Help with some roadblocks

[etherial]

Last night, I finally got to run an adventure I'd been looking forward to for years. Earthdawn has lots of nifty undead, but no Vampires. About a decade ago, some fellow Earthdawn GMs and I were theorycrafting about what an Earthdawn vampire might look like and we settled on blood magic gone seriously awry. I had a Nethermancer whose experiments on Immortality went horribly wrong. He lived forever, but took a point of damage every day and never regained Recovery Tests. As a result, he took to stealing life force from the neighboring village and attracted too much attention.

1) My players have discovered a rather frustrating combination. The Elementalist casts Air Armor, the Wizard casts Mage Armor, resulting in every character in the party having a Physical Armor of 12 or higher. Last night, the only PC who took more enemy damage than Strain was the Swordmaster who turned his back on the Guardian Spirit with Surprise Strike. He conveniently decided to not use Avoid Blow, declaring that this would probably result in him learning his lesson. 52 points of damage later, he learned his lesson. One mostly dead Swordmaster aside, the Spirits routinely hit with their Unarmed Attacks, but rarely did any damage at all. I know that if they weren't casting armor spells, they'd be casting other spells, but being unable to reliably harm the PCs means the combat takes forever with very little likelihood for harm. Any suggestions?

2) One thing that was effective against the PCs were the debuffs that Ally Spirits had access to. The Wall of Bones cast Pain on several PCs, the Banshee Confused the Wizard, and the Bone Spirit used Frighten on the Cavalryman. Now I don't really expect anyone with -10 to all Steps for 5 Rounds to have a good time, but even if the Bone Spirit only got 2 Successes, how is anyone supposed to get a 15 when rolling Willpower-4?

[Mataxes]

First of all, that's a really interesting approach to vampires in Earthdawn.

If your group is consistently using stuff to up their armor ratings, then you need to amp up the physical threat by using opponents with higher attack and damage steps. The higher attack steps should provide bonus damage that (especially when added to higher damage) will help overcome the armor.

The penalties resulting from talents like Frighten can cause problems, especially if the group isn't set up to deal with them. This is where things like Heartening Laugh, Lion Heart, and even Steel Thought/Resist Taunt can come in handy - as well as powers and such that provide a bonus to the applicable Defense Ratings.

One of the things about ED4 (and this is true with many new editions of games) is that the changes in the systems mean that some things you could take for granted are no longer a sure thing, and you may not be able to ignore tactics that weren't a problem before. There is bound to be some adjustment as players and GMs find a new groove.

[Utsukushi]

Yei.

My first thought is that both of those only increase physical armor. Especially if they're fighting Spirits, it shouldn't be too hard to work in some attacks that target Mystic Armor instead. Or something like Earth Darts; that would effectively negate at least one of the effects. It's not clear if the armor reduction from Earth Darts is cumulative or not.

Otherwise... what Circle are they? I gather they're in the Journeyman range, but since Mage Armor has dropped to a First Circle spell, I'm going mostly off the Swordmaster being `almost dead' after 52 points of damage. At lower Circles, I would say they just need a bit less time to prepare before the battle -- Air Armor and Mage Armor can both have their Duration changed to Minutes by giving it one thread, but if they're doing that, a low Circle caster can only give it to one person every other round, and that's not very viable when a fight has already started, and if you try to keep it up all day long, that becomes pretty much all anybody is doing.

At Journeyman, when you can add two Threads and have a higher Spellcasting Rank, you can much more easily expect to keep casting it, on everyone, every... well, five minutes for Mage, ten for Air Armor. It'd be irritating to have to do something like that in real life, but for PCs? It's feasible, so it's expected. Which suggests to me that by the time you have a Journeyman level party, you are, as Mataxes said, just supposed to be hitting them a lot harder.

Unfortunately, the things like Frighten and Confusion... don't sound to me very helpful here. Giving someone -10 for five rounds is going to drag out the battle, but when they're still effectively invulnerable, that's all it's going to do.

[Slimcreeper]

Poison, Grapple, Dispell magic, ambush, target matrices. Repeat villains ("Do you remember what happened last time? Yes? This time we hire a couple thief mercs to take out those magicians from behind.") (Maybe that's harsh ... but if it was an NPC party that's totally what they'd do). Problems that can't be solved with weapons. More skilled combatants. If someone is ineffective for 5 rounds, opponents can mob them, pull them to the ground, bind them or hold them while another cuts the straps on the armor.

Probably the simplest solution is to step up the level of the opposition or to attack social and mystic. Have 3 or 4 conflicts that only target mystic defense, then hit them with twin ogres on steroids. There's no sense of danger left - a PC may need to die in the course of a critical adventure.

[Mataxes]

One other thing I want to mention is that spirits are not very effective physical combatants -- even the "Guardian Spirit" (the 'beefiest' of the ally spirits). They are pretty good in support roles (buffing/debuffing), and can be hard to take down (retreating into astral space, etc).

This is by design. We don't want the solution to all problems to be 'summon a spirit and set it loose on the bad guys'.

[etherial]

[Flowswithdrek]

Are you using the Harried rule? Even if the sprits can't hurt the PC's if there are enough of them the spirits can still reduce their physical defence, mystic defence and actions by -2

[Dale]

I do like the vampire take using ED concepts. Great job there.

ED always seems about choices and consequences. Tradeoffs are a big part of that. If the party is highly armored, I'd hit them with something slow and strong that can do enough to pop through the armor. Alternatively, you could have a wizard in the opposition simply be there to dispel the buffs, which would give the PCs a chance to counter as it happens.

[etherial]

[Telarus_KSC]

Or a Ward Trap. ;D