CatharzGodfoot wrote:So, why not use the same rules for chasing and circling (which eliminates the 'combat starts, now you can run away' problem)?
That's a good start I think. A careful closing is a kind of chasing and a heedless closing is another. With characters who successfully close getting their attack in and characters who don't, not. The most important thing to keep in mind for combining chasing/closing/standing ground is This.
I'm looking at it in terms of 12 second rounds, which means that this particular set of events is a total of 15 rounds. 15 rounds of characters stunting to get away (and failing to stunt to follow), using move-by attacks to get past enemies who are occupying terrain, and that's about it.
The best thing I can imagine is that if you lose a chase, then you're exhausted or what not, so you can't flee again and have to turn and fight, possibly with fatigue penalties.
I'm not sure if it's going to be practical or even possible to easily combine combat movement and chase movement. Likely chase movement should be something else entirely. And if you're in combat, you can choose to enter a chase. Chases should always give more favoritism for the guy being chased to escape than he would if he stuck with normal combat, so it's in his best interest to start a chase, instead of staying in combat. once another guy enters chase mode, the other side should pretty much have to do chase mode itself or let him go.
Like the chase video Frank provided, every chase needs a series of obstacles to be overcome, whether those are rooftops or a crowded marketplace or what not. Your character's abilities to navigate those obstacles determine how well he does in the chase. A straightaway tends to go to the fastest runner, a set of complex corners probably to the most agile. Sometimes it may be a matter of intellect versus speed, such as James Bond in Casino Royale. Where the bad guy ends up doing crazy Jackie Chan moves to get down, and Bond just notices the elevator and uses it.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Sat Aug 23, 2008 11:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If you win a chase, you get to make an attack counting as a surprise attack - you attack him from the back. If the opponent wants to run, you additionately get to make an opportunity attack, which also counts as a surprise attack - since he has to turn away from you.
If you want to stop somebody from running, your first attack should be a grapple.
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Draco_Argentum wrote:Frank, are you thinking combat rounds are 12 seconds too? I assume so. That makes for rather long rounds IMO.
The thing is that I don't think it is. While it is undeniably true that you can swing a lot of blows in 12 seconds, in an actual fight you're kind of lucky to get anything done in 12 seconds. If we watch classic fights and time them, we see stuff like This in The Court Jester or This in The Princess Bride. Recall that AD&D had combat rounds that lasted for an entire minute and this didn't actually generate overall combat lengths that were terribly unreasonable.
I mean hell, even when we go to real sword play Like This things don't usually happen in any particular 3 or even 6 second time frame. We come in to the ongoing combat on second 21, and a blow doesn't actually land until second 39.
Yes, you "can" hit people with a sword in a second or less. But actually doing that in any particular second is incredibly unlikely. I mean heck, if you bust out even media that is supposed to be "extremely fast" it has a tendency to take place on the 12 second time frame much more than the 6 second time frame. Like say This from STALKER.
I don't have a problem with a 12-second round. The prime violator of that dynamic is stuff where the hero kills half-a-dozen mooks in a few seconds to show off how cool he is, and specific multiple-target effects can handle that.
On an only-somewhat-related note, do we want to try for anything like a reasonable fatigue system?
angelfromanotherpin wrote:
On an only-somewhat-related note, do we want to try for anything like a reasonable fatigue system?
I was thinking that there would be a fatigue-type damage track (with tiers 1 through 4), and that certain attacks as well as extended effort (e.g. forced march) would use it. However, in keeping with D&D we probably want characters to have unrealistically good endurance over short periods of time. Otherwise there are just too many things to keep track of.
That's a good thought, minimizing the subsystems when practical. So exertion functions like an attack? The tiers as described bother me a bit for recovering from fatigue, but that can be adjusted.
I think that it can be made to work, with harder exertion giving you a penalty that takes longer amounts of rest to fully recover from.
Although in general I agree that an unrealistic fatigue mechanic is probably better than having a realistic one. The things you really want to happen are:
Characters having the option of pushing their marching distance over a day in exchange for being kind of jacked up when they arrive.
Golems being able to implacably chase people down given time.
Anything else is negotiable. But I suspect that a fair amount of people would like there to be super magic attacks that hit super hard and leave characters burnt out upon completion.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:The tiers as described bother me a bit for recovering from fatigue, but that can be adjusted.
Why? 'Winded' (tier one) is recovered from by resting briefly, 'fatigued' (tier two) can be recovered from with more extended rest, 'worn out' and 'unconscious' require days of R&R to fully recover from.
FrankTrollman wrote:But I suspect that a fair amount of people would like there to be super magic attacks that hit super hard and leave characters burnt out upon completion.
For sure. We also probably want alpha strikes that leave the user injured, blinded, insane, or whatever else.
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FrankTrollman wrote:
Anything else is negotiable. But I suspect that a fair amount of people would like there to be super magic attacks that hit super hard and leave characters burnt out upon completion.
I'd like some super attacks, but they should be more like limit breaks or combos that you have to set up, not just first turn nukes that people toss out in the first round.
Really, what I'd like is for people to have to choose between either setting up a combo attack with a weaker strike, or just going for a basic medium damage attack, or something to that effect.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Anything else is negotiable. But I suspect that a fair amount of people would like there to be super magic attacks that hit super hard and leave characters burnt out upon completion.
I'd like some super attacks, but they should be more like limit breaks or combos that you have to set up, not just first turn nukes that people toss out in the first round.
Really, what I'd like is for people to have to choose between either setting up a combo attack with a weaker strike, or just going for a basic medium damage attack, or something to that effect.
