Continuity of Character

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm still with Frank from the healing surges thread as to the whole last stand thing. But if you are going to do it then Draco Argentum has a good idea.

People should be able to do the Star Wars scene where Obi Wan dies holding Vadar off. I'd suggest that blaze of glory turns you into a hardcore road block rather than letting your team butcher the enemy super hard.

Otherwise players will set up teams of suicide soldiers and take turns going out in a blaze of awesome then rolling up a new human time bomb.

Frank's position is well-taken, but here's the thing - these rules aren't part of a character's basic competence, they don't take up any class features. So the part where your class gives you the ability to die gloriously instead of an actual power is moot. And monsters don't have these rules applied to them, though it might be cool if the occasional recurring villain had something similar.

As to the 'last stand' part, it's not to my taste, but it might be to yours and I don't have a problem with it. I like 'taking you with me' fights as much as doomed last stands. Again, though: how do you write the system for it? 'Road Block' is not a supported role in 3.x, and given that three different classes may need three completely different mechanics to be effective in that way, it sounds like more work than I'm going to do.

I think the forced recharge on the ability to die should prevent the waves of suicide bombers phenomenon. Since it's a 'once per adventure' for each character at most, there's a real incentive to wait for the opportune moment.

I think the real issues with the rules are only going to come out in play. So, playtesting, is anyone interested in actually giving this stuff a try?

[violence in the media]

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about "Last Stand" type mechanics. I suppose I'm slightly against them. Though I do endorse some sort of turnaround or comeback mechanics, because that's just cool.

Maybe with the KO idea the character can suffer a wound each time they're reduced to zero or fewer HP? Thes wounds would last until the end of the adventure, but you could spend Drama points to overcome their penalties for an entire battle or encounter. Have heroes get 1 Drama point for every 2 levels they have, rounded up.

The wounds should take the form of specific restrictions or penalties, rather than just generally making you worse overall. If you switch up what you're doing, you might be able to minimize the impact of the wound. Ideally, you'd probably want to avoid a simple -X to everything you care about. A wound resulting in a penalty to Climb or Disable Device is probably ok, a penalty to everything you use your arms for is probably not. We'd have to come up with a good list of wounded statuses to give inspiration to DMs.

Or, as another idea, every Wound gives the GM a token, which he can use to do stuff with. Terribly specific, I know. Maybe he can use them to cause attacks to miss, or saves to be made, or bring in reinforcements, or whatever.

[the_taken]

Otherwise players will set up teams of suicide soldiers and take turns going out in a blaze of awesome then rolling up a new human time bomb.

Man this is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do...

Ooooh! Here's an idea. The role of the characters is determined by the players. That is, the game is centred around the players picking what kind of narrative effects they can use on their characters, and one of the options is for one player to have a constant stream of red shirts.

"OK, so last time, Picard, Ricker, Troy, and Ricky beamed down to the planet. Ricky materialized into a lob-monster. So who's the new Red Shirt this time? Jim."

The red shirt player has a character sheet, which is identical for every character he plays. It's just the characters have to die often, but are very useful even so.

Or we can go with the disaster movie system: A character that has fulfilled his duty dies. So the red shirt character has a whole gamut of potential but rather obscure useful abilities but rather obscure, and every time one is needed, a character pops up. After the character fills his purpose, he is destined to die in the next violent scene.
Hell, one of the special abilities can be Guinea Pig, used to test the enemy's abilities at the cost of losing the character this scene! New type of armor piercing bullet? Send in Charlie the Rookie. Did the Borg set-up a nano-probe launching mine field? Oh, Ensign Kim...

[Sir Neil]

Otherwise players will set up teams of suicide soldiers and take turns going out in a blaze of awesome then rolling up a new human time bomb.

Man this is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do...

Works great in Shadowrun when the GM is a dick...

Troll Demo Expert with bag of explosives: "PIZZA! PIZZA! *boom*"

[RandomCasualty2]

On the equipment topic, as long as the Book of Gears is in place, it shouldn't be too hard for people to get their level-appropriate gear back. Honestly. I'm far more concerned about imprisoning being boring for the player at the table.

