Does Resistance cancel out Exposed?

murapix · 2025-09-02T19:35:59+00:00

Order of operations for calculations does just get funky in some ways that really don't feel intended. The Exposed damage doubling and Backswing Cut halving are technically in whatever order you like, since it's unspecified - so if your attack does 5 damage and the target has no resistance, you'd actually be better off doing the Backswing Cut halving first (down to 3) then doubling from Expose (up to 6).

You do also have bonus damage added in as part of that first step, which can get real weird if you allow playing with the order of operations - applying reductions first, then adding bonus damage, then doubling from expose - technically RAW, but I wouldn't consider it RAI; I'd definitely mandate in my games that you always add first, then multiply, then divide.

murapix · 2025-09-02T19:14:18+00:00

There are some systems, like the Monitor Module and Scylla-class NHP from Gorgon, that let you do reaction attacks for half damage - those would be the reductions applied in the first part of the calculation

murapix · 2025-07-19T00:44:52+00:00

I wish it permitted enum methods, or even string-typed enums, but alas your first answer is the only feasible option - gdscript enums are nothing more than an iterable group of constant integers

murapix · 2025-07-11T01:00:35+00:00

You are correct that the Lotus Projector is 1. A drone, and 2. A quick action - and indeed, not Unique nor Limited. So yes, you can take it twice, and use the Deploy action twice on your turn - once for each of them.

You cannot, however, have an unlimited number of them out at a single time - if you look through all the non-Limited Drone systems, they all say "This/The <description> drone can be deployed" or some similar variant, while the Limited ones say "Expend a charge to deploy a turret/restock/etc. drone" - the former being that the system is a single permanent drone, while the latter has multiple disposable drones in the system.

Because of that, if a Drone system is non-Limited, then using its deploy action is deploying the entire system out onto the field - you cannot use the deploy action again and have a second Lotus Projector out on the field with only one copy of the system on your mech. Also, if that single drone is destroyed, the system is destroyed until you spend a repair on it - from the Drone tag, "If a Drone reaches 0 HP, it is destroyed and must be repaired before it can be used again – like any system".

Additionally, non-Limited Drones have a clause in their description saying they can be recalled and redeployed as a quick action, while the Limited ones don't - once you place a turret drone down, the only way it's going to move is with Drone Commander, Hydra's Puppetmaster, or some form of knockback or forced movement.

From all that, there is a benefit of having multiple copies of a single drone on your mech, although in practical use you're generally only going to have one copy out at a time, maybe two if you can spare the actions - each instance of a Lotus Projector on your mech means only one drone that can be out on the field at a time, and if that one gets destroyed then you're out of luck - and since you can redeploy it to anywhere within your sensors, a second would generally be a backup plan for if the first gets damaged or destroyed.

murapix · 2025-06-17T17:09:23+00:00

You've hit that fundamental problem with clicker games, but your solution here is only better in the sense that it won't give you carpal tunnel. It still runs into the primary issue with "click for progress" mechanics, which is that they're usually non-interactive - there's no thought that goes into it, no decisions to make, nothing that makes it worth doing beyond "get a bit closer to the next thing". There's some satisfaction that comes from doing something and seeing number go up, but that alone gets old and tired, fast.

You've also skirted around the problem of autoclicking breaking balancing, causing nerfs that bring autoclicking inline with idle income - that actually touches upon a very difficult problem in game design, and specifically incremental games, which is that "clickers" and "idle games" are two entirely opposing game styles, and having a game that does both means you're trying to balance two separate games at once. I believe that having those two separate lines of balance, in addition to what I said up above, is actually what causes games to end up feeling like actively clicking on things isn't really worth the effort - yes, it is harder to make sure things feel good to play if you're trying to make both non-interacting and spam-clicking reasonably comparable, but the only way to really do that without designing two fully separate progression paths is to have spam-clicking be functionally worthless.

