RPGamerzQuest: GamesCharacter

Showing posts with label GamesCharacter. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Role Playing Games--Character Guide 5

Introduction: Among the most feared of character types in a role playing game is the blaster. Whether a fire-throwing mage, machine-gun-toting soldier, or bomb-launching robot, these characters are respected not only for their ability to do phenomenal damage, but to attack multiple opponents at once. Their powers rarely come without cost, however, and the failure of their attacks is a larger setback for them than the failure of an attacker's stable strikes.

Blasters are the tide-turners of battles, able to attack multiple foes at once for high damage. However, they are not generally as good at attackers at causing solid damage turn after turn. In some games, they are limited in the number of times they can use their powers. In some (such as QoTR), they require extra time or effort to prepare their powerful attacks.

In Quests of the Realm, the blaster is represented by the direct preference.

Player Tactics: When playing a blaster, you should take care to understand your limits. Oftentimes, a large-area attack used in a thick melee will damage your allies as well as your enemies, limiting your effectiveness. If you have a limit to the number of times you can use your high-powered attacks, make sure they count, and be careful if you expect to meet several encounters before getting a chance to recover. If you require extra time or effort to utilize your skills, do what you can to ready your attacks during lulls, before battles, or in other safe periods as allowed by the game.

You don't want to go overboard with a blaster. One way or another, it will likely lead to burn out. Just because you can attack multiple foes doesn't mean you will succeed to hit them all, and there are often abilities available that can counteract an attack for all involved. In QoTR, for example, defenders have an ability called "intervene", which allows them to negate an action in its entirety. A successful intervention, thus, can counter a blaster's powerful attacks for all involved, resulting in wasted energy.

Bear in mind both your damage potential and your ability to attack multiple opponents. Together, these advantages make you the best choice for dealing with large groups of fodder foes. Don't waste extra effort dealing with individual opponents. With a blaster, it is all about getting the most out of every action.

Although all combinations can be effective, a blaster/attacker creates the potential for incredible damage, and also ensures that you have something to fall back on when you can't use your high-powered attacks. A blaster/speedster can get off its attacks faster, which leads to swifter victory but also a higher chance of burnout. Adding a defensive ability to a blaster makes for a fearsome opponent, while a blaster/trickster can wipe out entire enemy forces without even being seen.

GM Tactics: Putting blasters up against the party is always a risk. Since they are such capable damage dealers, and can attack the entire party at once, they are incredibly dangerous opponents. A blaster of roughly equal level to the party, backed up by other opponents, can make for a good challenge. A higher-level boss blaster is a deadly threat, but might not last long enough to be useful, since most parties will concentrate immediate and overwhelming attack to defeat such a foe before it can demolish them. Groups of elite or fodder blasters create a complicated scenario, since everyone has to defend against every attack from the enemy group. Generally speaking, if you want the party to have a good chance of winning, you should keep the number of blasters in any enemy group low.

As mentioned, the best way to use enemy blasters is to join them with other character types. A particularly effective tactic is to get a blaster with strong defenses. There is a good chance that the party will concentrate (and waste) significant effort on that opponent, allowing other foes the opening. If they don't, well, then they risk the power of the blaster's attacks.

In role playing games, blasters are feared for their ability to deal significant damage to multiple foes at once. Players can use blasters to eradicate large groups of fodder foes quickly and deal significant harm to boss opponents. However, overuse of a blaster's capabilities is likely to result in burnout, especially over a prolonged fight or series of fights. Enemy blasters can be devastating to the party, and are best kept to a minimum. In all cases, the ideal way to use blasters is not to try to pour everything they have into maximum-power assaults, but to use their puissant powers with deliberate decisiveness.

Dustin Schwerman has been playing RPGs for over a decade, using an analytical approach to critically evaluate the game systems (and so to create the most powerful characters he could get away with). He used the extensive experience gained doing so to create his own game, Quests of the Realm. QoTR focuses on unlimited character customization, relying on its author's understanding to detect and counter game-breaking power plays. Though balanced, QoTR still allows players to create highly effective characters and run them through heroic story lines. To contact Dustin, read more of his writings, or learn more about Quests of the Realm, visit his web site, Quellian-dyrae [http://www.quelliandyrae.com].

