deaddmwalking wrote: In any case, setting the number of attacks too low encourages abandoning any other strategy and ganking the boss with a couple of summoned monsters and disregarding every other possible strategy.
That's really only a glaring issue if you're unwilling to let combatants that are in over their heads fail regularly. Knocking people damn near off of the RNG can be a feature rather than a bug and it's a big part of how proportional systems make their hay--if you're unwilling to let the Rock no sell attacks from jobbers, then yes, LMSD is going to give you a bad time.
With that said, hit points are no panacea for stonewalling mooks, either. In Mearls' Land everything has too damn many hitpoints, even a cr 1/2 threat like fucking Mr. Tumnus. Yet minionmancy is stronger than ever precisely because the system barely notices the difference between X number of kobolds throwing rocks and Hercules deciding to make you tap out.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Thu Nov 07, 2019 7:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
Chamomile is right - if you're going to have a death spiral, at least let it be one that keeps the game moving instead of one that grinds everything to a halt.
The action movie stories that people want out of wound conditions don't actually sound like death spirals though. People want the story where the heroes are so beat down that everyone has to resort to last ditch efforts (sudden burst of strength, throwing your last dagger, resorting to the dark arts) to win. But that's actually a story of the party becoming desperation-themed while objectively being more effective - they're able to defeat a foe they couldn't when they weren't beaten to a pulp, after all.
jt wrote:Chamomile is right - if you're going to have a death spiral, at least let it be one that keeps the game moving instead of one that grinds everything to a halt.
The action movie stories that people want out of wound conditions don't actually sound like death spirals though. People want the story where the heroes are so beat down that everyone has to resort to last ditch efforts (sudden burst of strength, throwing your last dagger, resorting to the dark arts) to win. But that's actually a story of the party becoming desperation-themed while objectively being more effective - they're able to defeat a foe they couldn't when they weren't beaten to a pulp, after all.
Tenra Bansho Zero has characters knocked out of scenes rather than die (very player story driven). But you can raise a death flag that makes your character die at 0 hit boxes, in return you get a huge power boost.
Foxwarrior wrote:When death spirals affect defenses but not attacks, then the incentive to gank one enemy at a time goes up even more than the already quite large incentive in a basic hit point system.
That incentive is already strong enough that players will pretty much always do that, though, so the effect on in-game behavior is nil. If you have a specific way of discouraging focused fire that works by providing counter-incentives, then this becomes a concern, but most games either don't solve the problem or solve it by putting hard limits on your ability to focus fire.
Wounds can either go onto Offence or Defence, attacker's choice. So, kneecapping people to slow 'em down and make them easier to hit, hand/arm/shoulder shots to blunt their attack, and body/headshots to put out of the fight (which is harder to do, ofc, and also blunts attacks).
Behaviour I've seen this drive is to harm everything, ideally aiming to blunt their attacks, then kneecapping something they want to kill and burning that one thing down.
It keeps battle moving - yes, I'd like people to square off, but between wounds being able to do offence or defence, and solid zones of control/engagement mechanics, that still happens, with some characters tying up small pockets of enemies, or individual more dangerous ones, and supporting fire from allies helping to keep the fight under the party's (parties'?) control.
Death Spirals affecting your offense but not your defense gives people a chance to surrender, flee, or pursue alternate victory conditions.
Death spirals affecting defense is desirable if you want every combat to end in slaughter, with 80-95% of it being one-sided slaughter. That 5-20% of the time is for when the side that has the initial disadvantage manages to beat the odds. It does make combat go faster if the losing side doesn't have access to healing.
IOW, for certain games (D&D being one of them) wounds negatively impacting defense can be desirable to speed up combat and encourage butchery, but for a lot of other games I can see why you wouldn't want to do that.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Fri Nov 08, 2019 1:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
I have yet to see a house rule or NPC behavior that will successfully incentivize players away from hunting down and killing every single enemy on the battlemap. Enemies who never engage at all and thus never get put on the battlemap will sometimes be allowed to walk away to save table time, but for whatever reason once tokens are on the map players would rather spend an extra 2-3 rounds hunting down a nameless mook who's running away at top speed rather than get on with something more important. This remains true even on crowded wilderness maps where chasing down a fleeing enemy stands a good chance of aggroing a second encounter while the party is split up and low on resources. The main reason player characters kill everything in their path is not mechanical incentives. It is because the people playing them want to kill everything in their path.
