What if your PHB had actions instead of spells?

[Foxwarrior]

Chain binding kings, huh. That's... novel.

[MGuy]

So here is the idea: what if you switched out the spells for actions that all players could use? Rather than doing what most games do and maybe include mechanics for 40-50 types of actions crossing 4-5 subsystems, you instead fill the book with a thousand discretely defined actions/mechanics.

I know everyone is in here talking about classes and combat abilities, but you clearly meant more than that. Something like this?

Persuade the King
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The party makes a diplomacy check. On a success, an influential person (such as a Queen, High Priest, or Guildmaster) will provide appropriate aid for a given task, or against a given threat. On a failure, the target does not become hostile, but they will not provide aid and cannot be asked again until circumstances worsen.

Close.

So let's take the first example. To make it like a spell, we need to make it more specific. Let's say that that we rename it to be "Request A Knight From the King." Then we give it the same care and attention that someone gave Planar Binding

That gives us a budget of 532 words (ten for basic descriptors like Range and Duration).

With that many words, we could definitely define how our game handles requesting a knight or hero character for limited aid during an adventure, and we can do it better because we don't have to add occultism mechanics for semi-optional magic circles.

Then you basically do that for everything that people do in adventures. You can even just do Planar Binding by making it a call function to Request a Knight from the King and adding thirty to fifty words about the the flavor reskin.

I had that kind of idea a few years ago and I still think it's a good idea to create a framework for these kinds of actions.

[tussock]

The idea of referencing 1000 actions, that might in turn reference further actions, to get every fucking thing in the game done is a literal nightmare.

Have none of you seen people stall out trying to choose which spell to cast from their list of 20 prepared spells? That's two layer chunking they stall on, you're gunna ask people to do five layer decision trees to recall the right action to consider using for every possible thing in a fucking game?

Seriously, you should have 7 +- 2 actions you can take in each particular circumstance, and the GM declares the circumstances and players can turn to that page if unfamiliar and still choose actions as their turn comes up quickly enough and everyone's maximally happy.

[deaddmwalking]

For the sake of ease, imagine a fight in a modern fast-food restaurant.

If for my action I dump all the ice on the floor, what is the effect?

What if I spill water all over the floor?

What if I dump mayonnaise on the floor?

Are each of those separate actions? Each of the three substances will probably make the terrain 'slippery', but they each have different physical properties regarding how they spread, cover an area, and how slippery they might be. Should this action consider the type of floor - a hard tile floor is much more likely to become slippery as the result of my action than a straw-strewn dirt floor?

It might be worth describing actions you can take to create environmental effects in general, and perhaps even specific actions like 'Make the Ground Slippery', but defining the how and why for every item is beyond insane. You could perhaps define a 'general principle' with some undefined exceptions.

Example:

Make the Ground Slippery
As a standard action you can spread an appropriate item (a slick liquid like a flask of water or oil, marbles, ice cubes or similar) in your inventory to make the ground slippery in a 10' radius area. Characters who enter the area must make a balance check TN 15 with failure indicating that their movement stops and failure by 5 indicating they fall prone and must succeed on a balance check to stand up. Some substances, or excess amounts of those substances may spread out to fill a larger area or may create a higher Balance TN if environmental factors are deemed particularly suitable.

So now if you have a chance to spill an oil tank you could infer that it should make the ground slippery in a larger area, and possibly MORE SLIPPERY, but you don't have to define the difference between 1 flask of lamp oil and 40 metric tons of lamp oil.

[Foxwarrior]

you don't have to define the difference between 1 flask of lamp oil and 40 metric tons of lamp oil.

The original stated goal was to write enough that the designer could define the difference rather than the DM. The clarified stance of literally treating actions like spells would still involve a Slippery Floor action and a Greater Slippery Floor action.

I'm definitely down with the stance that when the DM tells you that the floor is cobblestone and there's a tanker of oil in some spot, you don't need to ask what oil even does before you get started on your Transporter scene.

[deaddmwalking]

The original stated goal was to write enough that the designer could define the difference rather than the DM.

The point is, that is an impossible standard, at least without creating mathematical formulas that take into account the volume of the liquid, the coefficient of friction, the viscocity, etc. If you define exactly what happens with one substance, you either say 'every other substance is basically like that with minor edits as appropriate' or you have to define every possible combination. The goal of the RPG should be to create a simple way to determine reasonably appropriate consequences without having to be an actual physics simulator - especially since real physics is often not appropriate from a genre emulation standpoint.

As a further elaboration using slipperiness, does wearing cleats make you less likely to slip (they penetrate the ground giving you more stability) or more likely to slip (you have less surface area in contact with the ground with effectively the same coefficient of friction, meaning slipping is more likely). That clearly depends on the type of surface, but if you create a generic rule like 'cleats provide a +2 on balance checks', you end up having people who can walk on water when they wear cleats, but not when they wear normal shoes.

