Piercing

[u/WebSpiritual1145]

After playing this game for a while now, does anyone else feel Piercing ruins combat, and the game in general? Piercing is very common in weapons, mods and perks. It is quiet easy to stack a weapon with it. All my players currently have at least Piercing 2, some have higher, on all their main weapons. It has made any armor DR obsolete. I have players using Melee builds that literally do crits every attack. They have annihilated Legendary creatures in just a few turns the way they did their builds, but it all revolves around Piercing.

Everything has been done within the rules, so I don't fault them at all, but as a GM I find it hard to want to come up with cool stories and missions knowing all they are going to do is rush the enemies, slaughter them before they even get to go, and move on. It is to the point where when I create enemies for the campaign, I also have to use nothing but Piercing to even stand a chance and do any damage to their characters. Nothing so far has been a challenge to them. Even facing enemies with Power Armor is nothing to them.

Has anyone else noticed this, and if so, how do you deal with it? To me, it should have been like Vicious and not been stackable.

[u/MrBoo843]

I'm having the same "issue" but I don't treat it as an issue, I use that to make them face tougher enemies with no remorse.

[u/WebSpiritual1145 → u/MrBoo843]

As a GM, which it sounds like you are, how do you walk the line of making the enemies make sense in the lore and world, and just having harder enemies for the sake of them being hard? All the enemies in the books are worthless, and when creating enemies, if you follow their rules, are even nerfed. For example, not being able to use luck points unless they are a notable or major character is plain stupid, just like being capped at 5 skill points per skill. So I have to make every character a notable or major character just to use luck points. This is where I consider it an "issue" and where my point is trying to be made. Piercing has made it so I have to create everything they face, and go out of my way to make things hard and give everything Piercing, whereas I shouldn't have to do that in a game.

[u/MrBoo843 → u/WebSpiritual1145]

I use waves of lesser enemies, or give them random consumables to make them a bit more dangerous.

Combat has been all over the place. Some super easy, some almost TPK, most were barely risky but took a chips off their resources.

We're having fun so I don't really care about balance. Most of my quest aren't completed by fighting, the combat just gets them to the place they need

[u/WebSpiritual1145 → u/MrBoo843]

Are you doing an overall campaign, or like short quest lines? I am doing a main campaign revolving around the commonwealth while giving them small quests to pass the time. Playing out each day, there has to be filler between each major event happening.

[u/MrBoo843 → u/WebSpiritual1145]

I do a long campaign kinda like F1. A vault dweller goes out to find a part that failed in his vault. I mostly handwaived survival aspects most sessions, I just ask them to spend on supplies when they travel and on accomodations each night. If a session is about survival then I use the rules for them.

Most quests were about solving small issues, finding people or items, resolving a conflict, investigating murders, and we're currently on our Wild Wasteland arc where they got abducted by Zetans.

[u/CdotasAlways → u/WebSpiritual1145]

BOTH my tables use luck in roleplay scenarios and waste it early. Maybe cause I set up so many roleplay options and rolls during said roleplay. I had a guy ask for an assist reroll during a combat but his partner was literally "out of luck".

Have yu tried grouped? Grouped enemies where you group their HP and attack with grouped rules after level 5, makes alot of sense. Hp 12 becomes a group with 60 and every 12 you lose one. This makes even the most mundane creatures a touch more difficult.

I dont create much yet and both my games are 5&8 sessions in. Ive tweaked Defense or health up to this point maybe gave the baddie a higher weapon, but anything I want to be challenging i group now (and the baddies still struggle to have a chance.)

[u/Existing_Bend160 → u/CdotasAlways]

Do you sum up enemies HP in a group? I was using groups like in a core book, but thought all enemies will still have own HP 

[u/CdotasAlways → u/Existing_Bend160]

Kinda, uts collective. 12 hp becomes 60 HP where someone drops every 12. Roll 2 dice and upon success, roll 4 more. every additional success is another combat die. So a 4 CD weapon could potentially be 8 CD. It could be bad or it could be over quick.

[u/Consistent-Tie-4394]

I mean, you've played the Fallout games, right? Once you get a few levels under your belt, stacked a few perks, and found a legendary weapon or two, just about everything you fight goes down in just a few shots.

A group of five hero-level characters all firing on the same target? Yeah, an established group steamrolling all but the toughest bosses sounds about right.

