Weird Targeting Brainstorming

[virgil]

So, I'm doing some brainstorming for a system, and I was looking at this:

Well, we have a system where you predeclare your moves in secret and we have a system where you move around on a 2 dimensional grid and your powers have a completely arbitrary targeting reticule. How arbitrary? Imagine that this is your area of effect for Vine Whip (B is for Bulbasaur):

Code: Select all

 X 
B XX
 X

That is how arbitrary I am talking. Like actual chess pieces, except hundreds of them, so they are weird as fuck. Let's throw another one out there, a simple Fire Spin (V is for Vulpix):

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 XXX
X   X  
X V X
X   X
 XXX

And here's a Shadow Ball (S is for Sableye):

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  X X 
SX X
  X X

And it's not just areas of effect that look crazy like that. Even single target effects should look like the threatened area of a Shogi piece.

The idea seems cool. However, there's the issue of feasibility. If you declare your action in secret, then move and reveal, it's just plain easier to have your moves be on cards. This goes double for seeing if your move covers the right area - opening the book to page XX and rotating it around to visually check that you're hitting the right squares. I just don't see how you couldn't process the moves without having a set of cards that show what squares they have. An additional issue was brought up by my wife - weird targeting patterns can be difficult to process for many people even when you have them displayed on a card. Unless you have a clear sheet with a 1:1 scale pattern to hold over the board, there will be people who just plain can't process it. The games I know of that even come close, including Disgaea 3, get away with it through having a computer to highlight the squares.

One could standardize the areas, but that essentially brings us back to 'vanilla' effects as we've seen in 3E - lines, radius attacks, cones, threatened spaces, etc. Is this complexity desirable, accepting the loss of a non-zero number of potential players; or is it better to simplify the areas and let the strategy emerge from the hidden moves, tactical positioning, and large number of different moves (even if the areas aren't that wild and crazy)?

ADDENDUM: Another thing I forgot about. How would one handle the third dimension with this targeting setups? Even outside of figuring out how high the edge of your vine whip can hit, the moment you have a flying pokemon with a longer range than its opponent it will auto-win against land-bound pokemon.

[Rejakor]

The last bit has an obvious answer: don't. Or design the system around team battles and have a 'flying tax' on flying pokemon (especially the ones with longer-ranged attacks) that means groundbound pokemon are going to be straight up better except for the inviolability of the flyers. But the easy answer is just don't have the third dimension. Flying just means you disappear off the map for a turn. When a 2d grid attack is hitting a flyer, the ground pokemon 'timed it' for the flyer's 'swoop'. Etc.

The problem with secret moves being on predesigned cards is you lose granularity in movement. Pokemon ATTACKS being on cards sounds like a great idea, and even the idea of shuffling a deck, dealing out cards, then assigning the correct 'type' of attack to certain pokemon, so your opponent doesn't necessarily know what you've loaded your Raichu up with. But the movement itself being on a card means you only have a limited number of movement choices (without going into cardsplosion territory) and pokemon have a more limited range of movement (so it's harder to have 'fast' and 'slow' pokemon types).

'Standard' areas loses you a lot of granularity. This idea is essentially a non-standard-attack-area idea. The strategy would be around using different shapes of attacks at where you THINK your enemy is going, which is kind of the draw of chess, shogi, go, etc. Losing that puts the game back into 'list-design' territory and you run into all the problems of modern tabletop battle games.

[virgil]

The problem with secret moves being on predesigned cards is you lose granularity in movement. Pokemon ATTACKS being on cards sounds like a great idea,

I meant for 'move' to mean attack, in the context of "I use my Quick Attack move."

'Standard' areas loses you a lot of granularity. This idea is essentially a non-standard-attack-area idea. The strategy would be around using different shapes of attacks at where you THINK your enemy is going, which is kind of the draw of chess, shogi, go, etc. Losing that puts the game back into 'list-design' territory and you run into all the problems of modern tabletop battle games.

But as I said, that brings to mind the issue of it being difficult to enjoyably process for a nonzero number of players. Games like chess and shogi do not have the same level of complexity suggested above, and do not have hidden information involved. Even games that do have wonky areas are computer games, where you can highlight your move to immediately see where it will strike - and so I feel the need to question whether the complexity barrier in processing this step by hand is too high.

[Username17]

You'd probably want to throw down moves a few at a time and reveal them robo rally style. And then you wouldn't use die rolls for attacks at all. The hilarity of pointing your solar beam in the wrong direction because someone spun you with a whirlwind would be the entire rng.

[Koumei]

You'd probably want to throw down moves a few at a time and reveal them robo rally style. And then you wouldn't use die rolls for attacks at all. The hilarity of pointing your solar beam in the wrong direction because someone spun you with a whirlwind would be the entire rng.

That is definitely the best way to do it. And also kind of in-theme for Pokemon, where prediction (being a sub-set of knowledge) is half the battle.

