How does your heartbreaker deal with noncombat challenges?

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Mar 13, 2020 2:58 am

The part of combat where you roll some dice and hit points go down and such isn't what makes it interesting, it's just the medium. The interesting part is where you have to make tactical decisions: move over there to put down a lightning bolt even though it puts you within walking distance of the giant land squid, or stay here and use a fireball even though it'll incinerate a party member?

How does a lock flank you, or inflict status effects on you that affect you next round? Are there tactical options for the DM to pick from when they take the lock's turn?

The Adventurer's Almanac · Fri Mar 13, 2020 3:10 am

I know in EYE: Divine Cybermancy, when you hack something, if you fuck up then it'll hack you and fry your brain, giving you a range of bad effects and possibly straight up killing you. So it is plausible within certain settings, but it's important to remember that the hacking minigame in that was weird and fucked up, so you shouldn't take anything else away from it other than "in the future, door hacks YOU".

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Mar 13, 2020 6:56 am

ETortoise wrote:This is cool. You could either do it as having sneaky points you spend to get through things, or have noise points that count up to a threshold. Do you think there’s any reason to do it one way instead of the other?

If you have sneaky points that you spend, it's more literally like Blackjack and the players can make more informed decisions. If you acquire noise points, then that creates the possibility of unknown or variable thresholds.

-Username17

The Adventurer's Almanac · Fri Mar 13, 2020 2:46 pm

So if I have a stealth system that already involves adding points via stealth actions to a Perception Score until it surpasses your Stealth Score, I could make it more player focused by looking at it the other way and swapping the positive and negative values?

Unity · Post by **Unity** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 9:11 am

What does "heartbreaker" even mean? It sounds terrible, yet every other person seems to be working on one (or more).

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 9:57 am

Unity wrote:What does "heartbreaker" even mean? It sounds terrible, yet every other person seems to be working on one (or more).

A self published game with a ton of heart put into it but nobody is ever gonna play it.

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 6:58 pm

A heartbreaker is your own little system, of which you expect great things (do things better than ALL these other systems), but which will break your heart when it is just as bad or good as those other systems.
And no matter how much you try, it will never reach that pinnacle of greatness that you imagined for it at the beginning.

GnomeWorks · Post by **GnomeWorks** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 8:15 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:The part of combat where you roll some dice and hit points go down and such isn't what makes it interesting, it's just the medium. The interesting part is where you have to make tactical decisions:

I think that for that kind of thing, you have to look more at the context. These things take time, so it's more about the opportunity cost of the time spent: do we take the 10 minutes to pick the lock, or move on?

In order to do that, though, you have to have a sensible timekeeping system outside of combat. So just like we have combat turns, we need "dungeon turns" and "wilderness turns" and "town turns," and such, and preferably with less-dumb names.

I also think that part of the problem with "how do you make lockpicking engaging" is that we're looking at the scope wrong. Rather than the lock being the encounter, the dungeon is the encounter, and the locked door is an "attack" the dungeon makes against the party. This kind of approach requires a bunch of (possibly weird) abstraction though.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 9:09 pm

A reminder: there are actually a lot of interesting turn-based board games with strategic decisions in them and such, D&D's tactical combat system is far from the only one.

Emerald · Post by **Emerald** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 9:19 pm

Unity wrote:What does "heartbreaker" even mean? It sounds terrible, yet every other person seems to be working on one (or more).

For reference, the term "fantasy heartbreaker" originally comes from this article and the followup here, though it's been expanded/diluted since then.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Mar 17, 2020 6:50 am

What was that franktrollman list of mechanics and games they corresponded to?

Blackjack was the mechanic for increasing risk towards the goal

Car chase is where you do increasingly more risky stunts to escape

Putting out fires is... you have X amount of problems to solve but can only deal with one at a time so running back and forth

There were more, I want to say there were 6 or so