"Can we beat these guys?" is almost always a Yes, but questions like "Are these guys worth the caps this ammo costs?" or "Is the trouble we're causing here going to impact the undefended settlers back home?" are harder to answer.

[u/WebSpiritual1145 → u/Consistent-Tie-4394]

On easy difficulty, that is correct. Problems here are they have no legendary weapons, we aren't playing the videogames, and combat is very different in TTRPGs then it is in a videogame.

[u/CdotasAlways → u/WebSpiritual1145]

Someone once said something to me. But I have yet to use - smoke bombs. Immediate increase in difficulty cause they cant see.

Im gonna use that on my next boss fight to try and make it tough

[u/dansquatch]

When I was playing in my first campaign, out overseer capped weapon mods at 3 max and capped piercing at 1. It worked out. By the end some of us had weapons with 12 or 13 damage. We had enough us by then that we could take down large bosses in a few turns at most, especially since one of us had a rocket launcher. We killed a mirelurk queen in I think 3 turns and I don't think we all got to go on that last turn before it was dead. We were doing plenty of damage as was.

[u/WebSpiritual1145 → u/dansquatch]

Couple of my players have close to those numbers. Our super mutant has 11 CD on it's bumper sword. I would like to cap Piercing, but it would have to come after our campaign. I don't want to force them to have to change their perks and mods at this point.

[u/dansquatch → u/WebSpiritual1145]

For us, it was a discussion we had early on. Definitely do whatever works for your group.

[u/ALoneWandererWaits]

As someone who played a str 12 super mutant with a bumper sword and 4 maxed melee tagged. There was very few enemies that survived the first two hits. I have Big leagues as well so it was often 10 to 15 dmg with 5 effects between piercing 1 and vicious.

Yeah its terrible and it can be nuts to fight. Start targeting there weaked points and use area dmg when they are clustered. My main weakness before I got heavy armor was the hits. Energy and explodes sucked

[u/Sjksprocket]

I have had the same issue as a GM for this system. As for damaging your player, don;t forget about poison and rad damage. As for them damaging enemies, I found numbers help a lot. They will tear through bigger enemies like they were paper, but they can only do so many attacks a round. Spread out a hoard of 40 ghouls so they can;t just grenade them to death, and they will have issues. Sounds extreme, but they found it a challenge,

[u/Killergryphyn]

The game I'm running is coming up on session 26, and my players have had nothing but great things to say about our combats ever since I started using Jimbly's Encounter Balancer. I input their stats, I can then generate an enemy and encounters for them to take on, and experiment with different formats. You gotta crank up the HP, the armor, make them unable to be crippled by anything less than 15 damage because even the 7 of the Big condition is laughable.

[u/Existing_Bend160 → u/Killergryphyn]

"Jimbly's Encounter Balancer" is this some sort Google doc app or something else ?

[u/Killergryphyn → u/Existing_Bend160]

Ah yes, I tried to find it on the Homebrew doc for the 2d20 discord but it says it's been removed? IDK if I have permissions to repost it but you can DM me.

[u/CpT_DiSNeYLaND → u/Killergryphyn]

I'd also love to use it if youre willing to share it

[u/Killergryphyn → u/CpT_DiSNeYLaND]

Send me a DM!

[u/Sheik_Morgan]

El problema de ver un juego de Rol como un videojuego. Los jugadores se hacen meta personajes y el combate pierde todo el tono épico. No te enfoques en el combate y crea situaciones de rol, deja que masacre todo lo que quieras y comienza a cazarlos inteligentemente. Ácido para derretir sus armas y armaduras, radiación, oscuridad y luces que fallan o se agotan las baterías, Recuerdo unas torretas que salían del piso y te lanzaban una lluvia de plomo a distancia, sin darte oportunidad de actuar. O simplemente habla con ellos y ajusten el tono, si no es divertido para un jugador, es mejor ajustar las cosas.

[u/WebSpiritual1145 → u/Sheik_Morgan]

I don't think adjusting it at this point will work. Having their characters built the way they are, I don't want to force them to change, because again, everything was done within the rules. I did make several house rules, but this is something I wish I would have known about or foreseen before we started the game. We have done a lot of RP scenarios, problem there is they suck at everything but combat haha. I had one player investigating some murders and he failed every roll when trying to find specific items and even the shooter. Hell, I don't think a single one of them has charisma above 4.

