Support Upgrades were a little on the underpowered side in BCG, however this wasn't so much because the Upgrades themselves were bad, rather it was because the Action economy didn't favor them. The bulk of the work in improving them was from General Upgrades which meant I had to be careful not to make the next set of Support Upgrades too powerful - or else they'd go from slightly underpowered to flat-out overpowered. That's why the six new Support Upgrades in BCZ provide utility value instead of doing, preventing or amplifying Damage.
Dividing Field
One of my favorite things about the expansion was that it opened the floodgates to many new abilities using all sorts of wacky space tech that might as well be magic. The Dividing Field is inspired by the Dividing Driver from GaoGaiGar, it is more or less what the flavor text describes. The big difference between the Dividing Driver and the Dividing Field is that the former was used to create a battlefield where the mechs can go wild without causing collateral damage while the latter is used to get rid of annoying Terrain properties. It is useful, but not too powerful due to its reactive nature.
Remote Hotfix
I believe this was a Restoration back in an early BCG draft, but it was a very lackluster one - for reasons that should be obvious considering it is now back as a 5 MP Support Upgrade. It's not an efficient Antimaim by any stretch of the imagination but it's a nice option to have as part of a Support suite. You really want to have 4-6 Support Upgrades, and if you're not going for a build with a secondary tank or healer role, this could come in handy.
Targeting Disruption
Speaking of secondary roles, this lets you do work as the party's off-tank! You can now let the main tank breathe while they heal or defend by tanking yourself! From a long distance too! With that said, 5 Energy (or your whole Action) for just a -4 attack penalty to a single target isn't really all that punishing and the Enemy might as well ignore you just because you got the worse part of the trade. Maybe the penalty should be equal to your Systems? Or should this have instead been able to target multiple enemies? It is a little underpowered, but it is not terrible.
Blue Screen Virus
Speaking of trades that aren't very good, trading one of your Actions for that of a Grunt is, on paper, a terrible idea. However, depending on the specific kind of Grunt this can turn a battle by shutting down a Guardian of Steel, Jury-Rigger or another key Unit. It's not amazing, but it's a solid pick if you expect to fight intelligent Grunts often.
Cryogenic Blast
This is one of the few ways for PCs to create Withering Terrain and it comes with a patch of Difficult Terrain to make it stick. It's not amazing, but it is very annoying. Anything that can drain Energy is, in general, very good. The area effect is simultaneously a good and bad thing, because it can hit multiple enemies but you also have to be careful not to hit your allies as well. This is probably the worst result you can get with Transpatial Randomizer if your Systems stat is low, as it will hit you... And probably hit your friends as well.
Gravity Manipulators
There are many abilities that let you push people around as a secondary effect, but this is the only one whose entire point is repositioning Enemies. It can also reposition Allies or even yourself if your team is desperate for movement. It used to cost 5 MP but that made Support users the absolute rulers of battlefield positioning and let them do a bunch of free Damage every Round by knocking Enemies into walls or each other, so it got a cost increase. It is a lot less useful now, as moving someone 1-5 Zones is rarely worth an Action, so I'm not super happy about the change. I'd be less happy with the overpowered version, though.
That's all! Support users are amazing now and the new Upgrades give them some additional utility without bumping up their raw power to obnoxious degrees. The one thing I'm not entirely satisfied with about Support Upgrades is that most of their value comes from spamming 5 MP Supports to the point where some builds ignore the 10 MP Supports entirely. I wonder if the more expensive ones could have instead been cheaper so that they would be compatible with EWAC. For Upgrades like Electromagnetic Detonator or Fire at Will some tweaking would've probably done the trick, but for Blue Screen Virus and Gravity Manipulators it would be a lot harder to figure out how to rework them.
Next: New Combination Upgrades.
Gimmick Out.
It definitely feels like support upgrades ended up being 'pick your cheap powers and spam those until the cows come home' instead of tactically varying your actions to suit the situation. It didn't help that the wording of EWAC (or was it Command Type? I forget) didn't specify whether not having to take an action to resupply a 5-point upgrade meant it didn't count towards the cap on support upgrade uses or not, because if the answer was it didn't count it made you a moron for picking 10-pointers before having a good 5-pointer core set up and running (though it DID make 10-pointers more readily usable since they didn't compete with 5-point upgrades once you got your core kit up and running...). I feel like borrowing from the Transpatial Randomizer's setup is probably the best solution there...imagine if you could pick and use ANY support power for a very nominal fee (2 energy and no action or something like that?), but you could only use each one once unless you took a massive penalty like blowing up one of your threshold levels or reducing your max energy by 3 for the rest of the operation. It'd force you to innovate and adapt to the circumstances, without making some powers feel outshined by default.