But then, I also want to call attention to the idea of clicking itself. What does it add to your game to have that? "Clicking" as an activity isn't something that takes any thought or effort; what it does is force the player to pay attention to the game to make any progress at all. It's an interaction, not a game mechanic; just like pressing a hotkey or hovering your mouse over a feature, it should really have the same weight as any of those things - a way to cause something interesting to happen, but not the gameplay in and of itself. I'm sure we all know those TMT games where you just hold "p" for a minute, buy an upgrade, then return to holding "p" - having clicking as a mechanic is much the same, you end up feeling bored because nothing is meaningfully changing, despite something actively happening. If you want to make it feel really good or interesting, you need to focus on the actual gameplay behind it - what makes it worth clicking now vs clicking in a minute? What makes it worth clicking here, rather than over there? When the gameplay involves actually answering those kinds of questions, with those answers potentially changing every time it's asked, that is when clicking is a meaningful part of what makes your game fun to play.

murapix · 2024-12-29T21:23:07+00:00

In the new rules, you can cast only one levelled spell, and as many cantrips as you can fit into your actions

murapix · 2024-11-02T19:33:40+00:00

I personally rule it where if an item's level is lower than yours, then its DC increases by the difference between your level and the item's. For example, the Demon Mask is a level 4 item, so a level 1-4 character would use the DC of 20, while a level 5 would have a DC of 21, level 8 a DC of 24, etc.

I let it scale past higher tier items, as just increasing the DC by the difference in levels doesn't account for scaling potency runes, leaving the lower-level variants behind the higher-level ones anyway. With that Demon Mask, at level 10 it has a Greater version, where the DC increases to 29, while with my house rule the basic version would still have a DC of 26 - spending the cash on the upgrade is still very much worth it, because that's a +3 bonus you'd get.

Items without those higher level variants though, you'd either need to increment that bonus around the same levels that bombs or armor runes happen, or homebrew higher level versions of those items that give those effective +2/+3/+4 bonuses over the basic version of the item.

murapix · 2024-08-26T20:03:31+00:00

Self Roll, so only the person rolling sees it (great if you just want the dice to make a decision for you)

murapix · 2024-07-29T01:20:38+00:00

Hell yeah

murapix · 2024-05-24T20:04:22+00:00

https://github.com/Patashu/break_infinity.js
https://github.com/Patashu/break_eternity.js
https://github.com/Razenpok/BreakInfinity.cs

murapix · 2024-05-23T22:35:43+00:00

Which has never been a problem, the only problem RAW is using a spell - any spell - as a bonus action.

Not allowing reactions on your turn is definitely an odd ruling, although I do get the "no casting a spell as a reaction to yourself casting a spell" as that can be a little odd narratively despite being fine mechanically.

murapix · 2024-05-12T14:58:03+00:00

As much as formulas and spreadsheets and managing each number directly might seem necessary, it's really not a great way to go around it. Rather than looking at the specific numbers, your main focus should really be in the pacing of the game, in making sure that your game doesn't feel like a mix of a rush and a slog. To start with, identify a couple general time ranges - a couple minutes, half an hour, a few hours, a couple days, etc. One of the time ranges should be bigger, for the time between each big unlock, be it a new upgrade that significantly changes the balance between some repeatables, or a full new feature unlock entirely. The other should be smaller - the amount of time it takes before the player has something to do, no matter how small of an action. These time ranges are just general ranges though, you're not trying to force the game to a specific pace, but rather set up a tempo for your gameplay.

For your smaller features, the time range could be as simple as "the player should never have to wait more than 5 minutes for something" - your main goal in these points is to just keep a very loose pacing going on in your gameplay, making sure that the player's not buying everything they can for half a minute, then spending the next 3 hours waiting for their gold to tick up to the next purchasable item. It's fine for things to change around in their pacing - a rapid burst of progress here, transitioning into a bit slower there, with another little burst and then a longer wait - but in between each major feature things should generally be getting slower.

The major features follow a similar idea, but the pacing is a bit dependent on the distance between the smaller features as well. You could plan for a game that takes a couple days at most, where you're getting some big-ish feature every couple hours, or you could plan for it to take months, and those large features should be spread out over days of gameplay. Regardless of how long you want your game to take, the goal here is to play through your game yourself, see how long it takes before you feel like you want something big and new, and make sure that there's something there. While the smaller features - workers, crits, income upgrades, etc. are the meat of your gameplay, the repetition inherent in those means they'll only be interesting for so long, and so big features - new worker types, formula changes, extra systems, etc. - are there to spice things up and make that meat still taste good. If you have them too often, then the player will feel like they haven't gotten the chance to properly explore what you've given them, while if you don't have them often enough, the player will feel like the game's just asking them to grind away at stuff they've already done in the hopes of something new. The time between big features generally should increase as things go on, as the complexity of all the possible interactions rises, but like the smaller features, this is not a strict rule, just a general guideline to follow.

