Brainstorming an Everything's At-Will Tactical System

[CCarter]

You can break up five moves of doom, if necessary, by having the tactical situation available depend on your current hit points, for instance, and dramatically limit healing so that the total hit points of any given side will trend downward. So when you're at full health, you have different moves available than when you're at 50%, and at each you have different moves available depending on your enemy's hit points.

Tactical feasibility of certain moves may very well alter, without much design input even. A partially disabling move early in a fight that affects an opponent for the whole fight (a disarm say, that reduces damage output) might be a good move early in a fight since it'll bring down their damage output for several rounds, and basically becomes pointless in the closing rounds when it'd make a difference on only a couple of hits.

[hyzmarca]

But I think you get that's not what I meant. I should rephrase it to "scripts should be non-trivial / non-obvious" or "we're gonna use hidden information to make scripting more than a turn in advance usually non-optimal" or something.

Combat scripts are never going to be non-trival/non-obvious. combat system. There is always going to be an optimal move. SWAT Teams are going to clear a building the same way every single time because some tactics just work best in most situations.

Scripting in advance is also going to work most of the time, even in the absence of accurate information, because some scripts are near universal. Your room-clearing team is always going to move in stacked positions and is always going to open by throwing a grenade through the door. Because this works.

There is no way to avoid default scripts so long as the players know what their characters can do. Winds of Fate solves this by randomizing the player's abilities. That works to prevent scripting in advance because the players don't know what they're capable of until the roll comes up. It still doesn't change the fact that there are optimal scripts. It just moves the point at which the players decide which script to use closer to the action.

Chess and Go are complex because of their simplicity. Knights don't have five different attack feats. Bishops don't throw fireballs or teleport. And no one can survive a single attack. If you want a really complex tactical system then you need to strip down power sets, normalize HP, open up the field, give your PCs followers/allies that they control, and make the game about maneuvering.