[Red_Rob]

This does sound hilariously appropriate for a Pokemon battle, where your poor Pokemon is supposed to be responding to commands given by a well meaning but distant trainer. The idea that you shout a list of commands and your Pokemon tries to fulfill them to the best of it's abilities whilst being whipped around, shunted and generally interfered with by the enemy is a fun one.

The only issue I can see is that to make the system really work you would need movement to be handled by cards, or else being pushed out of position is only a minor inconvenience. Roborally works by the board itself having sections that push, turn or attack your robot, if everything in this vein has to come from the opponent you are going to need a lot of that stuff going on. Hyperbeam would have to deal knockback aswell as damage, and Vine Whip would need to entangle the enemy and prevent it's next move for example. One option would be for the attacks themselves to create persistent board effects, clouds of gas or damaging patches of fire. Then the board itself would fill up with obstacles as you played.

[virgil]

So the original concern of whether the complicated shapes are too much for some people should just be an acceptable sacrifice?

[OgreBattle]

I'd drop the complex attack shapes for simpler cones and blasts. You can take a look at FFG X Wing as that game involves placing orders face down then revealing them to move your dudes around a field

[momothefiddler]

So the original concern of whether the complicated shapes are too much for some people should just be an acceptable sacrifice?

While I'm all for accessibility, I'm admittedly a little surprised to see it as a concern at all on this board, given the comparative opacity of, for instance, Dungeons and Dragons.

I like the overlay idea from the initial post, but it seems like that'd be clunky at best, plus if we're going for a secret selection -> all reveal thing, having someone stand up and hold a specific overlay over the board sort of ruins that.

On a computer, obviously, or an app that lets you take a picture of the current board state, the asymmetric information works ok.

One thing that almost certainly helps is to have alternating colors on your grid, like a chessboard. Your cards could even have two pictures, one for starting on a dark square and one for starting on a light, if you're really going for improved ease of processing. There are probably even easier-to-process coloring patterns, actually.

[pragma]

You should definitely compare and contrast this plan to the board game Tash Kalar: Arena of Legends. It has card based summons who populate a chess like board and lay down AoE effects. It's also quite fun, so you may be barking up a good tree.

[JonSetanta]

I'd drop the complex attack shapes for simpler cones and blasts. You can take a look at FFG X Wing as that game involves placing orders face down then revealing them to move your dudes around a field

This. None of the ridiculous Pokemon examples make sense, nor would they to an average gamer.
That is... unless you use cards. Which not many are wont to do.

[virgil]

If you drop attack rolls, will levels mean anything beside hit points, soak, and damage? Does it need to do anything else?

[Username17]

If you drop attack rolls, will levels mean anything beside hit points, soak, and damage? Does it need to do anything else?

Well, it gives you more and crazier moves to choose from. The game's complexity can ramp up with level by literally giving you more cards to choose from, or the game could "just" give you cards that are "better." Ember just gets upgraded to Heat Wave, which hits more squares and does more damage - that sort of thing.

But you're basically playing Robo Rally, and Robo Rally was in no way improved by the cards that used dice.

-Username17

[virgil]

If you drop attack rolls, how do you handle effects like Blindness or Darkness? How would moves like Double Team or Hone Claws work, as those modify evasion & accuracy, which don't really exist in a system with no attack roll.

[Username17]

If you drop attack rolls, how do you handle effects like Blindness or Darkness? How would moves like Double Team or Hone Claws work, as those modify evasion & accuracy, which don't really exist in a system with no attack roll.

Blindness could easily reduce the area of your attacks. Hone Claws could increase the area of your attacks. The first makes it more "likely" that you will miss, the second makes it more "likely" that you will hit. The game is completely deterministic still, but you'll notice your attacks landing less or more often nonetheless.

-Username17

[virgil]

If you drop attack rolls, how do you handle effects like Blindness or Darkness? How would moves like Double Team or Hone Claws work, as those modify evasion & accuracy, which don't really exist in a system with no attack roll.

Blindness could easily reduce the area of your attacks. Hone Claws could increase the area of your attacks. The first makes it more "likely" that you will miss, the second makes it more "likely" that you will hit. The game is completely deterministic still, but you'll notice your attacks landing less or more often nonetheless.

Since the attack patterns are so weird, what's a consistent way to 'increase' an attack area? Presumably decreasing would be something like removing all squares more than X away from the Pokemon with any moves they use?

[Username17]

If you really wanted to go all out, you could have each card give colored squares that were a different color if you could hit them even while impaired and another color that denoted squares you hit if and only if you had advantage. That would create a design space for attacks like Explosion that gave zero fucks whether you were blind or not.

And then you could have additional status effects that did shit like negate any hit squares more than 3 squares away or whatever.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

Actually; this is beginning to sound an awful lot like how to make a serious table top game out of the basic mechanics of Munchkin.