Ending TNE Work Stoppage

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Username17
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Ending TNE Work Stoppage

Post by Username17 »

So with my Shadowrun writing pretty much behind me forever, it's time to do the next thing: writing fantasy material.

The goal of a fantasy world is that it contain enough material in it that players can conceive of things to do with an evening's adventuring that doesn't include any time spent stabbing skeletons right in the face. That means that there should be established social orders that players can interact with directly as well as positions of power that characters can achieve in-game. It means that the world should e interactive enough that a character's actions can have predictable effects elsewhere such that players can work in order to generate specific outcomes. In short: the goal of a fantasy world is for it to work as little like Everquest as possible, full stop.

Now, the goal of a game system is to facilitate playing the game. This means that it actually has to achieve a set of specific criteria:
  • Diversity & Balance Different characters need to “feel” different one from another and they also need to not feel small in the pants while doing so. Whether a system is class based, skill based, or hybrid there should be a number of separately effective ways to play different kinds of characters and a reason for people to play different kinds of characters.
  • Tactical Depth The input of individual players needs to be real and it needs to matter. If a player's character contributes to the tactical minigame just as well with the player himself giving some standing orders and then wandering off to play Smash Bros. in adventure mode, the game has failed at its duty. Characters need to be presented with dynamic choices continuously through the combat portion of the game, even when it is not their turn. The statement “come and get me when it's my turn” kills the action dead just as well as the statement “have my character shoot something” does. Player skill, player engagement needs to make a real difference in the game's outcome during battles.
  • World Alteration Players need to have access to proactive world changing effects. That is, every character should have some thing that they can do with every resource that is available in the game (even if that thing is “sell it for a different resource that they can use”). Time, Gold, Power Crystals, whatever it is that player characters receive in order to spend on making the world a better place or filling it with Nubian dancing girls or whatever should be something that is of some obvious and real use to all characters.
  • Team Playing Whatever you want to call it, different player characters should bring different abilities to the table. The team should receive a benefit from the interworkings of different characters and their different abilities to make a better whole. D&D 4th edition calls this concept “roles” and despite the incredibly stupid way this was handled something kind of like that needs to be done. But not just for combat, for everything. Players need to be doing different things across the board in order to have synergy between characters.


So what does that mean? It means that there should be lots of different characters available to play who function differently both in and out of combat. It means that the world should be defined for the game, and that the world should have available things to do both to it and for it. It means that different kinds of characters should synergize one with another. The idea of having a “universal” game system that is plug and play for hundreds of different worlds is in some ways appealing, but it's really 1985. It doesn't really work out. Even Champions really only works in a Superhero setting, a setting which is actually extremely well defined whether you like it or not.

Playability
Pawn from Queen Knight Three to Queen Bishop Four.

One of the key elements of playing a game is having the ability to actually do so. This means that anything which is too complex or obscure just can't happen at all.

Limiting Die Rolls
Resolving an arrow shot could involve a wind direction and strength chart roll, a targeting test, a dodge roll, a damage test, an armor soak, a wound recovery check, a morale test, and probably some other stuff. But you wouldn't want to play that game because you'd never remember it all anyway. More rolls makes the game more random, it makes the game potentially deeper, and it makes the game definitely more time intensive to learn and play. Personally I think you lose more than you gain after your second roll. That gives you the ability to differentiate between accurate attacks and big attacks, it allows you to engage attacker and defender, and it doesn't require more of you than is barely necessary for that.

Movement Abstraction
Everything in the universe is in a constant state of flux. This makes any positional system in a game inherently problematic. A character's location is nominally fixed at various points in the game, but in the actual story these freeze frames of location never actually occur. Various methods have been attempted to handle this discrepancy, but the big one is that squares can't be used.

Why not? Sure, squares can make for an entertaining tactical minigame and work well enough in their place, but that place is not on Instant Message services, a place where this game will assuredly find itself time and again. This means that a positional system that can be described in the body of an AIM chat message is what has to be used. Which brings us back to the idea of a “distance number” between characters. The idea is that the statement “How far am I from character X?” can be answered with a simple scalar in a text format much more easily than it can as a vector. So long as we just keep track of raw distances between things rather than attempt to keep things in coordinate format, we can keep everything running in text format.

