I have a player that specializes in creating poisons and poisonous items. She’s going to use craft extraordinary item for this.
So let’s say she crafts an expendable, potent poisonous dart that applies the incapacitate bane. What’s the combat mechanic here? Originally, I figured she’d roll agility to see if the dart hits (and it will do its own damage) and then if it does hit the bane is automatically applied. But then I saw the “reliable” property in the rules, which makes me think the bane needs to be independently rolled (if it’s not reliable) once the dart hits?
Of course, I can make my own call here (which would be that the bane automatically applies if the dart hits), but I wanted to understand the intention behind the reliable property. I’m thinking it’s for situations when the item is being used to make a straight action with the bane/boon and not using something like an agility roll to hit with the item? Curious of other, more learned gm’s, thoughts.
Yep, you got it. Banes have to be applied by an attack, usually either using the character’s attack with “augmenting” or by giving the weapon its own attribute to attack with, which you might use for a magic wand or something like that.
So I have a follow-up. Another character wants to craft Phylacteries of Ball Lightning - physically a glass jar with lightning inside.
But when he wants to throw it at something, does he need to make an agility roll to throw it, and then if it hits, make an energy 5 attack roll? This mechanic doesn’t make sense to me, because what if the jar hits, but the energy roll “misses” (is really low)? Thoughts on the mechanics here?
Another thought is to give each phylactery he crafts a certain number of “charges”, so he can use it like a normal energy attack (aim jar, and uncork the bottle just a bit?), so then we avoid the whole throwing the jar thing…
Nope, you don’t need to roll twice. Open Legend always uses “single-roll combat”.
If the Energy is the main part, then accuracy isn’t as important, right? So if the Energy is the important part you can just say that they successfully throw it in the right general area and then roll Energy to attack. Conversely, if accuracy is more important than the power causing the effect (like with the darts, where you don’t have to make an attack for the poison, just the dart) then you only roll to hit.
also you don’t need the “Damage (Energy)” on there, b/c it is already ONLY Energy based. It doesn’t have a weapon associated with it, so it doesn’t have the Precise property.
Depends if that’s what they want it to mean or not. Damage (Energy) means damaged caused by the concept energy, not the attribute Energy (though it would usually have to be both). You could use Damage (Electricity) instead I suppose.
Yeah - the Damage (Energy) think is about the concept of doing damage with electricity, so it’s documented there in case it’s being used against an enemy with resistance to electricity.
I like that it’s the key stat that’s important, so with the dart, it makes sense that it’s an agility roll, while with the phylactery, it’s an energy roll. Good stuff all around guys!
Since the damage type doesn’t effect the wealth level, it’s almost a descriptor that is nice to include to get the essence of the item across. I’m still learning how to build fair extraordinary items as well.
yeah, I just saw it listed as “Energy” and since you can select “Lightning” I figured it would have been chosen instead. You can also select “Other” and type in whatever you want there.
Energy just made me think you were putting that in so it could deal “energy” but already had Energy Attribute put on, so you could choose ANY energy type, in theory. Limiting it to just Lighting or another type makes sense for an expendable item though.