Last edited by Chamomile on Fri Nov 08, 2019 5:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Chamomile wrote:I have yet to see a house rule or NPC behavior that will successfully incentivize players away from hunting down and killing every single enemy on the battlemap. Enemies who never engage at all and thus never get put on the battlemap will sometimes be allowed to walk away to save table time, but for whatever reason once tokens are on the map players would rather spend an extra 2-3 rounds hunting down a nameless mook who's running away at top speed rather than get on with something more important. This remains true even on crowded wilderness maps where chasing down a fleeing enemy stands a good chance of aggroing a second encounter while the party is split up and low on resources. The main reason player characters kill everything in their path is not mechanical incentives. It is because the people playing them want to kill everything in their path.
I'd say the lowest common denominator of players likely falls into that category. However what I frequently see happen at my tables is a random mook running off that the party wants to knock out so they can get some basic information for later, which of course usually results in that minion providing no information "where is your base?" "I don't know" "how do you not know where your base is? we aren't asking where your boss sleeps", with the players now completely irritated by the situation eventually just killing the guy since he's nothing more than a liability after they spent 4 rounds chasing him down in an attempt to capture him alive for the most basic of information that they never seem to have.
Or a recent situation that came up was a captured NPC that was about to be questioned, breaking a cyanide capsule hidden in her teeth.
Now is that set of issues I laid out likely specific to the DM/adventure/whatever? Probably. However just because players are chasing down NPCs, doesn't necessarily mean they want them dead all of the time(but if they're suddenly useless and more of a headache left alive, well that's what is going to end up happening).
From a narrative standpoint, having recurring villains can be really satisfying. When the party and a particular enemy have history, it's not hard to create an excuse that they should cross paths yet again. In the comics, it doesn't matter how many of Joker's plots Batman foils, there will be another one, later.
But from the PCs perspective, there isn't much reason to let the bad guy have another chance - especially if they're actually capital E evil. If a villain wiped out a village, PCs want to see the villain appropriately punished. If your bad guys are un-redeemable, players will want to see them killed.
For that reason, you want a few different types of villains. Sure, you have the really bad guy that the PCs defeat and they truly defeat him!. Let him stay DEAD. If he was such a bastard, it's a meaningful event that he died. But definitely think about having a few 'escape tricks' that he MIGHT try so he could be a recurring villain without any shenanigans. Besides the really bad guy, you want the 'bad things for a good reason' villain. Sandman from the Spiderman movie and Dr. Freeze from the Clooney Batman movie are examples of this - the PCs probably want them to succeed in their goal, but still have to stop them from implementing it in the current way. Having options where the PCs can stymie the enemy then help them succeed at their underlying desire is worthwhile. It fulfills a different set of accomplishments for the players than killing someone who 'deserves' to die.
Mooks that are cooperative and have some tragic element to their backstory might not just be NPCs that the players end up liking, they may end up recruiting them as followers.
In my experience it's usually pretty paranoid "we don't want him telling any of his buddies about us and our tactics or goals" that encourages a basic level of hunting down retreating badguys. So usually non sentient enemies can run away and no one minds, but if it's someone who could be going back to the Demon Summoner to tell him exactly what tactics we used to beat his Demon Summons, you probably want to hunt them down.
Although, usually the PCs or monsters have abilities that make the question of "chasing them down" so moot that we resolve it in off screen mode. "The goblin runs away" doesn't get far with "I follow at 200ft per round because I'm a Time Mage and use immediate action lockdown effects." conversely when the spellshadow decides to retreat by walking into the ground and moving literally anywhere else in the world without coming out of the ground it's easier to just ask the players if they have any way of stopping that then running it round by round.
When I brought up the one-sided butchery argument, I was thinking more in terms of the PCs being able to retreat/pursue alternate victory conditions/surrender. Depending on the game and the genre, it may or may not be desirable to have half of the party unconscious before people decide to ask for a parlay or surrender their valuables or try to hack the computers.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