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Post by Ice9 »

Movement abstraction - at least the way you've described it - seems tricky for any multi-person fights on non-trivial terrain ... which are pretty common in many campaigns.

Consider:
The Orc is 25' from the Fighter.
The Fighter is 10' from the Wizard.
The Orc is 30' from the Wizard.
The Wizard is 10' from the Lava.
The Fighter is 10' from the Lava.
The Orc is 15' from the Lava.
The Archer is 15' from the Fighter.
The Archer is 15' from the Wizard.
The Archer is 20' from the Orc.
The Fighter has cover from the Archer.

Can the Orc charge the Wizard without having to go through the Fighter or fall in the Lava, and will the Archer still have a clear shot to it after it does?
I think if you went to abstract positioning, you'd have to go all the way - reduce things to Melee/Close/Medium/Long range, and have things like guarding someone or blocking a passageway represented by manuevers.


Actually, it seems like it'll be necessary to pick a medium (face to face, IM, PBP, ...) to target the rules to before it can be determined what those rules should be. For instance, immediate actions taken during other people's turns can increase player interaction and fun in face-to-face, but slow things down hideously in PBP. And as mentioned, squares work fine in face-to-face or PBP, but not so well in IM.
Last edited by Ice9 on Tue Aug 05, 2008 9:44 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by Absentminded_Wizard »

You'd probably also have to give distances from major strategic terrain features as well. There would be way too much information for any one player to hold it all in their head. Realistically, any non-grid movement system is probably going to have to assume that the GM has a rough map indicating both distances and angles (this could be done with arrows, though). Even though this is complicated, I like this direction. I've always wondered how you could give players some sense of tactical options without having a big battlemat and detailed positioning rules.

When you talk about the world being defined for the game, are we talking about one set of setting assumptions for all games of TNE? I agree that the idea of a universal system like GURPS tries to be isn't really workable, but a versatile system is another matter entirely, especially if you're only worried about the variation within one genre.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:When you talk about the world being defined for the game, are we talking about one set of setting assumptions for all games of TNE? I agree that the idea of a universal system like GURPS tries to be isn't really workable, but a versatile system is another matter entirely, especially if you're only worried about the variation within one genre.
Yeah, I've been making notes on a version of the world that looks a lot more like classic fantasy, just because I know my friends aren't going to be into the crypto-Hindu stuff.

Also...

I remember looking at the wiki before it got filled with spam, and seeing the 'to-hit' roll, with 'critical effect' at the top, and 'even your automatic effect fails, sucka' at the bottom. I think that's a bad plan, considering that the automatic effect was there to keep bad die rolls from negating a person's presence in the first place. I propose an alternative: really poor to-hit rolls draw negative consequences from your target. This is like provoking, so the target has some choices as to what might happen to you, probably based on their stance as well as some generic ones. This is another reason people have to be at the table not during their turn.
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Post by The 13 Wise Buttlords »

Yeah, I've been making notes on a version of the world that looks a lot more like classic fantasy, just because I know my friends aren't going to be into the crypto-Hindu stuff.
Frank, I hate to do this to you because I know you're trying to get rid of a lot of dumb leftover LotR fantasy tropes, but from a pure marketing standpoint I have to agree with this guy.

Okay, let me relate a story. One of the explicit design goals for Final Fantasy X was to create a fantasy world that had nothing to do with LotR-style fantasy. And superficially, they succeeded.

However, the setting still used a lot (and I mean a lot) of standard fantasy tropes. Probably the most grating ones was the concept of ' chosen ones whom society revolves around', 'a civilization in the past that's better than we have now', 'a misguided religion unknowingly serving evil', and the religion/afterlife resembles that of Abrahamic religions. And they further smoothed over the transition by sticking in a cubic assload of standard Final Fantasy icons like chocobos, airships, the standard FF spells, the monsters, so on.

And this setting is still one of the biggest departures from standard fantasy that most geeks have heard of.

In other words, I believe you are going to have to throw in many more nods to standard western fantasy if you're going to appeal to a significant slice of the gamer population.

