When does a game need Swift/Minor actions? Action Economy

[OgreBattle]

let's talk about the kinds of actions available in different games, and why they work (or don't) for those games, and what it will mean for your Heart breaker when you choose one.

The ones I'm familiar with being....


Adventurer Conqueror King (AD&D?)
-You get one action
-it includes movement most of the time
-not too heavily defined Free Actions like talking


D&D3e
-Full round actions for multi-hit attacks at level 6+
-Standard action that can be taken with move and swift
-Movement action
-Swift action added in as in between standard and move, for things like activating stances
-Free actions


D&D4e
-Standard action for attacking and such
-Minor action for designating targets for special abilities, entering special stances, activating super powers
-movement action

RIFTS
You have action points (that have a confusing name). Most fighty types will start with 3 or 4. Movement is usually free. An attack like shooting a gun or swinging a sword is one action, but a 'power attack' that hits harder will take two action points.
-Some people play it as "take all your actions on your turn" some people play it as "do one action on your turn, go around initiative order until everyone spends their actions"


Shadowrun
-two basic actions that are used to attack, move, and other stuff. You can move/attack, attack/attack, and so on.

Dark Heresy
-same thing as shadowrun (yeah?)

Fallout
-You have an AP pool. You spend X amount on your turn and then it refreshes. Movement and attacking and items all cost variable AP.




So then, what are the strengths and weaknesses of different action schemes?

What would Shadowrun look like if it had Standard/Minor/Move?
How would D&D3e be altered by having two basic actions per turn?

Which action schemes do you prefer for your RPG development projects?

[Wrathzog]

Well, it's all about Fidelity vs. Complexity. Action Point systems let you get all fiddly with what you do in a round while being more complex. Something like WoD is pretty simple, but you can only perform one action in a round (movement is free, kind of?) and I know that that's been a sticking point with my group.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Fallout's Action Points system but 3E's system is fairly elegant even if badly implemented in places.

[Winnah]

You should probably include reactions and interrupts to your lists for the sake of completeness.

[hogarth]

Champions/HERO is fairly similar to 3E D&D. In a single round (phase), you can make a double move or a single move + an attack. And there are other actions that can take up the whole round (like a Move Through) and actions that take no time but that still have to be done on your phase (like turning on a force field). I don't think there's anything that corresponds to a swift/minor action though; if a power can only be done once per round, they'd probably just spell that out in the particular power description.

[fectin]

You missed Exalted's battle wheel. An actually elegant way of handling varying action durations.

[ishy]

Immediate actions also lock you out of swift actions in 3e.
Which gives you more of a choice how to use them. Which is quite nice, except most of the time you don't get enough of those abilities to be able to make a choice.

[Pulsewidth]

Walking in Shadowrun 4 doesn't take any action, running is a Free action (which despite the name is not free).

[Josh_Kablack]

Champions/HERO is fairly similar to 3E D&D.

Save that in most HERO games, different characters get different numbers of phases per turn and you refer to the Speed Chart to determine turn order.

I don't think there's anything that corresponds to a swift/minor action though; if a power can only be done once per round, they'd probably just spell that out in the particular power description.

Well you can build that all sorts things with the Trigger advantage, but probably the closest analog are post-phase 12 effects such as Recovery and Fade rates, which happen once at the end of every Turn.

[OgreBattle]

You missed Exalted's battle wheel. An actually elegant way of handling varying action durations.

From what I remember, Exalted has... a pool of action points to use, and then what actions you take sets ticks on the wheel right?


But yeah, what are the advantages of using an Exalted style Battle wheel compared to say, D&D.

[Emerald]

How would D&D3e be altered by having two basic actions per turn?

Think of how things would look if everyone had 3.0 haste active all the time and that's basically what would happen. It wouldn't be too hard to put limiters in place like "can only use one magical ability per turn" to prevent breakage, but you'd certainly have to think it through before changing things.


Another action scheme I can think of is the SWSE one, where you have standard/move/swift actions as normal except that standards can be traded down to swifts, full-round actions consume all three actions, and there are a bunch of abilities that require you to use two swift actions in a turn or three consecutive swift actions over two turns or similar. It plays essentially like 3e except that you can generally cram more things into a round, since there are lots of "use ability X one step faster" features.

[fectin]

You missed Exalted's battle wheel. An actually elegant way of handling varying action durations.

From what I remember, Exalted has... a pool of action points to use, and then what actions you take sets ticks on the wheel right?


But yeah, what are the advantages of using an Exalted style Battle wheel compared to say, D&D.

Roughly, each action includes "you may not act again for [x] rounds," where x is a number that's usually from three to six. In Dnd, that would be a pain to track, but here it works. That means you can have weapon speeds where rapiers get lots of attacks for every sledgehammer swing, and have it work out in a not-very finicky way.

Okay. So the chart looks like this:
http://www.4shared.com/office/q9JLyZE1/ ... Wheel.html
You're looking at the circle with seven slices; the spikes are just decoration.

Pick something to mark the current tick, and put it on one of the pie slices. Each player also gets a distinct marker. Whoever wins initiative puts their marker on the pie slice with the tick marker. If there's a tie, both pieces go on the same slice. Everyone who lost also puts their pieces on pie slices: if they lost by one, it's one slice clockwise from the winner; if by two, two slices clockwise, etc. You can't lose by more than six.

