Filling a WoF Wheel

[Ganbare Gincun]

Not very well. For the Supers version, there is an actual class whose name is "Controller." But even in the context of Fantasy, there are guys out there who have a sword who want to attack every round. There are druids with vine growth powers who are there to shift terrain every round. So I could see something more like this:

Roll:	Tide of Battle Favors:	Example:
1	Turtling	Defensive Strike
2	Positioning	Bullrush
3	Harrying	Spring Attack
4	Grinding	Full Attack
5	Assault	Heedless Charge

-Username17

Yes, that works out much better then my original suggestion. But what kind of additional powers would be considered to be "Grinding"? What distinguishes Grinding powers from Assault ones?

[Username17]

Yes, that works out much better then my original suggestion. But what kind of additional powers would be considered to be "Grinding"? What distinguishes Grinding powers from Assault ones?

My thought was that grinding implies holding position, assault involves advancing position, harrying involves flanking, and positioning involves taking actions to change the positional advantage.

So to me, the ones that are most similar are Grinding and Turtling, since both involve staying pretty much where you are; and positioning to harrying and assault, since positioning is not clearly defined even in my own mind. Of those, Grinding and Turtling seem well differentiated (offense versus defense), and Harry and Assault are well differentiated from each other (around versus through). But Positioning is just not well differentiated or defined, and should probably be reformed or replaced.

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

My thought was that grinding implies holding position, assault involves advancing position, harrying involves flanking, and positioning involves taking actions to change the positional advantage.

So to me, the ones that are most similar are Grinding and Turtling, since both involve staying pretty much where you are; and positioning to harrying and assault, since positioning is not clearly defined even in my own mind. Of those, Grinding and Turtling seem well differentiated (offense versus defense), and Harry and Assault are well differentiated from each other (around versus through). But Positioning is just not well differentiated or defined, and should probably be reformed or replaced.

I'm not sure offhand what could replace Positioning on the WoF. But just to clarify: where would buffing, debuffing, healing, and crowd control powers fit in the above categories? I'm assuming buffs and healing would be placed in the Turtling, but where would debuffs and crowd control fit on the WoF wheel?

[Blicero]

I'm not sure offhand what could replace Positioning on the WoF. But just to clarify: where would buffing, debuffing, healing, and crowd control powers fit in the above categories? I'm assuming buffs and healing would be placed in the Turtling, but where would debuffs and crowd control fit on the WoF wheel?

I am clearly not Frank, but I could see debuffs as Positioning (because you're altering the conditions in which you fight, which is sorta like moving someone). Crowd Control could be...harrying(?), because you're affecting the battle but not necessarily killing a lotta creatures?

[Parthenon]

Um, thats like the complete opposite of what it should be.

Crowd control affects positioning- pushing, blocking and slowing affects movement and position. e.g: Crowd Control = Positioning.

Whereas debuffs harass the opponent, reducing their effectiveness and annoying them. e.g. Debuffs = Harrying.

---

I'd suggest getting rid of Grinding and instead adding Supporting. So things like healing, buffing and flanking. It still slightly overlaps with others- this time with positioning rather than turtling, but it is obviously extremely different.

Possibly something like:
Turtling: Ally defence buffs, Cancelling enemy attacks
Positioning: Crowd control, Ally movement
Harrying: Debuffs, Damage over time, Marks (e.g. taunts, if you can get them to work)
Supporting: Buffs, Healing, Aiding other's attacks
Assault: Extra damage, Multiple target attacks

[Username17]

Just like "attacking" can appear whether you are trying to hold your ground, skirmish, or take territory, "debuffing" or "battlefield control" could as well. If you were a Wizard with Water-based control aspects, you could assault the enemy position by turning the ground beneath them to liquid or protect your own position by putting up a wall of water. If you were a Necromancer with curses, you could throw down a defensive curse that penalized enemy attacks or an offensive curse that penalized enemy defenses or a skirmishing curse that penalized enemy movement.

Debuff and Control are things people can do on every WoF result.