Monday, February 14, 2011

Role Playing Games--Character Guide 2

Introduction: Its stats are low, its abilities limited. Why should your character, a mighty warrior skilled in both offensive and defensive arts, fear this foe? You strike with confidence, only for a quick augmentation to increase its defense for the action, blocking your attack. It returns the blow, scoring a solid hit and improving its damage--and adding in one of its most potent special abilities to further augment the effect. Wary now, you ply your own powers to defeat its next two moves, but you can only use these abilities so often. Your opponent, however, confidently continues to activate two or three of its abilities on every attack.

In a role playing game, this sort of character type can be referred to as the "user", a character who can quickly but temporarily improve otherwise low stats and/or activate its powerful abilities very frequently. The user is not a jack of all trades, but a versatility specialist. They may not have all the powers of other specialists, but those they do have they can use nearly as well, and much more often.

In Quests of the Realm, the advantages of the user are reflected in the ARN preference.

Player Tactics: In QoTR, a user--that is, a character with the ARN preference--has two main advantages. They can increase their stats on a by-action basis, and they can use their special preference aspects more often. Other RPGs might have characters that function as users with one or both advantages to varying degrees. Being a user is much less straightforward than being an attacker or defender. The advantages of the user--especially in the area of being able to use special abilities more often--can vary strongly based on the game.

Thus, the first step to effectively playing a user is to understand which advantages your character has, and to what degree. If you have both, you might also want to consider which you plan to use most often, since using one might impact the other. In QoTR, for example, simply activating the action improvement is itself a special ability, and so carries a correspondent cost in and of itself.

If you expect to most frequently use stat improvements, understand that while you can probably face a character so specialized on its own terms, you are unlikely to overpower its advantage. Much like with the achiever described in article one, you are skilled in all arts, and you have a strong advantage over the standard specialist if you specialize as both a user and the other specialty. Unlike with achievers, users are not so much the masters of succeeding actions as being able to improve the value of their actions. Thus, the best way to use stat improvements, much like with an achiever, is to minimize the foe's advantages (as by improving defensive stats against a powerful attacker) and maximize its disadvantages (improving stealth skills against unsubtle foes).

If you prefer the significant ability access, use it but don't get overconfident. A user might be able to utilize its abilities more often, but that does not mean they can do so forever. A user is also more likely to tap its special abilities, which can lead to burnout if they aren't careful. You might also want to consider not overusing your abilities. Use them only as needed, and win through attrition. This is particularly effective if you also have some sort of defensive specialty.

All combinations are valid, and the user specialty combines as well as any, but creating a user/tanker (or better, a user/defender/tanker) creates a character with a very good chance of winning through attrition. Combining user with achiever and/or enhancer creates an incredibly versatile character.

GM Tactics: Users can make very effective opponents thanks to their versatility. Generally, they aren't necessarily the best fodder foes, since they don't tend to get the chance to showcase all of their talents. Also, multiple users in the same battle can make for something of a headache to run. Users, thus, are best utilized as "boss" enemies, and can be particularly effective as recurring villains. Even better, a single opponent of similar power to the characters can make for a very effective user. Such a villain can stress the characters greatly by engaging them when they separate, attacking one at a time and always using tactics that work best against them. Such an opponent should probably make use of a defensive specialty as well, and it certainly wouldn't hurt for it to also be a troubleshooter--particularly, one who can teleport away when the going gets tough.

Users in numbers can be a bit more deadly than you might want, mainly due to the attrition aspect. Such battles promise to be long, grueling, and probably overly complicated, with a reasonable chance that the characters will be slogging away through most of the fight and then be virtually unable to utilize their powers and forced to retreat or fall after an hour or so of difficult fighting. Not the most entertaining scene.

