TNE: Combat Advantage Number

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is a major bump, but, this thread right here shows one of the pitfalls with CAN, that is, it's rather silly for hit point damage to make your charm person more likely to go off.

That said, I propose a split. There's a 'Mental' CAN and a 'Physical' CAN. You use one of the two scores for certain attacks. Some game effects, like being higher in level or getting a 'bless' add to both CANs but many more of them only add to one track.

For example, making an enemy slowed, stunned, bloodied, immobilized, etc. adds to Physical CAN. Being charmed, fear'd, fascinated, or confused adds to Mental CAN. Some very rare status effects will add to both (like being baleful polymorphed). These status effects have effects independent on their effect for the CAN, so being made fearful will make you worse in physical combat by adding a flat defense and attack penalty but will straight up make you easier to dominate or subject to more fear effects.

[Username17]

Not sure if simple "Mental CAN" is the way you want to chop it up. After all, you do want wounded people to panic easier when you start going Boogey Boogey at them.

But at the same time, you definitely don't want "raping people" to be a normal way to get discounts in stores, favorable treatment by bureaucrats, or to get people to marry you. Because that is out of game morally repugnant. And not genre appropriate for anything except maybe a Yakuza-themed Eroge.

Maybe some sort of NCAN? Non-Combat Advantage Number? You get boosts for favorable social positions or having leverage or your target being in greater need. Maybe something like that.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

Punching someone in the face as a part of intimidation seems pretty valid, so layering physical violence on your social abilities for better results in the social minigame is something you want. You could discourage it by having it be long-term problematic. It's an overtly hostile act, where as sweet-talking someone is not. If "the law" is at all relevant, they will come after you. People are far more reluctant to deal with you, and take precautions when you are around, which is probably represented by penalties in the social minigame unless you're using an actively hostile approach.

[Lago PARANOIA]

After all, you do want wounded people to panic easier when you start going Boogey Boogey at them.

We do? I mean, I can see this being the case for mooks fresh out of their beloved peasant villages, but action movies have shown us that for the vast majority of characters beyond this level -- even if they're unnamed -- being wounded straight-up doesn't make you harder to make fearful. This is both true for torture scenes or a pack of grizzled veterans standing up to a hopeless wave of enemy attacks. I mean, being wounded probably didn't even slightly make Picard, that Uruk-Hai, or Flik more vulnerable to intimidation attacks.

[Leress]

I mean, being wounded probably didn't even slightly make Picard

Yes it did, he even said that for a moment he thought he did see five lights.

[MfA]

I think it's far better to just use situational skill modifiers in diplomacy/intimidate and call it something else than try to make the tie to CAN.

CAN is for the save subsystem, diplomacy/intimidate can have it's own system entirely ... naming them similarly won't accomplish anything but confusion.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I mean, being wounded probably didn't even slightly make Picard

Yes it did, he even said that for a moment he thought he did see five lights.

I probably should've made it more clear I was talking about First Contact instead of Chain of Command. :embarrassed:

I think it's far better to just use situational skill modifiers in diplomacy/intimidate to take into account the history of battle than burden CAN with it.

Well, I kind of agree with the broad thrust that being entangled should make it easier for you to be frozen or stunned but shouldn't make it easier for you to be dominated or confused. And being exhausted should make any of the four follow-up conditions more likely. As far as combat thingies go.

[Username17]

After all, you do want wounded people to panic easier when you start going Boogey Boogey at them.

We do? I mean, I can see this being the case for mooks fresh out of their beloved peasant villages, but action movies have shown us that for the vast majority of characters beyond this level -- even if they're unnamed -- being wounded straight-up doesn't make you harder to make fearful. This is both true for torture scenes or a pack of grizzled veterans standing up to a hopeless wave of enemy attacks. I mean, being wounded probably didn't even slightly make Picard, that Uruk-Hai, or Flik more vulnerable to intimidation attacks.

Discussions of Chain of Command aside, this is a very good point. On the one hand, you definitely do want Loxodons and Oliphaunts to become susceptible to fear the moment they take serious damage. Half the fun of an enemy Oliphaunt is injuring it until it panics and runs back through the enemy archers.

