Let's actually make a mini WoF concept game. Fuckin Christ.

[quanta]

Ok, so here are my thoughts. We should brainstorm a small WoF style ruleset. Here are some of the choices I'd make for the sake of speed besides using WoF.

1)Use the matrix form of WoF. Have the matrix grow from 4x4 to 6x6. Or even more lazily, from 3x3 to 5x5. When players roll a 4 at early levels or a 6 at late levels, some little special effect happens.

2)The game has a typical level system with 5 levels.

3)The game has four classes. Warrior, Thief, Mage, Priest. All characters are single classed.

4)To cut down on time spent writing powers, there's also a list of more general powers that any class can access. Some of these may even be flavored and work in a way that makes more sense for certain classes than others. That way people can make a gish (mage who selects some fight-y universal powers) or a paladin (fighter who selects some priest-y universal powers). Have each character take something like 1/2 his powers from the universal list and 1/2 from his class list.

5)Fuck fiddly number buffing, debuffing, and condition tracking. There should be a small number of types of buffs, debuffs, and conditions. Also, the game will not have any stackable long-term buffs. Each character can be affected by one buff at a time maximum.

6)Now that you've freed yourself from fiddly number adjustments to some extent, make sure you've got a robust and simple system for terrain.

7)Just make general purpose non-combat utility stuff run off of something besides WoF.

8)Fuck having many stats. Just run and scale attack accuracy directly off of level. Ditto for defenses with the exception of some flat modifier players can place.

9)Fuck having a giant pile of items for the game. Everyone just has 1 magic item.

10)Have a simple skill system for when people want to do stuff not covered by their powers. <20 skills total. poor, average, good are the rankings. "good" level skills auto-scale with level. Skills are totally uncorrelated with class.

11)Mook monsters just have 2 at-will abilities. Not mooks have a fixed 3x3 WoF table of their own. BBEG have the same size WoF table as a PC.

[Psychic Robot]

this actually sounds pretty good

[Ravengm]

I'd play this, even if only as a test.

[quanta]

Ok, first things to determine. What sort of to-hit percentages do we want to obtain on a flat plane? Since there are only five levels, the RNG won't get very out of control and a d20 system seems really solid.

From playing 4e, I'd say a 50% chance of hitting an average defense is too low, so I'm thinking a 30-45% chance of hitting the low defense, 55-65% of hitting vs. an average defense, and 65%-85% chance of hitting an average defense.

Regardless of what's picked, I'm thinking situational (non-permanent) modifiers should be fixed between +-10% each, with a tops of two occurring at once (a buff, and then a situational/terrain advantage).

I'd like to try to keep buffs/debuffs simple. If you crack out a D&D 4e manual, you'll see 16 status conditions in the PHB (although one is surprised and another is unconscious). Ideally, I'd like it if I could have 5-6 very distinct easy to remember status effects. But that might be tough. I'd like the game to have blinded, deafened, hobbled, restrained, daze, and prone. Or something like that. I wouldn't not put in any uber-control or instant death effects like stun, dominate, or petrify. Sure, that kind of restrains how you write certain archetypes, but I think it's good for a little game like this to shoot for players always having at least one action to take on their turn.

As far as terrain effects, I was thinking a four elements type system. This would basically be the most complicated bit of the game and I'd like to tie it in to WoF. So far I'm thinking of something like

Earth- Can make cracks and rifts in the ground. Everyone moves slower on the cracks, and has lowered reflexes on this terrain.

Also can make walls of earth. This just reshapes the battlefield.

Wind- make a one directional gust. Any projectile going parallel and with the gust gets an extended range and does more damage. Anything projectile going perpendicular to the gust or against it either can't be fired at enemies or has a high built in miss chance.

Also can make whirlwinds. Whirlwinds just reshape the battlefield by making enemies slide around, doing damage, something like that.

Fire- lights shit on fire. Duh.

Water-makes rain? Seems kind of lame.

Also can make patches of ice that allow faster movement but are slippery or make walls of ice.

Finally, I'd like some of these effects to combine in neat ways. So if the mage rolls a column where he can cast gale on WoF, he makes a unidirectional gust. Then say the fighter rolls and gets crushing impact. He could then hit the ground in the area of the gust throw up a bunch of dust and turn that area into a sandstorm. All enemies in the sandstorm are blinded.

Or maybe the fighter goes first and uses crushing impact to attack an enemy and open up rifts in the ground. Then the mage goes and uses rising fire and makes lava pour out of the rifts.

