TNE: Multi-abilities

[K]

OK, based on what I've learned so far, I've decided that abilities that work only work in hyper-specific situations are bad.

So here is the design philosophy: every ability does it's thing, but it has a hyperspecific SUPA-POWWA.

For example, 3e Shatter breaks stuff, but it also does damage to crystalline creatures.

So, things like fire damage should automatically do more damage to cold creatures and lightning should do more damage to constructs.

How's that sound?

[CatharzGodfoot]

OK, based on what I've learned so far, I've decided that abilities that work only work in hyper-specific situations are bad.

So here is the design philosophy: every ability does it's thing, but it has a hyperspecific SUPA-POWWA.

For example, 3e Shatter breaks stuff, but it also does damage to crystalline creatures.

So, things like fire damage should automatically do more damage to cold creatures and lightning should do more damage to constructs.

How's that sound?

I like the first part, but the second seems iffy. How about going even more general? Instead of 'shatter', you've got the ability to generate strange vibrations in objects, especially crystals. This can be used is a simple destructive fashion, but you can also make ghost sound and magic mouth type effects, and using the right kind of 'resonance crystals' you can set up zone that do things like block dimensional travel, repel water-element creatures, or even create force fields/walls of force.

[Bigode]

Uh, you're talking about the part that sounds obvious, to be honest; more esoteric examples should help. OTOH, another thing I was thinking's more abilities like ... megalodon empowerment would be good, having a normal option and a big guns option; hopefully, that'd also make daily abilities seem less contrived. And, lastly, I'm not sure the game has to have really specific abilities; I mean, are burn stuff or destroy object anything anything less than really general?

[Talisman]

I'm in favor of it if it does away with the hyper-specific, you-must-have-this-color-key-to-beat-this-monster type of spell.

[Koumei]

Sounds good to me - I like the idea of a Fire power doing damage, with extra damage to cold/plant things, setting some foes alight, and also being used to burn objects away and melt ice. Along with a low-level setting to cook food and warm your hands.

Or electricity powers either dealing extra damage to constructs, or repairing/super-charging them, dealing damage to every creature in a body of water, being drawn towards electric and flying creatures, and maybe even being used as a last-resort resurrection ability on people who died within one round (assuming they could be brought back with a heart-zapper-thing, as opposed to having been decapitated).

[Username17]

So getting rid of resistances all together and just throwing down vulnerabilities? That works for Werewolves (who are just really tough and vulnerable to silver), but I'd like the occasional demon who is immune to fire.

-Username17

[Ravengm]

K, yes.

If you've got a whole spellbook of spells that are useless in all but the most specific situations, because the generalized ones just totally suck, it's terrible.

[Koumei]

There could be room for resistances/immunities and vulnerabilities as well. Presumably I could point out an example that isn't Pokemon, but who cares, it's the example I'm using.

Having a vulnerability (probably better that the critter has the "vulnerable to ___" tag than abilities having "super-effective against ___" tag) means you take a penalty on the save/it has a bonus to hit you/extra "damage" is done/effects last longer/something special.

Having a resistance (again, creatures get resistances, rather than abilities listing everything that is resistant) does the opposite or something.

There could just be flat out "Resistant" and "Vulnerable" as qualities, or they could be numerical the way things currently are.

And immunity, well, is self-explanatory - either immunity to fire means you are completely immune to any effect by a fire ability (fire elementals are made of fire, more fire won't do anything except make them bigger, perhaps), or it is also numeric, and provides immunity to fire abilities of level X or lower (fire giants are still vaporised if hurled into the sun).

[Ravengm]

And immunity, well, is self-explanatory - either immunity to fire means you are completely immune to any effect by a fire ability (fire elementals are made of fire, more fire won't do anything except make them bigger, perhaps), or it is also numeric, and provides immunity to fire abilities of level X or lower (fire giants are still vaporised if hurled into the sun).

I like immunity to level X or lower, personally. Because if there's a level 1 Kobold NPC commoner that just happened to find a ring of fire immunity, it means that hurling him into the sun does nothing either.

[JonSetanta]

Good plan, K.
I feel the same way about Shatter too. And yet, just had to try it myself back in 3.0. It did suck...

However, as far as Fire vs. Cold and contrarywise, don't put the weakness to an 'opposing element' in the creature's element tags.
The interactions should be left to individual spells, as they have near-infinite more possibilities than one could cram into a subtype description.
D&D fails at this because the weakness is included in the subtype rather than in a spell subtype.

