Any houseruling to make Pressure Point unbroken but fun?

Hello,
so I’ve again been confronted with Pressure Point due to an upcoming oneshot and I wanted to make a Force Monk that fights unarmed.
Since XP isn’t enough to give him 4-5 Force Ranks to provide enough Pierce, I looked at Pressure Point again in hopes to make him a viable combatant but alas the character becomes instantly op when taking that Talent…

So I’ve been trying to come up with a houserule for the Pressure Point talent that makes it not as broken anymore but still fun and interesting.

Here’s what I’ve come up with until now:
Idea 1:
When making a Brawl check against a living opponent, the character may choose to forgo dealing damage as wounds, instead dealing the equivalent damage as strain.
These checks cannot be made with any weapons.
An attack made in this way also is granted Pierce Ranks equal to your Ranks in Medicine.

Idea 2:
When making a Brawl check against a living opponent, the character may choose to forgo dealing damage as wounds, instead dealing the equivalent damage as strain, plus additional strain equal to his ranks in Medicine.
These checks cannot be made with any weapons, but the additional strain damage from your ranks in Medicine is not reduced by Soak.

I’m not all that happy with both of these and therefore wanted to ask if anyone else has come up with rulings for this talent?
Kind regards =)

First, a character can already elect to deal only strain damage with Brawl checks. It already has a built-in “Stun Setting” quality, essentially. Check the combat chapter for unarmed attacks.

Second, they released an updated version of Pressure Point with Genesys (in particular, with Realms of Terrinoth), which essentially just increases strain damage, not ignoring soak, by ranks in Medicine.

Ah that’s great to know, have to look it up though.

As for the first point, yeah that’s true ofcourse, slipped my mind there.

Thanks for the help ;)

The Medicine=Pierce is a good fix, but I’d just as soon drop the “ignore Soak” qualifier. It has basically the same result (unless your Medicine exceeds the target’s Soak, which is unlikely), but it simpler to write out.

So the additional damage isn’t, but the initial damage is? I think it’d just be better to either go with or without the Soak, and not have that qualifier.


Here are a couple alternate rewrites:

  1. “When making an unarmed Brawl check to deal strain, the character deals additional damage equal to ranks in Medicine. This only applies against living targets.”

  2. “When making an unarmed Brawl check against a living target, the character may choose to forgo dealing damage as wounds, instead dealing the equivalent damage as strain and ignoring soak.” (This doesn’t require Medicine)

  3. “When making an unarmed Brawl check to deal strain, the character may spend a Triumph to ignore the target’s soak. This only applies against living targets.” (Again, doesn’t involve Medicine)

I prefer the first. It is rather like Deadly Accuracy, but a bit weaker since it’s a separate skill and is limited to certain scenarios.

Honestly, you could probably take Pressure Point as-is and just not go overboard with ranks in Medicine, Feral Strength, Deadly Accuracy, etc. and get by okay. It’s really only broken when abused.

Thanks for the extensive feedback.
Have to say I do see Pressure Point as problematic as is, as soon as a Melee character (= high brawn) takes it; Because then it begins to make it likely to oneshot enemies, I dont know.

For the time being I went with the Genesys Version which matches with your (1.) I think that’s a good compromise, although I’m not quite sure if it lacks a little bit of oomph.

The spirit of the talent was that a Doctor character, with likely only 2-3 Brawn isn’t going to have a ton of success results with a small Brawl pool to roll. Brawl isn’t even a career skill for them. Even with Medicine at 5 ranks, that’s still only 7-8 strain per hit, which SHOULD be balanced with the fact that’s it’s, once again, a doctor. Average melee challenge to hit them back and they should drop well before straining their opponents out. Strain can be healed with advantages from the enemy as well.

If you are adding Doctor to a monk build, to get Pressure Point, why wouldn’t you want it to be OP? Just tie the power with a responsibility (Morality) so that the character will only use it to counter a real threat.

Also, using the talent is optional, it says “may” in there. You can simply just choose whether or not to activate it.

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I’m not saying it can’t be broken, just that for a oneshot, you can use it in a non-broken manner since you get to build your character how you want to.

The problem is when people decide to take a dedicated melee character and go for Doctor because they want to break Pressure Point. That’s something I would not allow in my games.

I agree with SuperWookie on its intended use.

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Yes both of you are of course right.
It’s just not meant to be used like that, although it being in the Interrogator Tree seems questionable to me when looking at it that way (but that’s besides the point).

Yeah I will probably just bend the rules for that one character a bit so they have something nice in the oneshot to be unique at and leave the Genesys Pressure Point in my game as a substitute talent.

Thanks for your feedback =)

The damage range for intended use is enough to take out a minion, so think of it in the case of the Doctor they are using anatomy knowledge to safely knock out an unruly patient and get them back into bed. While the Interrogator knows just the right places to torture someone and make them pass out.

Personally, I have no problem with the martial artist having Pressure Point. Reminds me of Chi Kung Healing from the Street Fighter RPG, and of course acupuncture techniques IRL.

Are you playing the character, or provided it to a player to use? They might not even understand the power of the talent unless you point it out to them. My players forget they even have talents quite often.

It’s just for a Rebel Oneshot I host for my usual group plus some guests, so I’m providing the characters.
My usual players will very certain recognize the original Pressure Point Talent as a possible op mechanic when used with that character (but probably no one would choose the character, exactly because of this).

So my idea was to change the Talent to make the character unique but not broken (One-shotting the Nova Troopers that may or may not appear in the oneshot could have been a thing with the original).

But I now believe that my approach was wrong, I will probably just give the character a modified Version of the talent to improve upon the Steelhand Adepts Piercing brawl attacks without the need to give the character 4 force ranks or something like that.

Your feedback has really helped me realize this,
so Thanks again =)

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