Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[scriver]

Can I have a revolving matchlock shotgun revolver?

[Jimmy]

Pathfinder has a early firearm revolver, the pepperbox. It's a 6-shooter that works similar to a flintlock. As for a shotgun, no such luck per the Pathfinder rules, although if you're in the market, you can get the Taurus Judge five-shot revolver that shoots shotgun shells, because of course you can get a bloody huge hand-cannon in the USA.

[Draignean]

Pathfinder has a early firearm revolver, the pepperbox. It's a 6-shooter that works similar to a flintlock. As for a shotgun, no such luck per the Pathfinder rules, although if you're in the market, you can get the Taurus Judge five-shot revolver that shoots shotgun shells, because of course you can get a bloody huge hand-cannon in the USA.

Objection! This statement is misleading. The Judge is able to chamber a very small shotgun shell,  one smaller than this bullet. Wouldn't even make it into the top ten lists for muzzle velocity or caliber.

If you want a real revolver, much like a real knife, you need to head to Australia and pick up the Pfeifer-Zeliska and its absurd .6 cartridges.

[milo christiansen]

Yeah, 410 shotshells are about the smallest dedicated shotgun rounds you can get. IIRC there are quite a few pistols that can handle them.

[GiglameshDespair]

I mean, one could argue that a sawn-off shotgun is converted into a pistol. It's certainly used for the same sort of reasons and often falls under the same laws.

[Draignean]

I mean, one could argue that a sawn-off shotgun is converted into a pistol. It's certainly used for the same sort of reasons and often falls under the same laws.

What you want is the Serbu Super Shorty.

[NullForceOmega]

I got a new player in my group for the first time in a few years, he's an old friend who has decades of experience with AD&D, but this is only his second time with a Palladium game.  He's coping so far but the poor layout of the books is giving him trouble, and due to his own hangups, I'm having some problems gauging where he needs me to step in and help.

[SalmonGod]

Which Palladium game?

[NullForceOmega]

Splicers, fairly heavily modified setting wise, so those parts of the book aren't very important.  Where we're running into trouble is the piss-poor way the actual content is arranged, he's having problems with the amount of shifting back and forth through the book to find things (and the need to either write down a bunch of information that becomes meaningless after character creation or have several pages ear-marked simultaneously.)  We're making progress, but the already painfully long character creation process has stretched out over three sessions now.

[SalmonGod]

Palladium is pretty broken, system-wise.  It's a shame, because I love some of their content anyway.  Nightbane, for example, is a great setting.  If I ever try to play any of their stuff again, I'll go to the trouble of adapting their ideas to a different system.

[NullForceOmega]

I'm a twenty-year Palladium veteran, believe me, I know how utterly broken it is.  New player just called a bit ago, he's feeling pretty sick so he won't make it this session, gives him more time to read the book tho' so not a complete loss.

I love K.S.' ideas, but he's an absolutely terrible writer and editor, and the product suffers for it, immensely.

[heydude6]

Would you say it’s worse or better than shadowrun mechanics-wise? I don’t care if the information is confusingly presented, but if you actually put in the effort to understand the rules, will you get something enjoyable?

[NullForceOmega]

To be completely honest, the rules are so screwed up that the game is basically unplayable in its default state.  The core mechanics were built to be an alternative to AD&D 2nd edition, and they work okay for PFRPG (Palladium Fantasy RPG), and to a limited extent in the other low-power (standard damage or S.D. in Palladium products), but once you shift to the high-power titles (RIFTS, Robotech, Splicers, other mega-damage/M.D. settings) the systems just fall apart.

The ideas and core concepts backing the Palladium system are fairly solid, with lots of variation and some pretty involved settings, but the mechanics are just not adequate at all.

Here's an example:

You are falling off a very tall building, when you hit the ground you take S.D./hit point damage from the fall that scales to the distance travelled, so this works.

A car is falling from the same very high building, it takes S.D. that scales to the fall, but does NOT scale to the weight/size of the vehicle, so right there we already have a problem.

An advanced super heavy tank is falling from the building, it takes S.D. as above, but it is a M.D. structure, so unless the total damage from the fall exceeds 100 S.D./hitpoints, it takes NO DAMAGE.  Now the mechanic is not functioning at all.

A demon is falling from the building, as a M.D. supernatural being it also only takes damage if the total exceeds 100 S.D. (and it must deal another 100 S.D. for each additional point of M.D.)

Here's the kicker: That tank has several hundred M.D., so even if the total damage from the fall is high enough to do some damage, it will be almost meaninglessly small, and the demon has potentially THOUSANDS of M.D., and regenerates several M.D. per second making the whole exercise pointless.

That is just one of the many ways that the core mechanics are broken, I could probably write a fairly substantial breakdown of what doesn't work in the game, but that would be several pages long.

Shadowrun's mechanics are very involved, but they actually work, Palladium's mechanics just don't.

[Egan_BW]

Makes sense. If you're super anime buff, you don't worry about falling damage. This simplifies all sorts of awesome and unnecessary high-power combat techniques.

[NullForceOmega]

Except that it doesn't, due to innumerable other massive issues.  Not the least of which is how combat actually functions in Palladium titles.  It is entirely possible, and even probable, that a first level character can have a +11 to dodge or strike (or both), on a D20 roll.  This system is broken to hell and back in every imaginable way.

I am not exaggerating when I say that a single battle with less than half a dozen combatants can take four hours of table time.