ReplyDeleteSomething like that could make for a decent alternative to the current system. Combat that lasts longer than a handful of turns will make that kind of Upgrade feel terrible, but the idea behind it is something to keep in mind for the future.
DeleteYou could always introduce an upgrade that lets the player select a signature maneuver they have access to one more time to alleviate that. Possibly even make it repurchaseable at a scaling cost for truly dedicated supports, even? The key is to decide if support characters are meant to just pick one or two tricks and spam those until the cows come home, or grab a variety of unique miscellaneous moves and diversify and go from there, IMO. The rest will flow from that.
Delete(Which does beg the question, who are the 'iconics' for support heroes? Like, it's easy to see Simon and Kamina as the poster boys for Tension-based gimmicks and Limit Engine, Char Aznable and Amuro are the guys who define Eagle-type mecha, but who's a protagonist or at least really major supporting character anime who does what support powers do in BCG to draw inspiration from?
Lelouch is probably the most obvious example of a Support user, with his signature Surprise Minefield (Actually volcanoes, but still) ability. Beyond him and the aforementioned Guy Shishio's Dividing Driver, the abilities are half inspired by one-off support Mecha from Majestic Prince or Valvrave and from things that NERV does to support the Evangelions in combat.
ReplyDeleteBright Noa yelling at people to launch Minovsky Particles and Dummy balloons counts as well.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me that, with Lelouch specifically as an example, several of the Support powers probably should just be actions unto themselves. Specifically, Targeting Disruption, Remote Hotfix and Assisted Targeting probably could be turned into actions of some kind to give supports a basic toolbox to play with so that you don't feel so pressured to grab like, one and only one power (or at most two) when starting out to then use every round with Commander Type + EWAC. The reason those specifically strike me as good candidates is twofold:
ReplyDeleteA) In SRW, probably the greatest mechanical inspiration around, buffing hitrate and evade is exactly what the Command aura does. While granting everyone bonuses at once is Genre Power territory, a single target version is certainly something people wouldn't mind being able to do - and it'd give Systems more baseline utility to boot.
B) Those three powers in particular feel like the most common ones that could still easily be turned to default actions. I don't have meaningful amounts of playtest data, but in my home games it felt like Assisted Targeting in particular was an autopick just because it was so versatile. Targeting Disruption is kind of its obvious defensive mirror, and Remote Hotfix is something that by itself would enable a 'healer archetype' gimmick without actually having to restore threshold by making the team better as a whole (due to letting people spend their points on things that aren't antimaims).
There might be others that could benefit from being actionized too, but those three in particular have the nice benefit of instantly telling players that there is a support archetype (because it gets equal billing to 'hit a guy with sword/gun') and stabilizes the toolset they have available. At that point, the extra powers can be made truly special knowing that no matter what, a support character WILL have something to fall back on.
Addendum: The reason I said 'it'd give Systems more baseline utility' up in point A is that obviously you'd make a Systems test (and possibly do it out to Systems or Systems x2 range?) to grant benefits with those actions. I think GGG had something like this way back when, but due to how Systems wasn't really a thing it couldn't be tuned around being a specialist option just like Attack and Move are for Might and Speed builds.
Delete(also, a thought that occurs to me is that Targeting Disruption as a basic action specifically serves to introduce 'tank builds' as a concept to newbies, since the ability to make it harder to kill your allies is *right there* and all you have to do is follow the obvious subsequent steps of upping your Guard and Systems to make a competent tank. While there's downsides to it, there's something to be said about standardizing support default abilities just like attackers have Attack, Suppress and Aim as part of their intrinsic toolkit.)
Interesting. I like that it does away with some of the inherent difficulty in making a support unit at lower levels, where it feels like there's just not enough MP. I also like that it communicates clearly that you can buff allies and mark enemies as a thing before you start buying any stuff for your PC. Then you can just buy upgrades and powers to make you better at it.
