Abilities "In" and "Out" of Combat

[MGuy]

I think what Frank is saying is that if you specifically write every out of combat effect something has then you'll be writing nigh forever. He said it before... somewhere... that every time you explicitly write a mechanic for an ability you implicitly state that you can't do other things with it.

For example let's take this counter conundrum I'm having. Let's say I said that the in combat rule is that you can deflect an attack aimed at you and its out of combat affect is you can keep something flying towards you from striking you. Those are two codified effects and because I've stated you can only use your counter to deflect things that will hit you it prevents you from using it to deflect things flying at someone else,catch things that are flying past you, etc. While if I had a more general ability like "super reflexes" that allowed you a chance to interact with things that come into a given area around you then there are much fewer limits behind what you can do with that ability.

[mean_liar]

Any tabletop ruleset that doesn't include rules for Stunting and Magic Tea Party is missing something important. That's not adding to the discussion.

[Soda]

It's not that you couldn't use non-combat effects in combat, but rather your acquisition of them are separated. Blasting people to pieces is separate from the ability to control the ambient heat in an area, for example. I'm arguing for two things:

1. Combat and non-combat abilities are selected from separate pools, and XP is split between the categories such that you can't forego non-combat abilities for combat abilities.

This is what I was thinking. Say you gain a level and get to select a combat feat and a noncombat feat. A wizard would have to choose Create Flame as his noncombat feat in order to choose Blast Fools with Fire as his combat feat. While a fighter could choose Super Strike in addition to Run on Walls.

The magical character gains combat power and out of combat utility, the mundane character gains combat power and out of combat utility.

[Username17]

Unless your game is as formalized as Arkham Horror, everything you do out of combat is a stunt.

Any ability you have is therefore a stunt building block. Even "combat abilities". The idea of "non combat effects" is basically asinine.

-Username17

[TheWorid]

This is what I was thinking. Say you gain a level and get to select a combat feat and a noncombat feat. A wizard would have to choose Create Flame as his noncombat feat in order to choose Blast Fools with Fire as his combat feat. While a fighter could choose Super Strike in addition to Run on Walls.

I'm pretty sure I could figure out a way to use "Create Flame" to hurt people. Probably involving burning them.

[Username17]

I'm pretty sure I could figure out a way to use "Create Flame" to hurt people. Probably involving burning them.

Probably. Or by making something explode.

However, many games have a very high level of formalism in combat mechanics. People are generally OK with being told that they aren't allowed to trip people with their mage hand or blind people with their daylight. Not completely OK with it, but a lot more OK than if you told them that they couldn't use the flash of light from their fire blast to see what shape the statue was in the dark. When you have very high levels of formalism, you can have abilities doing exactly what they say they do and no more.

With high levels of formalism, you're basically playing a board game. And for some things that's OK. Lots of people genuinely want to play board games. Nothing wrong with that. And having individual minigames break out into board game structure is fine - the combat minigame does in many systems. But some things don't work that well as board games. The "Everything Else" minigame almost never does. And any time you aren't working in the board game format (or card game if you're in to that) you're pretty much using a system where you piece together your character's abilities and declare stunts based on the synergies between them and sweet talk your way into getting things moving.

And in that case, you're in a situation where everything that isn't forbidden is allowed. That is, you can declare that you're going to use your "great coordination" or "great speed" or whatever to run across the wall as it collapses. But if there's a "run across collapsing things" ability and you don't have it, then you're retroactively not going to be able to.

Bottom line: there are a thousand ways to keep people from using their non-combat telepathy or even their non-combat ability to set things on fire
in combat. But there isn't any way to keep people from using their combat fire blasts to accomplish non-combat goals without doing a 4e Herp Derp.

-Username17

[fectin]

Unless your game is as formalized as Arkham Horror, everything you do out of combat is a stunt.

Any ability you have is therefore a stunt building block. Even "combat abilities". The idea of "non combat effects" is basically asinine.

-Username17

"non combat effects" sure sounds like "Non-Weapon Proficiencies", and I think I've heard this same discussion there.