Well chances are if one PC gets imprisoned, all of them do, unless the party just abandons their own.

The problem with the fighting bonus based on injury is that it's very complicated and weird. I mean, some things don't even injure you, or do weird forms of injury like Charisma damage. And what is the bonus to that it benefits as many characters as equally as possible? All attributes, maybe? I wouldn't even know how to begin writing that as a system.

Yeah, I'd do it more like 4E does it where you get bonus points of some kind for completing several encounters in a row. Such that your group actually gathers momentum and if you rest, you lose that momentum. You probably even want to make it where having momentum points might make you even stronger than if you went in fresh and fully rested. That way heroes really have a lot of incentive to keep pressing on and you could even hand out some wound penalties, yet the momentum points would keep them relatively even or ahead.

On Blazes of Glory:

I've always felt that a blaze of glory has to involve a meaningful character. As such, you should only be able to invoke a BoG if your character has been with the group for a few adventures. I like the old rule that you must have at least gained 2 levels during your course of adventuring with the group to allow you to perform a BoG. That prevents PCs from just creating a bunch of suicide bombers. Because seriously, nobody cares if a red shirt dies.

[TarkisFlux]

Seconding RC's limiting of BoGs in some manner. Two levels with the group assumes you're running a game where players are gaining levels instead of doing some serial heroism variant. A session limit might work a bit better.

On BoG specifics, why not make the BoGs class specific? To borrow from annoying 4e terminology, would giving the striker a "you're coming with me" BoG, the defender a "last stand" BoG, the leader a "group revitalizing" BoG, etc. work out?

[violence in the media]

On BoG specifics, why not make the BoGs class specific? To borrow from annoying 4e terminology, would giving the striker a "you're coming with me" BoG, the defender a "last stand" BoG, the leader a "group revitalizing" BoG, etc. work out?

[tangent]

I really wish we could break role apart from class. Sometimes I want to be a tanking Abjurist, or a Controlling swordsman, or whatever. It would be nice if role was what you did and class was how you went about doing it.

[/tangent]

[TarkisFlux]

Oh, then do those things violence. It's a pretty thin division anyway. Just have characters pick their BoG at creation, or let people select the one they want when they go down. Whatever.

My more general point was that we could easily have several types of BoGs, each of which accomplish something slightly different, and that one may be more appropriate for a character than others.

[violence in the media]

Ah, my mistake, I though we were talking in a more 4e sense.

[TarkisFlux]

Eh, I knew I was stealing poor terminology when I did it. angel's been talking about this in a 3.x context, which doesn't have those obnoxious boxes pasted on to the classes, but I hoped that borrowing those terms would help make things more clear with less work on my part. Laziness fails me again.

Edit:
This is potentially all well and good for combat, but did you also want to eliminate death by poison, trap, environment (drowning), etc.?

[Draco_Argentum]

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about "Last Stand" type mechanics. I suppose I'm slightly against them. Though I do endorse some sort of turnaround or comeback mechanics, because that's just cool.

I think we need them, the source material does have people sacrificing themselves to save their friends. A heroic death is a good plot point. Frank is right about suicide bombers not being a good idea though. If dying lets you actually win then its going to be something you do. If it just lets you not lose theres a lot less pressure to do it.

As far as 3.x making road block impossible I'm assuming a system with some form of chase mechanic.

[Username17]

Yeah, I'd do it more like 4E does it where you get bonus points of some kind for completing several encounters in a row. Such that your group actually gathers momentum and if you rest, you lose that momentum.

I think I know what you're talking about. But of course 4e doesn't work like that at all. You get your Encounter powers back every encounter, and you get your action point back every other encounter, but the Healing Surges and Daily Powers just run out. At no point are you ever as full up as you are right after your rest. You get some of your spent resources refunded to you if you keep going. You get all of your resources refunded if you rest.

-Username17

[Murtak]

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about "Last Stand" type mechanics. I suppose I'm slightly against them. Though I do endorse some sort of turnaround or comeback mechanics, because that's just cool.