DeleteAnd here's the obligatory "But" section. There's no clear way to make the Actions useful out of the box without potentially making them absurd when buffed and they're basically incompatible with dicerolling.
Let's say we tie the buff/debuff effects to the systems stat, okay. Well, marking a dude is basically a reverse Maneuver, if they attack anyone else then they're 90% likely to miss, which is good but you can't really buff this outside of letting you target more people per turn or else you just make this a devastating debuff. What about buffing an ally? It is a balanced ability at 2-6 systems and exceedingly broken at 8+, which is where all support builds will have the stat. And remote hotfix? Well, systems could represent the number of areas you can hotfix? The number of allies you can target? It is unlikely to become broken, at least, but just as unlikely to be worth a whole turn.
If the fixed effects have issues, the randomized effects depending on the results of a die roll are even more iffy. Maneuvering was, once upon a time, something you rolled as well and the results were way too often either not worth your turn or made you near invincible. Marking is weaker than maneuvering so this *might* be fine. Buffing someone is going to feel redundant with the assist action around. Hotfixing... Boy, it sure isn't going to feel good when you roll low.
With all that said, I still like the potential of the idea. This specific version of the rules would have trouble making it work, but it's a very interesting take on supports for a 2nd edition, whenever that becomes a thing on my radar.
Good stuff.
It definitely has its issues with the current rules, yeah. Doing some napkin design for each one under the premise that the current rules would be a guideline and not something that needed to be followed unerringly, this is what comes to mind...
Delete-'Command' (Assisted Targeting) Action: Exceed an enemy's Guard+5 with systems to grant two advantages. Effectively make it a 'systems attack', sorta. Whether you could use active defenses to make it harder to pinpoint your weaknesses or not is up in the air (feels kind of appropriate but gotta make sure stuff that blocks beams doesn't cancel this, for example. Maybe there's a tag that could be applied to the appropriate defenses to indicate that they can be used to defend against this?). Possibly add +1 advantage per 5 points Guard is exceeded by? Though it's plenty good just as a 'beat the defense' effect already. Could also grant it to extra allies per 5 points you beat the defense instead (maybe just 1 advantage for extra allies to keep it from being too silly), to really sell that 'battlefield commander' angle.
-'Taunt'/'Interfere' (Targeting Disruption) Action: Roll Systems vs Speed + 5, target takes two Disadvantages to hit others on success? Upgrades could make it so you apply a disadvantage no matter what, hit or miss (so say you roll an 8 to hit a Speed + 5 of 9 - enemy still takes a disad because you're THAT distracting), apply negative tags to enemy attacks ('hit me or your weapon gains Overheating/Unreliable!'), extend range, make it guaranteed if your enemy is Engaged (can't very well hit others cleanly when you're grappled!), or taunt multiple targets if you beat the highest Speed by a hefty amount (say, 5 over to taunt two targets, 10 over to taunt 3, etc.).
-'Hotfix' (Remote Hotfix): Beat TN10, mend a Maim, easy enough. Per 5 points you beat the TN by, mend an extra maim? The obvious upgrades would be to allow you to hit more allies per 5 points you beat the TN by, distributing the antimaims across them (and gain an advantage to doing so), to apply a tiny amount of healing (like, 1 TP on success and 1 more per 5 points - not a thing that erases enemy turns wholesale but it can lead to a feelgood moment when you can't fix ALL maims at once but you patch a threshold up just barely and fix the others), and possibly granting temporary buffs when you successfully hotfix a mech (gain +1 energy for a turn? Gain an advantage to your first test afterward? Something else?).
With all of these, I think the key is to make sure the roll is as interactive as possible. Rolling to spot weakpoints and guide allies makes sense, for example, as does having to actually best the enemy's attempts to get a clean shot when running interference - and it means these moves play nice with Tension while also having limits to how much they can do, both at a minimum and maximum. It'd obviously be a lot of work to get everything balanced, but there's definitely ways to do it.
Rolling against defense is... An option. Not sure if it is better or worse than a static roll, but it's an alternative with more variables to play around with... Albeit variables outside of the player's control.
DeleteUsing systems as an alternative attack stat for stuff that doesn't do damage could be neat. I've always thought that systems worked better as a defensive or utility stat but in this case the utility works like an attack. It makes sense.