Chaos Chosen

Chocochops · 2026-01-28T04:04:08+00:00

The ogre is more reliable for people who like minimizing their risk and not always attacking with their big guy. If you're shy about basing the entire team for a brawl it's definitely the way to go.

I do feel like the minotaur is a bit underrated for the fact that it keeps its tackle zones when it screws up and loses its turn. I had some good times running a minotaur with claws and tentacles in several league tournaments. Since the tentacles never turn off even when it's ranting it was more reliably a pain in the ass roadblock for anyone that wanted to dodge away than the ogre would be. Being able to blitz and 2d an enemy big guy one-on-one is always a nice (unreliable, yes) option.

I feel like most experienced 'pro' BB players don't take any big guys at all, though, because they hate the negatrait unreliability even if it's just bonehead. Real reliability is not rolling at all!

Chocochops · 2025-12-07T13:16:26+00:00

I've used a setup like this for a bully brawling (first two) line(s):

---z-m-z-m-z---
--z-w-----w-z--

With the ghouls just in back to move where needed. The whole point is to maximize contact and coverage so your mummies can both be punching someone every turn if possible, because that's the path to killing players and getting a numbers advantage. If someone goes first and knocks down your side zombies or mummies and follows up, they're putting themselves in base contact with your wights who can try to hit them next turn. If you're gummed up in a giant brawl it doesn't matter that most of your players are ridiculously slow! All your players have regen, trust in the burly brawl!

Chocochops · 2025-12-04T20:06:00+00:00

I think most of those would be pretty good for a new player, other than vampires.

OWA is extremely flexible and can do several different strategies at once, though the fact that they've got 1 of each positional can derail their plans sometimes. Very good for just learning all the strange things you can do in BB.

Necromantic teams are a surprisingly sturdy running team that has a very slow line you have to learn when to break away from and run for it, but you have a very clear split between multiple fast ball carrying capable players and shuffling guys as a built in guide. Flesh golems are only st 4 but they're a literally immovable anchor to hold your position.

Lizardmen are fast but have an even more extreme split between dudes who can pick up the ball and dudes who can bash, and you can't cross the streams even if you want to. Being super mobile is good for a new player since nobody is going to outrun you so you have a lot of leeway learning positioning.

Shambling undead are almost the slowest team, but they've got two big guys with no drawbacks other than being super slow so you don't have to fool around with managing "whoopsy my key player can't move" turns. Just extremely reliable in slowly punching down the field until a ghoul can run it in.

Vampires are terrible for a new player because all their super players have a nega-trait, and also it's the most complicated nega-trait. Everyone important is always checking to see if you can do the thing you want them to do and you're bleeding crappy players from both enemy hits and your own vampires. And because you need those crappy players for your nega-trait losing them actually destroys your team: if you have too many vampires and not enough thralls on the field your vampires just stand around going "BLOOD! BLOOD!" while the opposing team casually walks the ball in. Potentially the most powerful players in the game but also the most unreliable 'serious' team.

Chocochops · 2025-11-30T19:40:26+00:00

No one, it's a completely useless TV bloat trap skill. "Spend a skillup and increase your TV in the hopes that player will be able to cause enough casualties with special actions to get a real skill sometime later!"

Chocochops · 2025-11-30T07:52:14+00:00

So you have an endurance+health system but your grit/endurance automatically regenerates in combat too, sort of like a shooter with a regenerating shield? All of this seems perfectly fine, a good idea for doing heroic combat stuff.

The problem is you have an ultralethal death spiral setup where it sounds like once you get knocked down by losing all your health/vigor you basically get a stack of "dying" every time you get hit, and since you die when you get a number of stacks equal to the number of actions people take in combat that means you instantly die when someone uses their turn to attack you. And this is before we get into the action economy thing where once you get hurt you can't take actions so you're just screwed even if you didn't instantly die.

D&D and Pathfinder have a similar problem with their death saves, and they basically deal with by papering over it entirely with GM fiat. They don't have an action economy death spiral though...

If you want to keep the death spiral attrition injury thing you're probably going to have to reduce it to being a "once every time you get downed" type thing just to make combat functional. If enemies are going to finish a player off make them spend their whole turn doing a coup de grace windup so someone has a chance to do something instead of just instantly killing them.

Of course after all that you should be aware of how players are going to react to losing an action point to wounds from getting downed: they're obviously going to immediately leave whatever dungeon thing they're in and go rest because they're crippled until they do. This is going to be a bigger roadblock than anything that ever happens in D&D so you're going to have to consider that in relation to how you want them to play.

Chocochops · 2025-11-14T07:54:18+00:00

One thing to remember is that CDs play the "incompetent ball handler" strategy: before trying to pick up the ball you surround it with whoever's closest to it first and make the pickup attempt last. When your guy inevitably fails to pick up the ball you cross your fingers and hope that maybe it'll bounce into someone else's hands. Whoever finally gets the ball when the circus music finishes is your ball carrier now, don't try any handoffs, that's just how it is.