I think we need them, the source material does have people sacrificing themselves to save their friends. A heroic death is a good plot point. Frank is right about suicide bombers not being a good idea though. If dying lets you actually win then its going to be something you do. If it just lets you not lose theres a lot less pressure to do it.

Not to mention "extra damage" is not needed at all for a glorious final stand, is it? Not being able to die for x rounds or only "truly dying" after dying x times should be plenty to be able to shout "save yourselves, fools" or to kill a couple dozen goblins before you finally succumb to your wounds.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Edit:
This is potentially all well and good for combat, but did you also want to eliminate death by poison, trap, environment (drowning), etc.?

Yes. That's how we free people to try swan-dives into lightning sand to rescue other people and so forth.

There are, of course, still consequences for these things. A severely poisoned person is still debilitated, a trapped character is still trapped, and a character who should have drowned will wash up on shore somewhere later, but the reason they were swimming so desperately is probably resolved by then.

[MartinHarper]

On the other hand, maybe being captured and imprisoned becomes the new horrible fate, and keeping the enemy from escaping with your pal's 'unconscious' form could be a real issue.

I like this a lot. Maybe in the game universe, the way for evil creatures to gain power is to imprison other powerful beings. So the bad folks have an incentive to capture heroes rather than killing them.

3. Problem: Getting Locked Up is Worse than Death.
Seriously, at least if you were dead you could roll a new character. If your character is just dragged back to an effective prison, you get to play 'Count of Monte Cristo: The Boring Years.' Not sure how to solve that.

Play a backup character while you rescue your old character. If the rescue succeeds, you can go back to playing the main character. If it fails, the torch of the story arc, and the player's investment in it, is effectively passed on from the main character to the backup. You can have a touching scene where Backup Bill comes across the corpse of Main Molly floating face down in the river, and vows to avenge her death and smite the evil Lobster Men.

(if all the PCs get locked up, then you play Monte Cristo and skip ahead to the escape scene).

You get your Encounter powers back every encounter, and you get your action point back every other encounter, but the Healing Surges and Daily Powers just run out. At no point are you ever as full up as you are right after your rest.

It was on the other thread, but one idea would be to modify the 4e approach so that you wake up with no action points.

[IGTN]

I like this a lot. Maybe in the game universe, the way for evil creatures to gain power is to imprison other powerful beings. So the bad folks have an incentive to capture heroes rather than killing them.

I'm not entirely sure I like this idea. This pretty much guarantees that every necromancer and warlord will have hero prisons in their dungeon (probably spread out, to prevent jailbreaks), and once they reach a moderate level of success will have a problem with making enough prison space. Oddly enough, this idea actually helps under a disposable heroes paradigm (as in "It's a good thing the villain was keeping Alice prisoner in a cell right around the corner from where Bob died, and even better that she has the same stats"). If PCs are pressing through without weakening, though, then rescuing other heroes gives more reinforcements, and can potentially lead to a deus-ex-machina situation, where the PCs rescue a bunch of other heroes, and then take an army of high-level characters into the boss fight.

If being drained for power makes you weak, then this problem is eliminated, but it makes being rescued dull, and escaping even more difficult.

Also there's the issue with rescuing large numbers of advanced heroes; that doesn't seem to sit well.

I think it might be simpler to set up a feudal/tribal model where adventurers automatically have someone who will ransom them back when they get captured.

It was on the other thread, but one idea would be to modify the 4e approach so that you wake up with no action points.

Band-aid on a sucking chest wound. What might be interesting would be to give PCs "Momentum Points," (with a better name) where you get an one every so many encounters and get all of those you spent in an encounter back at the end, and lose them all when you rest. Maybe also have Action Points that you save up for the big encounter. This way, building up a lot of Momentum lets you use it in every encounter.

[MartinHarper]

(a variety of problems with hero prisons)

Hmm. You could avoid those problems by having evil folks gain power by sacrificing heroes during the next full moon (or whatever), but I'm not sure that's any better.

[Username17]

I think the best solutions are:

• Get rid of gear.
• Make the ransom culture standard for everybody.

So if minor heroes get defeated by the minions of King Imag, they can be expected to sell the heroes back in exchange for livestock, land, and sacks of grain. And the heroes can pretty much equip themselves with shit from around the village.

