Heroica RPG General Discussion

[Rider Raider]

3 hours ago, UsernameMDM said:

The artefacts and upgraded weapons really threw things out of whack.  Uncontrollable power creep.  

I’m glad that someone mentioned power creep, because IMO that is the main problem with this game. This is the strongest weapon dropped in Quest 2, a quest where everyone sans one player was a level one:

Chain Whip (WP: 4)

This is the strongest weapon dropped in Quest 154, the latest quest where all players sans one were level one:

Blackstone mace of muck (WP:20, earth- and darkness-elemental mace, user is confused for 1 round of the battle)

That’s a 16 WP and 2 element difference. If there is a sequel to this game, there should be some limitations to prevent power creep.

 

[Asphalt]

5 hours ago, CMP said:

We'll have to setup a discussion thread once this quest is over. I may not be into LEGO as much these days but I've never been more experienced with RPGs.  The system's got a lot of advantages and disadvantages, that's for sure.

I completely agree and relate.  This game got me into lego again as an old man, but it has tapered off.  But RPGs never die.  or is that goonies?  Either way. I'm all in. 

 

[Endgame]

I would love to have a Heroica post-mortem. I think that could be really valuable.

And also... You can't end a story about Heroes without slaying a couple of dragons, huh?

[Palathadric]

Can we expect a Sorrow reappearance, so Pretzel can kill him for good this time?   

Edited July 31, 2018 by Palathadric

[Endgame]

No, but take too long and you'll have to deal with Undead Lethauros. :look:

[Waterbrick Down]

2 hours ago, Endgame said:

No, but take too long and you'll have to deal with Undead Lethauros.

Sssshhhhh. No giving away the ending.

[Palathadric]

17 hours ago, Endgame said:

No, but take too long and you'll have to deal with Undead Lethauros.

And just when we think we have him beat...where is DannyLongLegs when we need him?

All I know is that colour-coded actions and battle orders work a treat against Endgame bosses.

Edited August 1, 2018 by Palathadric

[Endgame]

On 8/1/2018 at 3:21 PM, Palathadric said:

And just when we think we have him beat...where is DannyLongLegs when we need him?

All I know is that colour-coded actions and battle orders work a treat against Endgame bosses.

Those work well against literally any fight.

 

And I played nice with bosses at the end of QM career! Lethauros and Vorpalis didn't change phase at all, and Immortalis' second-half salvo was barely any change.

[Duvors]

1 hour ago, Endgame said:

Those work well against literally any fight.

 

And I played nice with bosses at the end of QM career! Lethauros and Vorpalis didn't change phase at all, and Immortalis' second-half salvo was barely any change.

Believe me, we're grateful.

[Lind Whisperer]

I was going back to see which of the three Immortalis quests Throlar was on, since I didn't remember him(#134, like I figured), and I noticed something.

No character got to see the entire story, from beginning to end.  No character went on more than two out of the three quests.

Slyph, Annienal, and Throlar only went on #134. Warlen almost made it, with both #134 and #138 under his belt, but according to the Hall, he was busy with #146 while #147 was going on.

Vindsval came closest, going on both the beginning and ending quests - though he missed #138.

Kind of sad. It was a good arc! 

Edited August 4, 2018 by Lind Whisperer

[Kintobor]

7 hours ago, Lind Whisperer said:

I was going back to see which of the three Immortalis quests Throlar was on, since I didn't remember him(#134, like I figured), and I noticed something.

No character got to see the entire story, from beginning to end.  No character went on more than two out of the three quests.

Slyph, Annienal, and Throlar only went on #134. Warlen almost made it, with both #134 and #138 under his belt, but according to the Hall, he was busy with #146 while #147 was going on.

Vindsval came closest, going on both the beginning and ending quests - though he missed #138.

Kind of sad. It was a good arc! 

Karie saw the middle and end of that arc. I'm pretty sure Lind did, too. 

[Endgame]

The story arc was kind of tenuous at best. All three were designed to stand (mostly) alone... which greatly affected who the final boss of 147 was going to be!

And technically Kinto was on every single one of them, if that counts. :tongue:

[Kintobor]

13 minutes ago, Endgame said:

The story arc was kind of tenuous at best. All three were designed to stand (mostly) alone... which greatly affected who the final boss of 147 was going to be!

And technically Kinto was on every single one of them, if that counts.

Endgame Quests Kinto was on:

Most of Them 

[Endgame]

Just now, Kintobor said:

Endgame Quests Kinto was on:

Most of Them 

Nuh-uh, you weren't there for 48! ...Which is still the longest quest to date, no?