For instance, a Fire spell subtype or tag could read as "Fire: Spells with this subtype deal +(Level) more damage to creatures with the Cold subtype."
Spells would have additional effects on top of this.

[Neeeek]

(fire giants are still vaporised if hurled into the sun).

They would be anyways. The gravity would crush them into paste.

[Koumei]

Neeeek: Gravity only exists as a form of falling damage, I think, so it'd only be 20d6 falling damage. But you know what I mean, there should probably be a distinction between "hardcore/magical enough to not be affected by fire, unless you find a clever way to dish out a really powerful one" and "made of fire".

Sigma: Nonono. Don't put it in spell subtypes. If it deals fire damage, and we work out what fire-dealing spells should be able to do, we give it the [Fire] tag, and that stuff is under the tag. Individual critters can be given the "Vulnerable to Fire" ability (note: you don't want this "ability"), and that explains what it means.

It won't be a blanket "You are type X, you automatically are vulnerable", but the fact that someone is vulnerable is found written on their sheet.

[JonSetanta]

Koumei: Ah. So it wouldn't exactly be universal to, say, all [Fire] critters, but if a beast is Weak: Lightning and Weak: Ice it would have those tags listed as part of its species. The Weak property would define the same result each time, but the element or material appended after it states which other tagged effects cause the Weak

That's much like Final Fantasy or Pokemon and I have no objection to that either. My proposal was mostly a jerk-reaction against the universal properties D&D tends to carry for ALL [Fire] beings rather than specific.

It wouldn't have hurt any designers to at least use the fucking tags!
They were so close with types and subtypes in 3.0, and yet the concept wasn't carried any farther. Shit. Sucks.

Frank: What about devils that are just reelly, really resistant to fire, rather than immune?

Also, that bit about fire giants in the sun reminds me of when I proposed to a DM that we should remove all immunities in favor of scaled resistances (on average, -10 element or negate 2 ability score damage per level)
I cited the example of devils living in lava or the sun, since they could teleport.. but didn't consider the incredible gravity or necessity for Outsiders to breath.

[Manxome]

There are advantages to putting resistances and weaknesses on either the attacks or the targets: each one lets you create interesting exceptions that the other doesn't.


If an attack lists its effects for resistant and vulnerable targets, then you can have some spells that change their damage, others that change their duration, others that add bonus conditions on vulnerable targets, etc. and you have more control over which attacks have wide use and which are used in special cases (by controlling how important resistance or weakness is). You can also avoid nasty special cases where being resistant or vulnerable to a spell does much less or much more than it should--if an attack does 2 points of fire damage and adds the conditions "burning," "immolated," "scorched," and "OMGHELPHELPIMONFIRE," then we'd like someone resistant to fire to be less affected, but if "fire resistance" just reduces fire damage, it might make almost no difference.

Case study: spells in WarCraft 3 all list two durations: one for heroes, and one for everyone else. For beneficial spells, they're usually the same. Thunderclap, an AoE damage+slow used by a hero, slows heroes for 60% as long as regular units. Slow, a single-target debuff used by a nonhero caster, slows heroes for roughly 18% as long as regular units.


If a monster lists how attacks targeting it should be modified, then you can have lots of degrees of vulnerability or resistance--one monster can reduce fire damage by half, while another reduces it by two thirds, etc. You can cut across normal classes of resistance, to create a monster that recovers from all conditions in half the normal time but doesn't resist damage, or one that is resistant to magical lightning but not natural lightning. You can also have resistances that work on different curves; one monster could take half damage from fire, while another subtracts 5 points from each packet of fire damage suffered, so the former is resistant across the board, while the latter can ignore minor fire stuff but has no meaningful resistance to solar flares.


I suspect you actually want to allow yourselves to use both--at least in special cases, if not for typical interactions. Consider:


Suppose you want a spell that encases the target in a giant hamster ball and lets you roll them around the battlefield and crush other monsters with them. I think it makes a lot more sense for the spell to say "this only works on targets with a maximum size of X and a maximum weight of Y" than to find every monster larger than X or more massive than Y and add "cannot be encased in a giant hamster ball" to its description.

On the other hand, suppose you want to design a mechanical monster with a lightning rod for gathering the power needed to activate its omega attack. You're going to add "may use omega attack on first turn after taking lightning damage" to the monster, not put "allows monster X to use its omega attack for one turn" on every lightning attack in the game.

[Username17]

There could just be flat out "Resistant" and "Vulnerable" as qualities, or they could be numerical the way things currently are.

