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Saturday, December 9, 2017

Easiest templates for DFRPG for a returning player - my take

Yesterday I asked about what the easiest templates would be for a GURPS 3e player returning to 4e-based play.

As promised, here are my comments.

My recommendation

What I said to the player was this:

"In terms of rules-know-how required to do really well, from easiest to most complex, the templates seem to go:

1) Thief, Artificer
2) fighter-types of all kinds
3) spellcasters of all kinds

2 includes barbarians, knights, martial artists (possibly the hardest of the fighter types), scouts, holy warriors.
3 includes clerics, druids, bards, and wizards.

Spellcasters are just tough because you have to learn the casting rules, deal with spell prereqs, track [energy from a power item, fatigue, and an energy reserve, etc.

It's totally doable [. . . ] It's just something you'd need to learn on top of knowing all of the other stuff.

Fighting is a little more complex than 3e, but if you read Exploits and a house rules doc I'll email to you (I need to clean it up to be readable) fighter-types are simple.
"

So that's how I ranked it.

Why are thief and artificer the easiest? Basically because:

- there is no combat complexity

and

- most of their skills are "decide what to do, describe it, and roll."

Not a lot of opposed rolls in there except against skills you're very good at (Stealth, for example). Most of the time, within your niche, you're top dog and roll against very high numbers.

Fighters are next. I think martial artists are the most complex, because of the combo of low armor values generally and specialty skills. We've had a heavy armor martial artist with weaponry, but a) he died and b) I'm not sure how effectively that leveraged what martial artists are actually good at.

Spellcasters are harder because of all of the things to track. Lots of rules to know, and all of them are critical to doing your job right. A non-optimized caster is a drag on the group, and one who either does too little or too much equally weights down the party in bad ways.

Ranks within Ranks

But how would I rank the fighters?

Easiest to hardest:

Knight
Barbarian
Holy Warrior
Swashbuckler
Scout
Martial Artist

In terms of making choices and playing the character, the Knight is the easiest. There is no bad set of choices for a Knight on the template. You're good at combat, largely melee combat. Melee combat really comes down to a few basic choices and understanding the rules for Deceptive Attack - something easily mastered. The numbers you roll against rarely change during a session. And you're probably going to either take cutting or crushing weaponry as your main weapon, and both are good choices against everything except Diffuse creatures (who you aren't good against anyway.) They're simple in actual play. "I drop my skill to 16 or 17 and then hit it in a random location or torso" is rarely a bad choice. It might not be the best choice, but it's almost always a step toward victory. Plus they're defensively sound unless you are a big risk-taker.

Barbarians are simple to design. Holy Warriors take a few more nuanced choices, as you need to decide if you're a demon-hunter or an undead-hunter and hopefully make choices that support that.

Swashbucklers can be tough - "Speed is Armor" means knowing how to leverage your speed. And knowing the rules for doing so, or depending on someone else to know for you.

Scouts aren't hard, but I don't think they are actually easy. You need to know:

- the range table
- the hit location table
- the rules for Homogenous and Unliving targets
- how the Chinks in Armor rules work
- how ACC works
- the Aim rules
- the rules for Fast-Draw and cumulative Fast-Draw.

Plus, you need to buy and track ammo. And have a good bow or two.

It's actually a more complex template than most melee fighters. It's not like a new player or returning player can't handle all of that. But it's very easy for players to think scout works like this:

- I shoot everything in the vitals or face and it dies.

I've literally had to pull aside every single scout's player save one - Galen's - at least once and say, "Please learn (some or all of the above list)." It's very frustrating for a player to expect they just shoot arrows and everything dies, then find out most of the foes they encounter in DF are most effective against their best damage types. Watching scouts shoot Unliving targets with broadheads, or accept advice from well-meaning friends who say, "Use bodkins points against those golems!" when Homogenous gives a 1/5 divider on injury, or not really get how the Range table works, or ask to shoot Chinks in Armor with a cutting-head arrow against a foe with only natural DR . . . it's frustrating as a GM. I end up needing to intervene to teach people how to run their guy. GURPS really needs less system mastery than people suppose, but for a scout you do need some. If you get buy with "I shoot it in the vitals!" or "I shoot it in the face!" and basically play Impaling McFaceshooty, you're going to spend a lot of time rolling relatively low damage and having the GM multiply it by x1 or x1/2 or x1/5 and ticking off arrows from your sheet.

None of this is to say Scout is a bad choice, or that this player couldn't run a Scout. It's just not the easiest template, it just on the surface presents the easiest choice. I still think a melee-oriented Knight, followed by an equally melee-oriented Barbarian or Holy Warrior, is the easiest way to go. You have more options in front of you, but no need to use them to be an effective character.

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