Rogue’s Luck in Mageblade! combat

Mageblade classes all focus in something specific. For example fighters have a bonus in combat rolls. This bonus is called Focus, and it depends only on the character level, starting at +3 at level 1, so level 1 fighters have +3 to hit.

Rogues focus on luck, which means they have Focus free rerolls every day. They can use those for initiative rolls, skill rolls, damage rolls, even to hit rolls that hit them.

This is interesting because it essentially gives rogues the ability to get away with something if they really really need to. I really really need to climb that wall? To win initiative and leg it? To vanish in the crowd? Reroll until you succeed.

To hit someone’s face? It gets better. Not only you can reroll to hit, but this has an additional effect: critical hits proliferation. Each character has a 5% chance of a critical in combat. But if you miss and reroll you have another 5% chance. And at level 1 you can reroll 3 times a day, which makes for a bit less than 19% of taking a critical hit, if they decide to dump their luck in a single round, for example if cornered.

That would not be the most effective use of rerolls though: simply rerolling on a miss is more effective, and stretches the Focus a bit more.

MAGEBLADE! the adventuring natural philosopher and Extra Resilience optional rules

Mageblade healing is somewhat inferior compared to other recent fantasy RPGs, so here are a couple of optional rules that help help with party resilience, but not their overall strength.

Better Life through Surgery: The first one is simply to increase the Surgery healing from 1d4 to Focus. I’m not sure if the focus should be the surgeon’s, the patient, the highest of the two or the lowest of the two. My gut feeling tells me that it should be the surgeon’s: there are good arguments for any of those amounts, but all Focus amounts in the game scale related to the active character, and I do not want to trow off people with that one weird rule that works completely differently.

This makes Surgery a better skill, and hopefully there will be more skill options soon for an educated adventuring person.

from vixen vintage: http://www.vixen-vintage.com/2013/06/inspired-by-lady-adventurers.html

Because I really want to play this ->

… but with goggles, guns, grenades and a grappling hook.

I want to play a character that is a gentleman and a scholar, and while the book has Surgery, Engineering, Exotic/Dead Foreign Languages, Research, Diplomacy, Gather Information and Bullshit, and Climbing and Swimming are definitely an educated person’s kind of outdoorsy activity.

Of course there are more, like Pharmacy, Geography and Law in MB!: Silk Road and Sailing or Piloting in MB!: Tales of the Wind, and stranger things in MB!: Vyrnaccean Science.

The second rule is somewhat similar to the short rest concept from recent games like Into the Odd and possibly D&D (but I’m not sure, I played 4E and 5E a grand total of three times).

Resilience: a character can spend two turns after an encounter to get a proper rest. They can then recover 1d6 hits if they have been wounded or 1 mana if they spent any. Each character can rest this way Focus time per day.

This is great for everybody, without making characters stronger. It stared as only healing 1d6, but adding the mana option gives other classes some more occasions to shine. It mostly get around the problem of the five minutes adventuring day in the following ways:

• front line people get some healing, so last for more encounters
• mageblades get extra blademagic and devotions, so can use them in more encounters
• rogues get even more mana to spend as luck, for extra shenanigans
• casters get extra mana, which is great for extra malevolence and magic shields, but still does not let them spam the same spell over and over again: the hard limit of 1 cast per spell per day is still enforced.

Also, the extra mana means more attempts at saves. And nobody wants to fail those!