In a role playing game, users are the masters of versatility. Whether they use their powers frequently or boost whatever stat is necessary to the situation, they often seem to always have another trick or tactic to ply. Players can take advantage of this versatility to improve whatever other specialties they possess, or utilize it in its own right to claim an advantage over foes. Villains, too, can find this build advantageous--especially for thoroughly annoying the players!

Role Playing Games--Character Guide 6

Introduction: The majority of role playing games available rely on dice to create a system of random chance. As such, one can never truly predict how things will go. Even an attacker, blaster, or speedster can't guarantee victory before the foe gets a chance to make a crucial attack. Even an achiever, trickster, or defender can't assume that a foe will never succeed to score a hit. Eventually, sometimes even often, characters will take hits. If anything in an RPG is guaranteed, it is this simple fact.

How to deal with it? Play a tanker. Tankers are the characters who take the hits and keep on going. They do not fall easily, do not succumb to single blows. All tankers are alike in their ability to take the hits, but in some games, they also heal rapidly over time, making them virtually impossible to wear down through attrition and compounding their incredible stamina with constant recuperation.

In Quests of the Realm, tankers are represented by the endure preference.

Player Tactics: The tanker, like the defender, is primarily a protective specialty. In QoTR, tankers supplement their stamina with some functional options. They can sacrifice their resilience to improve their actions, and can ignore some of the penalties that come from being badly injured (and, indeed, gain bonuses instead!) This isn't always the case, however, and being able to take a lot doesn't matter much if you can't likewise dish it out.

The tanker, thus, is a specialty that helps to maximize other advantages more than granting benefits of its own. Since a tanker doesn't fall easily, it has more chances to make use of its abilities. When other characters are falling back to get healing, the tanker is still going strong, possibly even stronger than it was in the beginning of the fight.

A tanker should never go for minimal impact. Do whatever you can to pester your enemies so they turn their attention onto you. As with a defender, your value to the party, other specialties aside, is strongly limited if foes elect not to attack you. On the other hand, don't let the value of your strength defeat itself. Tankers are hard to take down--but not impossible. You want to draw attacks off of your allies, but much as with a user, if you rely too heavily on your ability to resist hard, it will be used up when you need it later.

Although any combination can prove effective, tankers do lend themselves to certain other specialties. A user/tanker, used wisely, is a master of winning through attrition. A blaster/tanker might risk a high chance of burnout, but played with some caution, can devastate the enemy force without fearing being taken down quickly due to the perceived threat of blasters. An enhancer/tanker, able to take the hits and heal, is virtually immortal on the field, while a defender/tanker is not only hard to hit, but also requires more hits to drop (and may be able to lower the damage of those hits it takes, to boot).

GM Tactics: Tankers share many of the same advantages of defenders for villain design. They make great boss opponents, especially if a lot of the players have high-damage characters that would otherwise eradicate a boss in one or two hits. If tankers can gain in effectiveness as they are injured (as in QoTR), the challenge of such a battle increases as the characters get closer to winning, not unlike in some video game RPGs.

Attacker/tanker fodder opponents are a pretty safe bet. Since they are lower level than the party, their ability to take more hits and deal more harm make them credible threats. And, since their tactics are straightforward, the GM can use them without having to worry about complicated strategy. As with defenders, though, tanker fodder can mean a much longer battle. On the flip side, they're a great choice if the party contains a slightly-too-effective blaster.

Tanker elites can prove effective, especially if combined with more powerful allies. A trickster/achiever boss, for example, with a couple of tanker elites can make for an interesting challenge. All in all, the tanker specialty is among the best choice for villains--it makes them effective without making them unnecessarily devastating, and nicely complements any other specialty they have.