The interactions should be left to individual spells, as they have near-infinite more possibilities than one could cram into a subtype description.

There are two ways to make damage/critter effects that make any fucking sense. One of them is to have a finite number of creature types and have abilities reference which creature types get hosed or not by them; and the other is to have a finite number of attack types and have each creature reference which attack types they are vulnerable or invulnerable to.

Then there's the D&D method in which you have a theoretically unlimited number of attack and creature types and put interactions into the rules text of either one interchangeably. This leads to spells that do "earth damage" while no effect in the entire game triggers on that shit at all.

Now personally I think that fixing the number of attack types at some arbitrary number is a better solution than fixing the creature types. After all, attack types transfer to other settings well and critters don't.

-Username17

[virgil]

Frank's old design document from the "It's My Invention" subforum looked like a good idea, since it seems to be a conglomerate of the Chinese system, and you can throw in a bit of a Buddhist/Hindu twist on it...

Earth
Air
Fire
Water
Animal/Life
Spirit/Death
* Followed by a physical/mental varation of each (ie, fear = mental fire)

I don't know if TNE's mythos works with Void included, since Frank's interpretation of Void was iron/steel, and the Hindu mythos doesn't attribute anything special to iron like they do in more European cultures.

[Username17]

I don't know if TNE's mythos works with Void included, since Frank's interpretation of Void was iron/steel, and the Hindu mythos doesn't attribute anything special to iron like they do in more European cultures.

Actually has a rather striking Hindu parallel:

King Vikramaditya, after great thought got seven seats spread out, the first of gold and the last of iron. He then requested the deities to take their seats. Shani (Saturn) knew that his seat was iron seat viz. the last and as much, he was recognized as inferior to all.

Furthermore, there's stuff like how the palace of the dead is made of bands of iron and copper; and the ancient rulers of India used to make large columns of iron to put up at the borders as a manner of frightening away would-be invaders.

So the Throne of Iron is held by:


The void principle.

-Username17

[virgil]

There was some other stuff that A_Cynic told me about. Shani is associated with iron, and Shani is either thought of as an all-bad demon or a bringer of mixed blessings at best (depends on the region). Also, "Shani represents a loss of awareness, or ignorance."

And apparently Kali Yuga more or less translates as "Iron Age".

So Iron seems to have connotations of bad, unelightened, etc.

[Username17]

I'm not sure what to make of having the seven elemental materials be:

Gold, silver, bronze, brass, tin, zinc, mica and iron.

I mean, I'm totally fine with people making weapons out of gold to draw fire strength or silver to draw water strength. But somewhere in the middle it gets freaky. Tin? Mica? What the fuck?

-Username17

[SphereOfFeetMan]

I don't know if this is relevant, but Tin has a lot of interesting qualities that might lend itself to Gadgeteers. Maybe you could conflate the properties of Tin with supernatural elements.

Here are a couple Wiki links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_cry

[Koumei]

So the Throne of Iron is held by:
(image of Sailor Saturn)

YES!

[K]

My current design philosophy is: start with the absolute minimum.

I mean, there is always complication as people want to tell more permutations or complications of the same stories, but starting at the minimum seems to way to go at the beginning.

[ckafrica]

Do we have to have real world materials represent each element? I mean it is fantasy. Could we not just have crazy new materials or adjust the characteristics of the existing materials to fit our need.

Lets have death swords made out of bone and cloud crystals that have to be harvested from the tops of mountains obsidian fire spears, chitin/resin life armor, pearl water knives and whatever else we come up with.

Perhaps having several associated with each so people can choose what things look like to some extent while still fitting within the theme and being mechanically equivalent. To me, the big thing is to not feel like the system is pushing me into a corner of what my character is going to be like. We don't want to be like 4e

[Username17]

Oh sure. Some of the big ones like Iron can be almost unique, while weird ones like Gold can be forced to share their element with obsidian and whatever.

-Username17

[virgil]

I can live with that, so long as we actually decide on a finite number of distinct attack types. I can live with the 14 posited earlier, or something similar; as I can think of variations...

* Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Void; with an Animal/Spirit division (10 types)
* Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, Wood: with a physical/mental/spiritual division (15 types)

Whatever really, but we should decide on how many we want before we start jumping ahead and deciding the form they'll take.

My vote is for Earth/Air/Fire/Water/Void with Animal/Spirit (or physical/mental) division; the one that creates 10 possible damage types.

If we ever decide on how many different mechanical effects we want, we can tailor the elemental system around that, but I don't know if we ever codified that.