You could also interfere with an enemies terrain effects and vice versa, like using wind or rain to snuff out a wall of fire.

The idea is you'd restrict the number of powers that do this somewhat (like having a single column be terrain effects so each row has a terrain effect from a different element), that way people don't always set up the same situation. That way WoF feeds into the dynamics of the battlefield pretty obviously.

Somebody tell me if this sounds retarded or too complicated, and we should just roll with more traditional terrain effects like chokepoint and elevation (although I think that sounds more boring).

[Ravengm]

Adding in combos might detract from the focus of WoF, but I see what you're doing with this in general.

For water, you could also do stuff like draw moisture out of things (or into, in the case of, say, lungs or dirt to make mud), sweep people away with a wave out of nowhere, trap people in a bubble of water, or just have Squirtle use Water Gun to cut holes in things. With enough water pressure, you can do some pretty crazy stuff.

As for to-hit percentages, that seems pretty solid, although I suspect you meant 30-45% chance of hitting the high defense, 55-65% of hitting vs. an average defense, and 65%-85% chance of hitting a low defense.

[PhoneLobster]

You guys are drifting off purpose without product. Your elemental side effects should be interesting and relevant however your various buff and situational reforms are fairly tangential for inclusion in your initial design direction.

Meanwhile though there is some core stuff you need to plan your design around before getting to that.

In the interest of having SOME sort of WoF example other than green arrow to beat up on let me help you a bit.

So the thing that leaps out at me as missing here in your design intent post is a lack of a clear idea of combat duration.

This is an important aspect for any RPG system, but especially important for your WoF test bed. Because combat duration is going to interact with WoF in important ways.

So before you do your hit rate, damage, movement and positioning, and start of combat set up materials... you need to decide what sort of combat durations you want those sort of rules to generate.

Does combat last...
1) Fewer rounds than your WoF table so you CAN'T select from all your Rows at least once per combat.
2) About as many rounds as your WoF table so you MIGHT (but probably won't) select from all your Rows at least once per combat.
3) Significantly more rounds than your WoF table so you almost certainly will select from all your Rows once, or more, per combat.
4) Some (specified) variable range depending on situational variation between easy and hard combats.

Hell, you should probably even determine some idea of the intended duration of combat BEFORE deciding the size of your WoF table.

[Datawolf]

High pressure water cannon sounds hilarious. You could also do a freezing blast (deals cold damage, slows down opponents) or hurled icicles or a cloud of scalding steam (obscures vision, deals damage).

EDIT: Phonelobster has a point. I would tentatively suggest the number of combat rounds being n + 1, where n is the size of your table. Maybe n + 2. This would (in my baseless opinion) be useful for testing purposes.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So:
* What do you play? Time traveling robot wizards!
* What do your characters do? Save the world!
* What challenges do your characters face? Giant monsters!
* What do the characters do to overcome their challenges? Kill the monsters!
* What does overcoming a challenge look like?
[1] A monster appears!
[2] Robots A-D cast spells at the monster.
[3] The monster attacks
[4] Repeat steps 2-3 about four times
[5] Have your time-janitors clean up the mess

How does that look?

[jadagul]

I'll throw out that I sort of like the idea of combining Frank's six-zone system for battlefield layouts with Winds of Fate. Might involve too many different pieces for this sort of proof-of-concept design, though.

[PhoneLobster]

It's not exactly too many different pieces, it's more like the SAME piece again (use a 1d6 to take away player choices! Yay!).

But I think the question you need to answer to include "Wind's of Where The Heck Are We Now?" in your mini-WoF is less mechanical and more, well, political.

Do you...
1) Fear that demonstrating WoF to a belligerent audience will be difficult and doesn't need a whole extra helping of the exact same thing that people hate about WoF.

or...
2) WoF is awesome, test WoF will be awesome, everyone will love WoF once test WoF is complete, lets add even more Wind!

There ARE good, er, proof of concept reasons to include the "Where the fuck are we?" mechanic in your WoF. But do you think your mini system can still be successful in winning converts if you include it?

[jadagul]

PL: honestly, I think the two systems actually complement each other; I'm just worried that insofar as designing something like this is complicated, adding in a second not-really-tested system makes it even more complicated.