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Post by Amra »

I agree with the comments on the setting. I can't see my lot buying into a fantastic setting that's so dissimilar to the one they're used to... and I'm not sure I'd be motivated enough to try in the first instance. :(

It's a weakness I'll own up to, but D&D-dragons-and-knights type fantasy is something of a comfort to me in a dark and confusing world ;)
Last edited by Amra on Tue Aug 05, 2008 3:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Voss »

I don't necessarily mind the setting stuff, but gutting a RPG to the point that it works over AIM doesn't strike me as a worthwhile goal. Scalar 'distance numbers' are going to make people's eyes cross, and they're just going to go play WoW (or Everquest, or Conan or whatever). Because someone is going to have to keep track of the distance to everything thats non-trivial [monsters, other pcs, tables, traps, doors, other interesting terrain features, treasure, etc] and somehow communicate it. Thats a pain in the ass, and its going to grind things to a halt on regular basis: its a game stopper, and sadly its a constant one.
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Re: Ending TNE Work Stoppage

Post by JonSetanta »

FrankTrollman wrote: Limiting Die Rolls
Resolving an arrow shot could involve a wind direction and strength chart roll, a targeting test, a dodge roll, a damage test, an armor soak, a wound recovery check, a morale test, and probably some other stuff. But you wouldn't want to play that game because you'd never remember it all anyway.
How absurd! Every RPG should be interlaced with more charts and graphs than one can digest in a year, let alone remember the page number.
It's the true Gygaxian experience; confused and overwhelmed in both character and real life.

/sarcasm

I expect the Hindi-dominant flavor of this system (TNE) to be a modular component of the game.
If you don't like Hindu mythos, you simply don't use it.
However... you will have to make up your standard orcs-and-elves fantasy as replacement.
The numbers should be the same so why make a fuss over it!

The best alternative would be for Frank to slap out some sample Euro-fantasy standbys as example for adaptation.

I'm mostly glad that abstract distances will be used rather than spacing.
I've been doing that with friends for years.
Figurine-free, here we come.
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Post by Username17 »

Keeping Track of Position Without Minis
Kids these days are spoiled. I our day we were lucky to have sticks to draw in sand.

D&D has been moving to a more and more miniatures dependent system for about 30 years. But back in the day, and even now, a lot of people never had any miniatures and battle mats to play with. These people had to game only with their imaginations and the stories that they told. Some of these people don't even have dice and have to play games like Amber and Münchhausen. We aren't going that far, but seriously gaming should be handleable without recourse to figurines of any kind.

Locations in a Room: Crowds and Duels
Let's say that a room is 3m x 4m. Actually quite a substantial room that you could easily get 20 people in for a party. And yet on a 1m square it would be cramped at 12. With a 5' square grid it would e squeezing with 6. And that kind of granularity is harmful even if it is convenient. So by dropping the grid and simply placing people “in the room” we lose an easy method to keep track of distance, but we actually gain the ability to keep track of distances we actually care about much more finely. The distance between two people in adjacent squares is somewhere between 0 and 10 feet on a D&D map, and that's honestly the entire width of a 3m room.

Anyway, there are really only a couple of “places” in a 3x4 room that actually matter. If you are blocking a door, that matters. If you are on top of a table or chair, that matters. And finally, if you are inside the reach of a hostile axeman, that's important as well. But frankly, most of the places you could be in a room don't actually matter. Rooms are pretty small, and getting to the door is mostly a question of initiative more than physical distance unless someone is actually in the doorway with a hammer.

So failing being one of the lucky guys who is actually in an important location one's self, the only thing that is actually important is what kind of range you are at from people you are physically fighting. And furthermore, if that range is longer than the reach of the arm + weapon of either participant, that doesn't matter either. People will move around a lot during combat. And while 0-10 feet is probably a bit extreme, it is a simple point of fact that any foot work you do while outside the reach of an enemy sword is essentially unopposed.

Opposed vs. Unopposed Movement
An important idea of freeform position is that people who are close enough to threaten you “matter” in terms of where you want to go and people who don't, well, don't. If someone has a sword and you want to run over and hug them, there's a good meter of steel that gets to have a say in whether or not that happens. But if you're out of that reach you can move left or right, and that's pretty much that.

