What?
The goal is to design a game engine where all PC attacks (powers) are at-wills, but the round-to-round situation varies enough that most players will want to use different powers in a single fight, and in different fights they will want to vary their choices based on the round-by-round tactical situation rather than constructing scripted combos.
Why?
Because at-will abilities are really easy to keep track of resources for, and simulate a lot of fiction. And because people despise other resource management systems, yet don't want characters to just spam one or two moves repeatedly.
How?
Figuring some potential answers out is the purpose of this thread.
So far, the idea is to try to blend something like the attack power concept of 4th ed D&D with concepts from a 2d arcade fighting game (such as Street Fighter). So if a character performs "jump kick" they can hit an opponent for knockdown, but they become vulnerable to taking extra damage from "uppercut" and similar anti-air moves.
The most obvious obstacle to such a system is that we have the contradictory design goals of
- We want conditions to change round-by-round. Thereby encouraging the PCs to use different abilities based on such changes.
- We want to Keep It Simple, Stupid. Updating multiple statuses on multiple characters multiple times per round over multiple rounds of combat is obviously a multiplicative function, and having the potential for any one of those variables to be too large means we have the potential to have a system too large to keep track of.
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My *preliminary* thoughts on this are to use D&D/Final Fantasy style condition tags / status ailments, but keep things manageable by chunking it so that multiple conditions map to a set of at most 7 different triggering conditions for attacks. (like how in 4e Blind, Stunned, Dazed, and Prone all had "you grant Combat Advantage" as part of their effect). That gives us a hopefully manageable cap on the number of statuses to track. Then we ditch individual initiatives and go with "PC actions" and "Team Monster Actions" (resolved in seating order or something else hyper-simple), but we keep something like the 4e "save every round" duration - so after all of the PC actions, there's a specific "save phase" where the PCs save to end each condition currently on them; and after all of the Team Monster actions, there's a specific save phase where the monsters save to end each condition currently affecting them. And we put everything that's not "longer than fight" on that exact duration. Of course that sort of system gives us the quirk that you would now have a chance to save against your own "airborne" after performing a "jump kick" on your own turn, and wouldn't necessarily leave yourself open to an anti-air counter move. I'm not sure if I like that or not.
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But as that's just preliminary thinking I'm sure those have issues beyond the obvious ones. As there seemed to be enough interest in such a system in the WoF thread, I figured it was worth starting a separate discussion.