-Username17

[Blasted]

Debuff and Control are things people can do on every WoF result.

so would this give an advantage to characters build around debuff and control?

[Ganbare Gincun]

Debuff and Control are things people can do on every WoF result.

so would this give an advantage to characters build around debuff and control?

If I'm understanding Frank's assertions, characters that are built around debuff and control will have those kinds of options available on every Tide Of Battle result. The question of which powers are on which WoF roll is determined by the purpose of the power (assault, harrying) as opposed to the type of power (crowd control, DPS). The big question right now seems to be "what can we do to reform/replace Positioning on the WoF", at which point we could probably move onto creating a sample WoF that has a variety of various power types with different purposes.

[Ganbare Gincun]

But Positioning is just not well differentiated or defined, and should probably be reformed or replaced.

If you plan on using the WoF for non-fantasy games, you could fold Movement abilities into Defensive or Assault and have a Suppressive category replace Positioning. Or just change the name from Positioning to Maneuvering to stress the tactical (and sometimes opportunistic) nature of movement abilities? Or perhaps eliminate Positioning altogether and replace it with some kind of "Utility" category that covers actions taken in combat that are not inherently offensive or defensive in nature (i.e. dimension door, true seeing, disguise self)? What are your thoughts on this matter?

[Username17]

'Tactical' sounds pretty decent. It could have different meanings for different classes while still retaining a clear meaning across the table.

So:

1. Defensive
2. Tactical
3. Direct
4. Harrying
5. Assault

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

'Tactical' sounds pretty decent. It could have different meanings for different classes while still retaining a clear meaning across the table.

So:

1. Defensive
2. Tactical
3. Direct
4. Harrying
5. Assault

-Username17

Two questions:

1) Any objection to changing "Direct" to "Offensive"?
2) What is the first class that you want to give the full WoF treatment to?

[Username17]

Unlike Defensive, I feel that Offensive is overly vague. It's tautological. "What kind of attack are you using?" "The offense related kind." Not helpful. A defensive attack has meaning, but an offensive attack is just an attack.

As for first class? I think the ones to do would be the ones that are simple to describe: either Rogue (KFRP) or Blaster (Fantastic!).

-Username17

[Crissa]

Direct, Indirect, all-out, fold, pass.

-Crissa

[Ganbare Gincun]

As for first class? I think the ones to do would be the ones that are simple to describe: either Rogue (KFRP) or Blaster (Fantastic!).

So what would be the base "options" available to the Rogue? And how many options should be made available to beginning characters of all stripes?

[Ganbare Gincun]

I don't think that I have a really good "feel" for the Rogue and the Blaster, so I went ahead and put together some WoF options for the Psion.

Roll:	Tide of Battle Favors:	Telekinetic 1	Telekinetic 2	Pyrokinetic 1	Pyrokinetic 2	Telepathic 1	Telepathic 2
1	Defensive	Inertial Armor	Kinetic Barrier	Self-Ignition	Wall Of Fire	Aversion	Empathic Feedback
2	Tactical	Flight	Touchsense	Control Flame	Fire Walk	Cloud Mind	Read Thoughts
3	Direct	Concussive Blast	Throw	Plasma Bolt	Scorching Wave	Death Urge	Psychic Crush
4	Harrying	Levitation	Anchor	Blinding Flare	Immolation	Psionic Blast	Suggestion
5	Assault	Kinetic Charge	Shockwave	Burning Charge	Conflagration	Dominate	Id Insinuation

I believe that the function of most of these powers can be deduced from their text, but I can elaborate on them as necessary. But my main question is: does this look like a viable WoF table?

[Purple]

I get and understand the idea behind the Winds of Fate. To keep things interesting and make sure that people aren't always using the same bland attacks over and over. I can get behind that as a viable goal.

But I can't get behind having whatever number comes up on the roll determining what have to be your tactics for that round. That's a really stupid idea. If you want to do Winds of Fate then you need to have an assortment of varied abilities each round to use. Not just six different ways of 'defense' or 'assault'. All you're doing is taking away the ability to choose whether to defend or assault on any given turn. So if, for example, the enemy is fleeing and you want to pursue him, you'd better hope that turtling doesn't come up, since your character will be forced to sit around twiddling his thumbs.