The advantage of an RPG compared to most other types of games is that the number of actions you can take is theoretically unlimited. Numerating all of the possible actions is not possible and not desirable. Providing good examples of TYPES of actions and how you adjudicate them within the rules without creating more and more complex epicycles of subsystems is important.

If a rule is complex and does little to make the game fun, it will be ignored - we have plenty of evidence for that position. Ensuring that rules are generally as consistent as possible (ie, that you can accurately describe what the rule SHOULD BE based on first principles) makes using them and applying them easy.

[Emerald]

A combinatoric explosion of powers is pretty neat for character customization, but bad for tactical variety. Take Fireball and Lightning Bolt for example (pretending for a moment that they do good damage). When fighting normal or electricity-immune enemies, you toss out fireballs, putting your spheres willy-nilly on large concentrations of forces; but if you encounter some fire-immune enemies you have to switch to looking for interesting starting points for lines for you to walk to if you want to blast everyone to death at once. If you know Fireball and Lightningball instead then your tactical considerations are the same in all sorts of fights.

(I'm pretty sure more people would like to play a fire wizard or a lightning wizard than would like to play a fire and lightning wizard though, but if you get rid of the proliferation of immunities it's still easier to make a lightning wizard with effects that they sometimes want attached to more and less awkward shapes in a non-combinatoric system.)

Being able to combine energy types and areas doesn't necessarily mean that everyone can use any combination; that all depends on how you slice up your themes, powers, and augmentations.

Fireball and lightning bolt could both be base powers because fire comes in spheres and lightning comes in lines by default, or energy ball and line of energy could be base powers with defined areas (and ranges and damage types are augmentations), or fire blast and lightning blast could be base powers with defined riders (and areas and ranges are augmentations). And the relevant list of powers+augmentations could be "Elementalist" (you get fireball and lightning bolt, but not lightningball and fire bolt) or "Pyromancer" (you get fire blast, which comes with several shapes) or "Metamage" (you get Burst Spell and Line Spell augmentations but not fire or lightning powers) or some other slice of the pie.

Declaring that the Warmage gets access to Elementalist and Metamage while the Sorcerer chooses one or two of Pyromancer/Cryomancer/Electromancer/... lets you can condense the Warmage's "get ALL the blasting spells!" list significantly without removing tactical considerations from the Sorcerer.

Then you basically do that for everything that people do in adventures. You can even just do Planar Binding by making it a call function to Request a Knight from the King and adding thirty to fifty words about the the flavor reskin.

The combinatoric power thing would work nicely with that function call setup, I think. Create a "Diabolist" list that gives you a "(But With Fiends Instead)" augmentation, and then if Request a Knight from the King mostly refers to minions in a general creature type/class/CR range, then Request a Knight from the King (But With Fiends Instead) can get you a bound marilith instead of a high-level paladin; if Harvest Magical Ores mostly refers to certain gold piece ranges and rarity categories, then Harvest Magical Ores (But With Fiends Instead) gets you Baatorian iron/Pandemonic silver/etc. ore instead of the normal adamantine/mithral/etc. ore.

Then your other theme lists combo in the same way. Angel Summoner gives you (But With Angels Instead) to bind angels and mine magical metals from the Upper Planes, Sneaky Dude gives you (But With Shadows Instead) to hire assassins and and mine magical metals from the Plane of Shadow, and so on. Obviously not every power would be combo-able with every augmentation, and not every list should hand out equivalent capabities, but trying to write base powers with at least one function pointer to something else that an augmentation can modify would made things nicely modular and highly expansible.

[MGuy]

We already have skills that are modified by things like "floor slippery" and "lie is believable". The idea that having explicit function calls that are just more fungible that do the same thing is impossible ignores the fact that games already do that. Calculating coefficients? What? No. You can let the gm decide if mayo or water being on the floor counts as 'creates slippery terrain' or 'creates advanced slippery floor' and we know that this works because, again, we do it already. You also don't litigate every possibility. That's the point in just having things that alter it. The planar call gets turned into hire assassin but still functions like planar call. That's not litigating every single possible creature type or whatever that's saying "whenever you're seeking out leveled help this is how it functions.

[OgreBattle]

Personal or Party resources being tracked for this?

Say with "Request a knight from the king", what's the mechanic that keeps that from being repeated every day or hour or so?

This kinda feels like MtG where green summons a tree spirit from a tree and white summons soldiers from farms living on the plains

[K]

Personal or Party resources being tracked for this?

Say with "Request a knight from the king", what's the mechanic that keeps that from being repeated every day or hour or so?

This kinda feels like MtG where green summons a tree spirit from a tree and white summons soldiers from farms living on the plains

Uuuuuuuh, like basic design skills.

I know that we are used to bad things in RPGs, but with a budget of over 500 words you can toss in a line like "does not work if you already have a hero on loan from the King." Seriously, writing limiting mechanics is not hard if you just look at your mechanic and say "how would I break this?"

[MGuy]

Also you can edit it when people find a way to break it that you don't predict.