Fights against tigers are still going to be scary because tigers don't take prisoners. But predators also don't usually fight to the death, so you can probably work wit that.

-Username17

[Bigode]

Someone simply wanting to kill you becomes a setting problem?

[Username17]

Someone simply wanting to kill you becomes a setting problem?

Absolutely. Groups that actually butchered their enemies are pretty rare in history when compared to those who took prisoners. And when you are up against enemies like the Assyrians, that's essentially a different setting.

You're looking at a world with magical anti-infection techniques and magical limb and organ repair - actually dying on the field of battle is pretty hard to arrange. So if you make it so that executing captured enemies is pointless and barbaric, you're good to go.

I suggest the first step is to make al the same races appear in the rank and file of rival nations as in player parties. Also standardize the cattle raiding cultures of the Irish.

-Username17

[Bigode]

Absolutely. Groups that actually butchered their enemies are pretty rare in history when compared to those who took prisoners. And when you are up against enemies like the Assyrians, that's essentially a different setting.

But those guys did exist and I think you wouldn't need to walk far to be fighting someone else not like them. So ... ?

You're looking at a world with magical anti-infection techniques and magical limb and organ repair - actually dying on the field of battle is pretty hard to arrange. So if you make it so that executing captured enemies is pointless and barbaric, you're good to go.

That's all well for war. But what about the small-scale situations that (I suppose) pretty much every RPG ever favors, which might well involve breaking into private pantries?

[MartinHarper]

What about the small-scale situations that (I suppose) pretty much every RPG ever favors, which might well involve breaking into private pantries?

I guess if someone from a rival clan breaks into your pantry, you knock them out, tie them up, and ransom them back to their clan. If it's someone from your own clan, you do the same, but hand them over to the clan elders for punishment.

My question is: does this mean that the PCs have to capture everyone too?

[SphereOfFeetMan]

On choosing when to die:

In any given battle, a character has a choice concerning how their wounds manifest themselves. He chooses a Wound Path from one of the following:

1 Live to Fight Another Day: Your wounds inflict progressive penalties to your offensive capabilities. This encourages fleeing and character continuity.

2 No Old Bold Soldiers: Your wounds inflict progressive penalties on your ability to run/flee. You keep your offensive capabilities, and keep on fighting at full offensive power right up until the end. The outcome of a battle is uncertain, so you may or may not win, and as a result you may be killed/caught, depending upon tactics and luck.

3 No Surrender: Your wounds inflict progressive penalties on your ability to survive and to run/flee. In addition to your normal capabilities, you gain a significant bonus on your offensive power right up until you win or die. This option costs a resource which players can spend on similarly powerful options.


This setup gives every gaming group the choice on how deadly they want their campaign, and even individual combats, to be. They could always use option 1 because they are mercenaries with survival as a top priority. They might use a combination of option 1 or 2 depending upon likely ransom costs and their goals. They might use option 3 every fight in a one-shot for side-characters. In a battle with differing goals, one character might use option 2 or 3 for a last stand, while the others choose option 1 to survive.

The physical descriptions of the different Wound Paths are decided by how a character defends themselves. For LtFAD, characters block strikes aimed at their vitals with their arms/hands (for swordsman), or gutshots (breaks concentration), etc. For NOBS, you expend your endurance in not incurring hampering wounds, so you are unable to run/flee afterwards. Or you take the most damaging attacks to your legs, etc. For NS, your priority is only to temporarily maintain your ability to kill. Your enemy’s strikes to your vital areas are not blocked at all, and you won’t last long. So a stab at your lungs won’t be parried so that your death charge is completed.

[TavishArtair]

• Get rid of gear.
• Make the ransom culture standard for everybody.

What happens to the Gae Bolga and Scythe-Wheel Chariot, then?

[IGTN]

What happens to the Gae Bolga and Scythe-Wheel Chariot, then?

Special named items associated with a specific person don't work unless that person never gets captured, or can always retrieve their gear. It works fine for stories, but building a game system to include it requires giving up other things, like losing (at least, losing in a way that directly affects you personally).