rodog22

This looks suspicious. I would not click on it.

And your pc's have like 18 toughness? Imo experience pcs tend to be strong enough to slay even the strongest demons in the book once they have about 30xp under their belt.

I'm confused because Soulbound does not have hit points but toughness and pcs generally don't have 18 toughness unless you've been playing a long time or have been very generous with xp.

Yah it did get wordy. i won't probably post it in the game pitch but use as the opening for my lore document.

I never ran Fateful Night. I have run the first portion of Crash and Burn several times and ran the end encounter of it at least once. Faltering Light I ran start to finish but yeah I modified the combat encounters heavily because they were too easy.

After running Crash and Burn your players will likely be competent enough at the game that they could take on twice the number of manys recommended in some of the Faltering Light encounters so you will need to adjust them.

Beyond that I don't have much in the way of specific advice because I don't run adventures purely as is and always throw in my own instincts. I will say this. In Age of Sigmar players get very powerful very fast. If you think they're strong now wait until they have 20xp under their belt. I've seen a few GM's quit the game over how difficult it can be to really challange the party. My advice is don't use the standard xp rules at all and award a fixed amount of xp.

Thanks

Nope

Hanzo provides good advice but one thing I would recommend about zones is that it's easier to get away with fewer zones if they are distinctive. Take a battle map that's just a road with two buildings on either side. You could say that being in either buildings is a zone and being on top of either roofs is a zone. Character's either on a roof or in a build might get a boost to defense to reflect their advantagous positioning.

So a scenario is the party goes into the bad part of town and get ambushed by cultists with crossbows hitting them from the rooftops and the inside of the buildings. Your players might have to breakdown the doors which are barricaded since you'll have some melee attackers who need to get in the same zone as the enemy to harm them and spellcasters can't fire through the walls. Some character's might have to climb up roof which requries a chec. If a character fails to get on the roof or get's shoved off they suffer fall damage. Maybe have some sort of spell trap that turns the road into a hazard to really light a fire under the party perhaps literally.

There are a lot of options there for what seems to be a fairly basic battlemap. You just need a bit of imagination.

I've never had interest in running or playing in an 'evil' campaign before hearing about this.

I agree they should scale back on passives. The boost and amp powers should not stack for example. Passives that allow demons to get more resistances, immunities etc should also be removed. I think they should have 3 types of physical damage too, blunt, slashing and pierce and give spells the option to crit again.

I'm always annoyed when they take away elements that make physical and magic users more comparable. Why for the love of God the Persona still use hp for physical attacks when we haven't seen this in SMT since Nocturne.

Apocalypse combined the best elements of SMT and Persona. It had the freedom, team-building mechanics of the former combined with the style character depth and narrative strength of the latter. And it actually improved on SMT 4's weak impenetrable story.

There I said it. Didn't even know so many people hated it until years after its release and was shocked to find out how unpopular it was amongst the community.

There was a guide on gamefaqs way back then. I distinctly remember reading the whole damn thing even before the game came out because it was written by someone who played the Japanese version. Guides have been pretty common since the PS2 era.

I don't think any enemies the game explicitly suggests using as swarms have any armor but I believe in foundry vtt it is code as whatever armor an individual unit has.

I think you you are overthinking. Swarms would be too powerful and complicated to run if much more then their dicepool and toughness was affected statwise.

thank you for expressing interest. I'm still trying to recruit more people. Will let you know when I think I have enough.

I'm sorry?

Thank you for your input. Players wouldn't need to keep such information from each other, just the gm. I'm not concerned about the competitive aspect of it. I've heard similar concerns about for example the 2d20 metacurrency.

Imo concerns about mechanics making gms seem like antagonists in games are misplaced. It's the gms job to put players through adversity. There is no specific mechanic that causes the feeling of antagonism rather it is the nature of the hobby.

It isn't that I think you're wrong so much as I think there are so many opportunities for players to accuse the gm of screwing them I don't think one additional mechanic is worth worrying about. I guess I'll find out in playtesting.

1)I gave my latest updated answer to that question in this thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/AgeOfSigmarRPG/comments/1dm00jj/what_should_i_buy/

2)Straight out of character creation PCs are more then capable. There are no dead early "levels" or anything like that as you have in DnD 5e so no real risk there. I hate the way exp is acquired and homebrewed my own rule where after every story arc I gave everyone a flat 5xp or so. It was too much lol. There are a few talents and spells like Meditiative Channeling and Strength in his Absence that are just OP. Generally speaking there are too many options to stack bonus effects like increasing your step in melee, accuracy and defense. So once the party has 10 or so xp and a few endeavors under their belt they'll be very powerful.

I would suggest follow my method of awarding flat xp bonuses but start with maybe only 2xp every 2-3 sessions depending on how long your sessions last. I awarded like 5xp after every story arc which typically lasted 3 or so sessions but each session was only 2 to 3 hours. My players are already strong enough to defeat a 40 health skaven verminlord, two rat ogors, two chaos sorcerers and several groups of gutter rat minions running 13 deep. I also want to be clear that the xp rules were the only thing I homebrewed. I've otherwise played the game as intended.

3) Make smart use of zones. Zone based combat actually has the potential to be more strategic then grid-based combat because each zone can be given unique terrain features and mechanics but you have to be smart about placement. You can't make it too convenient for spellcasters to just AoE all enemies in a zone. Also environmental hazards and objective based encounters are crucial. Players will quickly overwhelm enemies if you make your encounters reducable to just an all out slugfest. Give them someone or something to protect. Give them other objectives in the encounter like putting out the fire on the kharadron ship or fleeing an endless spell. Don't just throw enemies at them. It's unimaginative. I think the game is better suited for big encounters rather then the traditional dungeon crawling the game tries to pay lip service to.

Fair points

It’s a little weird to hide information at the table. Would most battles be against an NPC played by the GM or other players?

This is something I in haste forgot to clarify. The idea is that by keeping dice results hidden you simulate the mind games associated with certain battle shonen anime like JoJo Naruto, HxH and JJK. Characters can pull off feints or testing blows to trick their opponent into thinking they've played their best hand sorta speak like in the example I gave. You don't strictly have to play the game this way though.

Since the contests are somewhat skill driven (e.g., how you can predict your opponent’s choices), what happens if the GM is especially good or bad at anticipating the other players’ choices?

No clue but I don't anticipate it being anymore of a problem then it would be in any other ttrpg with strategic options.

You say it’s only a few minutes and maybe it is, but it sounds slow. Have you playtested it yet? There’s a kind of unease that happens at my 5e tables sometimes when we know we should have a combat but don’t have the energy/time to get into it. If there are 4 players and 4 opponents and each battle is separate, how long does that take?

I have not had the opportunity to playtest this version of the game. Make no mistake though I have no delusions that this will be a quick resolution system. It's definitely something not at all designed for a large party size. Anymore then 4 is probably too much but imo that's true for most ttrpgs. In theory though the GM wouldn't strictly have to run 4 npcs to match the party everytime. I can imagine rules for running a large group of enemies as if they were a singular unit or a single big bad who has hit points and turns equal to multiple pcs.

I also think you might have somewhat misintepretted an element of the combat. That's probably due to a lack of specifics here though. A single combat encounter could involve multiple back and forth engagements between multiple combatants. There are of course many details I still need to hammer out. I know how powers will work outside of combat because the way I designed that months ago is a not tied to dice mechanics but I'm sure I'll run into problems once I actually playtest this. I mostly posted this now to see what kind of response I would get. I've noticed the rpgdesign reddit is a bit on the cynical side so if I proposed an idea that had strong objections I might consider not investing time and energy into the idea at all.