[Crissa]

No, Purple, the WoF moves are specials, not standard moves.

You still get to opt to give chase or do normal level moves.

-Crissa

[Username17]

I get and understand the idea behind the Winds of Fate. To keep things interesting and make sure that people aren't always using the same bland attacks over and over. I can get behind that as a viable goal.

But I can't get behind having whatever number comes up on the roll determining what have to be your tactics for that round. That's a really stupid idea. If you want to do Winds of Fate then you need to have an assortment of varied abilities each round to use. Not just six different ways of 'defense' or 'assault'. All you're doing is taking away the ability to choose whether to defend or assault on any given turn. So if, for example, the enemy is fleeing and you want to pursue him, you'd better hope that turtling doesn't come up, since your character will be forced to sit around twiddling his thumbs.

Whatever list of abilities you have each round is going to dictate your available tactics for that round. If your choices are Cone of Cold or Wall of Fire, you are going to want to move yourself to a point orthogonal to an imaginary line through a group of enemies. If your choices are Lightning Bolt or Force Lance, you're going to want to arrange yourself to be in that same imaginary line to maximize your effect.

The idea behind grouping the powers on the WoF numbers in rough positional themes is simply to make the related tactical choices more memorable - thereby speeding up play. After all, if your allies know that you're probably going to be on that orthogonal line come next turn because you rolled a 3, their choice of how to use their own bull rushes and such will be much easier than if you have to explain what kinds of enemy formations are most beneficial for whatever number you happened to roll newly each time.

No matter what, there is going to be some sort of tactical imperative based on what your available options are each turn. Still, it would be nice to be able to tell the party Druid "I rolled a 3" and have him say "I'm on it." and proceed to use his wind blasts to set something up for you rather than have him ask what that means and what he can do to help.

-Username17

[Purple]

Simplicity definitely counts for a lot, and having a given number on the Winds of Fate roll refer to a particular tactic would definitely speed things up when planning out tactics for the entire party. My only concern is when parties get screwed by the RNG and get options that aren't really useful for the situation. I understand that you'll have your regular abilities, like 4E's 'basic attack' or whatever, but the whole point of this is to make sure that people constantly have interesting and powerful level-appropriate stuff to do.

There are a few common problems I could see happening:

• One player constantly has bad luck and gets inappropriate choices, causing resentment.

• The party has bad luck and gets tactics that don't synergize well together or just aren't useful for a given fight.

• Parties planning out strategies based on given Winds of Fate rolls and simply waiting until a particular result comes up, which is pretty much the opposite of what you're going for here.

There are a few things you could do to help alleviate people getting screwed over by the system. Obviously you don't want to let people move abilities around on the wheel, since that would just lead to people coming up with optimized combinations and ignoring everything else. I think the best way to manage it might be to give people metacombat abilities based on their class, race or whatever that can help manipulate Winds of Fate rolls in their favor. Like, for example, the barbarian has a rage-type stance that says, "while in a rage your Winds of Fate rolls all move one step towards aggressiveness (+1)" to emphasize the tactics the barbarian would most commonly be using and make it more likely to get abilities that are useful to him while in a rage.

Just a thought, but I could see serious problems coming from only having level-appropriate actions which suit a single tactic each round, especially when that tactic is determined randomly.

[Username17]

The die rolls can fuck you. Not as badly as outright missing with an attack can, but yes it can fuck you. I honestly would rather be told ahead of time that I wasn't going to be able land a firelance next round so that I could at least abort to something productive like moving to a better position or quaffing a healing potion than waiting for my turn to come up and get my 1 then.

-Username17

[Lich-Loved]

Sorry for the thread necromancy but I believe this question is best asked here.