Tankers can take the hits and keep on fighting. They lack powerful offensive abilities of their own, but if they have a halfway decent fighting specialty to back them up, they can win their fights through attrition. Players should value the added survivability of tankers, since a player's character is naturally subject to more attacks--and more successful attacks--over the course of a long-running game than any individual villain. However, enemies too can benefit from a tanker's capabilities, allowing them to actually stay in the fight long enough to cause an effect, even against a group of high-damage characters.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Role Playing Games--Character Guide 3

Introduction: Ah the attacker. How can one go wrong? Truly, this is the specialty that needs no introduction, but we'll give it one anyway. In a role playing game, the attackers are the solid, effective damage dealers. Whether through their high chance of successfully hitting, their ability to inflict severe injury, or their capability at causing debilitating status damage, attackers master the art of taking their opponents down. Solid and dependable, attackers don't need a variety of tricks and tactics. Give them their weapons, point them at their opponents, and watch the combat end.

For purposes of this article, attackers can include any and all of the following: a character who has a reliable chance of hitting in combat; a character who deals significant damage; or a character who can weaken opponents with status effects. An attacker, however, should not be confused with an achiever (who has a high chance of succeeding any action, not just attacks) or a blaster (who deals massive damage to multiple opponents). Generally speaking, an attacker can attack only a few foes, typically one, on any given turn. Attackers also are able to attack without cost; they don't usually have major limitations on how often they can utilize most of their abilities.

In Quests of the Realm, attackers are represented, logically enough, by the attack preference.

Player Tactics: Obviously, if you are playing an attacker, your tactic is to attack. It helps, however, to determine just what style of attacking you prefer. In QoTR, you can decide this on the fly in battle if you want, varying your tactics. Depending on the game you play, the type of character and abilities you choose may limit your options.

If you plan to go for damage power over accuracy, you might not get many hits in, but those you do achieve will be decisive. This can be a weakness against defenders, who take your already low chance of hitting and further reduce it. If you favor hitting often, don't expect to turn the tide with a single move; you need some time to wear your foe down. This, then, is of less use against tankers, who can take more of your hits. If you favor status effects over direct "hit point" style damage, your attacks are better at directly weakening a foe in combat, but not strictly better at wearing them down. The effectiveness generally varies depending on how your game handles status effects, but generally speaking, it is easier to deal damage than to blind, stun, or confuse a foe.

All combinations have merit, and an attacker certainly compliments any other specialty in a combat-oriented game. Attacker/defenders or attacker/tankers have both offense and defense covered. If you favor direct damage, being an attacker/blaster might suit you well. On the flip side, if you like a high chance of hitting, you might prefer attacker/achiever. Generally speaking, an attacker/user might be better able to inflict status effects than others, while an attacker/enhancer is good at weakening foes while augmenting allies, which can make for an interesting combination.

GM Tactics: Attackers are good at dealing damage, which makes them deadly. If you put your players up against a boss-level attacker, you are putting their characters at significant risk of death. Although some groups prefer a "take us to the edge" style of play, the focus of these articles for a GM is to help challenge the players while maintaining a respectable chance that their characters will survive the encounter.

That in mind, attackers are best used as fodder foes--that is to say, opponents who are individually weaker than the main characters, and tend to fight in numbers. The numerical advantage indicates that despite their lesser power, these opponents will probably score a hit eventually. As attackers, they can deal respectable harm even to higher-level foes, making them into credible threats. A couple elite-level attackers focused on status effects helping out a boss can strongly intensify the challenge of a climactic battle, though you may want to tone the boss down some. If you wish to use a boss attacker, you might go for a character who hits often at the expense of pure damage power. This maintains the attacker's threat and helps get around pesky defenders, but also gives characters a chance to retreat, heal, or overwhelm the foe through numbers.

Attackers are front-lines fighters, plain and simple. They don't need tricks and tactics, but that doesn't mean they can't use them, and it certainly doesn't mean that all attackers are alike. By choosing your preferred attack style and selecting specialties that compliment it, you can create a highly customized warrior. This variety can also help wise QLs use offensively-oriented foes to threaten the players without putting them at excessive risk of character death.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Role Playing Games--Character Guide 4

Introduction: Being able to cause massive damage is well and good, but it's a useless ability in either of the following cases: you can't hit your foe, or you've already been dropped. In the world of role playing games, these simple facts explain the existence of defenders, characters who don't rely on massive damage power to win the day, but get through their battles by outlasting their opponents. Defenders prefer to wear their foes down over time, and since they avoid most attacks against them, they are in a perfect position to do just that.