On the other other hand, bad ass PCs are not supposed to run away when they are injured. Honestly, I think all player characters should simply have a high willpower defense by virtue of being player characters.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Imagine, if you will, having two tags.

[Critter]: This refers to non-sapient but non-mindless creatures like dire sharks, wyverns, oliphaunts, and honey badgers. Mostly animals in other words.

The major thing about Critters is that they use the worse of their two CANs for every resolution effect.

[Mook]: Unlike most tags, this is a DM-assigned tag rather than being one inherent to an enemy stat block. So depending on the context, a unit of level 4 of 20 town guards would be mooks (if fighting against the Black Demon Hordes) or would not be mooks (if raiding the local thieves' guild). Among other things, the Mook tag makes it so that they do not have separate Physical and Mental CANs. Unlike critters, they do not accumulate CAN bonuses unless it would apply to both scores. Also unlike critters, CAN penalties of either type apply to both scores.

The Mook tag might be too dissociative and postmodern, however, even though that's how it works in fiction. Not to mention the accounting issues.


The net effect however is that being wounded and blinded by smoke does not cause brave warriors to lose morale. Beasts of burden and new recruits will however run the risk of breaking into a blind panic and rout just because the druid caused sharp nettles to grow over the battlefield and the artificer released low-grade mustard gas.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't know. Maybe I'm just being too contrary here, but while I can accept and even embrace that being blinded renders you more vulnerable to paralysis attacks from Hokuto Shinken or entanglement attacks from Kurama's various vine weirdness, I'm not really feeling that being slowed should make you that much more vulnerable to fear or domination attacks.

[Username17]

I don't know. Maybe I'm just being too contrary here, but while I can accept and even embrace that being blinded renders you more vulnerable to paralysis attacks from Hokuto Shinken or entanglement attacks from Kurama's various vine weirdness, I'm not really feeling that being slowed should make you that much more vulnerable to fear or domination attacks.

The basic question of CAN like systems is that if you make all the attacks stack you get some kind of dumb shit like the Enchanter trying to butter people up and that making the pyromancer have an easier time making them explode. But if you don't have them all stack, you run the risk of two PCs not being able to play the same game because the things they are doing don't stack. It's a lemma with unlimited solutions (a sliding scale that goes from "every unique attack is its own condition track" straight to "hammering your way into peoples' pants"), but none of them are wholly satisfying.

Right now I am leaning towards the sort of Flow Chart dynamics where each foundation condition adds to several end-state conditions and each end-state condition can come from several foundation conditions. That seems to be a good tradeoff of players being able to cooperate and not having stupid shit happen. It does have the drawback of being complicated to visualize the interactions between large numbers of conditions. Hopefully as a player you'd just go "Hey, that guy is Shaken, my golden heart chain attack triggers off Shaken people!" rather than getting bogged down into multiplayer optimization discussions of what maneuvers each person could use if you did or did not get a critical with your Unbalancing Strike.

-Username17

[MfA]

Maybe it would be better to just stick the status effect conditional save modifiers in the spell/maneuver descriptions rather than trying to think up some general mechanism?

[Seerow]

The basic question of CAN like systems is that if you make all the attacks stack you get some kind of dumb shit like the Enchanter trying to butter people up and that making the pyromancer have an easier time making them explode.

Is this really that unreasonable? The enchanter butters the person up, they let their guard down, so now when the pyromancer does his thing they aren't actively defending which makes them take more damage. Seems to work to me.

[Username17]

The basic question of CAN like systems is that if you make all the attacks stack you get some kind of dumb shit like the Enchanter trying to butter people up and that making the pyromancer have an easier time making them explode.

Is this really that unreasonable? The enchanter butters the person up, they let their guard down, so now when the pyromancer does his thing they aren't actively defending which makes them take more damage. Seems to work to me.

You can make an argument for or against any particular chain of conditions leading from healthy to defeat. Certainly it is possible for the MC or a player to describe such a series of events no matter what the conditions are (you could draw them out of a hat and any half-competent player would be able to tell a story around it).

