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• Jun 4, 2019

  Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Berbalang

  

  Berbalangs are ghouls from filipino myth, and were first made into D&D monsters in an old issue of White Dwarf back in the OD&D days. Here, they’re only on the Monster Manual.

  The Lore

  Despite the impy look of the picture, Berbalangs are Medium! They’re Immortal Humanoids and Evil, but are not devils. The book doesn’t say much about their in-setting origin, but what little description is there implies berbalangs live in the world and not on the Astral Sea. They’re definitely sapient with Int 14, and speak Supernal.

  They feed on the flesh and bones of dead humanoids, but that’s just a carrier for their real source of nourishment: the memories of the deceased. The creature relives those memories when it sleeps, and derives sustenance from them. It doesn’t matter whether the corpse is fresh or centuries old, the memories encoded in its physical form will still serve as food just fine.

  Some berbalangs take up residence in remote villages, where they make a deal with the local leadership: instead of burying their dead, they offer them up to the monster, presumably in exchange for protection against other threats. If no one has died of natural causes recently, the berbalang instead demands a sacrifice.

  Berbalangs are solitary, but will occasionally share their lairs with other monsters that like dwelling in tombs and crypts.

  The Numbers

  Berbalangs are Level 10 Solo Skirmishers with 408 HP. Their AC and Reflex are strong for their level, and their Will is slightly weak. They have a ground speed of 6 and a flight speed of 8.

  The only reason I don’t consider them the most gimmicky monster I saw so far is because I just reviewed beholders. You see, the berbalang’s main ability is Summon Duplicate, an at-will minor action. While not bloodied, the creature can create up to four psychic duplicates of itself. Creating a duplicate costs the berbalang one quarter of its current hit points, which become that duplicate’s HP. So a healthy berbalang can create three duplicates with 104, 76 and 57 HP respectively, leaving itself with 171.

  The duplicates have all the same statistics of the original, and the damage of their attacks is psychic. They act as fully independent combatants and can be targeted by PCs normally. A berbalang can use a standard action to either absorb a duplicate and regain 50 HP, or detonate it. The resulting explosion affects every enemy adjacent to the sacrificed duplicate with an attack that does psychic damage, and which dazes even if it misses. This also causes 25 damage to the original berbalang.

  Once per round the creature can also deflect all damage and all negative effects from an attack that hit it to one of its duplicates.

  Its basic melee attack is downright prosaic next to all this: a claw attack that suffers from the usual math problems. In a given turn, every duplicate will get one of these, and they get sneak attacks against enemies flanked by two of them.

  The suggested encounter is level 12: a berbalang, a gibbering mouther, and a skeletal tomb guardian walk into a bar.

  A lone berbalang might make an interesting boss battle against a level 7-8 party, at the end of an investigative adventure where they find out it’s enslaving a village.

• May 30, 2019

  Video Game Shields in GURPS

  

  As we saw in a recent post, force screens in GURPS work in a manner that is almost, but not entirely unlike that of energy shields in popular game franchises like Borderlands, Mass Effect, or Warframe. If you’re familiar with these games and read GURPS for the first time, the differences might trip you up a bit.

  Energy shields in these games usually work like a separate pool of HP. Attacks that hit your character take directly from this pool, which lets nothing through until it’s completely depleted. Once that happens the character must avoid getting hit for a few seconds before their shields start to regenerate, which in turn takes a few more seconds. Games that give players a lot of insight into their numbers tend to also provide lots of options to tweak your shield recharge delay and recharge rate. Still, recovering your shields is always easier than recovering your “real” HP, which requires healing items or powers.

  These games also feature multiple damage types of varying effectiveness against each type of defense. An attack that’s good at damaging shields will usually be worse at damaging HP (and/or armor, if that’s a thing in the game), and vice-versa.

  How would this look like in GURPS? Let’s make an attempt to adapt these mechanics.

  Campaign Option: Energy Shields

  This is a campaign option for settings which use force screens, making them work in a more “video-game-like” fashion (described above). It’s good for campaigns meant to emulate the games I discuss at the beginning of this post. If you’re instead trying to model something like Star Trek shields, use the default rules from Ultra-Tech instead.

  Under these rules, Force Screens still provide the listed DR for the equipment in question, but this DR is considered fully Ablative and ignores all armor divisors. If an attack lowers the screen’s DR to 0, any excess damage is lost. Attacks with the Surge modifier cause double damage to force screens, and they protect from radiation as if it was damage. This does mean that an attack that does “rad sur” damage would do triple damage to a force screen.

  Shields recover at the usual rate of 10% per second, but they only start recovering after the user spends 2 seconds without being hit by further attacks. If the user is hit while the shield is mid-recovery, it takes another 2 seconds before it can start again.