The length between two combatants only needs to be kept track of if it is the extreme range of one attacker or the other or closer than that. Once it's in there, characters who are in-range have an ability to “oppose” movement attempts by the other guy. Movement itself can be “careful” or “heedless” (probably some things in between that as well). If you move “carefully” you try to get an opening to move in, which allows the movement opposition to potentially stop your movement. If you move “heedlessly” you just frickin move, and the opposition gets to smack you in the face on the way in. And of course, when unopposed movement happens, you just pick where you want to be.

Interception
Another important idea is one of “intercepting” – that is that some people want to close to a relative distance where the lengths of swords matter and other people don't. Simple turns make this exceedingly easy. After all, it is difficult to imagine a turn length so short in duration that one could not cover tha entire length and breadth of a 4m or even 8m room in a “combat round” so anyone who goes last in the initiative count is always going to be able to charge into any person still in the room with no possibility of failure with a battle mat being used. That's unfortunate, because it creates a need for people to have weird lateral movement rules to pull the kinds of side stepping that we all know are possible.

Interception comes in the form of chasing and circling. In chasing, one character or the other is trying to get to a specific place. In a circling maneuver, one character is trying to get to combat range and the other is trying to avoid it while still remaining in the area. The difference is not only in the outcome, but in whether speed or reaction is primary.
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Post by Voss »

Oh, so you don't want a distance measure at all.
What you want is a threatened flag.

So, if Bob threatens Fred, Fred has a list of things he can't do, or can do with a risk.

Similarly, people & monsters occupy (or perhaps block) significant terrain features. Bob occupies the table while Fred occupies the door.
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Post by K »

The setting elements will be modular.

I was actually thinking of providing three settings: a default fantasy, the Hindu one, and another one. I'm leaning toward Far Future or Oriental, but a post-apocalyptic Cowboys, Cadillacs, Mutants, and Dinosaurs has a certain appeal.

Setting elements are super easy to make, so I don't know why designers bitch like little girls when they have to do it.

Heck, the only thing you need to do is describe some characters, add in flavor text about a few cities and locations that PCs will want to visit, then make a few iconic monsters (and making iconic monsters is not a big deal since you seriously can rub the serial numbers off a Wraith and call it a Semi-Sentient Energy Humaform and add in a flavor description and people will be perfectly happy).
Last edited by K on Tue Aug 05, 2008 7:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by virgil »

Bah, LotR-flavour RPGs have been so prevalent, I'm starting to get sick of it. I don't plan on running a game with elves and dwarves for a very long time.

I'm fairly certain that when you use the X' away system, you don't try to replicate the existance of a grid with it, but use it as a more specific form of the abstract "Melee/Close/Medium/Long" system. Describing it that way, I envision something not unlike a Battle of the Venn Diagram.

You have a stretched circle representing "The Twin Plateaus", then you have two circles that just about fill the larger one without intersection (Plateau A, Plateau B). You draw a small circle that overlaps the two Plateaus, "The Bridge of Despair".

Plateau A, B: Close Range
Bridge of Dispair: Melee Range
Twin Plateaus: Medium Range

If you want to go from plateau-to-plateau, you have to Enter Melee with the bridge.

You can then place X number of people on the plateaus, each representing their own seperate Melee circle that doesn't intersect with each other. In order for one to swing the sword at another, you need to perform an Enter Melee maneuver with them. I don't know if you want to or not, but you could have character's Melee circles not fully intersect with their opponent when they enter melee, which allows for a chain...

Cleric [melee] Fighter [melee] Monster; where the Fighter is in melee with both Cleric and Monster, but the Cleric and Monster are not in melee with each other. You then have a Rotate Maneuver, where the Monster can choose to include the Cleric in its Melee (which the Cleric can later perform to undo this).

You throw in various descriptors and environmental-like traits for each terrain circle, including capacity; like only three people on the Bridge of Despair with an penalty for attempting to use the Rotate Maneuver.

