[MarcoSkoll]

Hey, I'm new to these forums, new to inquisitor, new to the whole show, as it were.  I was wondering if these rules were still being worked on, and if not, if there are any rules projects being played today for inquisitor-type games?

Well, first of all, the traditional Big Yellow Welcome^TM

WELCOME TO THE CONCLAVE!

As far as the actual question, although the project is a bit sporadic, it is still active, and I have actually been working on it recently. (Particularly as there's been a tentative suggestion of using it for an upcoming event).

There will be a V 0.4 update at some point, but it will be relatively minor from the perspective of the core mechanics. IRE has grown to become a pretty robust system between the experience of the people who've contributed and many long hours carefully working out how to explain those mechanics on the page. Any major hiccups with the core mechanisms have been ironed out at this point, and future changes to the system will be more about fine-tuning modifiers or adding new sections rather than large changes.

Most of the remaining work on the core book is more about filling in those sections that have been largely left to be filled in by the original book, and thus flesh out IRE to a fully self-contained rulebook in its own right.

As a project, it's not yet quite done, but I'm pretty proud of it so far.

[MarcoSkoll]

Coming back to IRE's Awareness section... in the Inquisitor games I've played, awareness is one area of the rules that is generally very heavily fudged compared to the original rulebook. Sort of:

Player: "I look around the corner"
GM: "Roll awareness"
Player: "Pass by 42"
GM: "Although they're well concealed enough that you can't make out specific details, you can clearly see that two figures are trying to hide in the woods ahead. However, because of the light mist, you don't manage to see the sniper on the second level of the watch tower"

This is obviously a lot quicker than in the rulebook, where you have to roll for each specific character you might see, working out modifiers for distance, number concealed locations, etc... which is obviously why it usually gets used instead. It is not however something that can really be put down into rules.

I'm wondering if it may be simplest to have a system that plays off degrees of success somehow - for a rough example, Inquisitor Shyloque gets 4 degrees of success. He can "spend" those to work out what he can actually see in front of him.

Tyrus is out in the open, so he doesn't need any DoS spent to actually be aware someone is there, but if Shyloque wants to look more closely and work out who it is, or what he's up to, then each DoS spent gets him more detail.
Because Sgt Stone is some distance away, and also in partial cover, then Shyloque must spend two of his Degrees of Success to become aware someone is there, and more if he wants to work out who specifically.
However, if he wants to see Barbaretta whose entire body is behind smoke in the distance, he'll have to spend all of his DoS and miss out on other details.

Becoming aware of easily visible characters is relatively simple, but actually knowing who they are and what they're doing takes more of your time and attention when trying to quickly glance around a corner.

Thoughts? Alternative suggestions? Etc?

[MarcoSkoll]

I'm playing around with whether I can turn the above idea into something viable, and I think I possibly can.

However, possibly radical suggestion: Should characters automatically get a free awareness test at the start of their turn?

Often the GM has to throw in awareness tests anyway because of "Did I see that happen?" (and it feeling odd that a character has to use up actions to actually take in new information, even if they were looking that way when it happened) - and, as it is, one of the things that often holds up the progression of play is characters having to use up their actions failing to see what's going on.

Actively using awareness will remain an option (a free test doesn't guarantee they'll see things, so characters may still spend their time bewildered) but it does solve the question of whether the character is aware of what's happened since their last turn, and may mean more time actually in the action of the game.

(Note that this is a free awareness test, not a free Pause for Breath, so actively using a Pause for Breath still provides those benefits).

[MarcoSkoll]

After a bit of a ramble on Facebook, it's time to look at the issue of blast weapons...

Blast weapons are an issue in Inquisitor. Admittedly, detailed blast weapons are just difficult in general. Partly that is because they're often just slow to resolve, but because the two natural ways to harm them both have odd side effects:

1) Like Inquisitor, you can have a blast weapon doing multiple hits. However, this naturally skews them towards being ineffective versus armour - because they do multiple hits, blast weapons need to do less damage per hit to not be hugely overpowered, and once they do less damage per hit, and armour is applying against each hit, armour easily absorbs a lot of the damage.

Krak grenades in Inquisitor are lethal against light armoured targets, and functionally fairly useless against well armoured targets. Not what they're supposed to be lore-wise.

2) Something like Dark Heresy, where you still only do one hit and thus the weapon can still have similar damage stats... but it's kind of odd having the large blast hit ONLY your arm.

~~~~~

I think IRE needs to stick with the first approach, as neither is a flawless system, and at least this way we're sticking with the established rules.

However, as far as improving on the fact that it's so skewed by armour, I'm struggling for a solution better than having blast weapons automatically halve armour (representing the spray of shrapnel/plasma/etc being likely to find gaps or weaknesses in armour).

That's not necessarily a terrible idea, as theoretically, flak armour could ignore that if not directly hit; that would be in keeping with the lore about it being mostly intended to protect against indirect hits.

Any thoughts?

[Mike712]

After a bit of a ramble on Facebook, it's time to look at the issue of bast weapons...

Blast weapons are an issue in Inquisitor. Admittedly, detailed blast weapons are just difficult in general. Partly that is because they're often just slow to resolve, but because the two natural ways to harm them both have odd side effects:

1) Like Inquisitor, you can have a blast weapon doing multiple hits. However, this naturally skews them towards being ineffective versus armour - because they do multiple hits, blast weapons need to do less damage per hit to not be hugely overpowered, and once they do less damage per hit, and armour is applying against each hit, armour easily absorbs a lot of the damage.

Krak grenades in Inquisitor are lethal against light armoured targets, and functionally fairly useless against well armoured targets. Not what they're supposed to be lore-wise.

2) Something like Dark Heresy, where you still only do one hit and thus the weapon can still have similar damage stats... but it's kind of odd having the large blast hit ONLY your arm.