  Shield Overflow: GMs who don’t want to bother with the bookkeeping can eliminate both the 2-second recharge delay and the “no overflow” property of force screens. This means that damage in excess of the shield’s DR applies to the user, but the screen begins recovering on the very next turn.

  All force screen variants from Ultra-Tech p. 191-192 except Kinetic and Energy can still apply to force screens using this rule¹.

  Examples

  Remember Tom Tomorrow and the Robber Baron? Let’s see how their many confrontations would have happened under this rule. As before, Tom Tomorrow has a DR 60 personal force screen and a DR 30/15* armored space suit, and the Baron has an increasingly absurd modern arsenal.

  During the First National Bank robbery, each shot from the Baron’s 9mm pistol (damage 2d+2 pi) would reduce the DR of Tom’s Force Screen by 9 on average. It would take 7 shots to disable the force screen entirely, but until that happens Tom is completely safe from the Baron’s gunfire. Tom can’t just stand there and laugh at the villain anymore, but he can still easily make the arrest.

  During the Second National Bank robbery, each shot from the baron’s assault rifle (damage 5d pi) would reduce the DR of Tom’s Force Screen by 18! It will only take four of them before Tom’s shields are down, forcing him to be a lot more careful this time around. He can still take a lucky burst and survive unscathed, but likely has to hide behind some hard cover once or twice to let his shields recover. He’s still quite a bit safer than a mundane cop would be, though.

  During the Third National Bank Robbery, the Baron’s antitank grenade (damage 4d(10) cr exp) would reduce the screen’s DR by 14, but Tom himself would be completely unaffected by the explosion! The Baron would likely be so surprised by this Tom would easily be able to handcuff him for the third and final time.

  If the Baron somehow got ahold of a death ray (6d burn rad sur), each shot from that weapon would do 63 damage to Tom’s shields on average, meaning a single shot would be enough to destroy them! Tom himself would still be unaffected, but subsequent shots would threathen him directly until he had a couple of seconds to let his screen recharge at least a little. Luckily for him and for Paragon City, futuristic beam weapons are totally outside the Baron’s idiom.

  1. Well, you can allow them if you really want to, but that will lead to a setting like Gun Gale Online, where everyone only uses weapons that ignore shields. ↩

• May 27, 2019

  Where I read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Beholder

  

  This post is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.

  You probably heard of beholders before. You know, floaty spheres with a toothy mouth and an arbitrarily large number of eyes. They’re kind of a big deal. I believe they’ve been in the game since at least the BECMI era, and were one of the handful of creatures declared off-limits by Wizards of the Coast when they opened the door for third-party content through the OGL.

  As classic boss monsters who nevertheless don’t quite get the same level of hype as dragons, it’s quite possible more D&D players have faced beholders than have faced the monster mentioned in the game’s own title.

  Both the Monster Manual and the Monster Vault contain stats for beholders. We’ll look at both in parallel.

  The Lore

  The lore bits in the monster manual say barely more than the first two sentences in this article. Beholders are among the most feared monsters of all, and are so egotistical they normally can’t get along even with others of their kind. They like to rule over “lesser” creatures, a category which includes pretty much anyone other than themselves.

  The Monster Vault elaborates on the above. It says beholders come from the Far Realm, but that unlike lots of other aberrant creatures that either cross over into our world by accident or to cause destruction, they come here as conquerors. There are many beholder varieties, and this diversity is further increased by the fact that some of then are changed by the passage from the Far Realm into the world.

  All beholders are anti-social megalomaniacs, though, believing themselves the rightful rulers of everything they see (and yes, the book does make the pun that they see a lot with all those eyes). Beholders don’t really have allies - they have minions they lord over or masters they constantly plot to overthrow, Starscream-like.

  Other interesting beholder facts gathered by osmosis from other editions:

  • Their flight is natural, not magic (their organisms contain pockets of lighter-than-air gas).

  • Beholders reproduce asexually, by nightmare. By this I mean that when a beholder has a particularly bad nightmare, that nightmare will manifest physically and take the form of a new beholder. No wonder they’re so antisocial. Each beholder is some other beholder’s literal worst nightmare.

  You decide which of these are true in your game, of course.

  The Numbers

  Beholders are aberrant magical beasts. All are highly intelligent and of Evil alignment. They move via flight, and can hover. With all those eyes, they’re trained in Perception, have darkvision, and all-around vision, which means they can’t be flanked.