However, some of them are more of a stretch than others, and as pointed out on the other thread: some of them are downright offensive. I don't want to hear about your game where people make a habit of taking targets through entangled and bloodied to charmed.

-Username17

[Seerow]

The basic question of CAN like systems is that if you make all the attacks stack you get some kind of dumb shit like the Enchanter trying to butter people up and that making the pyromancer have an easier time making them explode.

Is this really that unreasonable? The enchanter butters the person up, they let their guard down, so now when the pyromancer does his thing they aren't actively defending which makes them take more damage. Seems to work to me.

You can make an argument for or against any particular chain of conditions leading from healthy to defeat. Certainly it is possible for the MC or a player to describe such a series of events no matter what the conditions are (you could draw them out of a hat and any half-competent player would be able to tell a story around it).

However, some of them are more of a stretch than others, and as pointed out on the other thread: some of them are downright offensive. I don't want to hear about your game where people make a habit of taking targets through entangled and bloodied to charmed.

-Username17

Well that's doing the exact reverse of what I was responding to... but okay. Given your feelings on this, maybe the best answer is to just excise charm from combat altogether? If you're that offended by the idea of other status effects or HP damage potentially leading to a character being charmed, dominated, or otherwise diplomancied, because you imagine implications of rape in every possible scenario... it seems like the best answer is to just make that not possible. No charm in combat. No dominate in combat. When you hit combat, socializing has officially gone off the table in any way shape or form.

Yeah it sucks to be an enchanter in a system like that, but in that case you just put enchanter as a secondary focus rather than a primary class focus.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The basic question of CAN like systems is that if you make all the attacks stack you get some kind of dumb shit like the Enchanter trying to butter people up and that making the pyromancer have an easier time making them explode. But if you don't have them all stack, you run the risk of two PCs not being able to play the same game because the things they are doing don't stack. It's a lemma with unlimited solutions (a sliding scale that goes from "every unique attack is its own condition track" straight to "hammering your way into peoples' pants"), but none of them are wholly satisfying.

"The hammer is my penis."

Well, one of the things I noticed from examining certain status effects was that it's plausible for certain effects to stack with almost everything else. While I still think that people being more prone to domination by virtue of being stuck in quicksand is dumb, I don't think it's that much of a stretch of imagination for people who are cursed or drained (distinct from exhaustion) or possessed or confused or essence poisoned or despairing to apply to so many potential follow-up conditions that they just apply to all of them.

That is, the idea I have is to have two condition tracks to minimize the basic problem of non-overlappingness but to make them overlap further you liberally sprinkle powersets with status effects that make a barbarian work together with an enchanter. And furthermore make it so that basic vanilla damage uses the best CAN bonus; I don't think that anyone is really willing to argue that a target being dazed or charmed should make it easier for them to have their heads lopped off.

[Mask_De_H]

Wait, I think you accidentally a word Lago. Are you saying negative status effects should or should not make it easier to drop people? I thought the problem was certain chains of effect were confusing or ultimately distasteful. I don't have a problem with the enchanter distracting an enemy so the pyromancer can get a better shot in, but the reverse is problematic.

A charmed person should be able to be coerced into throwing their life away, but you shouldn't be able to rape someone into loving you (unless you are making a Rance TTRPG or something). Frank made a solution to this back with SAME; to actually charm or kill, it required a number of wounds/effects of the correct type. Mix and matching just made it easier to take someone out.

So perhaps making certain effects only trigger with enough preceding effects of similar type?

[TheWorid]

So is the idea of befriending someone through hurting them the only end result that bothers people? Because we can seriously just take that out as an option. You can give people good impressions of you, do things for you, and inflict emotions, but not force long-term beliefs onto them unless you go into brainwashing territory. Keep in mind that I am saying that making someone your friend through mundane persuasion is not a death-equivalent status effect, not that supernatural mental domination is impossible: both those are two very different things.

