The Gaming Den

So lately there has been a number of discussions about how the 4e design team have a bunch of ideas that simply do not and cannot be made to harmonize. And a lot of them are just stupid, things like "people should use this ability every episode because it's their signature ability" vs. "people shouldn't use this ability every episode because powerful abilities should be used sparingly." Obviously they should just grow a pair and choose one of those. But there are actually design goals that are rational to have, which nevertheless are contradictory. People have no problem believing or wanting contradictory things, and so it is that simply putting a target somewhere along a direct slider between two goals likely fails to meet one or both.

The goal then is to find a completely orthogonal change that allows us to have the results closely approximate both goals simultaneously.

Conflict: Time Between Turns

No one likes bing told that their character won't have anything to do for 15 minutes, it makes people lose give-a-shit with the game. On the flip side, people want some fucking descriptive text in their actions. With just 3 minutes per player's turn (the length of an average commercial break), just five players acting between your last and next turn (including the gamemaster) brings you up to yes, 15 minutes. Tell people that they get to or have to make their turns shorter and they feel detached. But if you don't, it's a long time between their actions and they feel detached. Truly it's a lose-lose situation.

Even after making obvious concessions like providing grossly simplified decision matrices for conjured assistants and members of Team Monster, the simple fact is that if each person takes a decently long turn of cooperative storytelling, then it'll be a long time before each person's turn for storytelling comes up again.

Orthogonal Idea: Interrupt actions like Attacks of Opportunity and Saving Throws can be remarkably effective as far as that goes. That is, even if people get a lot of "face time" during their actual turns, if players get to perform minor actions and roll a die at various points between their turns, the total amount of time between player turns can be kept relatively low. Saving Throws can be expanded into Soak Rolls or Defense Rolls so that players get to roll dice every time they are attacked, and interrupt actions can be expanded to covering fire so that players who stay in the back and get protected by the plate wearers up front still get to roll dice.

Conflict: Signature Super Moves

A move is your signature move because you use it. A move is super because you used something else before that move. If you let people use them all the time, then players will. If you don't let people use them, it's like they don't have them.

Recharge time basically just makes players use their abilities in a consistent rhythm, which in turn is as boring as watching someone play World of Warcraft. Adventure charges make players horde abilities so dearly that they essentially don't have them.

Orthogonal Idea: A WoF system can make signature moves come out at various plausible statistical frequencies. And since they come online at random times, they won't always come out in the same order, solving the "five moves of doom" problem that the 4e Encounter power creates.

The WoF can be married to Encounter Poweresque charge casting and actually generate people questioning whether to use a super power right now or not. Because the question "do I use super move X or wait for super move Y to be available and use that instead" is way more tactically deep than "do I use super move X this turn or next turn?"

Conflict: Timely Expressive Character Development

Most people will tell you that broadly speaking creating a character that is unique is good. There are limits of course, in that "laser toting star patrolman" is probably not a valid character concept for a fantasy heartbreaker, but in general people want moar options. But they also want chargen to be over in a reasonable length of time. Noone likes the "character generation" session. That's bullshit!

Orthogonal Idea: Choices can be cordoned off from one another and made independently. Making a choice from 100 possibilities is going to take a long time. But making a choice from 10 can be done in a short time. If you make two independent choices from 10 each time, you will have in total generated 100 distinct possibilities. But not only did you only have to write up 20 real choices, but the player was able to make that decision in a shorter amount of time. Column A and Column B really can cover both the need for speed and the need for options.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:With just 3 minutes per player's turn (the length of an average commercial break), just five players acting between your last and next turn (including the gamemaster) brings you up to yes, 15 minutes. Tell people that they get to or have to make their turns shorter and they feel detached. But if you don't, it's a long time between their actions and they feel detached. Truly it's a lose-lose situation.

Just three minutes? That seems too long to me. I mean, aside from some multiple target or overly complicated effects, it doesn't take that long to resolve someone's turn in 3.X's low level situations. Shouldn't it be possible to have a system where each turn is tactically interesting and doesn't take long to resolve?

FrankTrollman wrote:The WoF can be married to Encounter Poweresque charge casting and actually generate people questioning whether to use a super power right now or not. Because the question "do I use super move X or wait for super move Y to be available and use that instead" is way more tactically deep than "do I use super move X this turn or next turn?"