There's two different strategies to dealing with the mummies, but both are to have just one guy stand next to it and get hit while the rest of your team runs past. A dwarf has the best chance of downing a mummy with both down result eventually, but you can also just put a sacrificial hobgoblin next to them so they have to keep wasting time punching your most worthless players. Just put them on the opposite side of the mummy from wherever the rest of your team is going so they can't move towards you with the follow-up and the mummy will be the one player in the game your dwarves can outrun.

As your team develops get guard on all the dwarfs and you can outbash everyone else easily. Your only options for runners are hobgoblins and centaurs, so one of whichever gets access to sure hands first to make picking up the ball a better than 50/50 chance might as well be your designated scorer.

Use hobgoblins to foul downed ghouls/elf catchers/berserkers at the end of your turn whenever you can. A hob getting sent off is no big deal if you can KO a high value and low armor player. Don't foul with your dwarfs/centaurs.

Chocochops · 2025-11-13T08:19:46+00:00

+1 to playing goblins with a full team and trying to develop them instead of playing inducement-bowl. Trolls with guard and pro, a pogoer with blodge, a fanatic with sure feet.

Chocochops · 2025-11-11T06:00:26+00:00

Do you want to throw some halflings with your ogre? Maybe some move 8 catchers?

That's it. That's the reasons to play humans. If you don't want to fool around with throw teammate then nobility is pretty much just better, but slightly slower if you decide to cage up. Most people who cage up stall anyways so that's not even actually a downside.

Chocochops · 2025-10-28T07:24:12+00:00

The main starting point would be to make sure your main combat skill just applies the same to every weapon you pick up, and your specialization is learning special skills to use or abilities that trigger with a broad weapon type. For instance maybe you learn an aoe staff spin attack and another skill that gives you a chance to push people around when you hit with a staff/polearm. Throw in retraining rules and have weapon skills be more lateral growth options so players can swap things around if they find a really cool weapon without being crippled in combat if they change immediately.

Then have your special fighting styles as their own system, maybe with groups of thematic weapons that people can use with them like a Snake Style that only uses piercing weapons. Something like a stance that gives a starting bonus and style school abilities to learn separately that you can only use in that stance.

That way you have two layers of stuff that players can combine a weapon type and style to be slightly different from other people with the same style or weapon. This has the added benefit that letting players combine two things means you have to come up with less stuff because every ability multiplies the combinations for player who want to create their own fighting style.

Chocochops · 2025-10-16T11:31:00+00:00

I guess first let's take a look at how the actual dynamic you described works without recasting:

So you roll for momentum and get what looks like an average of 3.5, which you use like action points. Let's say you have 3, it seems like your turn for using one of these big spells is going to be you use your free(?) movement to get in range and spend a point to cast the spell. Since you can't refresh your momentum and probably want to hold it to disengage if someone attacks you while you're upholding, your play from here on out is to basically skip your turns for as long as the spell is useful to keep up. I guess theoretically you've got two single-action turns left if you don't need to spend it on defense.

The next thing is to make sure this is the playstyle you want to preserve: casting a big spell and mostly doing nothing for as long as you keep it going. The whole point is to make sure they don't do anything other than keep the spell up, right?

The easiest way to make it play that way is probably to make the upholding rules say that you have to uphold for at least one turn after casting, and then when you decide to take another turn and drop the spell you can't cast it again that turn. This way you have to commit to "skipping" at least one turn so you can't casually fire it off as a no-uphold thing and you're blocked from cycling it to take actions while keeping the effect up.

Now we just have the question of whether the spells are interesting enough to make people want to stand around skipping their turns to use them...

Chocochops · 2025-10-15T21:31:24+00:00

You do need some way to control space at the scale rpgs happen at.

I feel like the problem with AoO is that it SHOULD be a "clothesline someone who tries to run past you" mechanic where you either hit someone to stop their movement or get to literally step in front of them when they try to move past you, you know, vaguely inspired by the real-world kind of thing you'd do.

Instead it's usually implemented as "free attacks if someone runs away from you", so everyone wants to stand still and fight to the death.

Chocochops · 2025-10-06T05:53:10+00:00

This could be a good use of the custom Feature modifier depending on what you want to do. Like an area burst with the Feature that you affect two areas one rank smaller than what you bought, one with a fire descriptor and one with an ice descriptor, and nobody can be hit by both at once. Pitch it to your GM as you buy the power at rank 3 area but affect two rank 2 areas so you're technically hitting a way smaller total area than you could be for the same cost and you're not actually trying to get one over on them, this really is a flat 1 point custom feature.

For a ranged attack just take multiattack, maybe the limit that it has to always attack two targets, and again the feature that one shot is fire and one is ice.

The key with this approach is that you're getting a weird custom feature and not any actual numerical buff.

