Hunting

Hunting is dangerous business, as it requires heading deep into enemy territory and doing battle with fiercest of monsters.   The further afield you go, the more dangerous the journey will be.  A strong hunting part can bring down greater beasts than a weak one, but all run the risk of becoming the hunted.  You don't want to be caught out without weapons and armor.  Bring any equipment you think you'd need in a perilous situation.  

To begin a hunting contract, post your in-progress submission form in the dice rolling channel.  This indicates the beginning of the contract's dice rolls.

Once this submission form is posted, it's time to roll dice!

Roll your first bout on the Region's roll table in the Hunter's Guide. Upon encountering a creature, you can choose to kill it, or move on.  Each hunting contract lasts 5 dice rolls. These rolls in order, represent what your party comes across throughout the day, but how will they know what's worth the risk?

Cumulative flux determines what level of warped your team can take down, and how many enemies you will be able to fight. Killing a creature subtracts its flux from the party's cumulative flux.  Calculate cumulative flux by adding together the flux of each party member.  You can only kill creatures of a lower level than your party's cumulative flux.  If your party fails to kill any of the creatures rolled that day, they kill the weakest creature in the region. If they lack the flux to kill even this fragile beast, they must return home empty handed.

If you roll an encounter, you can continue to submit contracts as usual.  A DM will reveal the encounter to you when they're next available.

If you roll a peril, you must now follow peril rules.  No more contract submissions!  A DM will run your encounter when they're next available.

It sounds complex, but the practice is easy.  Let's see an example of two cats on a hunt...

That was fun!  But what do we do if things go wrong?  What if...we roll a peril?

Speaking of the worst...what if you feel like making a bad decision today?  What if you went hunting in a region, knowing full well there was nothing you could defeat there?  There is one more example for this section.

This may seem like a silly example in a group where most characters have more than a Snoutbeasts's worth of flux, but late game regions may be extremely perilous compared to their early game counterparts.  Some may choose to risk a lootless run in the hopes of getting an encounter.  Others may go simply for the sake of story.  Either way, it's allowed!  Just not advised.

Hunting Rules

Setup is Final

Once you have posted your submission form to begin the hunting rolls, you are not allowed to edit it.  If your submission form is edited, it will be rejected by the DMs.  If you need to make corrections, repost the submission form before starting your hunt.  If you have begun rolling, then realize you need to make a correction, post a new message in chat stating your correction and ping the DMs.  

This rule helps us confirm that no retconning of hunts took place.  It keeps things fair!  

If you mess up and edit your hunting submission form after beginning rolls, your Hunting Contract will be voided. Perils will still occur.  You just lose your loot.  

Dice Rolls are Final

One a hunt has been declared, the leader's next 5 rolls will apply to the hunt (unless a peril cuts things short).  Do not roll for any other rp/prompt/event in the middle of a hunt.  It will count as one of your hunting rolls.  If you need to make another roll while mid-contract, finish the contract rolls first.  Players found manipulating/deleting rolls will have their Hunting Contract voided.  Perils will still occur.  You just lose your loot.  

Kills Are Final

Players should decide on each kill as they are rolled.  Roll once, decide what to do with this beast, then roll again.  That allows for the most depth/fun in the storytelling side of the system.  There are currently no consequences for messing this one up.  

While roaming the world, you are likely to uncover all sorts of interesting things...

NPCs, points of interest, subregions, perils, and more!

Every hunting contract also has a chance to reveal a Warped Den. These dens are home to a specific warped, and are useful for targeted elimination and trapping.  This is especially common in regions with a low warped concentration.

Leader of the Hunt

The leader of the hunt is both and in character and out of character role.  It is a temporary position that lasts only as long as the hunt does, and grants an individual power and responsibility for their group.  The leader of the hunt must be decided prior to making the contract submission.

When hunting alone, your character is the default leader of the hunt.  

The leader of the hunt is responsible for: 

In Character
Choosing who can go on the hunt.
Leaders have final say on party decisions.  It is encouraged to work with your party when making decisions, but not mandatory.
Leaders get to choose their part of the loot first.  It is possible for a leader to take all of the loot, none of the loot, or just the pieces they want.

These privileges are granted by The Voltspire Hearth faction, and may not apply when performing contracts for other factions.

Out of Character
Handling anything that goes on in the submissions channel
Uploading the contract submission
Submitting the form for the contract
Rolling the contact's outcome
Creating the contract's diceroll thread
Confirming contract results and loot distribution when the contract is done(post in submissions channel)

These responsibilities are always part of a hunting contract.

This is to make tracking easier for players and DM's, and prevent hunting contracts from stalling due to disagreements.  If you aren't a fan of how your leader ran the hunt last time, try running a hunt yourself!

Help!  Our leader is missing!

After two weeks of waiting, other members of the hunting party are allowed to step in and complete the leader's tasks.  This is to prevent people from getting locked into a hunting contract forever!  If you are taking over as leader of the hunt, reply to the original contact submission to inform the DMs.  If a hunting contract is taking too long to resolve, a DM may step in as the OOC leader of the hunt. 

Should this happen, the loot will be randomly distributed among the party members at the end of the hunt.  

Help!  Someone else got something I want!