Let me see if I have this right. Say a person's WoF looks like:

1. Punch
2. Kick
3. Throw
4. Fireball
5. Hurricane Kick
6. Rising Dragon Fist

But then they also have an x/encounter number of charges to spend. And using one upgrades a move to a super version of that move, like...

1. Punch -> Super Karate Punch (Armor Piercing)
2. Kick -> High Side Kick (Difficult to Block)
3. Throw -> Tomonage (Throws farther)
4. Fireball -> Shinku Hadoken (AE: Beam)
5. Whirlwind Kick -> Vacuum Tornado Whirlwind Kick (Pulls enemies into it)
6. Rising Dragon Fist -> True Rising Dragon Fist (stronger, higher, and on fire)

Is that about right?

FrankTrollman wrote: Orthogonal Idea: Choices can be cordoned off from one another and made independently. Making a choice from 100 possibilities is going to take a long time. But making a choice from 10 can be done in a short time. If you make two independent choices from 10 each time, you will have in total generated 100 distinct possibilities. But not only did you only have to write up 20 real choices, but the player was able to make that decision in a shorter amount of time. Column A and Column B really can cover both the need for speed and the need for options.

I'm guessing that this relates to your concept of assumed/enforced dual-classing. However, when speaking of character creation, any two choices will impact the character as a whole, so one must consider both before choosing either. So although it does save write-up effort and page space, it isn't actually speeding up character creation, as far as I am reading this; that is, unless you had something specific in mind.

If you reduce the number of qualities that a person has to pick out RIGHT NOW in order to establish their character to a number that you can count off your hands, you reduce drastically the amount of chargen time. For instance, the best example would be between 3e and 4e. I will not champion 4e as an example of good character generation systems (it isn't) but there is an observable difference in the time cost between "pick 24 or so skill points which can go up to 4 amongst all these skills, and you should probably put points into this one skill to make sure it is high" and "pick 5 skills and get this one for free."

As much interrupts do allow for players to have something to do when it's not their turn, and thus allow for longer turn times, interrupts are a big problem with high level 4e play (not the only problem, by any means).

I'm not talking opportunity attacks...they can be annoying at times, but they're pretty fixed into the system, and are at least a little predictable.

The powers, on the other hand, are a bit much. Every class has one or two at this level, meaning every round one of the guys on Team Monster is nailed by an interrupt.

Almost all the interrupts are of the form "monster attack negated", which gets to be a real drag when you consider how hard it is to even get a character vulnerable. I don't blame the players for always cancelling the most important attack; but it's always "I'll stop it, or do you want to do it"...very difficult to wade through, and imagine how ticked off the players would get if every important was countered by a monster interrupt.

The preponderance of such abilities also really adds to the combat round, because these 'mid move' shots mean you've got to recalculate all the modifiers on the fly, unlike during a player move, where the player usually determines where his modifiers are best, and moves accordingly.

Anyway, interrupts needs more restrictions (more situational than "a monster hits", or harder to generate an effect) otherwise they get overwhelming fast, and there really needs to be more interrupt-y things to do, at least in 4e.

The biggest problem with interrupts, in my experience, is people remembering to use them. Sure, you can throw out the standard "if you forgot, you missed your chance" solution, but people are still going to complain anyway. I definitely agree that interrupts are a good way to keep people engaged, though, to the point where everyone ought to have something they can do even when it's not their turn.

Maybe you can fix the former problem by making it very clear that interrupts are a big part of the game; not everyone immediately realizes their prevalence in 4e, for example.

Addendum: We've established that WoF tends to create more interesting gameplay--what are some good ways to build WoF mechanics into your fluff? Even if it doesn't seem important from a design perspective, it's not an idea that will be popular with most gamers unless you can give some concrete suggestions. It seems like you'd have to build your entire game world around the fact that WoF mechanics govern character abilities.

Yeah, that's the other thing.

Monter hits, move on to the next monster.

Monster moves, monster swings...

"Wait, I want to interrupt that first attack."

Can someone explain me what is WoF?

The best way to deal with that is to explain rounds in potential actions, rather than results.

But that's more a DM style thing, but a game book can teach a different style of play.

