Artifact Creation system from S&S

[lowguppy]

Ok, after going through it trying to make some nifty armor, I'm convinced that very little thought was actually put into this system, and even less explanation thereof.


Ok, so the basics work like this:


Use the charts to determine the 4 attributes of the Artifact,


Sum them,


Subtract drawbacks,


Divide by 4, rounding up, to determine the artifact's rating.


If you're going to use this formula at all, I suggest adjusting it thusly:


Determine the 4 attributes as described.


Compute their average, rounding up.


The artifact's rating is the average of the four attributes or the Power Level score, whichever is higher.


Otherwise its pretty easy to create 4 dot armor that's just plain better than the stock 5 dot armor. This might not always be a terrible thing, but its almost impossible to create 5 dot armor that isn't totally obscene otherwise. I understand its 5 dots, and it should be badass (I love the game for being badass) but seriously, there's a line somewhere, but this book just doesn't seem to know where it is.

 

[Persell]

Or you just sit down with your storyteller and actually talk about your pre game start generated artifact? Why not just TALK instead of coming up with some formula... I mean at the end of the day your ST is the final arbiter anyway.

 

[Persell]

I actually liked the old system better, although it was more vague.

 

[lowguppy]

Well, talking is what I'm gonna do. I'm just saying that IF you want to use it, and its not bad as a rough guide to what a dot X artifact should do, you need to fudge it a bit.

 

[Gtroc]

As an ST I loved the artifact creation rules in BoTC, they were vague, and gave me control over the powerlevel of most artifacts, wich help me reign in my kill crazy PCs. as a player, though, I hated it for the very same reasons. I felt as if I could not make a the weapon I wanted because the ST would not agree with my assesment of its power level. I hate S&S though, good concept, poor design. I am really looking forward to the new artifact and spell books for 2ED.

 

[lowguppy]

The big discrepancy I see between the different artifacts and artifact design systems is the relative power level between different dots of artifact. If you look at the Solar book, the armor definitely shows diminishing returns, adding very little soak at each level along with mobility and fatigue penalties. In contrast, 4-5 dot armors in other books all have some pretty sweet things they can do, and at least as good soak as those in the Solar book. S&S goes even further, suggesting (by its classification of charms in power level) that each dot is around 3x the power level, especially considering how Power Level affects dots in that system, even if you modify it like I suggest. Hopefully someone in their design department will sit down and decide how much power you should get out of each dot. Until then all we can do is compare our designs to the (limited) examples in the various books.

 

[Silence In Daylight]

Hopefully someone in their design department will sit down and decide how much power you should get out of each dot.

 Is this before or after WW starts putting out universally useful indices?  8)

 

[Diamond Viper]

I wish the S&S system crawls into some really dark hole at the edge of the univaerse and dies...


I mean it's so damn stupid. You can't get the whole picture, the WW boys deny its inapplicability and space is wasted on forums just to get a glipmse of it.

 

[SagaciousAscendingHero]

Otherwise its pretty easy to create 4 dot armor that's just plain better than the stock 5 dot armor. This might not always be a terrible thing, but its almost impossible to create 5 dot armor that isn't totally obscene otherwise. I understand its 5 dots, and it should be badass (I love the game for being badass) but seriously, there's a line somewhere, but this book just doesn't seem to know where it is.

Well with the new system, I've revised the levels of the "stock" armor from the main book from 1,2,3,4,5 to 1,2,2,3,3. If you follow the links in my Sig to my Wiki page, I have all the details of my tweaks for my artifacts, etc.


Here is the revised chart.


0 - Breastplate


00 - Reinforced Buffjacket


00 - Reinforced Breastplate


000 - Articulated Plate


000 - Superheavy Plate

 

[lowguppy]

I like all of those house rules, especially just giving more virtues to start. Exalted should be fucking virtuous. Also, higher virtues make for more limit break, which is always fun. I might limit them to only starting with one virtue above 3 w/o bonus points though.

 

[SagaciousAscendingHero]

Yeah, we've been giving 7 dots since nearly the beginning. What do you think of the artifact guns? I still havent had a chance to playtest them and its bugging me..

 

[lowguppy]

We've been playing in a ff7-ish setting with guns lately and did some tweaking on them. They didn't play much of a factor in the session we did with the first ST, and the second sorta over-used them (more modern than fantasy).


We did mess around with the stats though, because the baseline gun stats were useless. We added speed to guns, mainly because as a weapon they don't get boned in close combat like bows do, and firing them is pulling a trigger, not pulling out, notching, and then firing an arrow. We also didn't like that a guy with a sword would, with impugnity, always be able to run up and smack the guy pointing a gun at him before he could shoot. I know as well as anyone that if Anime teaches us anything, its that swords beat guns, but there is a line somewhere. We didn't mess with ammo types. Another thing we added was effectively putting Hungry Tiger Technique into effect on them, where extra successes count twice. We did this instead of upping damage and to reflect the narrow area a bullet effects.


Our next ST will probably tweak them again, back to her original concept of existing more as artifacts than mass produced and standard issue for Dragonblood soldiers. Commanders with the equivalent of 50cals will probably still pop up though.