[mean_liar]

This is what I was thinking. Say you gain a level and get to select a combat feat and a noncombat feat. A wizard would have to choose Create Flame as his noncombat feat in order to choose Blast Fools with Fire as his combat feat. While a fighter could choose Super Strike in addition to Run on Walls.

The magical character gains combat power and out of combat utility, the mundane character gains combat power and out of combat utility.

Your error here is assuming that there are classes that put you on rails.

Why the hell can't the mundane character take Create Flame? Dude has an elixir that can pour it out. Or his trusty flint and straw. Whatever. Or maybe he'd rather Run On Walls, because that's what he wants to do.

Is that character now shittier for having chosen something he wants to do? That's the complaint?

Unless your game is as formalized as Arkham Horror, everything you do out of combat is a stunt.

Any ability you have is therefore a stunt building block. Even "combat abilities". The idea of "non combat effects" is basically asinine.

...

And in that case, you're in a situation where everything that isn't forbidden is allowed. That is, you can declare that you're going to use your "great coordination" or "great speed" or whatever to run across the wall as it collapses. But if there's a "run across collapsing things" ability and you don't have it, then you're retroactively not going to be able to.

Bottom line: there are a thousand ways to keep people from using their non-combat telepathy or even their non-combat ability to set things on fire
in combat. But there isn't any way to keep people from using their combat fire blasts to accomplish non-combat goals without doing a 4e Herp Derp.

Bullshit. The idea that you cannot split powers in a game between "predominantly used for combat" and "predominantly used out of combat" is straight-up bullshit, and so is the idea that somehow they should never cross-pollinate. The only hurdle here is that your non-combat shit should not generally overwhelm or obviate someone else's combat shit. If you blow up the castle with Create Flame and a shitload of explosives, that's not a fuckup - that's a feature, depending on how and what "explosives" are and what it takes to make them. If they can do it with just Create Flame sans explosives - that's a fuckup, unless the guy over there can smash it and the mountain its standing on to rubble with his Big Hammer Strike.

Not only that, but your complaint about synergies is similarly bullshit strawmanning. You're complaining about over-specificity and straitjacket stunting rules, which are issues of implementation, not unstoppable forces that will forevermore prevent effects-based systems from being useful. Yeah, if you have "hop" and "jump" as abilities (which is the shit you wanted to account for) then yes, getting someone to "skip" is tricky. But that's because the rules are shitty, not the general framework.

You can say, "you want to avoid situations where X and Y happen because they suck", but saying "it'll never work" is just lazy bullshit.

[Username17]

I've got a idea: put up or shut up.

How about instead of saying "an effects based system for out of combat abilities would be awesome!" and then accusing people of straw manning you when they list ways in which actual effects based are in fact not that awesome, you explain what the fucking hell you mean by "effects based system"?

Give some concrete examples. Having people make observations about games that call themselves "effect based" only to have you insult them and say that you didn't mean that kind of effects based system over and over again is a waste of our fucking time.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

I've got a idea: put up or shut up.

NO U

How about instead of saying "an effects based system for out of combat abilities would be awesome!" and then accusing people of straw manning you when they list ways in which actual effects based are in fact not that awesome, you explain what the fucking hell you mean by "effects based system"?

Give some concrete examples. Having people make observations about games that call themselves "effect based" only to have you insult them and say that you didn't mean that kind of effects based system over and over again is a waste of our fucking time.

Fine, let's talk about HERO. Or MnM. Those are widely used.

So when was the last time you had a real problem because your character sheet didn't have "Hands" and "Tactile Awareness" written on your sheet?

And fuck you. Soda thinks an effects-based system has classes (wut). You think that any explicit powers list necessarily obviates creative use of powers (wut). In MnM, the worst-case is that you... burn a Hero Point and stunt away, building your on-the-cuff alt-power with the same points as your active power you're stunting from. No one is locked out, unless you're doing shit that makes everyone at the table slap their foreheads (no Blast as Teleport, bitch).

For "put up or shut up" you seem to be saying some outrageous abstract shit divorced from any in-play gaming I've seen.

