Post by easyDisaster in Brighter Worlds comments

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Allo, I was the DM for this, and I had my own input, though I might have trouble putting it easily into words.

Wanted to mirror Miah's statement that this was a lot of fun and very easy from my POV as the DM to run, I was using another adventure meant for OSE as my test for this and it more or less worked swimmingly.

We didn't end up having a beefy enemy battle due to the RP, and if we run into that in future runs of other adventures I'll be sure to note if there are issues on my end. I actually had a concern on the conversion for this, as the "direct conversion of Cairn statistics into grit" had me worried about the skeletal enemies I was using for the adventure, especially since they had outnumbered the party and 5 grit seemed a bit much. I ended up relying on the fact that the fiction of the adventure gave them a clear weak point to attack, and gave enhanced rolls striking for it. But that might have been on me for not accounting for a slightly undersized party.

Otherwise, it went well, the ability for people to intuitively and through the fiction understand what they can do and how they can use it and my own inclinations as a DM were extremely harmonious with the game.

The main thing I'd be thankful for is more of an idea of how to handle treasure and items in the game, especially since once again, trying to convert Cairn's items over causes some issues I don't think are intentional - such as being capable of getting 3 armor (at the cost of it being Bulky and vaguely expensive) if a substantial amount of gold is acquired via buying Plate. Some guidance on what kind of things can be bought and what the general expectations of buying items should be would be appreciated, if only cause armor and weapon purchases have a substantial effect on the effectiveness of the players (which they should!) that I'm worried is unintended.

AwkwardTurtle75 days ago(+1)

Hello, thanks for running Brighter Worlds!

For the conversion guidance, I do need to take a second look at those. Under the original combat rules stats were far more comparable between Cairn and BW, but now characters are much more fragile at low STR, and much more durable at high STR, so I’m not yet sure how I want to tweak the guidance for converting Grit. If you find yourself consistently feeling that using Cairn HP as Grit is too much that’s good information.

Writing a price list is one of the last “big” chunks of the game I haven’t done yet. So your want of it is very reasonable. If you’re looking for something short term, I’d recommend looking at the equipment prices in Electric Bastionland, which is usually where my head is at about these things.

For armor specifically, my eventual intent is that any single piece of equipment that provides 2 armor should have some sort of drawback or limitation (outside of stuff produced by Calling abilities). I plan to have a number of examples for this, because as you said high armor is very useful so it’s going to be in high demand.

easyDisaster74 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

I would have to run the system more to get a stronger read on it, but from what I can tell, honestly? I genuinely think that 3-4 grit is universally the sweet spot for most NPCs, even the tough ones.

Since grit is effectively "warm up"/"wasted" damage, having high grit and a high str die is genuinely painful, and a lot of the Cairn monsters by default have both if they're meant to be chewed through, something that favors Team Monster more than the players in a lot of situations.

I genuinely think that 3 grit with a d8 strength die (let alone a single point of armor) is genuinely more difficult to kill than even a 10 grit creature with a d4 hit die since the variance on a d8's rolls (not to mention the attack rolls targeting it) can result in it feeling like if you could just get ONE hit in you'd be able to bulldoze through it, whereas with the 10 grit creature it feels like wearing it down is inevitable, just that it will get its attacks in while you do.

I'm going to try the "All NPCs have 3 grit and their durability is based on armor and strength die" approach myself and see how it goes, I will let you know!

AwkwardTurtle74 days ago

You’re absolutely right about how high STR makes things much more durable than high Grit. Not only do you have the entire die’s worth of “damage” to get through, you have a higher chance of any given attack not getting through at all.

Now, some caveats to that:

It encourages people to gang up for simultaneous attacks so they can add the damage together. This goes both ways though, so a single PC trying to fight a big group can get dangerous fast.
NPCs have to make Morale Saves to avoid fleeing every time they take Critical Damage. So they won’t necessarily stick around for the PCs to get through all their STR.
Stepping down STR means an actual wound, and something that takes time to heal. Whereas Grit heals almost instantly. This isn’t necessarily something that will come up in an average session, but when combined with Morale Saves or if they’re recurring characters it can start to matter.

For myself, I usually use d4 for mooks, and d6 for almost everyone else. And then step up above that only for enemies that are supposed to be very difficult to simply attack down.

Which is all to say: I need to expand the guidance in the book to cover all this. Part of this is that I haven’t sat with the newest version of combat rules long enough to have 100% internalized them. Another thing on the “to do” list, haha.

Any thoughts you have about any of this as you continue, especially with your plan to use only armor and STR as your “toughness” dials. I’ll be really interested to see how that pans out.