered will incur a cost of 1 xp per Charm as part of the ongoing payment towards being mastered. Insufficient xp to pay means that excess Charms will be dropped from the combo.

• Charms must have an instant duration to be comboed; of course, if you have mastered a Charm that has a non-instant duration you can activate that Charm reflexively outside the combo provided you have Charm Mastery. This way, you can still gain its effects.

• These combo rules do not change the rules for Five Directions Formation Protocol; users of the Protocol must pay for their group combos with experience normally and are subject to the previous rules as far as their protocols are concerned

For example:

Shin has mastered the Charms Immaculate Golden Bow (which summons a golden bow of essence), Rain of Feathered Death (which multiplies the number of arrows shot with one attack) and Wise Arrow (which adds to his archery attack dice).

Shin cannot combo the three together because Immaculate Golden Bow lasts for the entire scene, not just an instant, but he can still invoke it separately from the combo. After he summons the bow, he can then use Wise Arrow to boost his attack and, by spending a willpower point, combo it with Rain of Feathered Death to multiply his damage.

CHARM MASTERY (ESSENCE EFFICIENCY)

Another rule we're playtesting - I was asked that since the Exalted could reduce the time needed to use their Charms, whether the same reasoning could be applied to reducing the costs of the Charms. I'm not too sure what the repercussions will be, and this might not be something you'd like to try in your game, but sure why not.

MECHANICS: The cost of mastering a Charm for essence efficiency is the same as the cost of mastering a Charm for speed, the student needs to spend Experience equal to [2x the Ability requisite]+[the Essence requisite]. It costs 2 Experience points less to master a Charm from any ability that is Favoured.

Each time this mastery is paid for, the total cost of the Charm can be reduced by either 3 motes or 1 willpower - but there will always be a minimum cost of 1 mote and/or willpower per use. There is no restriction on how many times Charm Mastery for Essence Efficiency can be done (at least not yet), as long as the experience costs are paid each time.

FROM THE PLAYER'S GUIDE

I will be using some rules adapted from the Exalted Player's Guide, with the following changes:

ONE ACTIVATION PER INSTANT

The one activation per instant rule applies here but there's a special need to note that reflexive charms mastered for speed can be stacked i.e. dodge/parries; the user is considered to have used one first, invoking the second one if he failed to defend himself on the first roll.

INCREASED MINIMUM DAMAGE

Minimum damage will be calculated using
[Attacker's Essence]-[Defender's Essence],
with at least one die damage as per the classic rules.

CHARMS

Wherever a Charm provides Hardness or Weapon stats, they are ignored.

MISCELLANEOUS

These other rules changes will not be used:

• Changes to weapon stats
• Changes to Initiative
• Hardness

LUNARS

The following changes are in effect for Lunars (subject to tweaking):

• All the changes in Hotfixing the Lunars by (DeadManSeven)
• Towering Beast Form and Humble Mouse Shape come free with Finding the Spirit's Shape.

HERO POINTS

I'm using a version of the 'Hero points' suggested in Eric Brennan's article here

The system is still under testing though, and I will make changes when necessary.

Briefly, Hero Points are a pool of points from which an important character can draw upon to do things covered in heroic conventions that aren't normally covered in the rules. These things include drawing upon a hidden endurance that you never thought was there to pull off the finishing blow when you should be a slowly-cooling corpse or surviving a collapsing building by finding a trap-door that should not exist. Conversely, you get hero points by doing heroic things or by making sacrifices that add to the direction of the plot.

SPENDING HERO POINTS

Hero points can be spent on heroic conventions:

I'm not done yet!
Through a supreme act of will or passion, the drained or beaten hero calls upon a last surge of power that draws him past any reasonable limits, giving him that final blow to end it!

Spending Hero points on this allows a character to regain any combination of essence, willpower, health levels, subject to a limit on the number of points one can spend on this each turn.

1 HP regains 10% of total Essence pool
1 HP regains 1 temporary Willpower
1 HP regains 1 Health Level
3 HP regains 40% of total Essence pool
3 HP regains 1/2 of total temporary Willpower
3 HP regains 1/2 of total Health Levels

Elementary My Dear Watson!
Sometimes the plot gets too complicated or so much time has passed since the clues were in play that the players are wandering lost and confused, making the game a drag. Of course, this never happens to heroes and great villains, who always have some maybe-not-so-accurate but still great leaps of intuition.

Spending points here gives the characters a clue or a sudden realisation: everytime 1 Hero point is spent here, the ST will describe what the character can assume to be true based on the knowledge he has access to. Therefore, characters who have higher Investigation ratings or have a good range of relevant abilities to the particular situation will get better information.

REFRESHING HERO POINTS

Hero points (for PCs) are given everytime they do something heroically dramatic:

• Doing something heroically dramatic (1 pt): staying in a town to fend off the coming Fair Folk raid even though they have no interests there or defeating a powerful foe and sparing his life in the hope that he will wake up to error of his ways.
• Adding drama with personal issues (1 pt): developing a character's personality or life situation through subtle roleplaying about their difficulties. These issues probably shouldn't divert the spotlight to themselves at the expense of the game, but rather highlight that he or she is a real person. For Reia, this might occur when she and her mother must confront the truth of her being one of the Anathema, making her nervous and withdrawn in the session and forcing her to work through her issues behind the scenes.

HERO POINT POOLS

All players get a basic pool of 6 Hero Points - a minimum pool of 3 points and an additional 3 points at their power level. Stronger characters will have fewer points added to the basic 3 to reflect how standards for such characters are higher since they can already count on their greater skills to save them.

Every session, the players refresh half of this pool.