Welcome to Gaia! ::

New rules

Casual roleplaying:
This is something which I have implied in the past, but never made a solid rule about. Any player who wishes to may roleplay on the side, making his or her own thread. He or she may invite other players, and may play it out over long or short periods of time, with or without the GM present. Popular scenes will probably include conversations between characters during downtime, training, and other relatively mundane, day-to-day things. For purposes of setting the scene and such, the player who started it is considered the GM for the duration of that thread. They may be completely outragous, if you wish... all the characters dying or some such thing.

If I see one of these threads that I like and that fits into the storyline, I may decide to make it an official part of the storyline. If/when I do so, I will make it a sticky, rename and lock it. It will be considered to have taken place between two adventures, and I will indicate so in the first post. If the thread is still a regular thread, rather than a sticky, it is considered non-cannon, and anything that takes place in it does not factor into the official storyline.

What is the upside to all this? Well, other than practicing your roleplaying and getting to know your character, I will also give XP awards for doing these well. These rewards will not be huge... probably no more than 1-2 XP... and will be given out along with the rest of the XP at the end of an adventure. For instance, I may say, "Everyone gets 5 XP, except for Amethyst, who gets 6 because of her side-adventure." This XP will be given out to anyone participating in any side-thread, even if it doesn't become part of the official storyline, as long as I like the thread. A storyline that involves aliens coming down and taking over NYC, while it doesn't fit into the storyline, is still rather entertaining and you will be rewarded for creating it.


Critical success/failure:
From this point forward, I'm going to be implimenting a new critical system. It's a little more complex, but I think it provides for much more enjoyment.

Basically, here's the dillema I've been thinking out: If you make it so a 1 always fails and a 20 always succeeds, there is a 1 in 20 chance to do anything. An average guy off the street with no base attack bonus and an 8 strength can still hit a super-fast character with a defense of 30, and he can do it 1 in 20 times. And that same hero, with a base attack bonus of 10 and a total ranged attack roll of +25 will still miss that average guy 1 in 20 times. That just seems wrong. But it also seems wrong to say there is absolutely no chance of it happening.

So here's the way it will work. Whenever you roll a 1 or a 20, you make another roll. This second roll gets a +20 or -20 modifier. Success or failure is then determined based on this new number.

So, for instance, a task with a DC of 65 requires you to roll a 20 3 times, then roll a 5 or more on the next roll. Very, very unlikely (A 1 in 10000 chance,) but still possible. Much more reasonable a number than 1 in 20 for something that insanely difficult.

If you roll a sequence of 1's and 20's, they naturally cancel each-other out; you continue re-rolling until you get something that isn't a 1 or 20. So in the unlikely event that you roll 20-1-1-20-20-19, the final result of the roll is 39, since the final result is modified by all the previous rolls (19+20-20-20+20+20=39). Hopefully this isn't too difficult to understand. I think it is a nice way of dealing with a world where nothing is impossible, but some things are very, very unlikely.

As to how this actually occurs in the gameplay, I will roll the second (and third and fourth...) roll(s) on my own. The extent of your success/failure will not be completely evident to you, though I may tell you the number OOC.

20's and 1's kind of cancel out. a 20 then a 1 then a 5 would just be 5, since you're taking 5, adding 20 (for the 20) and subtracting 20 (for the 1)

For your climb check example... you take the second roll (the 15) subtract the 20 (from the roll of 1) and get -5, after your mod, a -4. And there's nothing really wrong with negative numbers. I'm not going to rule them extremely bad. Like, a -10 will be about the equivalent of rolling a 1. Nothing unrealistically bad will happen... like, if there's a ladder, the worst that can happen as a result of you climbing up it is slipping and falling, hurting yourself a little. I'm not going to make up some huge explosion that happens just because you rolled a -245 (possible, but very unlikely) it just means that you took a particularly nasty fall and maybe twisted your ankle.

Anyone who's worried about making a terribly negative damage save and dying instantly, lookup damage on 127-128... dying immediately from one hit is impossible in this system. Even with lethal damage, the worst one hit can do is bring you to disabled, which simply means you can't take any strenuous action or more damage before you start dying. The only way it would work is if I was using the optional Massive Damage rules on page 128, which I'm not. If you become disabled, but lay there and the enemy ignores you, or even walk away and the enemy ignores you, you won't die. Guarenteed, 100%.

Also, in all these cases, remember hero points. You get 5 per adventure.. more once you're higher level. They can be used to re-roll any roll. So if you're jumping from one skyscraper to another and roll a -45... re-roll it, for goodness sake! A short description of all the uses for hero points is listed on your character sheets. Look at the second page of any of the three... standard, comicy or fancy. It's all right there. They're very useful little things for when you need to get out of a pinch... there are multiple ways to keep your character from dying, using them, at any step along the way. You can use one to up your defense for a round if you're feeling nervous about a particular enemy, or when you botch your damage save to re-roll it, or when you're lying on the ground (unconsious or disabled) to immediately make a recovery roll from it, or take a strenuous action while disabled without shifting to dying, or even immediately go from dying back to disabled! All the exact descriptions of these uses are on pages 105-106.

Any other questions or further clarification, ask them here, as always. Hopefully that cleared everything up for you.