I mean, you say that you've "list(ed) ways in which actual effects based are in fact not that awesome" and in reality you aren't talking about anything actual, you're talking about how some dick GM didn't let you stunt "great coordination" (what game is that again? I missed that in my copy of HERO) to "run on walls" (I think you mean "Clinging")... presumably because the system didn't account for stunting ("Heroic Action Points" in HERO). So what the fuck are you talking about?

[Kaelik]

Mean Liar, your example is shit. MnM has no synergies. Like, at all.

The only synergies in the game are "Clone" with "Anything else"

And various kiting shit.

That's it. You are never allowed to use two abilities to do anything, ever.

[mean_liar]

Odd. Frank's complaint is that effects-based systems don't work because synergies are rampant and lead to imbalances.

He framed it in the context of "fighters don't get nice things"; I believe an example conforming to his earlier post would be that mages can see in the dark with the right powers, and therefore they would have greater synergy because now they can effectively use their blasty powers at night; a fighter without access to similar powers could not.

That example holds in MnM, by the way, so I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, especially since I don't really care about synergies. The root discussion is about splitting combat and non-combat effects. You're talking about a digression about fighters can't have nice things, and even with that you're talking out your ass.

Strictly speaking, my only point was and remains: having a pool of character points (or XP or whatever) split between (predominantly) combat effects and (predominantly) non-combat effects, and set character allocations according to those limits, you're going to have a balanced game where the fighter doesn't suck a dick compared to Mr Mage.

At some point Frank decided that having "hands" inflicted systemically unbalancing synergies into the game, and therefore all effects systems suck, which is an astounding leap of logic usually reserved for the mentally disturbed. TIME CUBE.

[Kaelik]

No, I'm talking about how in effects based systems, effects can't interact with each other.

MnM demonstrates this because the only interactions are "Has more bodies" and "Cannot be seen/reached." Whether you do the second one by burrowing and seeing through the ground, or by having speed Too Fucking Much, and the ability to hit and run, doesn't really matter.

Blast doesn't have any synergies at all with "create object" or "stun" or "any attack power at all."

The point is that having strictly defined Non combat and combat powers drafted from different pools is going to result in a bunch of people with non combat powers that don't synergize with their combat powers, and combat powers that don't synergize with each other.

[mean_liar]

How so?

In MnM (and HERO) you specifically use Linked powers to create locked-in, non-stunt synergies amongst powers. Blast+Stun for a power that does damage and Stuns, for example. You can do that on the fly with Hero Points.

Considering how you listed two ways to hit-and-run and that's hardly meant to be exhaustive, you're giving an example of combat (the "hit" of hit-and-run) and non-combat synergy (the "run": burrowing and seeing through the ground, for example).

[Kaelik]

How so?

In MnM (and HERO) you specifically use Linked powers to create locked-in, non-stunt synergies amongst powers. Blast+Stun for a power that does damage and Stuns, for example.

And then you have a single power that doesn't synergize with any other attack powers.

I mean really, you can't point to any synergy in MnM at all.

(Also, your example is a really shitty power that no one should ever use.)

[mean_liar]

I don't think I understand what you mean by "synergize" then. What do you mean? Give an example of something you would expect to be synergistic, and then describe why it doesn't exist in MnM.

Mostly I'm getting out of it that you want to do some kind of end-run, off-the-books sort of power tweaking that gives you an advantage with no points cost. The point of effects systems is that you buy what you can do, and if you haven't bought it you're at-best cobbling together your trick from a limited resource pool.

Blast doesn't have any synergies at all with "create object" or "stun" or "any attack power at all."

If I understood what you were trying to say here I could understand it better. I'll try to interpret this though:

Damage; Ranged, Multiattack, Limited - only affects Stunned opponents
- ranged power ball attack that hammers Stunned opponents for the same cost as a no-frills power ball attack

So right there you have the ability to create a more powerful Blast that synergizes with Stun (though in 3e this is considered an 2nd degree Affliction effect). You could even make it an Alternate Power of a no-frills blast power for only 1PP - you set them up and then knock them down. I'd have to reread Stun, but you could probably get that Limited condition to be a lot more forgiving so that your blast-o power affects all kinds of targets with hindered conditions.