~~~~~

I think IRE needs to stick with the first approach, as neither is a flawless system, and at least this way we're sticking with the established rules.

However, as far as improving on the fact that it's so skewed by armour, I'm struggling for a solution better than having blast weapons automatically halve armour (representing the spray of shrapnel/plasma/etc being likely to find gaps or weaknesses in armour).

That's not necessarily a terrible idea, as theoretically, flak armour could ignore that if not directly hit; that would be in keeping with the lore about it being mostly intended to protect against indirect hits.

Any thoughts?

Hi new here, but I thought I'd contribute.

The explosion should get weaker, instead of do less hits as it projects from point of detonation.

It does indeed make sense that multiple locations of the body are hit, so using a blast number to limit number of hits does make some sense, as having all locations hit at once is going to be overwhelming damage for almost any character to sustain.

Personally I would scale the damage numbers, so an explosion is very lethal at the point of detonation, but damage that is likely to only cause a light injury or be mitigated by armour the thinnest of armour as the explosion radiates outwards.

So damage rather than number of hits drops off with range.

Personally I would use another method to work out the number of hits. A roll against an updated blast number with modifiers for smaller locations of the body,  e.g. no modifier for legs, abdomen, chest +1 for arms +2 for head. Could even add an additional +1 in the outer radius of the blast if it needed further balancing.

A typical blast number could range from 4-6, a D6 result higher than the blast number plus modifiers, that location avoids being hit.

This does give the possibility for all locations to potentially be hit, but it would be rare event.

I would rework the blast radius of some explosives too.

Happy to set aside some time to mathhammer/playtest if you wanted any assistance.

[MarcoSkoll]

Apologies for the slightly slow reply and welcome - I've been somewhat occupied of late, including an unplanned computer reinstall after it went wibbly last week.

The explosion should get weaker, instead of do less hits as it projects from point of detonation.

It has some potential as an idea, depending on exactly how it's handled.

I'm wary of having blast weapons continue to do a large number of hits at all radii, as working out multiple hits is time consuming; the falling off on the number of hits does at least naturally limit that.

(I once had a discussion to this effect with PrecinctOmega about the auto fire rules in his version of Inquisitor 2 - although the rolling to hit was much faster, you then were likely to get many more hits than the existing rules, and working out the damage for that could make the whole process much slower as a result. That said, I did use something similar for IRE's flame weapon rules, but with different underlying numbers, so it didn't result in quite so many hits).

Still, a mechanism that resulted in fewer hits on average, but scaling the damage instead could potentially be an approach to go with; working out a damage modifier only needs to be done once for each character, but each additional hit is multiplicative.

Personally I would use another method to work out the number of hits. A roll against an updated blast number with modifiers for smaller locations of the body,  e.g. no modifier for legs, abdomen, chest +1 for arms +2 for head. Could even add an additional +1 in the outer radius of the blast if it needed further balancing.

Hmm. If I'm interpreting you right, that immediately calls for eight rolls (2x legs, 2x arms, chest, abdomen, groin, head) with varying modifiers each time a character is hit, and the order is important, so they can't just be rolled as one. Even if they're just D6 rolls, that's still going to be somewhat time consuming. Of course, the trade off is that does remove any need for location rolls, so possibly it's even on time.

The fact that it creates an exception within the rules with a unique way of choosing hit location, I'm a bit less happy about; IRE has tried to remove such "special cases" where possible (for example, "Close up" and "Arm's Reach" are gone from IRE's melee rules, as the new way Reach works naturally represents those).

The other concern I have is that I want to maximise compatibility with first edition; I don't want having to maintain more than one character sheet to be a barrier to IRE. (As is, although IRE has added a couple of melee weapon characteristics and Psy Rating, IRE character sheets are mostly back compatible into 1stE, and with a couple of exceptions like psychic powers, a 1stE character sheet is usually quick to update).

However, complaints aside, I do see potential in the idea. My first thought is that if possible, I'd want to preserve the existing profiles, instead trying to see if it was feasible to choose modifiers that had you rolling under existing blast values. (Rather than over an updated one).

I'll need to do some numbers and tests to see how well it can be made to work, but I'll take a look at those as suggestions. I suspect I may also still need to do something about the way blast interacts with armour for the reasons noted above, but we'll see what the numbers say...

[Mentirius]

I'm afraid I'm far too rusty on the original rules to contribute anything useful here, and ad-hoc house rules were rife in my old gaming group, but I'd be in favour of the free awareness test.  I also like the sound of a melee rework - one day when people can safely congregate again, I think I'd enjoy trying out your Revised Edition.  It seems like a monumental amount of work must have gone into it over the years.