There are two primary possibilities for defenders, either or both of which might be represented in a given game's defense-oriented characters. The first involves simply avoiding attacks, causing them to fail utterly. The second involves lessening the impact of those attacks that succeed. Obviously, the best defenders are those who are able to do both.

In Quests of the Realm, defenders are represented, as one would hope, by the defend preference.

Player Tactics: The style of game can have a strong effect on the value of playing a defender. You may wish to set your sights elsewhere in some cases, because unless they have some decent secondary advantages or methods of using their abilities, defenders can be boring to play. Not only do you lack impressive offenses, but smart foes will identify defenders and avoid attacking them. Now, on one hand, this only makes you better at doing what you do best: avoiding getting hit. On the other hand, your big value to the party is to draw off enemy attacks, and if your foes don't bother attacking you, you're useless. Worse still, just because you can often avoid attacks doesn't mean you always will. If your attacks are so weak that you find it as hard to appreciably hurt your foes and they find you, you don't have any advantage at all in single combat.

In QoTR, defenders have abilities allowing them to defend their allies, thus foiling foes regardless of who they attack. QoTR defenders also have abilities that allow them to turn a foe's botched attacks to their own advantage, typically by giving them an opening to improve their next attack. If you are playing another RPG, you might want to see if you can find a character who has such abilities before you dedicate yourself to playing a defender.

On the other hand, if characters in your game tend to have multiple specialties, adding defense might be viable regardless of specialty tactics. The fact of the matter is, no matter what your other skills are, adding defense helps you stay alive, so it is always welcome. The only time you want to be careful is when considering an all-out defensive character.

On the subject of combinations, any choice can work fine, but some that stand out are attacker/defender (or blaster/defender), tanker/defender, and achiever/defender. The attacker/defender adds good damage to strong defenses, which makes for a foe both hard to kill and quite capable of killing your opponents. A tanker/defender adds phenomenal endurance to high ability to avoid hits, exponentially improving both advantages. The achiever/defender is good at avoiding attacks and good at succeeding actions (such as defenses), for a layered benefit. Such characters also have at least functional attacks to fall back on.

GM Tactics: Defenders make great boss opponents. An RPG boss, generally speaking, is outnumbered by the characters, but more individually powerful than each one. Having a defense specialization allows it to better handle the threat of multiple foes, while its naturally higher stats can still serve as offensively effective. Such an opponent can be quite stressful to players, since they get many turns but still don't seem to be causing any effect. Even if the villain isn't making much real headway itself, the sheer number of misses the characters get can make it seem much more formidable than it actually is.

Elite opponents can also benefit from a defensive specialization. A particularly effective tactic is to have a couple skilled defenders backing up more offensively-minded opponents. While the focus of these articles is always on challenging the players without putting their characters at overwhelming risk, if you are in the market for a truly dangerous battle, an attacker or blaster boss with a couple elite defender minions (provided those defenders can somehow protect the boss) makes a devastating team.

You may wish to shy away from defender fodder foes. Giving fodder opponents high defenses basically means a long, grueling, and potentially embarrassing battle. Fodder opponents are never much expected to seriously threaten the characters, but it's nice for them to have at least a degree of impact. As defenders, they just get in the way and stay there for longer.

Defenders are skilled at avoiding attacks. They have good survivability, but without other specialties, can be limited in their actual impact on combat. Consider the advantages the defenders of your game have access to. All-out defenders might have really strong survivability, but can be boring to play if all they can do is dodge really well. For players, the best defenders are those that can protect their allies. For GMs, defenders are effective ways at making a battle seem much harder than it actually is--which can be good or bad, depending on what you want the encounter to accomplish.