Fantasy Craft: Crits!

Having run Fantasy Craft for nearly a year and a half now, it's high time I started compiling thoughts on this, towards a potential mega-review, perhaps, maybe.

So, crits.

How critical hits works is a little different than Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition. In D&D 3e, if you roll within your critical range on a twenty-sided die, you roll to hit again and if you do, you get a critical hit. It generally, to simplify, cuts the amount of times you can get a critical hit. Critical hits do generally double damage, or more rarely triple or quadruple.

In Fantasy Craft, when you roll in your critical range, you have to spend an action die to activate your critical hit. Players generally get 3-5 action dice a session, which can be spent for a variety of uses but are generally used to boost rolls or critical hits. Players often hoard them - especially when down to 1-2 dice - to activate critical hits. As such, critical hits occur more often. Critical hits inflict damage on wounds, not vitality - wounds being a small amount of damage that normally only come into play when vitality is completed.

The key point is that wounds are generally very low - a creature with 500 points of vitality will only have 20-50 wounds. And as character levels increase, their critical range, ability to activate critical hits, and damage all increase.

The potential problem is that NPC wounds generally do not increase. They can have traits like Monstrous Defense (that reduces a character's critical range) and Tough (that denies critical hits entirely) but those are available at any level, and aren't always appropriate. As such, players become proficient enough that in a group, doing two attacks or more per round each, their 10% or more chance of getting a critical hit becomes a near-certainty. And when they're dealing out damage in the 20+ range, they have a good chance to kill anything in one turn.

And to some extent, this is appropriate; characters should be better at killing at higher levels, and since monsters and villains scale in terms of bonuses as levels get higher, this is one way to represent this. The issue is that there isn't a real counter per se, short of having every villain the players face be heavily armored and with some degree of Tough and Monstrous Defense, which grows repetitive and dull. "The villain shrugs off your hit! For the fourth time! Isn't this exciting!?"

If I run Spycraft, Fantasy Craft's sister system, I'm not likely to change it - combat is supposed to be deadly. I'm certainly not going to change it my current game after running for a year and a half and nearly being finished - but here are some alternate ideas for crit systems for Fantasy Craft:

• When you make a critical threat, you do damage normally, but can spend and roll an action die. The results of that action die are transferred directly to wounds. Since the die may explode as normal, you can get one-shot kills, but as not often as usual.
• When you take a critical hit, make a Toughness save (1/2 level + Con bonus) against a DC equal to 10 + 1/2 the damage inflicted after DR. If you fail, the damage goes to Wounds as usual, and if you succeed, you take a level of Fatigue.
• When you make a critical hit, you may spend an action dice. The attack does maximum damage instead of inflicting a critical hit. You can spend two dice to have it do normal damage.
• When you inflict a critical hit, you can spend one die for maximum damage, two dice for double damage, or three dice to inflict it directly to wounds.

Of course, Campaign Options can be used to make a campaign more or less deadly. Generally, crits are more dangerous to players than villains, because villains generally have more flunkies and more chances to roll a crit - though the presence of a capable healer in the party can reverse those fortunes.

Okay, maybe not so random

Three hundred hours.

My jaw dropped when I saw how much I'd played. Three hundred hours of Team Fortress 2. I had the scores to show for it, the hats, the guns, but I don't recall noticing how much I had played. Maybe that tracking feature wasn't around before? Three hundred.

And I'm closing in on four hundred. I've never put that much time into a game. Probably over a hundred hours on Street Fighter Alpha 3, or eighty hours in a game like Advance Wars DS or Dragon Age.

But why?

Tonight, I was playing, and I decided I wanted to play a Demoman, and picked the grenade launcher, chargin' shield, and... then I had to pick a melee weapon. The sword and the head remover reduced my health. The axe would slow me down. The grenade would blow up in my face. I wanted a weapon without drawbacks. I always used the head remover, but never really thought hard about the vulnerability it gave.

I picked the Demoman's most basic weapon, the bottle, and went forth into the fray.

Team Fortress 2 has changed, but by drips and drops. The game is much bigger, with many more options, but it doesn't change. And yet, I still feel like I'm discovering more all the time.

Charging around, I murdered people right and left, switching between the grenade launcher and bottle. One-shotting people with a sword is one thing, but taking down people with a broken piece of glass obviously never intended for war? By the time I was whittled down I'd exploded or shivved ten enemy players.

And that's why I keep playing. Because even as I close in on four hundred hours, I'm still surprised by the game - and myself.

I'll have to try the same thing with the frying pan sometime. It's no different, but it's a frying pan!

Random Reviews

I was playing Saints Row recently, and there's a term for the "open-world" sort of game like this - the sandbox game. But games like Terraria and Minecraft have given us literal sandboxes (sand included), so that doesn't really fit anymore. It's really more like an arcade where you walk around and stop by various games. For all the people that laud its freedom over GTA IV, it's not so much - it's just that the arcade games are more fun (throwing poop is more fun than throwing darts, for example).

That being said, it's a rather good evolution of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The writing is well enough, somehow wittier but not as funny. Overall it's like discovering Grand Theft Auto III was there all along, just working on getting better and waiting to come back... but never having quite fixed all the drawbacks. I've fallen through the ground, sent skidding to my death upon bumping into a running person, had a living person merge with my hood, her legs kicking as s I drove...

Recently, a designer said in regards to a certain well-selling but critically savaged game "I guess sometimes we want greasy hamburgers instead of caviar..." Well, Saints Row is a far better target of that metaphor, it is a tasty, tasty hamburger that occasionally makes you feel a little guilty for not playing something, well, better.