Which I think would be important to implementing WoF, for instance. To describe it not as a limit but instead, 'Roll your Fate roll to see what opening/advantage your character has this round.' Describe things as an action movie, rather than a board game.

-Crissa

There is no reason why WoF should act as a kludgy sim for actual tactical vulnerability.

As a system, WoF is easy to write but ultimately its sloppy and lazy.

xechnao wrote:Can someone explain me what is WoF?

"Winds of Fate". You roll a die to see what attack is available to you each round (or some such).

"WoF" stands for "Winds of Fate". Basically, you roll dice to determine which moves are available each turn. This is designed to keep players engaged by preventing them from spamming the same attack round after round.

Or, alternately, all moves are always available, but some of them are randomly chosen each round to be incentivized, ideally creating interesting tactical choices.

Archmage wrote:Or, alternately, all moves are always available, but some of them are randomly chosen each round to be incentivized, ideally creating interesting tactical choices.

The stumbling block with this method of WoF is that you have to make it so that the moves the RNG incentivizes is always superior to the other moves.

Otherwise you'll get a 4E situation where someone spams the same move because they have Echoes of Thunder + Resound Thunding + Mark of Storm + Elemental Admixture attached to their At-Will, defeating the purpose of the system.

The problem there, Lago, is that the 4e stack-o-feats-n-powers on the At-Will has made it transcend it's At-Will status into something more awesome. Supermove incentivizing isn't not a stumbling block at all as long as you realize that a base move is only supposed to do something basic, and the neato KABLAMMO stuff is solely the arena of the special.

Prevent that stacking by making the addons only relevant (or by degrees more relevant) to supermoves, or hardcap the base moves somehow and the problem goes away.

mean_liar wrote:There is no reason why WoF should act as a kludgy sim for actual tactical vulnerability.

Metagame is better than simulation?

-Crissa

Depending on how long you want combat to be, every move should be a super move. Take Frank's example of the problem of boredom while waiting for your turn. Three minutes might be a bit of an overestimate when dealing with basic attacks, but say a turn only takes 2 minutes. Then you're spending 8 minutes a round for four players, plus at least another 2 for the DM. A three round combat takes at least half an hour.

With time at that kind of premium, does it really make sense to be slugging things out with intentionally boring moves for any of the time?

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Depending on how long you want combat to be, every move should be a super move. Take Frank's example of the problem of boredom while waiting for your turn. Three minutes might be a bit of an overestimate when dealing with basic attacks, but say a turn only takes 2 minutes. Then you're spending 8 minutes a round for four players, plus at least another 2 for the DM. A three round combat takes at least half an hour.

With time at that kind of premium, does it really make sense to be slugging things out with intentionally boring moves for any of the time?

If every move is a super move, then super moves will no longer be so super.

Zinegata wrote:If every move is a super move, then super moves will no longer be so super.

OH MY GOD!!!



If you can use a different 'no longer super move' every round, and they all have neat effects rather than Reflex vs. 3[W] damage, I'll be OK with the loss of speshul.

And when everyone is super...

If the game's fun, the desire to feel like a special snowflake can go to hell for all I care.

TheWorid wrote:

And when everyone is super...

Exactly.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Zinegata wrote:If every move is a super move, then super moves will no longer be so super.

OH MY GOD!!!



If you can use a different 'no longer super move' every round, and they all have neat effects rather than Reflex vs. 3[W] damage, I'll be OK with the loss of speshul.

Different, meaningful options every round are fine.

Did anyone here play Lost Worlds? It is an old fighting book game. Each turn you choose a maneuver and your opponent chooses a maneuver and you flip back and forth to see how that worked out for each character and read out the restrictions each character is under. If your weapon has downward momentum you might not be able to use any Red maneuvers, if you are off balance you might not be able to use any Yellow and so on.

That's a pretty elegant and cool combat system. But mass combat basically doesn't work at all. And I sincerely doubt that any tabletop roleplaying game is going to have the desire to fit the kind of granularity and attack/defense comparison for four PCs and 6 monsters in order to get that kind of "reasonable" restrictions on what powers a character can invoke on each enemy. Better to simply generate the limits and let players storytell for why it is that they do or do not have an opening for a trip attack at any particular moment.

-Username17