Is there a way to have a super bar without chicken slaughter

[Surgo]

Okay, we've all seen the super bar. It's been in like every 2d fighting game made since 1996 outside of the Smash Bros. line. And at some point, we've all had the idea that characters in an RPG could fight a bit to build up their super bar and then unleash one of their supers, thus draining the bar. Or maybe it's something like Guilty Gear where a complex algorithm of actions builds up bar and a bunch of totally different options can drain it. Whatever.

But is there a way to do this without getting a bunch of chickens being slaughtered before an ambush? Because this sort of thing always seems to devolve into the chicken or rat slaughter.

[virgil]

Only have super bar apply to the person you made an attack against? On top of that, have non-super bar attacks so you can turn around and smack some people around without getting your bar reset against your chosen foe.

[Username17]

Sure. You could have a rage bar that filled while you were damaged, which would occasionally lead to people stabbing themselves before unleashing hell but usually not. You could give people a super bar that filled up for extra super moves against the target you were flipping out on. You could give a rage bar that filled up for super moves against that type of enemy.

As an example of that last one, imagine if while running through Diablo you got a super anti-demon move unlocked for killing a certain number of demons in a short time period. Or a bonus anti-undead move after scything down enough skeletons. In that setup you would only get anything you cared about by sacrificing chickens if you were actually hunting other beasts - and then it would be "OK" in light of the Voodoo nature of the magic system. I mean, even though it's basically bag-of-rats, I'm assuming no one has a problem with major villains tying up a bunch of little girls and cleaving through them in order to activate a major anti-humanoid move. Similarly, I don't think anyone really minds if people keep imps in jars to smash in order to enact greater banishments.

The bag of rats doesn't necessarily have to be absent from the game for things to be acceptable.

-Username17

[Surgo]

I guess I'm not being all that helpful because I'm not giving any parameters of what I want the super bar to do. But at the same time I'm not trying to make a concrete mechanic here, just theoretically hammer out the idea of the super bar.

Only have super bar apply to the person you made an attack against? On top of that, have non-super bar attacks so you can turn around and smack some people around without getting your bar reset against your chosen foe.

That works, yeah. But it's also kind of limiting. Like, it rules out area-of-effect supers. But it also leads to scenarios like where I'm Cable and I'm fighting Magneto, who has Psylocke back behind him somewhere. I've built up some super so tactically I want punch Magneto hard enough so he goes flying backwards and Psylocke comes rushing in, and then I'd hit her with my Hyper Viper Beam but not be able to do so because I only had that bar when I was fighting Magneto. I guess there's a parameter: "it would be cool to be able to do stuff like this".


I like the 'type' idea, Frank. I suppose you could even generalize it to "this group of people who are working together to kill you" without including stuff like the anthill you happened to kick in the combat at some point. And that's a pretty good point about keeping imps in jars. That leads to some interesting storytelling.

[Psychic Robot]

Imperfect rule #1: "You can't charge up your super bar by slaughtering things that don't pose a threat. This is up to GM discretion; GMs, please don't be douchebags."

Imperfect rule #2: "Your super bar charges up based on the challenge that an opponent poses to you. [Insert math here.]"

[Tsuzua]

One way you could do it is that charging the bar isn't caused by dealing damage but taking it. Healing (be it special or natural) would reduce the bar by an equal amount the damage gave. Thus PCs can stab each other silly for their super bar for an ambush, but they are at least paying for it. It might still be a good idea (if alpha striking prevents more damage than charging costs), but it's not an automatic decision. It's still a weird system since you might get people shooting themselves in the head for power.

Another one would be that there is an unique super bar for each opponent. Thus stabbing a chicken charges the bar only against that chicken. It means you're almost always going to focus fire on one guy and changing targets sucks.

[Ravengm]

Imperfect rule #1: "You can't charge up your super bar by slaughtering things that don't pose a threat. This is up to GM discretion; GMs, please don't be douchebags."

Imperfect rule #2: "Your super bar charges up based on the challenge that an opponent poses to you. [Insert math here.]"

I like the first one. Provided GMs aren't actually dicks.

[Surgo]

Sure. You could have a rage bar that filled while you were damaged, which would occasionally lead to people stabbing themselves before unleashing hell but usually not.

One way you could do it is that charging the bar isn't caused by dealing damage but taking it. Healing (be it special or natural) would reduce the bar by an equal amount the damage gave. Thus PCs can stab each other silly for their super bar for an ambush, but they are at least paying for it. It might still be a good idea (if alpha striking prevents more damage than charging costs), but it's not an automatic decision. It's still a weird system since you might get people shooting themselves in the head for power.

It's a good idea, but I think the sort of problem with this idea is that it leads to times where you -don't- want to punch your enemy because that final punch will push him to the point where his super bar is filled.

Maybe that's not really a problem and I'm overthinking matters, I don't know.

[virgil]

aka, you fight to a certain point, then you hold off on damaging him until your bar is large enough that you can one-shot him from that point?

[Surgo]

Yeah, and to prevent him from flipping out and pulling his super on you before you can finish him off with your own super. Kind of a stalemate in that regard. But I'm thinking that might not be a bad idea? You could have some pretty interesting combats with that sort of thing going on.

[violence in the media]

What if the magic of the setting required you to monologue at whoever you were going to unleash a super-move on? You could charge in secret, but, at worst, they would get 1 round of warning while you invoke the ritual language required. Make all super-moves single target so their use must be deliberate and obvious and you can't catch another target in the effect.

Just my random thoughts, but I thought it might be cool to try and incorporate some functional shit-talking into fights beyond typical use of Intimidate skills.

