Gun Kata - Ringing Vale

[yog]

    RINGING VALE

There are some things you just can't prepare for, and so Ringing Vale adepts have learned to take the preparations of their enemies as their own. Fittingly, the essence of this gun kata was first evoked by a team of space ninjas who boarded an alien spelljammer to either destroy a planet-busting superweapon, or to steal it.

The key skill for Ringing Vale is Common Lore, as adepts must be familiar with every firearm under the sun, and its special action type is Disarm: there isn't much more satisfying than blasting a berk's face in with their own gun.

With School Equivalency, Ringing Vale is an alternative to the Point Blank gun kata. When entering the first level of a class that offers the Point Blank gun kata, you may choose to substitute it with Ringing Vale.


    Level 1: Apprentice

- Give It Up
If you make a Ready action after you Disarm an enemy to ready the weapon that they drop, the Ready action does not provoke opportunity attacks.

- Action (Disarm)
Use Disarm actions with trick shots. Any attack-related advantages applied to this Trick Shot instead are applied to your next attack if you use this action to disarm an enemy of their weapon and use that weapon in your attack.

    Level 2: Initiate

(-1) Sealing the Peace Vault
This attack causes the weapon to jam, or empties the clip if the weapon cannot jam.

(2/4) Frozen Synapse
This attack does not provoke opportunity attacks. At 4 Style Points, add: A target hit by this attack cannot make opportunity attacks until the beginning of your next turn.

    Level 3: Journeyman

(-1) Skill (Common Lore)
As part of this attack, make a Common Lore check against the static defense of the target. If it fails, the attack fails.

(1/2) One Gun Crossfire
If you can use the weapon in melee, and this attack is a Full Auto Burst: Instead of the normal effects of a Full Auto Burst, the attack is made against a number of targets engaged in melee combat with you up to the weapon's ROF. At 2 Style Points, add: If this weapon's ROF is S/-, it becomes S/2.

    Level 4: Master

- Free Bird
Once per scene, you may make one action with the Movement subtype, except the Run action, as a free action.

- Instant Firing Squad
Opponents you Disarm provoke an opportunity attack.

    Level 5: Grandmaster

(4) Turbo Killer
If this attack would take a Full Action, then it may be made as a Half Action.

[Lestat]

(4) Turbo Killer
If this attack would take a Full Action, then it may be made as a Half Action.

Others said this advantage needed to be 4 points for some reason, I don't think they considered at all how this breaks the "one real attack per round" action economy that is only broken by certain exalts, and the Aid Another action (RAW/RAI arguably) slinging a bonus 10 points to someone else each round. This is effectively a 200 XP premium to access 6 extra advantage points per round, the 200 XP also pays for either an extra standard attack or full action attack. Compare it to other advantages that spend points to 'gain' points.

Twin Kata:
500 XP for 10 point attack
4 points of whatever multiplied by 2
A Full Action Attack
A Standard Attack

Replay:
500 XP for 10 point attack
5 points of effects that apply to the main attack multiplied by 2
One attack

Turbo Killer:
1000 XP for two 10 point attacks
6 points + 10 points of whatever
A Full Action Attack
A Standard Attack

It would take 600 XP to emulate what Twin Kata does (4 points for Turbo Killer, 4 more points to make it an 8 point attack, and 4 more on a second attack) though it would only have 3 restrictions while Twin Kata would have 5 x 2 restrictions, each point after that is 'cap breaking'. Mathematically as long as it costs fewer than 10 points it will always be a way for exalts that don't break the action/point economy to partially do so, the only question being how many bonus points is worth how much XP.

To be fair the Kata that should be getting this level of analysis first should be Daemon Trigger which has a benefit that scales to 3x effectiveness with a level 1 dip, and at level 3 lets you make two full 10 point attacks per round at the "cost" of holding two pistols, but such a thing was created and ignored before I began playing.

