Altered State and DC

question
#1

I’ve had so much downtime lately. I decided to see what I could use from Altered State for my current game.

I’m a bit perplexed because I think I finally got a handle on how DC is supposed to work in ICRPG.

The loot progression system requires that the GM is supposed to separate players from their loot pretty consistently as a campaign progresses or they will become OP and even the steepest DC won’t be enough.

Which brings me back to AS. The players start with more STATs. The loot is very powerful even at the start. Progression has a greater reliance on improving STATs.

How do you keep up with DC when players have such advantages straight out of the box? What am I missing?

[I understand that I can use the same techniques to remove loot (and there are more tools to do so in AS) but I don’t see the same being possible for STATs. Forcing the players to re-tune?]

#2

You’re not missing anything. In my entire AS campaign, my Target never went above 12 until the very end of the campaign, when I took it to a 15 for two or three boards. If 12 doesn’t seem to challenge your players, take it to a 13.

The starting stat builds aren’t much higher than 8 to 10 point builds. Even in core, a starting character with 6 points plus 2 from bio-form is an 8 point build!

We used to play games with 10 point builds and 2 to 3 starting milestones as a matter of course. None of those games required a crazy starting target.

Loot is powerful, but that’s just damage. You can control damage output through enemy hit points, not target number.

And your take on separating players from gear on a regular basis isn’t a truism. I’ve played in epic tier games with game-breaking builds and still felt challenged with a 15 target. The highest I have ever seen is an 18, and that’s with near perfect gear and a 20 point build. And guess what? We all nearly died. I’ve run campaigns where maybe one or two players lost 1 or 2 pieces over the course of a campaign, and the game never broke. We had a blast.

So, don’t be afraid of Altered State. I promise that it isn’t game-breaking in any fashion.

#3

Oh, and don’t forget the great leveler: hit points. You can easily challenge players in AS as a DM because they don’t have a ton of life, and enemy damage spikes are huge. I think I made all of my enemies do a dice category less for the first three sessions of the campaign so I didn’t kill them all outright. Lol.

#4

Short version: adding enemies and tactical play on the part of the GM can keep TN (target numbers) going no higher than 15 and still having great challenges.

Long convoluted diatribe below:

Please explain DC? Do you mean TN? Or damage class? Defense class?

I suspect that it is Difficulty Class. D&D terms are not universal and even what version of D&D can make it odd. Many of the people here know D&D well but acronyms typically trigger based on the game they are playing now.

Anyway, your assumption is a bit wrong. I played in a high powered session of AS using loot from any of the books available at the time. (We had a limited time to make characters so we did not totally optimize…but we where all pretty stout) @Ezzerharden ran the game.

In AS character survivability was way better than I expected, and at the high end, it was the characters mobility that really showed.

As to needing to raise the (Target Number) TN, not really. Characters have 10 active loot max. And you are rolling a D20. So assuming a min/max archer (speed quiver) character with +11 dex and +5 to magic damage With a magic bow, 15 AC and 3 hearts. Will Probably have a 75/25 shot with 30 goblins and a TN of 12.

The archer needs to roll a 2 to shoot again and to hit. The average hit will do 9 damage to 10 hp goblins.

The goblins have to roll 13 to hit, and averaged damage of 5.

Assume after archer turn 1 10 goblins are left. 4 will probably hit for 20 damage.

Archer then kills the 10 remaining goblins.

That’s the outcome assuming perfectly even rolls. An early 1 and the archer is toast.

Goblins using tactics, limiting potential targets…and this becomes a long drawn out (6 rounds)with advantage to the goblins.

Switch out for a couple of goblin bezerker types and shamans…it won’t be too much of a long fight and the archer is dead.

So, modify play to keep it interesting and don’t use TN as a crutch for high end play.

And the Links there might inspire added insights.

#5

I meant Target. I have been watching some of Runehammer’s older videos on YouTube and conflated the two :blush: You and Alex have answered my question quite well thanks.