  Their signature ability are the infamous eye rays, both from the little eyes on stalks and from the large central one. Each variety has a different set. They’re all ranged attacks, but they don’t provoke opportunity attacks from PCs. Let’s look at them sorted by level:

  Beholder Gauth

  This is a fun-sized version from the Monster Vault. The only Medium beholder, it’s Level 5 Elite Artillery with 102 HP. As a standard action it can bite or fire two of its eye rays at different targets, chosen from its list of four possible options:

  1. The fire ray targets Reflex and does fire damage.

  2. The exhaustion ray targets Fortitude, does somewhat less necrotic damage and weakens.

  3. The sleep ray targets Fort, does no damage and slows, with the condition worsening to unconsciousness on the first failed save.

  4. The telekinesis ray targets Fort, does no damage and slides a target 4 squares.

  As a minor action, it fires a beam from its central eye that targets Will, does no damage and immobilizes.

  The gauth’s non-damaging beams means it works better when together with other monsters that can take advantage of them. I guess that as the weakest beholder, it’s either going to rely more on its servants, or it’s going to be made a servant of a more powerful villain.

  Beholder

  The classic model, from the Monster Vault. It’s a Large aberrant magical beast, and a Level 9 Solo Artillery menace with 392 HP. It flies a bit slower than the gauth (Speed 4 instead of Speed 6), which fits since it’s more of a battleship than an agile corvette.

  For its standard actions, we have the standard bite, which does decent damage but it’s not likely to see use if the beholder has its way. The main attraction are its ten different eye beams. It gets to fire any two of its choice against different targets per standard action.

  1. Charm: Targets Will, no damage, dominates for a turn.
  2. Wounding: Targets Fortitude, straight necrotic damage.
  3. Sleep: Targets Will. No damage, immobilizes, and that turns into unconciousness after the first failed save.
  4. Telekinesis Targets Fort, slides 4 squares.
  5. Slowing: Targets Reflex, does necrotic damage and slows.
  6. Brilliant: Targets Will, does radiant damage and blinds.
  7. Terror: Targets Will, does psychic damage and pushes the target its speed.
  8. Petrifying: Targets Fort, does no damage but petrifies right away! This is a (save ends) effect, so it’s not quite fight-ending but it’s still scary. After you save from the petrification, you’re still immobilized until you pass another save.
  9. Death: Targets Fortitude. More necrotic damage than the wounding ray. If it bloodies the target (or hits an already bloodied target) it sets off a chain reaction: the target becomes dazed; on the first failed save, that turns into dazed and weakened; on the second, the target dies.
  10. Disintegration: Targets Fortitude, does untyped damage and 10 ongoing damage.

  Once the beholder is bloodied, it gains an Eye Ray Frenzy that recharges on a 6 and allows it to make 3 beam attacks instead of 2.

  Those are just the standard actions. As a minor action, the beholder can use its traditional anti-magic central eye, a close blast 5 attack that targets Will and does no damage, but prevents affected targets from using encounter and daily powers for a turn. Yes, it can prevent purely martial characters from using their special tricks, but that’s easily intepreted as a sort of enervating effect instead of or in addition to the usual magic-dampening.

  Finally, any enemy that starts its turn within 5 squares of the beholder gets tagged by a random eye ray a the start of the enemy’s own turn. That’s why they’re numbered! Roll 1d10 and watch your players pray they only get the vanilla wounding beam.

  Beholder Eye of Flame

  This one exists only on the Monster Manual. It’s Level 13 Elite Artillery, with 204 HP. It has the same “hit everyone nearby with a random eye ray” power as the classic Beholder, but here it’s written up as an aura. It flies at speed 6, and is all about fire.

  Being a MM1 monster, it shows some of the early rough design issues: its bite is ridiculously weak instead of doing level-appropriate damage like the two previous beholders. It has three different eye beams, and can use two of them against different creatures per standard action. At least one of those must be the fire ray, but the other can be chosen freely.

  1. Fire: Fire damage vs. Reflex.
  2. Telekinesis: As above.
  3. Fear: Targets Will, and works similarly to the fear ray from the classic beholder, but bestows an additional -2 penalty to attacks (save ends).

  It minor-action Central Eye power automatically gives a target Vulnerable 10 to fire, and makes them take 5 ongoing fire damage if they take fire damage from any source. This is a (save ends) condition, so the eye of flame will try to saddle every member of the party with it eventually. That more than makes up for its lack of eye ray variety.

  When bloodied, and once again when it dies, the eye of flame lets loose a fiery burst that targets Reflex and deals fire damage to everyone on a Close burst 2. I guess its buoyant gasses are more flamable than usual.

  Beholder Eye Tyrant

  The strongest of the lot, and present in both the Monster Manual and Monster Vault. The two versions are mostly identical aside from updated math.