All of these movement maneuvers can be checks with varying modifiers, in which case you no longer need to have exact speeds, but have Speed be a stat that gives you a bonus to movement maneuvers.
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Post by the_taken »

FrankTrollman wrote:Keeping Track of Position Without Minis
Kids these days are spoiled. I our day we were lucky to have sticks to draw in sand.
Avracadavra!
Last edited by the_taken on Tue Aug 05, 2008 7:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Maxus »

Typo, Frank.
FrankTrollman wrote:Kids these days are spoiled. I our day we were lucky to have sticks to draw in sand.
Last edited by Maxus on Tue Aug 05, 2008 7:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Cynic »

the_taken wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Keeping Track of Position Without Minis
Kids these days are spoiled. I our day we were lucky to have sticks to draw in sand.
Avracadavra!
WHat the hell?
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Post by MartinHarper »

Because I played too much Sonic the Hedgehog, I want to play a 2d RPG:

A.W.F.....L.....O

The Fighter can't get to the Orc without jumping over the lava.
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Post by Tydanosaurus »

That movement system has a lot of promise, but I'm concerned that it's not expandable. For instance:
The distance between two people in adjacent squares is somewhere between 0 and 10 feet on a D&D map, and that's honestly the entire width of a 3m room.
That's something I wouldn't map on a battlemat b/c it's too small. There's no movement possible in a 10x10 room in 4E or 3.5 except shifts or 5' steps.

The battlemat's for "big" rooms, 6x4 squares or bigger. Say its a "typical" guard sort of room that has 2 doors, a table, two chairs, a fireplace, a weaponrack, some sort of gong or bell or something, and a chest.

Using a mapless "significance" system, that's 9 "places" that need to be tracked, plus mobs, plus their relative location (at least "hindering" or "not hindering"). My guess is that even without a specific map-based movement system, the game's going to need a map to deal with this sort of room. So what's gained by losing the precision of incorporating the map into your system?
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Post by the_taken »

A_Cynic wrote:
the_taken wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Keeping Track of Position Without Minis
Kids these days are spoiled. I our day we were lucky to have sticks to draw in sand.
Avracadavra!
WHat the hell?
It's only a model.
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Post by Cynic »

the_taken wrote:
It's only a model.
Ah, sorry. I didn't mean that as a "what shit" comment.

I mistook it to be something that someone had stolen. My apologies. Thanks for the work. :-D I'm a douche.
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Post by Calibron »

I'm really liking the In a Room movement rules, it's kind of like Phone Lobster's Big Fat Squares, except not poorly implemented. I'd also like to vote yes on the 3 setting thing, I think it'd be cool to have setting 3 be post-apocalyptic, perhaps even Falloutesque.
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Post by Tydanosaurus »

virgileso wrote:You have a stretched circle representing "The Twin Plateaus", then you have two circles that just about fill the larger one without intersection (Plateau A, Plateau B). You draw a small circle that overlaps the two Plateaus, "The Bridge of Despair".

Plateau A, B: Close Range
Bridge of Dispair: Melee Range
Twin Plateaus: Medium Range

If you want to go from plateau-to-plateau, you have to Enter Melee with the bridge.
This sounds a little like Tannhauser. This could be interesting. You can easily put in Teleport, for example, and make cool effects work just because of how movement is defined.

The downside is that descripions have to be kept pretty vague, rules-wise. What's in the Plateaus, for instance? Flavor text, mostly. You can add conditions, like "A has two 5' conditions, B has a Slow condition (50% chance," etc.. However, b/c the areas lack geography, simple rules (the slime pit is in square X) have to be replaced with complicated rules (you enter a slime pit by doing *something*).
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Post by rapa-nui »

If you want tactical depth, the positional system is going to matter a lot.

I was thinking about chess today, and one of the most tactically deep features of that game is that one can be in a winning position even with material disadvantage. Also, if you're going to differentiate between a Full Plate Knight archetype dude, and a Swashbuckler archetype dude, then position is going to matter a lot.

So, perhaps the very first thing we should do here is create a straightforward system for a GM using TNE to create spaces.

Creating a Space

Creating a space is one of the most important things to do correctly as a GM. Spaces are the predominant feature of an encounter, perhaps even more so than the adversaries therein.

You do not need to graph or plot the encounter space. Most people have a working intuition on how large most places are. Let's say your next encounter is in the princess's bedchamber. You do not need to design the architecture of the room. All you need to do is write down 5 or more important features of the place. The more features you add, the more interesting and tactically engaging the encounter will be.

