Specialized combatants don't play together very well in D&D.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I personally am really not a fan of the current status quo, where the only way to take out a foe is either by SoD or by piling on enough hit point damage. What's even worse about this is that it doesn't meaningfully stack. The 'best' you can do is layer on status effects that makes it easier to inflict hit point damage and give all effects a side order of hit point damage, but that just makes effect seem all boring and samey.

Are there any systems out there that will allow someone to layer on a sword strike, a poison spell, and a petrify spell that will:

A) Take out an individual mook but won't necessary take out an equal or higher-level foe even if all of the spells hit?

B) Will make it so that allies aren't working at cross-purposes when they unleash the Spin Strike / Cloudkill / Basilisk's Gaze combo?

C) Make it such that you can actually kill a foe with multiple Cloudkill spells without it being an all-or-nothing deal?

[Kaelik]

Wow Lago. You are fucking terrible as a human being.

How did you find and fap over WoF so hard without ever knowing about CAN.

Use a condition track. Yay life. Problem solved.

[echoVanguard]

There are plenty of ways to deal with this sort of problem. As Kaelik mentions, Condition Tracks are one solution. You also have the options of unifying your mechanic (for example, having Poison and Petrify effects deal Hit Point damage), or even doing partial unification (ability damage instead of abstract effects). Effects don't need to have different systems, they just need different areas of expertise. If a a sword and a cloud of poison both deal hit point damage, the difference between them should be how they are avoided - for example, you dodge the sword, whereas you resist the poison.

echo

[fectin]

Once again, fantasycraft did it. Once again, it's exactly like someone looked at DnD, and said "needs more bookkeeping".

[CCarter]

Edge/Luck points/fate points. Whatever you want to call them.
If a character has a stack of these, they can be burned through both to resist SoDs and/or on soak rolls or parry rolls.

[Chamomile]

Pretty sure I've got the gist of it from the name, but how exactly does a Condition Track work?

[Captain_Karzak]

@Chamomile

Basically either damage or status-affect spells can both move you down a spectrum that ranges from perfectly fine to um.... swoon. At each step along the track, you become more vulnerable to attacks of any kind, and less capable in any actions you undertake. You are defeated once you run out of hit points, or when you hit the bottom of the condition track, whichever event comes first.

So condition track movement might be a secondary affect of taking too much damage in a single hit, and it might be the primary (or sole) effect of a spell like petrify. Thus meeting Lago's criteria of layering (creating synergy between) the effects of hit point damage and status-type spells.

[Kaelik]

Alternatively, you can have the condition track instead of HP. And being hit moves you down the condition track, or not, period, and never effects your HP, because you don't have HP.

For example:

In CAN, you have a condition track with say 6 slots.

Really Lose/Lose/Incompetent/Disadvantaged/Minor Disadvantage/Fine.

Everyone starts at fine. Now, when the Fighter attacks you, he rolls some stuff, and if he beats your CAN by 1-4 you move down the condition track 1, and if he beats you by 5-9, you move 2, and if he beats you by a lot you move all the way.

This is a great system for what Lago wants because:

1) Multiple Cloud kills stack on everyone.
2) No matter what the PCs do, they not only never work at cross purposes, but what Lago actually meant, every action by one is always contributing towards the same goal as everyone else's action.
3) You cast Finger of death on a Mook, it moves them from Fine to Really Lose. You cast Finger of Death on a equal level character, you on average move him two spots, sometimes one or none, sometimes 3. You cast Finger of Death on a higher level boss, you might move him one, or two on a really good roll, but most likely your action fails, so when everyone targets him, he moves a bit, but is still standing strong.

This allows single boss monsters to fight parties well. This allows Parties to face waves of mooks of absurdly large size, because the mooks are less likely to hit them, and they are more likely to murderize the mooks.

The diffiiculty in this system is determine what each spot on the condition track does.

For example:

1) You could just have each spot provide a -1 cumulative penalty to everything, and then have really Lose equal whatever the PCs want: IE Dead/Mind Controlled/Running away/Unconscious. Or whatever the last power used was.

Problem: Kinda samey, and takes alot of the difference out of the game, because Petrify seems exactly like shooting with a bow.

2) You could have each ability or each class of abilities cause a different condition when people reach each status condition.

So you have Fear spell: Minor: Shaken, Disadvantaged: Hesitant, Incompetent: Frightened, Lose: Panicked, Really Lose: Terrified

Sword strike: Minor: Bleeding, Disadvantage: Inconvenient Bleeding, Incompetent: Guts hanging out, Lose: Missing your main arm, Really Lose: Dead.

So then, the fight goes:

Wizard casts Fear, enemy moved one condition track, Shaken: get's -1 penalty to everything.