[Palathadric]

Just now, Endgame said:

Nuh-uh, you weren't there for 48! ...Which is still the longest quest to date, no?

Colour-coded Battle Orders were so in back then.

16 hours ago, Endgame said:

And I played nice with bosses at the end of QM career! Lethauros and Vorpalis didn't change phase at all, and Immortalis' second-half salvo was barely any change.

 

[Flipz]

I have to say, the whole Torc problem this Round really highlights some of the dumber elements of the whole Battle Order system.  To be clear, the whole "randomized Battle Order" system is totally fair as a mechanic (and it's really our fault for not making conditional actions for those characters), that's not my issue, it just seems really stupid to me from an in-universe perspective that a.) Torc would just take off without her passengers, and b.) the Heroes left behind wouldn't do something else with their action once Torc left.  It's kind of symptomatic of the biggest flaw of the system in general, really; because everything is mechanically reactionary, characters can end up taking some completely utterly absurd actions due to what's effectively the Artificial Stupidity trope.  In reality, we're not in control of our characters, we just point them in a general direction and then an AI (in this case dice-based and rules-based instead of programming-based) attempts to interpret those orders, and in retrospect that's been the source of a lot of frustration over the years.

[Waterbrick Down]

4 hours ago, Flipz said:

I have to say, the whole Torc problem this Round really highlights some of the dumber elements of the whole Battle Order system.  To be clear, the whole "randomized Battle Order" system is totally fair as a mechanic (and it's really our fault for not making conditional actions for those characters), that's not my issue, it just seems really stupid to me from an in-universe perspective that a.) Torc would just take off without her passengers, and b.) the Heroes left behind wouldn't do something else with their action once Torc left.  It's kind of symptomatic of the biggest flaw of the system in general, really; because everything is mechanically reactionary, characters can end up taking some completely utterly absurd actions due to what's effectively the Artificial Stupidity trope.  In reality, we're not in control of our characters, we just point them in a general direction and then an AI (in this case dice-based and rules-based instead of programming-based) attempts to interpret those orders, and in retrospect that's been the source of a lot of frustration over the years.

Right there with you. The best way I've thought to approach things like this is in the sense of the narrative. Yes, all the heroes tried to scramble onto Torc, but the windy gale prevented them from gaining purchase as the dragon was blown off course. Heroes that end up attacking the next enemy down the list after their first target was destroyed, mistime their swings or miscast their spells. It adds a sense of realism. Battles have unfortunately become puzzles and not areas for role-play, heroes are looked down upon for not making the most optimized decision and when that optimized decision takes more than 5 minutes to figure out, some players would rather just check out and let someone else figure out what they should do. It's a flaw of the system and unfortunately not one that can easily be fixed, but certainly a learning for any future endeavors.

[Zepher]

Yeah interesting points. I actually think allowing conditional actions is what harmed the action order most - it took out all the risk. But WBD raises a good point about how battles quickly became about optimizing results v. role playing, which seems like the biggest challenge. It’s tough - online we can’t take turns one at a time a la D&D, so this is a pretty good fix. Like most things it fell apart pretty seriously only once the game got too big, for low levels it works just fine.

[Palathadric]

1 hour ago, Zepher said:

Yeah interesting points. I actually think allowing conditional actions is what harmed the action order most - it took out all the risk. But WBD raises a good point about how battles quickly became about optimizing results v. role playing, which seems like the biggest challenge. It’s tough - online we can’t take turns one at a time a la D&D, so this is a pretty good fix. Like most things it fell apart pretty seriously only once the game got too big, for low levels it works just fine.

Yeah, I agree. Though in the case of the conditional actions, I think it was more the tough/impossible boss battles that led to the conditional actions than vice versa, but I could be wrong.

I guess one of the difficulties is that a lot of us have different reasons for playing the game, so for some people their pleasure comes from creating or fighting puzzle-like-battles, in the sense that you have to do everything right (with a little help from the die/dice) to succeed, whereas other people don't enjoy that and tend to get sidelined in those times.

As the classes got stronger and more complicated though, the battles, out of necessity (I think), became more and more like this though.

[Flipz]

6 hours ago, Zepher said:

Yeah interesting points. I actually think allowing conditional actions is what harmed the action order most - it took out all the risk. But WBD raises a good point about how battles quickly became about optimizing results v. role playing, which seems like the biggest challenge. It’s tough - online we can’t take turns one at a time a la D&D, so this is a pretty good fix. Like most things it fell apart pretty seriously only once the game got too big, for low levels it works just fine.