I think the vague positioning rules work well with winds of fate flavor-wise because they don't lead players to ask questions like "look, there's a clear opening to the boss right now, I can see it on the tactical board. Why can't I charge him?" One of the more visceral reactions to WoF when it was originally suggested was something like, "Well, what if I reach the boss fight and I only have one round with an opening before his minions close ranks and I can't get to him, and I don't roll a move I can use then?" And the vague positioning rules fix this because there are no openings you can point to actually on the board; whether there's an opening like that is determined by the WoF roll.

And second, I think vague positioning and WoF mesh well mechanically, because the vague positioning gives you more interesting ways to vary the moves you can take. So one turn you have a choice among a powerful single-target attack on the zone you're in, an AOE debuff on the zone you're targeting, a move that lets you single-target attack a character in the zone you're targeting then pick your target square for the following round, and a move that lets you withdraw to any zone on the board. The next turn you can launch an AOE attack on the zone you're in, move to a zone of your choice then deliver a small amount of damage to everyone in it, change the terrain in your target zone, or move to your target zone and then deliver a powerful attack to a single target in it.

And you could keep coming up with powers like that, and they'd all be different before we even worry about riders or what debuff effect they have or whether your enemies are vulnerable to fire.

But again, this just might be too complicated to put together as a proof-of concept. I'm not sure.

[PhoneLobster]

PL: honestly, I think the two systems actually complement each other

I would say multiply rather than compliment. Both WoF and "Where the fuck are we" are pretty much the same principle.

And should this proof of concept get anywhere you need to decide, are you trying to prove this concept with one sample, or are you going to try to prove it hard core all the way to the hilt.

PS "Where the fuck are we" still has turns on which the positioning system will "create an opening to the boss". Indeed it might even (randomly) do that in a more noticeable manner than traditional positioning systems do.

Edit: also the initial design... er... declaration, seems to want simplicity simplicity simplicity (not a bad idea, especially for the specific project). "Where the fuck are we" is another dice roll per player per turn even before the mechanical complexity that dice roll brings to resolution. Using fairly standard trends for dice rolls per player per turn the WoF test system is already looking at probably 3 rolls per player per turn without "Where the fuck are we?", hell if you aren't careful some of those rolls might be more than one dice and that will just be the MINIMUM per player. Can your sample test bed hold the strain? Maybe. But if it's the straw that breaks your test bed then critics are NOT going to be forgiving and say "Well WoF WOULD have worked if only you hadn't added X..."

[Draco_Argentum]

I don't see a need for them both at once. WoF restricts ability choice to y/x. WTFAW restricts target choice to m/n.

If y*n choices is still too many such that you need to drop it to y*m then you probably have to high an n. I'd come up with mob of mooks rules at that point because even if y*m is fast enough it'll still take a long time to resolved the actions of all n NPCs.

[jadagul]

PL: your last paragraph is basically what I was trying to say. I'd like to see a system with both elements in it, but I don't think that matches the "get a simple system up now" requirements of this post.

[quanta]

Adding in combos might detract from the focus of WoF, but I see what you're doing with this in general.

I don't really view WoF as a focus in itself. And the reason I want a combo system that's simple and based on a core half-dozen to dozen terrain effects is because I think it's most interesting with WoF. In a non-random system, I'd expect people to pick and stick with a particular terrain combo which would get boring. And they'd likely always counter a particular terrain effect the same way.

Basically, I'd like to roll with the "elemental chaos" explanation of WoF and then use it in this combo system that's more interesting because the chain of battle is unpredictable.

As for to-hit percentages, that seems pretty solid, although I suspect you meant 30-45% chance of hitting the high defense, 55-65% of hitting vs. an average defense, and 65%-85% chance of hitting a low defense.

This, definitely meant this. Tired.

You guys are drifting off purpose without product. Your elemental side effects should be interesting and relevant however your various buff and situational reforms are fairly tangential for inclusion in your initial design direction.

Good point. I agree with the poster up thread. n+1 or n+2 is about right for combat duration. And I think somewhere 4-8 round combats are about right. The reforms to buffing and such are just to immediately constrain design to be simpler and hopefully quicker to write.



Also, probably not gonna use the "where the fuck are we?" system. For the reasons mentioned upthread pretty much. Also, I want people to put their terrain manipulating combos where they like. The movement system will probably be 3e or 4e like.



Random thing that come to mind right now.

Probably not gonna have much in-combat flying in the system. I don't see an easy way to make that not lead to earth and fire terrain manipulation becoming irrelevant.