Fighter uses Sword Strike, moves one condition track, get's inconvenient bleeding, Blood obstructs vision for 20% miss chance on all attacks.

Wizard uses Fear, moves two condition tracks, enemy is panicked and starts to just run away as fast as possible. Fighter goes up and kills a fool, or let's him escape.

[Red_Rob]

Doesn't CAN suffer from a heavy dose of Inevitability? Once you get hit you are in a losing spiral of taking penalties, which mean you are less likely to hurt the enemy, which mean you get hit more, which means more penalties, until you die.

[Korwin]

Shadowrun?

[Kaelik]

Doesn't CAN suffer from a heavy dose of Inevitability? Once you get hit you are in a losing spiral of taking penalties, which mean you are less likely to hurt the enemy, which mean you get hit more, which means more penalties, until you die.

Um... Doesn't being petrified have a heavy dose of inevitability?

Which one of the design goals was "People who are almost dead are just as good as people who are in mint condition"?

I missed that design goal.

[Orion]

Well, CAN doesn't have to give out offensive penalties. It can give defensive penalties over--in fact I would venture that it *should*. That way, the odds of a fight ending go up over time rather than remaining static. And, while of course a certain sense of "inevitability" is the entire point, if it's defensive only you still feel at risk even having wounded your enemy.

[Kaelik]

Well, CAN doesn't have to give out offensive penalties. It can give defensive penalties over--in fact I would venture that it *should*. That way, the odds of a fight ending go up over time rather than remaining static. And, while of course a certain sense of "inevitability" is the entire point, if it's defensive only you still feel at risk even having wounded your enemy.

While Shaken could give out only a -1 penalty to defensive tests if you for some reason cared, some things are going to have to give out offensive penalties, for example, being Frightened causes you to run the fuck away, and this is an offensive penalty.

Likewise, being Petrified to the Incompetent stage makes you not able to move from your square. That's an offensive penalty to anyone who is not a ranged character.

The only alternative is the bullshit "Everything gives identical penalties, I can either Fire a Petrify that gives a -3 penalty, or I can shoot fire for a -3 penalty, or I can sword him for a -3 penalty."

In which case, you might as well just play with HP, and have everything do HP damage, because fuck that.

[Orion]

Obviously you can write in disables and offense debuffs if you want, I'm just saying that that shouldn't be the default effect. Anything which would just do "HP damage" in D&D should give you defense penalties only.

[Kaelik]

Obviously you can write in disables and offense debuffs if you want, I'm just saying that that shouldn't be the default effect. Anything which would just do "HP damage" in D&D should give you defense penalties only.

There shouldn't be anything that "just does HP damage" Those things should not exist in a condition track system. Every condition should be an actual condition, and shaken can plausibly provide penalties to everything, and guts hanging out might be something different.

In any actual system you won't have "sword strike" as a thing, you'll have hamstringing attacks and head shots and disarms and crap too.

[Orion]

The original CAN proposal called for generic "wounded" conditions to stack up penalties to damage resistance, and I don't see any reason to depart from that. I mean, you're never going to write "generic sword hit." Every move wants to have 2-3 interesting things about it.

But what if the interesting things are that it's an AoE and it increases your defense for a turn? What if it's interesting because it's a mobility power with an increased KO chance? There should absolutley be one or at most two "default effects" that things in this game do if they're not "special"

[Kaelik]

The original CAN proposal called for generic "wounded" conditions to stack up penalties to damage resistance, and I don't see any reason to depart from that. I mean, you're never going to write "generic sword hit." Every move wants to have 2-3 interesting things about it.

But what if the interesting things are that it's an AoE and it increases your defense for a turn? What if it's interesting because it's a mobility power with an increased KO chance? There should absolutley be one or at most two "default effects" that things in this game do if they're not "special"

And so it would cause the bleeding condition if it's a sword hitting. Or the crushed condition if it's a mace, or whatever. Having a generically wounded thing, where petrify/fear/swords/finger of death/mind control/fire/lightning/tentacle rape all do the exact same thing is fucking retarded.

[Novembermike]

FATE uses a fairly similar system. You have Stress and Consequences. Stress is basically HP and if you run out of Stress points you're out of the encounter, but it resets each encounter. Whenever you take Stress, though, you can negate a certain amount of it by taking either a Mild, Moderate or Severe Stress, which tends to represent an injury. Mild might be a black eye or something similar and last for one additional encounter, moderate is something on the level of an open wound or a painful burn and lasts for the rest of the session and Severe is something on the order of a broken leg that lasts for an additional 2-3 sessions.

The neat thing about this is that you can use the same damage system for other kinds of conflict. A particularly bad social attack might force you to take a Severe Social Consequence where people think that you murdered someone and you have to deal with all of the bad stuff (and the good, criminals might take you more seriously) that entails for the next couple sessions.