I mean, without the conditionals, the Artificial Stupidity was even worse, taking characters who should be at least nominally competent and making them do blatantly stupid things that aren't even motivated by character reasons.  Yes, competent characters can fail (i.e. roll poorly), and players can also make poor decisions, but in plenty of ways the system ends up changing actions that are competent and thought-out into actions that are completely nonsensical, through no fault of the player's own.  There's a difference between taking a risk and it not panning out (i.e. taking an action that requires a die roll and rolling badly), and taking an action that engages with the system in a competent way and then having the rug pulled out from under you.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the last point, though.  Heroica does not scale well; everything about the system seems to have been designed around the first 10-20 levels, and then everything past that sort of just spirals wildly out of control as the numbers just continually and exponentially increase.  Part of that does come from the old gold rules that put way more currency into circulation than the smithy rules were designed to handle, and part of that does come from the Artifact arms race where stacking multipliers started to become a thing, but really both of those are just particularly noticeable extensions of the base issue of the game's overall scaling; classes are built to scale at a linear pace, but wealth and equipment tend to increase in a multiplicative or even exponential fashion, and enemies ended up following the exponential curve rather than the linear one because to do otherwise would be to just get completely trampled by BS like WP:20 or x8-x16 damage multipliers or freaking SP:692.  But that's me getting ahead of myself just a bit.

4 hours ago, Palathadric said:

Yeah, I agree. Though in the case of the conditional actions, I think it was more the tough/impossible boss battles that led to the conditional actions than vice versa, but I could be wrong.

I guess one of the difficulties is that a lot of us have different reasons for playing the game, so for some people their pleasure comes from creating or fighting puzzle-like-battles, in the sense that you have to do everything right (with a little help from the die/dice) to succeed, whereas other people don't enjoy that and tend to get sidelined in those times.

As the classes got stronger and more complicated though, the battles, out of necessity (I think), became more and more like this though.

Yeah, I do place a fair bit of outright blame on the concept that every battle is supposed to be a challenge; I completely disagree with that argument, in part because it only encourages the further exponential scaling of enemies which in turn fuels the exponential arms race between players and their opponents.  (Think about it: if every battle is supposed to be a challenge, then QMs end up having to make the first-battle warm-up mooks of a new quest just as much of a challenge as the overpowered superbosses the players fought at the end of their last one; that's just not a sustainable increase.)  I understand not wanting the party to just walk over everything, but I definitely think we collectively went way too far in the other direction.

Honestly, I think part of the issue is how reactionary the system is.  Unlike the vast majority of other RPG systems I've looked at, enemies don't get their own turns but rather can only react when PCs roll poorly, meaning the only means QMs have to alter challenge is to inflate stats and add immunities/deal negative effects/make enemies have positive effects/etc., which of course just encourages PCs to respond in kind.  Instead of attempting to invoke an in-battle failure state via poor player choice, our system encourages QMs to try to invoke failure states via player HP loss, which is basically players losing because they got bad RNG rather than losing because they made a bad choice and suffered the consequences.  That, I think, is the core problem here--QMs want to induce the occasional failure because that's interesting (or at the very least, they want the possibility of failure to be ever-present to keep the battles engaging), but there's not really a mechanism by which the players can fail other than "my numbers weren't big enough", so the natural player response is to make their own numbers bigger so they don't die, which in turn prompts QMs to make their numbers bigger in response, etc. etc. etc.  Yes, players can make intentionally bad choices in the name of roleplaying, but that then runs the risk of drawing ire because one player screwed the situation up for everyone, which again means players getting mechanically punished for actions outside their control.

...Speaking of which, the automatic "TPKO = Quest Failed" outcome is another issue; it's such a massively harsh punishment for failure that it renders failure needlessly terrifying, and also punishes QMs just as much as players (by having their whole Quest be cut short) for something that, again, is largely the fault of RNG rather than poor decision-making.  In a standard D&D or other RPG session, a party getting completely taken out doesn't necessarily mean "oh, well, I guess the campaign is over forever now, you messed up and now the world is going to get eaten by monsters from the Outer Planes in three years because this particular group of characters got shanked by a small-time mob boss at Level 4"; rather, a failure state is merely a springboard for the survivors to explore new options and encounter different narrative and mechanical challenges connected to their failures.  Sure, characters can die permanently, and important things (hometowns, NPCs, artifacts, etc.) the players and characters like can be damaged or destroyed as a negative consequence for failure, but it doesn't mean the automatic failure of the entire campaign.  By contrast, our particular system of failure seems unnecessarily punitive, and again encourages players to fear failure (and inflate their stats to avoid it) rather than to accept it and then turn it into something interesting.

