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RE: [DL] Getting Started
Advice about traits vs trait levels in character creation.
say you have 1d12 and 4d6 still to assign and Vigor and knowledge left to assign them to
Always put the 1d12 in Knowledge.
Why? because you rarely make a straight Knowledge roll - you will be rolling xd12, where x is the Aptitude of one of the many knowledge based skills. (The same applies to deftness & nimbleness)
There are however NO vigor based skills. the vigor die type does matter of course, but since you roll straight Vigor a lot (every time you are wounded for example), you want more dice, rather than 1 die with a higher Trait.
Also, assign even numbers of dice to the things you will roll the most - Vigor, Quickness, Shootin' etc because you have a lower chance of going bust relative to you chance of success with even numbers of dice.
Also make sure your players know that Guts is a VERY important skill. With anything less than 3d8 in Guts they will be running away or standing open-mouthed in too many fights. Its like SAN in Call of Cthulhu, without a decent score the game isn't much fun.
I personally think a free point of Guts at the beginning is justified, like for Search and Scrutinise. Everyone has SOME Guts IMHO, if you have none its a Hindrance!
One other tip - Ignore hit locations for NPCs except for figuring out extra damage dice - treat everything as a 'Guts' hit or bookkeeping becomes a nightmare - especially since many creatures are not human-shaped and no hit location tables exist for quadrapeds, worms and 4-headed winged thingies!!
Only use the Stun rules for Posse members & important NPCs - for others, make every wound worth 3 wind and knock minor NPCs out of combat if they take 50% of their remaining wind in one hit (or a Critical Wound)
-----Original Message-----
From: Elliott Wong [mailto:ferricfoot@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, 5 August 2002 12:11 p.m.
To: deadlands@gamerz.net
Subject: [DL] Getting Started
Thanks for the advice about starting a Deadlands
campaign. I am going to push my players to using the
regular Deadlands ruleset instead of d20.
Now, in regard to these rules, I think I have some of
the basics down, but I do have a couple of questions.
What good are attributes? Let's say that I have 4
levels of 'bluff' and my Smarts Trait is d8 and my
coordination is 3 (hearts). I would roll 3d8 because
that is my Smarts/Coordination but how does the actual
'bluff' attribute modify those rolls? Does it make the
Target Number smaller? eg. I'm told that the TN is 5
but since I have 4 levels of bluff I only need to roll
a 1?
Thanks. There will probably be more questions as I
continue to go through the rules.
Elliott
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