It also lets you play around with abilities a bit. A person with powerful regeneration might be able to remove all of his physical consequences at the end of every encounter and might lose his minor consequences within a turn or two of getting them (ie. Wolverine). An unusually tough character, on the other hand, might just have a high resistance to stress, such that when someone deals 6 damage to him (enough to force a severe consequence for a normal character) he can shrug it off with a black eye.

[Lago PARANOIA]

On the other hand, handing out offensive penalties to people as they go down the condition track also reduces the effects of focus firing. Not to say that there aren't other ways to prevent focus-firing, it's just that this is the simplest and most obvious method.

My question is, is the aggregate effect desirable? Yes, being at -5 penalty to attacks on a d20 pretty much knocks you out of level-appropriate combat (thus removing the incentive for enemies to take you out of the combat totally), but you're also more likely to see the end of combat too. On the third hand, being able to take actions but at such a penalty that you're ineffectual will create just as much frustration as not being able to take actions at all.

[Novembermike]

On the other hand, handing out offensive penalties to people as they go down the condition track also reduces the effects of focus firing. Not to say that there aren't other ways to prevent focus-firing, it's just that this is the simplest and most obvious method.

My question is, is the aggregate effect desirable? Yes, being at -5 penalty to attacks on a d20 pretty much knocks you out of level-appropriate combat (thus removing the incentive for enemies to take you out of the combat totally), but you're also more likely to see the end of combat too. On the third hand, being able to take actions but at such a penalty that you're ineffectual will create just as much frustration as not being able to take actions at all.

What about treating those as "injuries" and having healing remove injuries? You'd have to mess with how much healing is available, but it means that the cleric's magic is often about bringing someone back into the fight rather than just keeping them from hitting zero.

[MfA]

My question is, is the aggregate effect desirable? Yes, being at -5 penalty to attacks on a d20 pretty much knocks you out of level-appropriate combat

Turning the game into a flurry of misses the moment you get hurt is incredibly annoying for players. Penalties to CAN and damage penalties are more appropriate.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Turning the game into a flurry of misses the moment you get hurt is incredibly annoying for players.

Of course I'm also a proponent of the idea that most fights shouldn't end up in one-sided butchery and that both NPCs and PCs need to flee/surrender more often than they do and this gives them an incentive to do so without 'rolling the dice' and turning every battle to a fight-to-the-finish. Mounting offensive penalties do that better than mounting defensive penalties alone.

[Dean]

The WoD style "You get hurt, take big negatives" bullshit is bullshit and we should not include that bullshit because it's bullshit.

More clearly. D20 is primarily additive and adding a subtractive step is, before anything else is even said, kind of obnoxious. It should be avoided if possible, including it as a part of every fight ever is downright horrible. Moving past that I can reference ballistics reports and boxing training guides that will tell you that fatigue much more than "damage" slows people down. If you stab me in the stomach I'm basically completely fine as far as you're concerned. It's counter-intuitive but it's true. I mean I'm not fine -forever- but in the time period that we're talking about which is approximately a 30 second combat you will see NO loss in my effectiveness as a combatant if I have a dagger in my belly. People don't get negative 2's they keep fighting because their lives are in danger and your brain will stow that pain shit until later when your ass is not on the line.

It's an artifact of gaming that people maintain is a good idea for no good reason. If we wanted to create a series of status effects based on what partial petrification and what partial disintegration do to you and whatnot that's fine but "Get a bullshit, no fun, not interesting -2 to rolls so that we can fulfill some Grognard fantasy that wounded people are FINALLY worse than healthy people" should not be on that list.

[Kaelik]

It's an artifact of gaming that people maintain is a good idea for no good reason. If we wanted to create a series of status effects based on what partial petrification and what partial disintegration do to you and whatnot that's fine but "Get a bullshit, no fun, not interesting -2 to rolls so that we can fulfill some Grognard fantasy that wounded people are FINALLY worse than healthy people" should not be on that list.

Indeed, which is why I specifically said "Everything being a bunch of penalties is fucking boring, and conditions should all have their own effects."

So cutting people results in them bleeding into their eyes and not seeing.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you don't hand out some kind of offensive penalty however (it doesn't have to be a cynical manipulation to a die roll though, that's just the easiest) then how do you stop battles from routinely ending in butchery?

The current setup creates a feedback loop where people are incentivized to slice an opponent up to bits before moving on to the next one, which ups the lethality. Both because someone on the 'losing' side is encouraged to stay in the battle in hopes of their fortunes turning and also because people on the 'winning' side are better off killing a foe rather than moving on to the next opponent once they've chopped someone's arm off/poisoned them real bad/super-cursed them.