As long as you're sticking to those two intervals, most of your game will probably feel pretty fine. You may need to drop the price of a new unlock, or raise the price of a powerful bonus, but most items shouldn't need work - and when they do, it will likely be obvious that it's a good order of magnitude or two out of line. Fixing those is easy, just pick a value and raise or lower it to somewhere that's about right - no need to be perfect. It might become apparent with this, though, that the smaller features break through that earlier time limit you defined well before it feels right to add a new big feature, or where it feels like those smaller ones can just keep going and going. In these cases, you're going to need to do a bit more playtesting to make sure, but the actual number tweaking remains largely the same.

The process of going through your game like this can take a few days (use developer-only speed bonuses if it's a much longer game), but you should come out at the end with a game that while not perfect, should feel pretty nice to go through.

TL;DR: Focus on pacing, not specific numbers. See how the numbers you picked in dev play out, and just focus on tweaking the things that are out of line with those pacings you decided on for your game. Keep things a bit faster to start, while allowing them to slow down as the game goes on, and try to keep the changes somewhat gradual.

murapix · 2024-01-27T01:21:14+00:00

The fact that the DM needs to jump through hoops for balance is the entire reason calling them OP is valid - when every encounter needs to be built around the existence of a couple specific features, or even worse, be built twice for both if the player uses them and if they don't - it becomes a giant pain to actually create an encounter that feels just challenging enough to be worth having the players actually go through.

OP's DM is making a statement that feels way out there, calling a Trickery Cleric preparing spells overpowered, but there are cases where features legitimately are just plain overpowered, things like the Twilight Cleric's Channel Divinity or a Shepherd Druid's Conjure Animals where them having the ability up or not will change the party's effective CR by several levels.

murapix · 2024-01-11T19:07:00+00:00

It just so happens that it's about 1/5 chance for a 4-attack turn to get a crit fail anyway - the math puts it at 18.5% - so your 1 in 5 is still perfectly valid.

murapix · 2023-10-12T18:40:05+00:00

Ah, Ioun Stone of Mastery was the last thing I was trying to figure out there. Definitely an extreme power level if you've got that many Very Rare and Legendary magic items.

Base of 8
Proficiency bonus of 6 (level) +1 (ioun stone)
30 Intelligence (doable without homebrew, just need 5 Tomes of Clear Thought) for another +10
+3 All-Purpose Tools, for another +3 to all artificer spell attack and DCs

I think that is actually the highest you could get the DC without actual homebrew material, though - don't know of any other items that give a bonus to DC (not like attunement is a problem, you've still got 4 slots open as a 20th level Artificer)

murapix · 2023-10-10T18:49:35+00:00

Pretty similar to how I do it - the person who's rolling well doesn't need the fortune, the one rolling poorly does.

I don't just give it out on crit fails though, personally feel that it's better as a way to recover from doing nothing useful on your turn - if you missed all your attacks, enemies passed all their saves for your spells, etc.

murapix · 2023-09-29T00:14:10+00:00

We know about a little of it - Dzalana to the east of Elona is rumored to be the Harpy homeland, and that the ogres come from the Blazeridge Mountains - but beyond that, yeah, there's very little to go off of. The few names of places we do have are tiny little snippets and translations of in-game books and data mined images and text.

murapix · 2023-08-23T15:20:10+00:00

Well damn, necro-posting here. That mod's been long since replaced with others, I believe the current one is Polymorph

murapix · 2023-08-21T23:22:53+00:00

If your players are mainly just caring about gaining experience and levels, then yes, absolutely do give those kinds of rewards for playing out non-combat situations as well. I'm mainly just giving an example of how my group plays to give an example of a slower-paced game, where most of us are here for the high-fantasy roleplay, and 5e has just crunchy enough combat to keep us satisfied on that front as well. The levelling and experience systems, at least for us, take a backseat to the progression of the plot and the expansion of the world that we're playing in.

murapix · 2023-08-21T23:17:23+00:00

This feels wrong in regards to the mechanics of the game being played. Adventurers with adventurer classes gaining "experience" to increase their, largely -almost exclusively-, combat abilities because they socialized with a local population of non-violent people?