If another character is in possession of an item you desire, see if there is a way to befriend, barter, or bribe them!  If you can't buy what you want, there's always the option to lead hunts until you run into the item you desire...  Stealing items counts as a form of PvP, and follows our Damaging PvP rules.  You will need the other player's permission to steal from them.

Trapping

Setting a trap requires a little more prep work than the average hunt offers.  Different traps operate on different rules and, depending on player strategy and planning, different outcomes may arise.  Here are a couple common examples of traps in action.

Option 1: Choose your trapped creature

When making hunting rolls, players can choose to use their trap on a specific roll to lower the level of a beast.  This can help a party make more rolls and enables the defeat of creatures otherwise too powerful for the party to take down.  Normal trapping bonuses apply.

Option 2: Set it and Forget it

Declare which roll your trap will apply to before making your hunting rolls.  The trap will be twice as effective against the creature it captures.  That means you can double any cumulative flux reduction and any loot bonuses it provides.  Debuffs are not doubled.

Option 3: Round Up

Use a trap during a targeted elimination to increase the effectiveness of your elimination run. The quality of a trap may allow your targeted elimination to count for 2 or 3 additional submissions!

Traps can also have several effects on a hunt, depending on how they were constructed.  

Biting Traps hold a creature in place so that it is easier to attack.  These traps tend to damage the creature that falls into them, causing some loss of materials.  Biting traps offer lots of level reduction.

Catch Traps keep a creature from leaving an area without injuring it.  These traps offer the greater material yields, but have less level reduction than a biting trap.

Other Traps are those specially designed to trap a creature in a new, undiscovered way.  These may be general trapping techniques that become widespread, or they may be specialist traps that target only a single species.  Players are free to explore the options for trap design through Crafting new types of traps.

Targetted Elimination[Unavailable]

Targetted eliminations are a brutal process by which many parties are sent into a region in short succession to drastically alter the population of a single species.  This type of hunting is too fast-paced for high quality materials to collected.  Elimination runs typically result in NO LOOT.  

Instead, something greater is achieved: A change to the ecology of the entire region.

It is possible, with enough elimination runs, to completely wipe out the population of one warped in a region.  This has the potential to permanently alter the roll tables listed in the Hunter's Guide.  Drive away your most feared and hated enemies.  Make regions safer.  Make room for something more valuable.  The world is yours to control, should you choose to change it.

Targetted elimination requires an excess of flux to complete.  Your party must completely overwhelm their enemies, or risk being injured before they can even make a dent.  The cumulative flux for the part must be at least 5x more than that of the warped they intend to target.

A targetted elimination submission can only be completed with a slayer in the party.  Their expertise in hunting and strength in battle is required to face the number of enemies required to decimate the population of any one species.

Targetted elimination is currently out of the reach of the Voltspire Hearth faction.  You'll need to recruit more survivors before you can turn the tides.

Delicates

Loot marked with a [TAG] cannot be harvested without the appropriate tool to do so.  If you roll a delicate part on a hunting contract but lack the tools required to harvest it, the item is lost.  

Common Butchering Tools

Butcher's Knife: A hardy blade designed to carve meat.  Useful for butchering [TOUGH] guts.

Scalpel: A particularly delicate blade honed to an extreme sharpness.  Ideal for harvesting [SOFT] guts.

Bone Saw: A small hand saw that can be used to break bones.  Best at collecting [HARD] items.

Gloves: Allows the user to handle [ACRID] items safely.

Most delicate items will specify what type of tool they need in their description.  This is also listed on the drop tables for convenience.

Some items are so strange, so rare, and so unique to the Post-Fracture world, that no tools have been invented for harvesting them!  If that's the case, your best bet is to speak to a Sentry or a Specter about researching new tools fit for the task.

Farming[Unavailable]

Farming warped is not allowed by The Voltspire Hearth faction.  Characters may petition to change this, but for now, the risk of keeping warped at the base outweighs the potential benefits.

Farming allows characters to keep small populations of prey animals on hand.  The animals will need to be fed their preferred food, and a lot of it.  Regular maintenance of a farmed flock of monsters is incredibly resource intensive, with the cost varying depending on the creature being farmed.  

Never-before farmed species must be captured and researched before farming can begin.  Without a detailed picture of how the beast survives in the wild, you've little hope of keeping one alive long enough to harvest it.

Slaying captured beasts safely requires enough characters to be involved that the group's cumulative flux is twice that of the farmed animal.  Harvesting your captives can be even more dangerous than hunting in the wild.  There is no element of surprise.  They know you are here, and will fight as fiercely as they would in a Peril to survive.  Harvesting farmed beasts with less flux than required grants 1% peril chance for every point of flux you are missing.

Additional mechanics and details of Farming will be made available in the future. 

Field Work

Field work hunting allows characters to Hunt and Trap creatures while out on an expedition.  It is not possible to perform a Targeted Elimination or Farm while on an expedition.  

When hunting as a group, use the skill level of the most skilled character in the group for rolls/calculations.  In character, this reflects the most skilled individual guiding/directing the others on the hunt.  This may change, however, if the DM believes the most skilled character has been sidelined, ignored, or is not in good enough condition to provide assistance(Ex. Half-conscious/drugged slayers do not give the best advice)