The Princess's Bedchamber (Large Room)

1. Entrance, large wooden door. (Leads to hallway, South)
2. Entrance, small wooden door. (Leads to maid's quarters, East)
3. Bed, large, draped with satin curtains. (Middle of room)
4. Balcony, view to outside, 50 foot drop (North).
5. Dresser, wooden, contains cosmetics and a large mirror. (Besides #6)
6. Walk-in closet, contains assorted clothing. (westmost part of room)

A creature can use a move action to move from any location in the room to any other location.

Another example.

Entrance: Cavern of Malahaputradanmashikma (Huge)

1. Opening to outside
2. Corpse of warrior Shashi.
3. Roots on ceiling
4. Stalagmites
5. entrance to tunnel 1
6. entrance to tunnel 2

----


OK, that's my brief example to see if I'm following Frank's lead correctly. this system has limitations. Attacks of opportunity can't be handled as they currently are in D&D (and I'm OK with that, I hate how a lot of tactical consideration in 4e revolves around AoO) because D&D assumes exact positional knowledge.

Magic spells get interesting. If you use an Entangle-like ability on the Corpse of Warrior Shashi, can it reach the entrance to tunnel 1? The lack of a precise positional system seems to limit some kinds of things you can do with magic. Perhaps a simple notation system will help with that.


Entrance: Cavern of Malahaputradanmashikma (Huge) *50*

1. Opening to outside *S10*
2. Corpse of warrior Shashi. *CEN*
3. Roots on ceiling *NE5*
4. Stalagmites *SW 20*
5. entrance to tunnel 1 *NE 15*
6. entrance to tunnel 2 *NW 15*

So, the first thing you do is look for the CEN tag, and that tells you what feature is near the center of the room (in some cases there will be none and the center may be defined alone). Every other tag dictates the direction and distance in feet of that feature from the center of the room. So, if I sprout my Entangle directly centered on Shashi's dessicated remains, it can reach the entrance to tunnel 1 if the spell has a radius of at least 15 feet.


Comments?
Last edited by rapa-nui on Tue Aug 05, 2008 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by JonSetanta »

Caliborn wrote:I'm really liking the In a Room movement rules, it's kind of like Phone Lobster's Big Fat Squares, except not poorly implemented. I'd also like to vote yes on the 3 setting thing, I think it'd be cool to have setting 3 be post-apocalyptic, perhaps even Falloutesque.
Keep in mind, PL and Frank are not the first nor last to do away with gridless positioning.

Here's an example of someone coming to the same conclusion: http://www.stuffoflegend.com/d20/d20Exp ... BattleMap/

I thought up the numberless Melee/Short/Medium/Long concept 3 weeks ago for a different RPG, too.
It's a common logical resolution to a shared peeve against obnoxious numbered systems.
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virgil
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Post by virgil »

Never heard of Tannhauser. As for the Plateaus, the example was intended to just be featureless terrain. I suppose for it to work properly, you'd have to include the facet that you can create an "Edge of Plateau" melee circle if you choose to.

As for the Slime Pit part, that's just a facet of the game in general. People aren't going to care about it unless they make a deliberate effort to move up to it or it's in the same vicinity as something else that's important; like next to the door and thus a chained melee circle that overlaps or is a part of the Door's melee circle.

And it's easy enough to incorporate something like a Hedge Maneuver, basically the Rotate Maneuver that targets someone else rather than yourself. For example, you can choose to overlap the pit's circle, which puts you in danger of falling in. However, anyone in melee with you is vulnerable to a Hedge Maneuver that puts them also overlapping with the slime pit and thus in danger of falling in, and fully overlapping it means they fall in (doable with another Hedge Maneuver).
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Post by Tydanosaurus »

virgileso wrote:Never heard of Tannhauser.
Tannhauser

However, anyone in melee with you is vulnerable to a Hedge Maneuver that puts them also overlapping with the slime pit and thus in danger of falling in, and fully overlapping it means they fall in (doable with another Hedge Maneuver).
And there's your rule. You'll need something for any geography you want to put in your space, and it'll need to cover everything you want that geography to cover. (This might not. Does fast movement give you a chance of falling into the pit? Does it hinder movement? Is there a chance of falling in just b/c of meleeing in the area?)

So there's a tradeoff.
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