Hitting someone pretty obviously can make them have sex with you - even before getting into battered wives and BDSM - because threats of physical violence are a decent way of getting someone to do just about anything. Is it a morally repugnant way of doing it? Yes, but that does not mean that a game designer has to play ethics cop. Rape is still pretty much only going to be done by the creepy players anyways, and jumping to it as somehow the optimal solution in any of the systems described is a little strange.

The more important distinction to draw is whether or not they actually want to have sex with you, or if they are being coerced. Because you can work with that: state that intimidation and violence makes people do what you want, but they hate you for it afterwords. Alternatively, make "positive" social interactions (such as Diplomacy or Bluff) that rely on good will be penalized for damage, and "negative" ones (such as Intimidate) work like everything else. I am not quite sold on a single condition track, but making the combat minigame and the social one play nice together is a good thing, if not outright fusing them.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Are you saying negative status effects should or should not make it easier to drop people?

I'm saying that some (the majority) negative status effects should only combo with some other negative status effects while a small pile of them (a significant minority) can combine with everything.

For example, slow and blind combine just fine because they're on the PCAN. So does fear and charm, both being on the MCAN. Along with the reverse. But slow doesn't meaningfully interact with fear, other than making the attack vector easier to land. An enemy that is Cursed or Despairing is equally susceptible to Slow, Blind, Fear, and Charm. And certain game effects don't combo with PCAN or MCAN at all; Polymorph Other only really combos with universally negative status effects like 'Being Lower Level' or 'Drained' or 'Possessed'.

The thing is, the classes will be designed have enough of the 'universal' negative status effects to gloss over any potential tactical discontinuities. An Artificer (who mostly specializes in PCAN penalties) and a Warlock (who mostly specializes in MCAN penalties) don't combo off of each other perfectly but it's understandable that an Artificer can sometimes bust out the old Hex Cannon for the cursed status effect and the Warlock can whip out their Hallucinatory Mist for the confused status effect.

There will still be a couple of hiccups in the system like being Slowed (in the time distortion sense, not the numb muscles sense) making you more susceptible to Paralysis unfortunately. It's not possible to eliminate all of them, but you want to cover enough of them that peoples' WSoD isn't continually challenged but not so many that people can't interact with each other.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So is the idea of befriending someone through hurting them the only end result that bothers people?

I've said on this very page that I'm also bothered by some of the other implications of the single condition track. For example, being stuck waist-deep in mud makes you more easily dominated or being charmed makes you more susceptible to being blinded.

[TheWorid]

So is the idea of befriending someone through hurting them the only end result that bothers people?

I've said on this very page that I'm also bothered by some of the other implications of the single condition track. For example, being stuck waist-deep in mud makes you more easily dominated or being charmed makes you more susceptible to being blinded.

When stuck waist deep in mud and facing a group of armed opponents, giving up tends to become a relatively good option as opposed to death. Being half-defeated saps the will, so I could easily see domination becoming easier. And being blinded while charmed? If you are already charmed, then you are putting your trust in the one who charmed you, and presumably their friends, which makes you vulnerable to just about anything they might want to do to you. Not to mention that being charmed could also imply that you could just order them to look straight into the dust you are about to throw into their eyes.

Regardless, I know what you are talking about. Not everyone is always going to be satisfied by every explanation. There is the suggestion of condition trees with different paths leading to a finite number of end states, which could possibly resolve that, but veers close to being byzantine.

[PhoneLobster]

Lago. Let me just stop in and attempt to give you some helpful advice here, since you and Frank appear to be attempting to completely sabotage any benefit of this thread as well as other peoples.

Combined status/hp/whatever damage tracks are a strong and well accepted abstraction that exist for a reason.

If you split your damage tracks by ANY action types you create a situation where the optimal PC party always stacks the same damage track. ALL member's of the resulting parties either punch OR charm depending on their party strategy.

Alternatively all party members punch AND charm and have an equal ability split (by character, possibly not by phase, and presumably this is mechanically enforced or it won't happen) and every encounter is artificially all one damage track or another. And that way lies the separate and indeed very artificially segregated social mini-game and a great deal more WTF moments and player dissatisfaction with unrewarding mechanics and complexity than you get from a simpler, more flexibly unified system.