  The Eye Tyrant is a Level 19 Solo Artillery weapons platform, essentially a vastly up-gunned classic beholder. The bite on the MM version is evey more ridiculously weak than that of the Eye of Flame, but the MV version strengthens it to what’s expected for a level 19 monster (MM: 2d6+1; MV: 4d8+7).

  The Eye Tyrant’s ten eye rays are slightly different:

  1. Searing: Targets Reflex, straight radiant damage.
  2. Withering: Targets Fortitude, necrotic damage and ongoing 10 necrotic damage.
  3. Sleep: Targets Will, no damage but causes instant unconsciousness (save ends).
  4. Telekinesis: identical to the classic beholder’s.
  5. Hold: Targets Reflex, no damage but restrains the target (save ends). Restrained is Immobilized’s big brother: the former only roots you to the spot, the latter prevents all action.
  6. Confusion: Targets Will, does no damage but forces the target to charge the nearest ally it can charge.
  7. Terror: The MM version is similar to the classic beholder’s. The MV version does psychic damage and makes the target move its speed away from the eye tyrant. This is different from a push because the target chooses where they end up. And it that destination is still within 4 squares of the beholder, the target takes psychic damage again!
  8. Petrifying: Targets fortitude and induces gradual petrification: slowed, worsening to immobilized and petrified with failed saves. Petrification this time is permanent.
  9. Death: Like the classic beholder’s but with lots more necrotic damage.
  10. Disintegration: Like the classic beholder’s, but ongoing damage is 2d20 instead of a flat 10.

  The eye tyrant’s eye ray frenzy allows it to fire four beams instead of the usual 2 on a recharge 6 timer.

  Its minor-action Central Eye blast dazes on the MM version, and disables encounter and daily powers on the MV version. It still has random eye rays.

  Final Impressions

  I’ve never used beholders in a game before, but I still have fond memories of them from the D&D cartoon and arcade games. Their 4e stat blocks give me pretty much the same feel as the ones from previous editions, since those also had the entire explanation for what each eye ray did as an itemized list.

  Fourth Edition shies away from instant save-or-die effects, so beholders end up with a lot fewer of those. Still, the classic beholder has one in the new “gradual doom” flavor, and the Eye Tyrant has two. The level 9 beholder is nastier than it seems too, because it’s a suitable boss battle for a party of level 6 adventurers who won’t have easy access to resurrection yet.

• May 23, 2019

  Force Screens, How Do They Work?

  

  Energy shields are a popular science fiction trope, appearing in enough stories to feature in GURPS Ultra-Tech as Force Screens and Force Shields. However, I didn’t have a very clear idea of how they worked until recently.

  The text describing them is a bit… fuzzy, probably because this was one of the first supplements written for GURPS Fourth Edition. The “real” explanation makes sense, but it does require quite a bit more deduction, research and/or knowing the rules by heart than latter additions to the system. To make it easier on you, here’s the complete picture of how GURPS Force Screens work, to the best of my knowledge:

  GURPS Force Screens come in “Barrier” and “Conformal” varieties, where the first represents the sort of shields used by starships or cities, and the second represents the kind worn by individuals and very common in video games. They both work the same way rules-wise.

  Force Screens provide DR to the person or thing they protect (the “user”). They protect all of the user’s hit locations, even the eyes. Anything that hits the user must contend with the force screen’s DR first, separate from any other DR from armor. Every 10 points of rolled damage from the attack reduces force screen DR by 1, whether it penetrates or not. Force Screens regenerate 10% of their lost DR every second.

  In short, they work exactly like DR (Force Field +20%, Semi-Ablative -10%), with Regeneration (Very Fast) applied to their DR instead of the user’s HP.

  Armor-piercing attacks apply their armor divisor both against the screen’s DR and against the number of damage points needed to ablate it. This was the hard bit to figure out! People have been asking questions about this for years according to this source.

  Examples

  Tom Tomorrow is a hero transported straight from the pages of pulp space opera to modern-day Paragon City. He fights crime with the help of his raygun, armored space suit (DR 30/15*), and personal force screen projector (DR 60).

  The Robber Baron is at it again, robbing the First National Bank. Tom Tomorrow arrives ot save the day, and the Baron shoots him with his pistol. The gun does 2d+2 pi damage, and its average damage roll of 9 is certainly not enough to get past Tom’s force screen. In fact, it would take 2 shots to reduce the screen’s DR by 1, and it would recover soon afterwards. The Baron has no means of harming Tom, making this an easy arrest.