Each tick, everyone on the currently marked slice acts, then the tick marker moves clockwise one slice. Every action has a "speed". E.g. punching someone is speed 4. After your action, you move your marker [speed] spaces clockwise (so if you punched a guy, you move your marker 4 spaces clockwise). Nothing has a speed higher than 6.

And that's it. That's all of initiative. It's enough to let you be moderately rigorous about how long things take, but still is very intuitive (in action, anyway).

[OgreBattle]

You missed Exalted's battle wheel. An actually elegant way of handling varying action durations.

From what I remember, Exalted has... a pool of action points to use, and then what actions you take sets ticks on the wheel right?


But yeah, what are the advantages of using an Exalted style Battle wheel compared to say, D&D.

Roughly, each action includes "you may not act again for [x] rounds," where x is a number that's usually from three to six. In Dnd, that would be a pain to track, but here it works. That means you can have weapon speeds where rapiers get lots of attacks for every sledgehammer swing, and have it work out in a not-very finicky way.

Okay. So the chart looks like this:
http://www.4shared.com/office/q9JLyZE1/ ... Wheel.html
You're looking at the circle with seven slices; the spikes are just decoration.

Pick something to mark the current tick, and put it on one of the pie slices. Each player also gets a distinct marker. Whoever wins initiative puts their marker on the pie slice with the tick marker. If there's a tie, both pieces go on the same slice. Everyone who lost also puts their pieces on pie slices: if they lost by one, it's one slice clockwise from the winner; if by two, two slices clockwise, etc. You can't lose by more than six.

Each tick, everyone on the currently marked slice acts, then the tick marker moves clockwise one slice. Every action has a "speed". E.g. punching someone is speed 4. After your action, you move your marker [speed] spaces clockwise (so if you punched a guy, you move your marker 4 spaces clockwise). Nothing has a speed higher than 6.

And that's it. That's all of initiative. It's enough to let you be moderately rigorous about how long things take, but still is very intuitive (in action, anyway).

Details on Exalted 3e say that the Battle Wheel has been removed.

A: The system is extremely obvious about when you get to act and it is way less complicated to keep track of. No battle wheel or tick sheets needed. (John Mørke)

So it seems like the Exalted designers felt it wasn't necessary, or overly complicated for what it functionally did in play.

[Username17]

I am not fond of giving out different attack rates for different weapons. In almost all cases it ends up with "really strong people who get a lot of static damage bonuses want to attack a lot of times, so they use small finesse weapons, while weak dodgy characters get less static damage bonuses and thus have a higher proportional share for their weapon damage, so they use giant hammers they can barely lift". The logic is just sort of baked-in for most weapon speed systems, and it feels totally wrong.

-Username17

[Eikre]

Then you offer strength a multiplicative effect contingent on the weapon's base damage and offer dexterity set damage from precision.

[BearsAreBrown]

Then you offer strength a multiplicative effect contingent on the weapon's base damage and offer dexterity set damage from precision.

Although workable, I don't see the advantage versus baking it all into a system where the weapons attack on the same speed.

[fectin]

Or offer weapon effects instead (e.g. the giant hammer is slowe, but has a strength-based chance to also knock you down), or have high enough damage soaks that your faster, smaller attacks might tink off without doing damage.

(Note that I'm not claiming Exalted did that, just that there are ways to balance those incentives)

With regard to the battle wheel: it's hard to have system simpler than "act when the arrow is pointing to you." I genuinely don't know how anyone could think that's hard.

[Stubbazubba]

When the industry standard is D&D's static turn order, having a more fluid wheel, while attractive, tends to take more concentration than the old standby.

[OgreBattle]

When the industry standard is D&D's static turn order, having a more fluid wheel, while attractive, tends to take more concentration than the old standby.

the largest problem with exalted 2e's wheel was that the wheel was being used to play exalted 2e.

It would be plenty fluid in AD&D (or 2e?) that had weapon speeds.

Maybe it would work for a fighting game with lots of dueling too.

[tussock]

AD&D is where you can cast a spell and then move, or shift 10' and then melee, or double move, or move and half-fire at the mid-point, or stand and full fire, or charge and then hit once (but only once per combat), or use Psi up to ten times, or do any number of other things the DM allows with movement and equipment handling or magic item activation by a rough count of segments. With longer weapons striking first in the first round of contact, then by random team initiative, with extra attacks for quick weapons on a tie, where extra attacks lets you go first and last.

Except it's different in surprise rounds, where your melee is full attacks per-segment, but only for a few segments where your movement is counted fractionally per-segment too, and your missile fire is three times normal (whatever the fuck that means in segments, unless you're specialised in bows where you get to fire first with surprise), and spellcasting doesn't work yet.

And there's an example somewhere of charging into melee while throwing axes and still getting melee at the end, despite that being, uh, kinda different to the rest of the rules, but awesome anyway.

Like the OP says, it's kinda one action which includes movement as appropriate, except when it's not like when you're counting segments.

[OgreBattle]

And there's an example somewhere of charging into melee while throwing axes and still getting melee at the end, despite that being, uh, kinda different to the rest of the rules, but awesome anyway.

That's the kind of thing I want swift actions to do in a standard/move/swift set-up.