Now. More easily blinding charmed people? More easily casting ANY spell including domination on someone struggling helplessly in mud? You have a problem with those scenarios? Well I certainly don't and I think it's pretty easy for most players to accept that "things make your general defense against stuff weaker", the more separate damage tracks the more confusing, more complex, more unrewarding and in the end harder to explain or accept through sheer VOLUME your system becomes. The alternative to unified damage is the "mud damage stacking only party" vs "blind damage stacking only party" and similar massive abstract mechanical pit falls.

You want to push hard for inserting a giant unneeded pitfall into your "improved" damage tracking system. Well. That's your problem. But it might help if I point out what you are doing so you can I dunno. Reconsider the sheer stupidity of it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm not going to refute your specific examples because even though I think your explanations as trite and contrived you saw the underlying point. If you want to know why I'll be happy to answer you, but at the moment I think it just distracts from the discussion.

Not everyone is always going to be satisfied by every explanation.

Regardless, I think you're understating the underlying problem. People are flat-out offended by how Bloody Path or even Blinding Strike works even though there is plenty of (poorly interpreted) narrative precedent for both. I am not aware of any story where the Big Bad Evil Guy became more flammable because the hero had lopped off his arm. And having to reach that far for an explanation just shows the poverty of the whole exercise.

Regardless, I know what you are talking about. Not everyone is always going to be satisfied by every explanation. There is the suggestion of condition trees with different paths leading to a finite number of end states, which could possibly resolve that, but veers close to being byzantine.

Beyond the potential overcomplexity, I'm not a fan, because that closes your system to the creation one-time unique status effects. Like an effect that causes your shadow to detach from your body and attack you until you overcome self-doubt or an effect that causes someone to uncontrollably bleed clouds of acid every time they're wounded.

Which is not a concern if you're publishing an evergreen or near-evergreen edition, but if you want to add new material you either have to rely on pre-existing stock effects or redraw the chart.

[TheWorid]

Regardless, I think you're understating the underlying problem. People are flat-out offended by how Bloody Path or even Blinding Strike works even though there is plenty of (poorly interpreted) narrative precedent for both. I am not aware of any story where the Big Bad Evil Guy became more flammable because the hero had lopped off his arm. And having to reach that far for an explanation just shows the poverty of the whole exercise.

"People" will be offended by anything different from older versions. What was actually wrong with Bloody Path was its execution (more skilled combatants hurting themselves more) not the idea that it represented.

Losing an arm does not make you chemically more flammable, but you would be hard pressed to convince me that it does not make you easier to set on fire. The pain and dizziness from blood loss alone would make it easier to... well, do most things to you, including fireball massacre. And besides, both dismemberment and ignition map onto Physical CAN, so by your own system, they would stack.

Basically, my point is that while I can definitely see the logic behind wanting to use multiple tracks, none of the solutions I have seen put forth deal with the problem adequately, including the PCAN/MCAN split.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Losing an arm does not make you chemically more flammable, but you would be hard pressed to convince me that it does not make you easier to set on fire.

You're really reaching there. Aside from the fact that I think your explanation is still stupid and contrived -- the typical badass warrior or stone golem certainly will not be feeling pain and dizziness from blood loss -- even if I accept your weakass explanation it still fails. CAN does not (or at least cannot) have the granularity to model the slight variations due to chaos theory for such piddling-ass shit. The CAN numbers we have been throwing about have been playing with that a +4 CAN makes you pretty much unbeatable. Even a +/- 1 CAN shift is supposed to be meaningful. And if you apply it to every effect it overstates certain status shifts to the point of absurdity.

And besides, both dismemberment and ignition map onto Physical CAN, so by your own system, they would stack.

If I was going to have an 'On Fire' status effect, it wouldn't be on the PCAN or MCAN status tracts; it'd be on the universal tract. And it'd still be slightly dissociative because I have said and continued to state that Possession and Despair are examples of effects that should add a universal CAN penalty.

But regardless that was sort of Frank's point. CAN is going to have some dissociation problems unless you push it to the point of overcomplexity and/or nonoverlappingness. There is no getting around that. Having a single condition track would make this problem worse.