  Some time later, the Baron escapes jail and tries to rob the Second National Bank. Tom intervenes again, and this time the baron fires at him with an assault rifle! The weapon does 5d pi damage and has a RoF of 12. Its average damage roll of 18 means a single shot can’t penetrate the force screen, but it does reduce its DR by 1. Assuming all shots hit, a second of sustained fire would lower the screen’s DR by 21. 6 of those points would return at the start of each turn, and it would take about three seconds before any bullets started getting through. Of course, it’s rare for all shots in a 12-round burst to hit and Tom isn’t just going to stand there, so the screen still makes him much safer than a mundane police officer would be. He manages to arrest the Baron once again.

  Yet more time later the Baron escapes again and tries to rob the Third National Bank. This time, when Tom arrives to stop him, the baron shoots him with an antitank grenade from his rifle’s brand new underbarrel launcher. The grenade does 4d(10) cr ex damage, with an average roll of 14. The screen protects against this with DR 6, and loses 14 points of DR from the attack. 8 damage get through to Tom’s armored space suit. It would normally protect against crushing damage with DR 15, but the armor divisor still applies, so it only protects against this blast with DR 1. Tom takes 7 points of damage and is visibly staggered and bloodied. Oh no! Can he defeat the Robber Baron this time?

  Conclusion

  Force Screens are good protection against single attacks, and give you something of a safety buffer against sustained fire from multiple sources. Anything that’s good at getting through physical armor will get through them just as well, though, and deplete them faster.

  Pretty much every weapon available at the same TL as force screens will have an armor divisor of at least 3, and more often 5 or 10, so their DR is going to ablate at a faster rate than you might think from looking at them in isolation. Against lower-tech weapons, though, even the belt-mounter personal force screen is enough to make its user as hard to take down as a lightly armored vehicle.

  In a future article I’m going to look at how to tweak GURPS force screens to make them work a bit more like video-game shields.

• May 13, 2019

  Where I Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Behemoth

  

  This article is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.

  Let’s get this out of the way right now: behemoths are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs have been a feature of D&D at least since the X1 module for BECMI, but as far as I know the new nomenclature is new in Fourth Edition.

  While I don’t know for sure why the authors decided on the name change, I can speculate. On Earth we call dinosaurs by Latin/Greek scientific names because we only known them through scientific studies - the creatures themselves became extinct millions of years ago.

  The world of D&D, however, is not Earth! They never spoke any Latin or Greek there. And in the setting implied by the Monster Manual, dinosaurs never went extinct. So naturally people who interact with them would come up with common-usage names for them. Another benefit of the alternate nomenclature might be that it frees authors to diverge from currently accepted science a bit. I’ve seen people get strict about it when the “dinosaur” terminology starts getting thrown arround, even in D&D monster books.

  The two behemoths presented in the first Monster Manual are described as omnivirous reptiles that live in herds and use their size and ferocity to drive out threats and rivals. Both are Large Natural Beasts, with the “reptile” keyword and Int 2. “Reptile” doesn’t come with any attached mechanics (like “aquatic” does), but I imagine some other monsters might have powers that interact with it. They’re only on the Monster Manual.

  Macetail Behemoth

  This one resembles a real-world ankylosaurus. D&D macetails are ill-tempered and territorial on the wild, but if raised from hatchlings they can be domesticated for use as pack animals. They’re Level 7 Soldiers with 82 HP, and fight with their tails. Their basic attack is a Tail Bludgeon that marks, and they can sweep their tails on a Close burst 1 that targets Reflex, and knocks Medium or smaller targets prone on a hit (in addition to doing damage). The sweep recharges on 4-6.

  The specification that the targets must be Medium or smaller is a bit unusual. After all, that covers every possible PC, so it’s theoretically unnecessary. I imagine it’s there in case the PCs have their own domesticated behemoths or other giant allies on their side.

  Bloodspike Behemoth

  AKA stegosaurus. Also fiercely territorial, with an even fouler mood than the macetail. Even domesticated bloodspikes (used to pull heavy loads or siege engines) are difficult to train and control.

  They’re level 9 Brutes with 118 HP, and also fight with their tails. The basic Spiked Tail attack does ongoing damage, and they also have the same Tail Sweep attack as the macetails. In addition to the usual Recharge 4-6 on the sweep, they get to do another one as a free action when first bloodied.

  Encounters

  The suggested encounter is level 7 and has a troop of troglodytes (shaman+muscle) using a macetail behemoth as armored support. It’s a all-reptile theme group!

  Personally, I’d also add behemoths to human or elven forces. Maybe that merchant caravan you were hired to protect is a train of macetails instead of the mules you’d normally expect, and when brigands attack keeping the beasts from going berserk is as much of a challenge as the fight itself.

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