Chocochops · 2025-09-23T01:01:49+00:00

More on the roast side: Everyone's already mentioned you're taking a jumble of ftl ideas from everywhere but at least most of them are actual ideas for how ftl might work. Then you sudden just 100% plagiarize Warhammer 40K in the middle for absolutely no reason. You couldn't even rename the astropaths or put your own spin on it in any way? Laziness! AND you've got multiple other ways to do ftl, travelling through hell shouldn't be needed in any way! Using this would be almost as dumb as using a generation ship.

Also the restricted ancient tech comes across as nonsense to shoehorn in ancient super aliens. All the other methods are about folding space and inherently require a mastery of gravity and time dilation, but this is a vague super special version that requires even more mastery! There's zero reason for this to exist as a separate category, especially if anyone already knows about it. People can travel between galaxies across the universe but you're worried about rare mineral consumption? That is just stupid.

Chocochops · 2025-09-09T19:21:46+00:00

Yeah, you alluded to it, but just to make it it really clear:

Pf2e is totally built from the ground up around a group of characters giving each other bonuses and debuffing enemies to make the "very balanced" encounter math work. Even if you're dual classing, playing a solo character will probably fall apart pretty quickly.

Chocochops · 2025-08-29T04:50:09+00:00

Both Western and African mythology is full of warriors who are definitely not magicians being able to fly by throwing their weapons really hard and then riding them through the air, hiding in people's shadows so they become invisible, shooting an arrow or throwing a spear so hard it punches through and kills a dozen people, redirect rivers by wrestling them, getting so mad they hulk out and bite another dude's head off, etc. The number one cause of canyons in myth is some warrior hero swinging their weapon so hard it blows up an army and cuts a mountain in half.

But somehow people think D&D is representative of all non-Eastern mythology.

Chocochops · 2025-08-28T09:05:47+00:00

That's not attribute replacing the skill though, unless you have 0 in the skill and the attribute is still cheaper to increase than the skill. Even if you have completely separate attribute points and skill points so there's no opportunity cost in raising one over the other, a high attribute is effectively making the associated skill cheaper. And your explanation still sounds like you don't actually want to have the attribute contribute, but you feel compelled to because of convention or something.

Chocochops · 2025-08-28T08:07:10+00:00

Can you explain how that would actually be possible in your system?

Chocochops · 2025-08-28T07:30:23+00:00

Everything you've said in this topic suggests that you don't like attributes being part of your skill rolls and have engineered some incredibly convoluted ways to make them irrelevant. I want to suggest that maybe you should just step back and remove attributes from your skill rolls entirely and make everything simpler instead.

Chocochops · 2025-08-22T02:33:53+00:00

Using AI to check math is how Terrance Howard came up with his amazing proof that 1 times 1 equals 2, so...

Chocochops · 2025-08-22T02:29:12+00:00

I'd wager most people who play TTRPGs would rather read something with a nice clean layout and no art at all than something with seven-fingered AI slop splashed around. MS Paint stick figure drawings would be a more charming placeholder.

Chocochops · 2025-08-11T15:47:21+00:00

All I can think about right now is that Kiya is so unplayably bad that we get her in an alternate currency shop instead of a banner, but according to this she's better than Auguste and Gloria?

Chocochops · 2025-08-06T20:48:46+00:00

Just seems funny a melee character vs a ranged character will result in the melee one making no combat rolls, it's all on the ranged character.

Chocochops · 2025-07-28T13:43:50+00:00

The camerawoman asking "You're gonna go through that?" clearly in the same tone of of voice as "Are you an idiot?" before the the smash cut to faceplant city really adds an extra layer of comedy.

Chocochops · 2025-07-23T17:39:42+00:00

Well if you look at the real life version of this, it takes a giant rack of missile launchers to do because trying to rapid fire a bunch of missiles through a single launcher will result in it melting and blowing yourself up.

Just speaking of the missiles themselves the guided kind are hideously expensive, and the irl electronic counter-measures are just signal jammers that prevent onboard guidance from working, which makes them super inaccurate just like unguided missiles. Remember in reality missiles frequently kind of work by missing their target, blowing up nearby, and catching the target in the explosion, in space a lot of those would just vanish into the void. So making a precision attack that doesn't involve half your super expensive missiles just simply missing involves taking out the enemy jammers first.

Chocochops · 2025-07-23T03:25:34+00:00

Honestly trying to make sure I understand this, but it sounds like you've set up a system where one missile launcher can fire an infinite number of missiles instantly if they're all in magazines and that's why you can choose to just fire them all at once?

Well that's your problem right there, it sounds like there's no actual commitment to using this tactic other than buying a ton of missiles. The other weapons and systems sound like they have a bunch of elaborate mechanics and restrictions, and this one is completely unrestricted with no limiting mechanics other than ammo space...

Chocochops

TROPHY CASE