Yeah, that's how it would work. You use more normal attacks until you have a decent chance of one-hitting your enemy with a super attack. Otherwise you're making a big gamble: it's likely that your enemies will be able to finish you off in your weakened state.
[Edit] Which reminds me, self-inflected damage would have to be fixed. [/Edit]
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angelfromanotherpin wrote:The tiers as described bother me a bit for recovering from fatigue, but that can be adjusted.
Why? 'Winded' (tier one) is recovered from by resting briefly, 'fatigued' (tier two) can be recovered from with more extended rest, 'worn out' and 'unconscious' require days of R&R to fully recover from.
I'm the last person to argue for extensive realism, but I do know that a person can pass out from exhaustion and be fully recovered hours later. Fatigue is a funny thing in terms of how long it lasts.
I don't really have a problem with going the way you suggest, because I think that system coherency is more important than strict realism. A more nuanced set of fatigue conditions can show up in a world book written by someone who cares more.
I'm the last person to argue for extensive realism, but I do know that a person can pass out from exhaustion and be fully recovered hours later.
Well, yes and no. Mostly no. People can push themselves as far as they'll go before really messing themselves up, go to sleep, and wake up feeling refreshed. But people actually can push themselves even farther than that, and if they do so they can be screwed up for days, even weeks. Marathon runners, for example, require rest days, even in training.
So as far action resolution mechanics go, we've only got Frank's attribute-based attack/level-based damage system.
For opposed checks, how about the following:
Binary: player (or arbitrarily chosen person) rolls 1d20 and adds her bonus. DM (or arbitrarily chosen person) compares that to 10 plus her bonus. If the die roll plus bonus is greater than the static number, the roller wins (otherwise the DM).
Gradiated: player (or arbitrarily chosen person) rolls 3d6 and adds her bonus. The DM subtracts 10 plus her bonus from that number, and the sign and magnitude determines who wins and the degree of the success
Unfortunately, neither of these systems allow for both characters to succeed. If that is desired, each character should probably make an attack-equivalent or damage-equivalent roll, which have their effects as appropriate.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
I'd assume that an opposed test is really only for situations where only one can succeed. Actually, are there any opposed rolls that need to be in the game? Or can everything be done as an attack vs a static value?
Draco_Argentum wrote:Frank, are you thinking combat rounds are 12 seconds too? I assume so. That makes for rather long rounds IMO.
Actually, I came to roughly the same conclusion a while ago for my own rewrite. One of the first things I did was look up a bunch of interesting fight videos (as well as chases and other things I wanted to model) and when I tried breaking them down into round by round setups and mechanical interpretation, it almost immediately seemed to me as if I was continuously working with 10 second rounds or so, whether it was Batman, Advent Children, God of War, Dead Fantasy, the KH3 preview where they fight Ansem, the Princess Bride, or whatever.
This has the additional benefit of meaning that you actually are having almost a minute of fighting represented by 5 combat rounds, which looks like a much more reasonable time frame for a decently interesting fight than the 6-24 seconds you were getting in 3e, as well as being a rather decent time frame for actual gameplay resolution.
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FrankTrollman wrote:Anything else is negotiable. But I suspect that a fair amount of people would like there to be super magic attacks that hit super hard and leave characters burnt out upon completion.
I can see alot of people wanting that too, but encounter design is a pain with such in place. NPCs are fighting for their lives, and are thus encouraged to release those fatiguing nova blasts, which really hurt players. How often the party has an encounter completely changes when and how often they use any fatigue-oriented attacks, and boss battles inherently encourage blowing their wad because they figure they can rest after killing the chieftain.
I remember hearing about how GURPS uses a magic system where fatigue is a factor, so I'm curious as to how it plays out in that system. Or are there other fundamental rules issues that skew the results?
Expanding the round to take longer would encourage a more fluid battlefield, because the shuffle inherent in combat can be glossed over and thus makes the exact place setting of your silverware unneeded. In theory, you could even use that fact to describe the activities in more active terms; as one thing I've noticed is that D&D with its 6 second rounds makes even those 5 round battles really damn short if you were to put it on film, making it an obvious rocket launcher tag combat for even a non-player.
Last edited by virgil on Wed Sep 10, 2008 8:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that fatigue recharge schemes such as encounters per day or fatigue points per hour marching/spell slung/sword swing are retarded, unless you can some how take into account the 5 minute adventuring workday.
Hicks wrote:I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that fatigue recharge schemes such as encounters per day or fatigue points per hour marching/spell slung/sword swing are retarded, unless you can some how take into account the 5 minute adventuring workday.
The 1 battle per day standard is going out, but first the encouragement against doing such a thing must be arranged and then rewards given to players that follow the expected frequency.
I'd say a system that allows multiple full-power battles every hour would be ideal, disregarding the "alpha strikes" that otherwise ruin a character temporarily even further than just being "tired", and select powers that otherwise count as outside the character's expected capabilities. I consider the latter Emergency Powers.
From a balance perspective, it is a nigh impossibility to adequatly "challenge" a group of 4 player characters against a number of 1 + n encounters (where n in a non-zero number) within the constraints of a an extended period. Hour, day, year, decade, centuary, millineum, the ammount of time needed to recharge is immaterial, as there is no guarentee that the fixed number of encounters or acting scennes where the PCs are not at full strength will ever pass or even be surpassed during that time.
What I argue is not that recharagable abilities (Spells, stunts, health, fatigue) should not exist, but that such abilities should not be rechargable while in combat time, and after a brief pause to catch their breath, flip through their spellbook, or pray to their god they are good to go to assault the next challenge at full strength.