[K]

The idea of referencing 1000 actions, that might in turn reference further actions, to get every fucking thing in the game done is a literal nightmare.

Have none of you seen people stall out trying to choose which spell to cast from their list of 20 prepared spells? That's two layer chunking they stall on, you're gunna ask people to do five layer decision trees to recall the right action to consider using for every possible thing in a fucking game?

Seriously, you should have 7 +- 2 actions you can take in each particular circumstance, and the GM declares the circumstances and players can turn to that page if unfamiliar and still choose actions as their turn comes up quickly enough and everyone's maximally happy.

Several points:

1. DnD is already of game of 1000s of potential actions. It's called the spell list, and it's broken up by level, class, and circumstances. There is no reason that the list I'm proposing can't be the same.

2. I've literally never seen a spellcaster stall out. People who play spellcasters like options, and people who are bad at options play fighters.

But that's a distraction.

The game always had limitless options, my friend. I've had many games where I asked to do several things not in the rules in a row and watched the game stall out. Sometimes it's feats of daring like lassoing a yeth hound so it can't fly away and then pulling it in so I can tie it to a tree, and sometimes it's opening a gate to a lava flow and filling a castle, but each and every time the game ground to a halt as the DM tried to figure out how the fuck he was going to rule on it.

And honesty, the game is poorer for the lack of rules. I've seen many a group be stifled creatively because trying cool shit was punished by their DM; he discouraged creative play because it was too much work by simply saying "the rules don't say you can do that, so I'm ruling you can't."

Make some fucking fun rules for fighting on ice flows. Make rules for freaking out goblins with scary stage plays. Make rules for infiltrating cursed fairy courts.

Make better rules, and you get better play.

[MGuy]

I'd actually like something similar for planning games. I imagine a GM's guide filled with tables and sidebars that help a GM generate content. I do not think most GMs and/or players want to switch over to playing a war/domain game halfway through play even though they'd likely be commanding armies and owning property at reasonable levels. Most people want adventure the game from levels 1 to 20 when that doesn't make sense given the power levels involved. A book dedicated to churning out large scale battle events and domain events leading to the creation of individual scenarios I think would find way more use out of DnD fans than balancing income sheets for their held territories.

[Dean]

1. DnD is already of game of 1000s of potential actions. It's called the spell list, and it's broken up by level, class, and circumstances. There is no reason that the list I'm proposing can't be the same.

One thing worth saying: In this framework the options cannot really be broken up by level. Not in any way that's meaningful within most concepts of "level". If every dramatic and interesting thing players might want to do has rules for it there's no versimilitudinous way to restrict things by "level". If an action is called "Throw in Eyes" or "Blind" where you throw something in an enemies eyes to blind them temporarily or permanently that's a great action to have. People have tried that many times in my D&D games and are sad there's no rules for it. It's definitely a good idea to have an entry that covers throwing pocket sand in someone's face, throwing a blinding agent in someones face, throwing beer in someone's face, and throwing a cloak over someone's face. Once the rule exists however there's no versimilitudinous way to make "acid in eyes" equal to "beer in eyes". They both need to be covered and one assumes they're covered by the same rule but one will be very powerful and one will be relatively weak but it's also totally unacceptable to tell me I need to be level 7 before I can throw battery acid if I happen to have some.

Obviously you can play a little footsie by saying people can only make acid at 7th level or whatever to get closer to things actually being level gated in a believable way but that's getting lost in the battery acid specific. I don't think a game with 1000 actions instead of spells can level gate most effects. Some could be level gated sure, you can say that "Create Demiplane" is an option only available to people at level 21+. But the majority of all options people would care about if you had them listed would all be things theoretically possible by a level 2 character so organizing things by level is mostly a non starter.

For my part I think that's mostly a good thing. I think the worst part of RPG's is when they get stuck in making sure all level 3 effects deal 3d6 damage to 3 targets or 9d6 damage to 1. That shit sucks and no one cares. People want abilities that create narrative effects not game mechanical effects. Balance isn't as important to people as versimilitude. Given the choice between 2E D&D and 4E D&D it's obvious which one you should replicate. One has terribly unbalanced options and is lots of fun and the other has lots of very well balanced options and is the worst thing ever made.

[Dean]

I've been writing under this concept since it was posted as an experiment and I'll say the first thing I notice is that it's starting to look like a system with only Skills rather than only Actions. It seems like the most sensible organizational system would be to have Calm Animal, Break Animal, Master Animal, and all the rules for breeding and raising super beasts in the same part of the book and that resembles a lengthy skill writeup more than an action writeup. Some things look more like attacks sure but by and large it seems like if you did this for an entire rule system you'd end up with something that read more like 1000 skills than 1000 actions.

After all what sense does it make to make "Fight on Ice Flow" as an action entry rather than a part of an entry either in the Balance skill or in an Icy Environments section. Likewise it seems sensible to make "Scare Goblins with Play" in a general Performance based section rather than sandwiched alphabetically between "Scar Psychologically" and "Scatter Enemy Army" in a grand action list.