I'm Burning, I'm Burning for You

I'm slowly working my way through the Humongous List of Attacks. Currently doing Incinerate. This is an attack that takes a Round to charge, does not miss (+8 Large Weapon Bonus), automatically Burns for 1 Round, and ignores armor (it burns the target from the inside out).

Our simulator won't handle the second round of Burn with an "Ignores Armor" modifier. I'm not overly concerned--the exact numbers probably won't be too different. But it highlights the sort of thing that makes the generic list of modifiers hard to quantify if you're designing really intricate attacks.

I just had a tooth removed so I'm not really inclined to a longer post but I do want to talk about our game last night.

I wanted to talk a little about the playtest last night

Have-Not Post Apocalypse
So we're down on the second run into the GC Complex and we've encountered a fair variety of robots. Including some recurring ones. The GM is using our spreadsheets to create "level appropriate fights" (and treasure). We fought:

• Oversized "Big Wheel" bikes with mounted machine guns and centralized "helmet monitors" that could see and display writing. The bikes had coverage armor (the wheel) and were fairly fragile around them
• Knife Fighter Robots: Flying helmet-monitors with blade weapons. These are very fragile once they take PEN damage they pretty much break.
• The "Egg Bot" which looked like an egg standing up and had speakers for eyes and mouth which could project powerful sonic blasts (took out a PC in one hit, pretty much)
• Bone Digger: A boss--a humanoid robot with shoulder cannons and a huge shotgun and throws armor piercing knives and two head-mounted blasters that took time to power up.
• In the same level we have also fought giant grappling roaches which will leap on you and grab you (probably immobileing you) before starting to eat you (net result: if you are by yourself and not a grapple master, you are in big trouble)

This is a small list of the things we've fought. For treasure we have found:

• Ring Tones: musical numbers that, if you have something to play them on (a "red key card" will do) give you a 5pt non-stackable power field.
• A platinum gift card with 1 Success Point to the holder as an added bonus.
• A T-Ball Inertial Glove that gives the sword guy big bonuses to his attacks
• A gift card for free music downloads (I wonder if we can get ring-tones with that?)
• We've also harvested a lot of power cells, toner ink from cartridges, and have kidnapped some small robots (a Script Kiddie hacker-bot). 
• There are collectible pogs that you can work into weapons and get sets of four (we currently have 3 "cleave pogs" and a "LuZ Pog" which came from the same terrorist organization that created the giant roaches ... it seems.

Anyway, I'm discussing this here because it all feels very surreal and baroque and bizarre. The game is currently handing a mass of carefully balanced fights and treasure and feels very D&D-ish without having to have a lot of guess-work in terms of what would flatten us (the GM has a history of throwing things in at semi-random and then discovering that they are well above ... or below ... our character's ability.

Not only is this an excellent play-test for our rule-set but it also is the sort of thing we tried to do in GURPS and Champions and had a very hard time with (mixing XP and treasure).

-Marco