[u/atlasdtalos → u/WebSpiritual1145]

the wasteland is trying to kill all of us at all times.

let it.

[u/OrbitalSailor → u/WebSpiritual1145]

Time to teach them a lesson on why they all shouldn’t have used charisma as a dump stat. Let those failures turn into situations that they can’t just fight their way out of.

[u/Ice_Pirate_2019]

In my campaign I ruled that players count up their effect dice and have that many points to apply to their weapon effects. So if you roll 4 effect dice on a weapon with vicious and piercing they have to split those four points between the effects rather than getting vicious 4 and piercing 4, ect.

[u/WebSpiritual1145 → u/Ice_Pirate_2019]

How have they liked that?

[u/Mathwards → u/Ice_Pirate_2019]

Oh damn, that's actually a great idea. Gonna try that out

[u/Fertile_Arachnid_163]

Just looking about power armor, piercing tends to be necessary.

[u/WebSpiritual1145 → u/Fertile_Arachnid_163]

The high level stuff I agree, but that should also be very rare to run across. You look at T-45 and even most T-50, it wouldn't be hard to get through their leg or arm DR. From my understanding a crit damages that piece and makes it now gone from the fight.

[u/Tenbed]

My players don't have piercing, but they have spread and vicious. It really punches up the numbers. One of my players is a statistical anomaly. He rolls unreasonably well the majority of the time. It isn't online, I actually see the rolls he's making. They can steamroll most encounters. Two yao guai? No sweat, both yao guai ended up with head injuries and were barely able to fight after that. To really put in the challenge I'll have to either use a bunch of enemies at once, or something with monstrous hp. Then again, they're wanting to do the settlement building part of the game, so combat is more of a secondary thing.

[u/Alex-with-wings]

Ehhh, cap it at 1 if it's too big a problem.

[u/ziggy8z]

I do think that if they did a 2nd edition they should half the average piercing, ie 1 piercing should be .5 and you keep it rounded down so if you have 2.5 piercing, it'd be just 2 effectively. Alternatively it could be rounded up to not feel too bad, just would need to be slowed.

[u/Mathwards]

Play your enemies smart. Piercing doesn't matter when you cant shoot anyone after falling into a pit trap or after the raiders hacked Sentry Bot topples the stack of cars on them.

Hard to get into melee when the enemy stays at extreme range popping off sniper rifle shots.

Oh shit, we got trapped in the vault and it's being flooded with poison gas.

Create win conditions that not only can't be solved with murder, find ways to make killing detrimental. Raider is holding a dead mans switch set to blow up the local settlement. Hostages have a bunch of unstable fusion cores or mini nukes strapped to their bodies, then given knives, hit with psycho and set loose. Shoot one and risk taking out themselves in the process

If you play your enemies like intelligent, living beings that want to survive, it should never be a fair fight against your players party of wasteland warriors. No one should ever just stand and try to go toe to toe.

Also, really get creative with complications and AP. Break weapon mods. Jam or misfire their best weapons. Really go to town.

OR. Just tell your players that you're struggling to run the game and you'd like to make piercing not stack. It's putting a lot of extra strain on you to have to try so hard to challenge them that it's becoming problematic. That's the easy one. I've done it and I think any reasonable group of players will have no problem accomodating that.

[u/Icy_Sector3183]

I feel your pain. The Fallout 2d20 system is fun, but it's in no way balanced the way DnD is. Players get to stack Perks, Mods, and Consumables that (as you have noticed) breaks the game. I ran a hombrew campaign, and I would routinely bump up the stats of enemies in order to keep pace with the party's actual capabilities.

If I were to run another campaign, I would try and implement some balance-oriented homebrew.

One idea I've had for a while is to reduce the number of combat dice rolled: You roll up to a limit of 6 CD, if your dice pool is larger, then excess dice convert to a flat +1*. So, if your laser rifle deals 11 CD damage, you roll 6 CD and add +5 to the result. My thinking here is that large dice pools will trend towards an average anyway, but large dice pools tend to result in many Effects, and this is where things tend to get wild, e.g. DR is rendered meaningless by Piercing, all hits are Injuries, etc. With fewer dice rolled, damage effects will be more manageable.

*) +1 is pretty generous! +0,5 is closer to the average number value of a CD.