I don't know if there's a real solution that fits within the (attempted) simplicity of the core Heroica system; I've considered whether giving enemies their own player phase might level the playing field (in much the same way that plenty of enemies in Pathfinder or D&D or whatever are just other parties with similar class levels to the PCs who get their own actions and rolls just like players do), but like every other solution I've considered, it again means more work on the QM's part to control the enemies and try to make them balanced compared to the PCs and account for the enemies' roleplaying decisions and whether or not they'd realistically have good tactics or not...it's a lot easier to just add on a couple zeroes to the HP and an immunity or two and call it a day, even if that does end up meaning 6+ hours of dice-rolling per Round at the end of the game's life cycle.  I'm not entirely convinced the core concept of the game can be saved from its own flaws, even with a full stats wipe and system revamp, because any revamp that really, truly addresses the underlying issues with the game would ultimately be a very different game from Heroica.  Either way, it would be a lot of work on both sides, and I think that's really what drove a lot of us away from the game--when, no matter which side of the GM screen we sat on, the game ended up turning into work instead of fun.  That's something that'll kill any game, no matter what system, and I truly think it was a major contributing factor here.

[UsernameMDM]

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

I'm really not bothered at all with the d6 system.  In fact, I think it's genius simple.  I understand and see it as a balancing mechanism.  But, as I've said before, and others have echoed it, I think what really 'ruined' the game was the artefacts and immunities. 

Maybe, if there is a 2.0, immunities can be treated similar to artefacts: the amount you can have is affected by your level.

Also, perhaps weapons can have a fixed amount of 'slots' to insert gems.   

[Palathadric]

6 hours ago, UsernameMDM said:

Maybe, if there is a 2.0, immunities can be treated similar to artefacts: the amount you can have is affected by your level.

Also, perhaps weapons can have a fixed amount of 'slots' to insert gems.   

Limited size of inventory could actually be a pretty big help. No more weapon-for-each-enemy-type, artifact-for-every-situation, endless amounts of consumables, etc. However, I don't think any of those things really address the things Flipz is talking about.

I do agree that there is a simple sort of beauty in the "d6" system, but there is a side to it which just doesn't really work. Hard for me to say what the real issue is, but definitely the TPKO one is quite a problem in that people will be extremely cautious about how they do things if the battle is difficult and therefore players who are not as tactically-inclined will be, sort of, automatically sidelined...

I'm just wondering how much a part the leveling system plays in all of this? I mean, I think people's desire to level up sort of forced QMs into making battles where there didn't necessarily need to be one and where there often wasn't a strong roleplaying prerogative for fighting...but maybe that was just the fault of the quest I ran.

But if we're talking about what broke Heroica, I, Palathadric - Vote: JimB (Hybros) and Scubacarrot (Guts)

In the name of Mizuki, I cry: Nerf rogues!  

[Waterbrick Down]

All good points folks, looking forward to the wrap up discussion.

[Kintobor]

2 hours ago, Palathadric said:

But if we're talking about what broke Heroica, I, Palathadric - Vote: JimB (Hybros) and Scubacarrot (Guts)

In the name of Mizuki, I cry: Nerf rogues!  

Palathadric Shakes Fist at Cloud

 

I actually thought about a perk system, wherein instead of directly gaining classes that dictate what you do, you instead take "perks" which dictate what a character can do. The base classes stay the same, but instead of slapping on a new template, you gain a new perk every some on levels. I didn't think too much into it, but it's a thought I had. Perhaps each perk costs a certain amount of "levels", and your level dictates which perks open up to you?

Food for thought, nonetheless.

[UsernameMDM]

27 minutes ago, Kintobor said:

Palathadric Shakes Fist at Cloud

 

I actually thought about a perk system, wherein instead of directly gaining classes that dictate what you do, you instead take "perks" which dictate what a character can do. The base classes stay the same, but instead of slapping on a new template, you gain a new perk every some on levels. I didn't think too much into it, but it's a thought I had. Perhaps each perk costs a certain amount of "levels", and your level dictates which perks open up to you?

Food for thought, nonetheless.

Like feats and abilities?