[Username17]

Limit Breaks in the system do encourage you to not use small attacks on enemies near damage thresholds. Vengeance bars that expire quickly actually encourage people to hold off on using large attacks at all until enemies are bloodied. Whether that's a problem depends upon what you're trying to get people to do.

But it also leads to scenarios like where I'm Cable and I'm fighting Magneto, who has Psylocke back behind him somewhere. I've built up some super so tactically I want punch Magneto hard enough so he goes flying backwards and Psylocke comes rushing in, and then I'd hit her with my Hyper Viper Beam but not be able to do so because I only had that bar when I was fighting Magneto. I guess there's a parameter: "it would be cool to be able to do stuff like this".

If you're doing anything based around the X-Men universe, Incarnum, Feng Shui or Tron, you actually have a built-in limiter in the setting that you can use. An actual enemy is a super mutant/charged with blue power/timewalker/user and that dog over there is not. So you can jolly well have a super bar that went up while you were slugging Dr. Octagon because he was charged with the setting phlebtonium and not when you slaughtered a bag of rats.

Then you can have beat-down activated area moves. You just have to have a setting with some sort of universal Incranum crap lying around to differentiate meaningful opposition from scenery extras.

-Username17

[Surgo]

I don't know about anyone else, but 'some people have phlebtonium' is a pretty generic solution that I'm 100% fine with.

[RandomCasualty2]

There's a few solutions.

DM arbitration: While it's hard to set up hard rules that prevent chicken slaughtering, it's relatively easy to use human common sense to figure out when the PCs are abusing it. So it's pretty easy to say "only apply this to real opponents and not some random helpless creature the PC uses to beat against the wall."

CR limit: Charging your power bar only happens when you attack something at 1 CR less than you or higher, and only when you haven't gotten XP for defeating it before. So if you bothered to capture some high CR creature, then you can't later lug it around to beat on for points, because you already got the XP for it.

[TarkisFlux]

CR limit seems like it would have issues with recurring villains...

[Heath Robinson]

Rule that the super bar applies to a finite collection of creatures that are currently known of in the combat. Such that extra enemies leaping into the fight reduce the super bars back to 0. Slaughtering a bunch of chickens would help you understand how to fight those chickens. That doesn't help you against the goblin you'll fight over there.

In universe justification - "magic is about manipulating patterns, introducing even a single extra person changes the pattern unpredictably". For your fighting men, it's all about reading enemy movements, and that changes when more people are introduced - they're an unknown quantity.

Yes, you get an advantage for waiting outside a combat and suddenly intruding on it unexpectedly (your bar doesn't reset, theirs does) and that should totally be a valid schtick.

'Course this kind of super bar doesn't go up with your attacks, it goes up over time and when the enemy does their fancy things.

[Tsuzua]

Another thing you can do to solve the chicken problem is to give counters to starting combat with highly charged super bars. Something like:

Super Bar Reverse:
If this is your first attack in this combat, you can use Super Bar Reverse. Super Bar Reverse does damage based off how charged up the target's super bar is and reduces it to 0.

It can be a power that everyone has or you can get. It's a pure and shameless hack for getting charge systems to work, so it's rather inelegant and likely cause problems elsewhere.

[MfA]

So you can jolly well have a super bar that went up while you were slugging Dr. Octagon because he was charged with the setting phlebtonium and not when you slaughtered a bag of rats.

So what if you tie up Dr. Octagon and carry him around in a bag?

[MfA]

CR limit: Charging your power bar only happens when you attack something at 1 CR less than you or higher, and only when you haven't gotten XP for defeating it before. So if you bothered to capture some high CR creature, then you can't later lug it around to beat on for points, because you already got the XP for it.

Might as well go whole hog and say you can only build Rage while in a challenging encounter ... this has the disadvantage of being completely impossible to explain fluff wise.

[Elennsar]

You're not stimulated to greater than normal effort because your regular abilities are more than sufficient to the task?

[Grek]

I like Frank's suggestion from post #3. Bag of rats is not a problem if you are killing a bag of rats to use your super attack on a giant rat. Likewise, offing a jar of imps sounds like a perfectly fine strategy for using your super move on a demon.

[JonSetanta]

We've had this discussion before no more than weeks ago, and even that was a repeat of yet more identical discussions.

Frank even quoted RAW on the matter of qualifying targets to build charge.
4e, I think.

[MfA]

Rule that the super bar applies to a finite collection of creatures that are currently known of in the combat. Such that extra enemies leaping into the fight reduce the super bars back to 0. Slaughtering a bunch of chickens would help you understand how to fight those chickens. That doesn't help you against the goblin you'll fight over there.

This is so extremely gameable, you can send in mooks before the fight while you wait, you can send in mooks during the fight of whose presence you were already aware ...

I'd simply remove the reset switch, a collection of creatures fighting each other creates Rage ... everyone in the area can use that Rage for super moves. With this you can chose between simply having ever escalating combat, where by the end everyone is only using super moves, or you can give everyone a separate counter which increases as they use super moves and subtract that from the encounter Rage to determine what moves they can use (both the encounter Rage in the area and the per character Rage counters would reset after 5 minute "rest").

[MfA]

You're not stimulated to greater than normal effort because your regular abilities are more than sufficient to the task?

So you use mind control powers to convince a party member he is wrestling a beholder while strangling chickens

[Username17]

So you can jolly well have a super bar that went up while you were slugging Dr. Octagon because he was charged with the setting phlebtonium and not when you slaughtered a bag of rats.

So what if you tie up Dr. Octagon and carry him around in a bag?

Kind of like this:



You'd have to have a setting where it "made sense" that you could tie Rogue up to a machine and use her to power it. But if you did, that would be something that people would do sometimes.

Bonus points if someone breaks Dr. Octagon out of the bag during the fight and he blasts you off a cliff.

-Username17