[GuardianTempest]

Sealing the Peace Vault's a strictly better Component Overload (Terminus Lockdown). I'll admit I didn't take un-jammable weapons into account for mine.

Also, imagine how much Turbo Killer stacks with feats and masteries that allow taking certain Full Actions as Half instead (like Daemon Trigger's). You sure you're okay with an attacking turn of Full Auto Bursts followed by Multiple Attacks?

[username]

Nov 19, 2020 9:09:01 GMT -6 GuardianTempest said:

Sealing the Peace Vault's a strictly better Component Overload (Terminus Lockdown). I'll admit I didn't take un-jammable weapons into account for mine.

I wouldn't say Sealing the Peace Vault is strictly better than Component Overload; there are some minor differences that make them operate quite differently.

(-2) Component Overload: Your weapon jams after this attack.

(-1) Sealing the Peace Vault This attack causes the weapon to jam, or empties the clip if the weapon cannot jam.

They are similar since they both deal in Jamming. Component Overload seems to be better at a glance, since it gives you more points, but it is actually a bit harsher due to how it and gun kata and guns work. Special Attacks and trick shots have what I'd call a "no free lunch" clause in the books where if a restriction (or advantage) wouldn't do anything, it can't be used. So if you try to use Component Overload with a weapon that can't jam, you're blocked from doing so. Furthermore, Reliable likely comes into play and does so differently. Reliable weapons don't Jam, but if they would the attack instead misses. With Component Overload, I'd interpret that to mean that you CAN still use it on attacks with Reliable weapons, at the cost of making the attack automatically miss (and thus almost always worthless to do, although there may be some extremely specific circumstances you'd want to do that). That reading may be incorrect though since it jams after the attack rather than during so depending on order of operations it may just block the attack from being attempted entirely.

Stealing the Peace Vault on the other hand similarly jams the gun, and is clearly worded to have the attack Jam so it would absolutely interact with Reliable like a normal Jam but the second clause changes that. For these weapons instead of inflicting automatic miss, it just empties the clip. This is a bit less restrictive and thus it having -1 instead of -2 seems reasonable. I'd argue that it could due to this run into a different issue from Component Overload where it wouldn't be able to be used with Reliable 1 clip weapons such as a Bow, since then the attack is unable to empty the clip (due to already being emptied) and cannot jam so it hits the "No Free Lunch" clause, but that situation is more rare. You might potentially be able to use it on a Trick Shot that has Jumping Dove Concentration with a 1 clip reliable weapon, since Jumping Dove makes the attack not use up Ammo and allows for the clip to still be emptied by the property but that situation seems even more silly.

Sealing the Peace Vault is actually somewhat functional offensively as well, like Clay Pigeon's Safe Shot (sometimes you don't want to deal damage with an attack). This kata is based around disarming and then you actually need to use the enemy's weapon in the attack to get the benefit. So with Sealing the Peace Vault you could disarm someone and attack them with their own gun, ensuring that it jams the gun or empties their clip. This is handy even if you aren't interested in the gun itself since you can go the extra step in disarming while sticking to your own weapons for other purposes.

[GuardianTempest]

Oct 5, 2020 21:33:59 GMT -6 Lestat said:

To be fair the Kata that should be getting this level of analysis first should be Daemon Trigger which has a benefit that scales to 3x effectiveness with a level 1 dip, and at level 3 lets you make two full 10 point attacks per round at the "cost" of holding two pistols, but such a thing was created and ignored before I began playing.

Oi, take that back! It's different now! Twosome Time is no longer a Half Action Multi-attack like in the previous version. The version before that is just Half Action to shoot two targets at once as long as you're dual-wielding firearms at all—it doesn't even say it's Multiple Attacks so no reaction wastage and could further stack with gun kata. The current iteration of Twosome Time is my attempt at staying true to the inspiration, which is just a reduction in Reaction costs as long as you're attacking two targets with two pistols. Powerful and efficient but it's still a single action (and only one target is affected by Kata advantages).