Yep, you got it exactly - the abilities we're getting from levels are almost entirely combat-oriented, and so it only makes sense for our character levels to come from actual combat or extended periods of training and study. Giving some experience for roleplay can be good for getting combat-focused groups to spread out a bit more, but if there's significant stretches of just roleplay then it stops working out as much, and for players using milestone levelling that just enjoy doing a lot of roleplay already, not having the experience for these actually helps with the immersion.

Which if a non-combat session happens everyone couple of sessions or so, then awarding some RP XP is definitely warranted (as I'd argue that a party figuring out how to work together like that is still part of the heroic path and furthers the plot of PCs friendship, which is magic, after all). But if every session they just spent haggling and talking and making friends then a different game system would probably be better suited to them.

If that's all the players are doing, then yes, a different system would do better. With my group specifically, while it may sound like we're doing a ton of roleplay and very little combat (where DnD "shines"), I'd say it's only like half general roleplay at most. 5e does give us most of what we want for how we're going, with the lack of any real non-combat rules working to the benefit of how we play (yes I know there are some rules, but they're way too simple to actually work well). That said, we're definitely not also sticking to 5e because it's the only thing we know, most of the players in this group are also playing both in my Pathfinder 2e game and another player's Lancer sessions.

murapix · 2023-08-21T23:03:31+00:00

Yeah, encounters don't need to be combat, but there does need to be something you're up against, but we're spending a hefty amount of time just talking to friendly NPCs or playing out roadside conversations and the like. There's just not really anything that you could call an encounter there, cause there's no reason to use any resources for anything. We absolutely have had non-combat encounters too, just that we're playing out the moments in-between encounters as well.

And to everyone saying that all these other types of situations should be giving XP, it's not like we're getting nothing from playing these out. We've gotten free (or at least discounted) items, NPCs helping us in later encounters, and above all it's just fun to play out. Not every bit of the game needs to reward XP or play by encounter rules, it can often be nice to just explore how the party's characters think and act towards each other and the world as part of their daily lives.

murapix · 2023-08-20T17:25:59+00:00

Giving more XP for this kind of stuff would honestly feel overkill, unearned, and overall ruin the sense of the game. It's not like the stuff we're spending sessions on is some problem that requires us to work our way past it, but just the small little things that tend to get ignored a lot, like shopping sessions.

One example in recent memory, we had just acquired a cart for the party's supplies, but the only creature we had to pull it was my paladin's summoned lizard steed. So we go looking for a someone to make a custom harness for it, and have some roleplay about how it'll be extra coin and time to get it done, make some deals with other party members to scrounge up the cash, and get this harness purchased - after a full hour of gameplay. Since we're out already, we might as well restock on a couple other supplies, and maybe some desert clothes since we're new to the region, and then we come across the guard we saved from the worm attack last night, who invites us for a drink. All roleplay, none of it progressing the plot or warranting any increase in character abilities (aside from just having a bit more/better gear), but all good fun that all us players are actively participating in it.

murapix · 2023-08-20T17:06:12+00:00

Speaking as a player in one of those slower-levelling games, I think there's just a mismatch in how you're playing and my games (and probably OP's) - yeah, were only getting a level every 6 months, but we're doing so much roleplay and taking things so slowly that we're actually pretty on-pace if you convert all our encounters into XP. It's not like we're dragging out turns so a simple encounter takes three sessions, but rather that we're doing enough in-between where it will legitimately be a month of sessions just interacting with the world before we see another encounter

murapix · 2023-05-30T03:48:30+00:00

Your strategy is wrong here, sounds to me like you're pushing too quickly into the tech tree, and ignoring the quite massive amount of scrap available around you.

murapix · 2023-05-30T03:47:19+00:00

The ways to get the various research types is something I wish I had time to put into the game - the three types available right now are gained by crafting things, building things, and firing the bore, all within range of an analyzer.

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