I have a question regarding filling out a WoF, narrow classes and a discussion we had some time ago on exception based design. First though, a statement of what I think has been said in the past:

It is my understanding that it is generally better to have narrowly defined classes rather than very broad classes both to aid in character creation and to ensure there are more archetypes available than there are players so players see a variety in class selection. I also believe we also discussed that one failure of exception based design was that it led to creation of n different fireball-like effects that were all subtly different from one another for no good reason.

If both of these things are true, isn't therefore necessary to create a metric assload of powers up front and balance these against one another (or at least rank them so they appear on the WoF in the right "columns" at the right time) before assigning them to classes? Looking at it another way, if we use a class-first approach, we might find ourselves defining some ability X that works great for the current class Y, but later find out that new class Z needs a very X-like power that is not really X, and thus we are forced to change X to avoid exception based issues.

Is this right?

[Username17]

It is my understanding that it is generally better to have narrowly defined classes rather than very broad classes both to aid in character creation and to ensure there are more archetypes available than there are players so players see a variety in class selection.

The question of Narrow vs. Broad classes is by no means settled and there are multiple peaks to be had. It's mostly a question of information transmission rather than one of game functionality. It doesn't really make any difference whether a character is "Rogue with the Assassin build option" or an "Assassin." Either way, they have whatever the Assassin abilities the game hands out.

Whatever arbitrary groupings you assign the various possible characters into, you're doing it so that players can contextualize their options and communicate to the other players what their character can do. Depending on how many radically different character options you have, you'll want to fork over more subdivisions or less. You might want to divide them into power sources or class kits, for example.

I also believe we also discussed that one failure of exception based design was that it led to creation of n different fireball-like effects that were all subtly different from one another for no good reason.

That is a problem of Exception Based Design. But you can combat it with copypasta.

If both of these things are true, isn't therefore necessary to create a metric assload of powers up front and balance these against one another (or at least rank them so they appear on the WoF in the right "columns" at the right time) before assigning them to classes? Looking at it another way, if we use a class-first approach, we might find ourselves defining some ability X that works great for the current class Y, but later find out that new class Z needs a very X-like power that is not really X, and thus we are forced to change X to avoid exception based issues.

Is this right?

Balance only means anything in the context of players vs. challenges. So the game design order is:

• Declare a single character's abilities abilities from chargen to however far the game goes.
• line fit some monsters to whatever the character does at each level.
• make enough new characters based on those monsters to make a party.
• work out a paradigm based on that party and the monsters they face.
• Use your paradigm to procedurally generate a fuck tonne of character options and enemies.
• jiggle things around so the fit a bit better - note that it is very likely that you will now be rewriting your originally declared class and monsters to fit your paradigm.

-Username17

[Lich-Loved]

Lucid and extremely useful information; this is exactly the kind of advice I was looking for.

Many thanks.

[Ice9]

Why not just turn the WoF chart "diagonally" so that instead of each number giving powers that favor one tactic, each number gives powers spread across all the tactics?

So taking Ganbare's example chart above, a roll of '1' would give you:
Defensive: Inertial Armor, Empathic Feedback
Tactical: Touchsense
Direct: Plasma Bolt
Harrying: Immolation
Assault: Dominate

And a roll of '2' would give you:
Defensive: Aversion
Tactical: Flight, Read Thoughts
Direct: Throw
Harrying: Blinding Flare
Assault: Conflagration

(You wouldn't actually read the chart diagonally, the powers would be arranged this way when you got them).


Same number of choices, same number of powers required to fill the grid, same distribution of powers by classes / paths. But now you actually get to pick your strategy instead of doing what the dice tell you to do.

Or hell, let people (optionally, if they want to) arrange their own WoF chart. I fail to see what the problem would be there, assuming that the powers were balanced.

[Username17]

WoF results are not themed for balance reasons, they are themed so that other players can make tactical choices based on your WoF results. A player or an NPC rolls a 3, and then the other characters can make tactical choices based on that fact without having to read the whole damn chart and slow down the game.

In short: it's not for you that your WoF are tactically themed on individual numbers, it's for everyone else.

-Username17