Combining HP and a CAN variant to solve problems

[Dean]

I have been working for some time for a way to solve the "Beat on the Brat" issue of combat lately. We have all discussed many times the ways to solve the problems that critical existence failure brings to the table, and why it's unfaithful to canon that when two super teams meet up in a d20 universe everyone just dogpiles Cyclops until he's dead instead of fighting in neat little duo's like they should.

Obviously the problem isn't hard to solve at all it's just incredibly hard to solve ELEGANTLY. It would be easy to just say that someone can only be damaged once per round or whatever but players absolutely won't accept that shit so cleverer means must be found. Before I present my idea I would like to mention the following solutions that I think are, sadly, non-starters:
*Unengaged people become more deadly thus theoretically incentivizing people to engage as many targets as possible (Too many weird side effects and unintended results with this)
*Attack penalties are given to people as they become wounded (A boring, unimaginative solution that causes fights to drag on, become less exciting, and all in all a generally shit idea that systems everywhere should get rid of yesterday)

But what if we combined traditional HP with a variant of the CAN system idea. In this system characters that were hit with attacks lose HP as normal and come closer to death but would also gain points in CAN. The key is you would only gain CAN in a very limited fashion. My current paradigm is you gain a single point of CAN in any round that you are hit with an attack that beats your toughness threshold, and it would represent you being put off your guard and allowing more openings. Expect a normal PC grade attack to meet this threshold basically every time and NPC mook attacks to do so rarely. As your CAN score racks up you become victim of nastier and nastier effects as people hit you. So while an attack launched at someone with 0 CAN might simply deal 10 damage, that same attack launched at someone with 3 CAN might deal 10 damage and break a limb and/or disarm you. At 5 CAN that attack might very well kill you.

So people have HP, Toughness Threshold, and a CAN score. Which is a lot, I know, but I think it could be worth it.

As a result players are incentivized to attack as many people per round as is feasible so they can open up super attacks on them as early as possible. This still absolutely allows for you to say "Everyone shoot the Wizard" and have it be just as effective but you will be a CAN point down on the opposing team, while they will be a team member down. So while the opposing team will have a smaller team they will be throwing superior attacks throughout the fight (all things assumed to be equal).

I think this could both properly incentivize spreading out attacks and still feel totally acceptable to players as an in-game mechanic AS WELL AS making fights get more exciting and dramatic as the fight goes on. I imagine that the CAN score variant might do well to be called something like "Opening". Discuss.

[MfA]

AFAIR originally CAN was intended as a hybrid offensive/defensive stat, the CAN difference determined the effectiveness of attacks ... so unengaged people would remain more deadly, I don't really see why this is a non starter though.

How about this .... if the damage from an attack exceeds your constitution you get a -5 CAN penalty for 1 round? Combined with a standard condition track which gives stacking CAN penalties depending on how far your HP has fallen.

PS. I'm going to call CAN morale in the rest of this thread, because the original term while cute is grating on my nerves.

[Dean]

The unengaged people get deadlier idea has a lot of niggling issues that come up that make me think it's not a good idea to use at the moment. For instance

*It is very hard to define the point of offensive bonus that makes opponents superior enough but not too much. Partially because it needs to be the same bonus for 3 opponents and for 30

*It also becomes basically completely ignorable after a certain point. If you are fighting a dozen men do you really care about having 9 of them get the bonus as opposed to 11? You care SOME all things being equal but not really.

*It really buffs stealth combat options and other "fight from afar" roles. This might be fine for some games but in a game that you want to feature combat it's probably a bad idea to have a mechanical effect that says "Here's the negative you take by being in combat"

*Can have a weird "tag" feel

[Manxome]

OK, so the enemy team is down a man but up a multiplier point. That means that next round, they cannot attack everyone on your team, so at least one person on your team is merely at the same multiplier as them the following round...the smaller team starts losing ground pretty quickly. Balancing that so that it remains "fair" (or even so that it favors distributed attacks) overall sounds pretty tough, especially if you want to cope with multiple sizes of battles.

I would also point out that a full solution to this issue really ought to be able to handle battles where the two teams do not start out at equal size. If you've got a 6 vs 3 fight, do you want that to break up into two 1-on-1 matches and one 4-on-1 slaughter, or into three 2-on-1 matches?

Also: if "you can only be damaged once per round" is unacceptable, why is "you can only have your CAN/morale/damage multiplier/whatever increased once per round" more acceptable? Just sounds like sleight of hand to me.



You might be able to get some traction with that "engaged" thing if you add a loophole like this:

1. If no one attacks you, you can attack anyone at full power.
2. If one or more people attack you, you can fight back against any of them at full power.
3. However, if anyone attacks you, then you take a penalty for attacking anyone who did NOT attack you.

So assuming that the enemy team is making distributed attacks, each person on your team faces the choice of making a full-strength counter-attack against their own opposite, or taking a penalty in order to attack their preferred target.

So, basically like attacks of opportunity are supposed to work: if you want to fight someone other than the guy who's in your face, you have to give him a free hit either by moving away or by using a distance attack from inside his threat range.

This still isn't that great for unequal teams, but the larger team has some incentive for wounded characters to "rotate out" and do support actions for a while so that none of their opponents can attack them without penalty, thereby causing damage to be more distributed but at the cost that they can't all attack constantly. Which could be fairly interesting, if it was balanced well.



There are also various "normal" mechanics that can incentivize strategies other than focused fire under appropriate circumstances, including:

• AoE damage is more effective when you can hit more targets at once, so it discourages eliminating opponents early.
• Single-target, short-duration defensive buffs make enemy attacks weaker when you predict the target, or can at least make a chosen target less attractive (e.g. shield the guy who's low on health).
• "Reckless attacks", that do extra damage at the cost of temporarily reducing defense, require your opponents to switch targets in order to punish you for using them.
• Certain types of combat "resurrection" can incentivize killing opponents simultaneously. For example, a spell like "restore incapacitated ally to full health if you are not yourself incapacitated after 2 rounds of casting time" means that you basically need to down all enemies that have that skill within a three-round window, which might require weakening them all before going for the first kill.
• Resource systems that make people gradually less dangerous don't encourage distributed fire, but they weaken the incentive to focus fire, especially if opponents with short life expectancy can "go nova".

[A Man In Black]

[*]Certain types of combat "resurrection" can incentivize killing opponents simultaneously. For example, a spell like "restore incapacitated ally to full health if you are not yourself incapacitated after 2 rounds of casting time" means that you basically need to down all enemies that have that skill within a three-round window, which might require weakening them all before going for the first kill.

Yes and no. That system seems like it encourages focus-firing those jerks down first.

[Seerow]

Yes and no. That system seems like it encourages focus-firing those jerks down first.

Unless it's something any of those jerks could do.

I did something like that once. I had a group of 4 monsters who were linked together, and if any of them was still up, the others could stand back up at 50% hp with a full round action on their turn. The problem was the encounter was annoying as hell until they figured out what was going on.

[Manxome]

[*]Certain types of combat "resurrection" can incentivize killing opponents simultaneously. For example, a spell like "restore incapacitated ally to full health if you are not yourself incapacitated after 2 rounds of casting time" means that you basically need to down all enemies that have that skill within a three-round window, which might require weakening them all before going for the first kill.

Yes and no. That system seems like it encourages focus-firing those jerks down first.

Pretty much any form of combat resurrection encourages killing the people who have it before the people who don't. But if multiple people have this skill, you are encouraged to kill all the people that have it simultaneously, rather than focus-firing one at a time.

[Dean]

OK, so the enemy team is down a man but up a multiplier point. That means that next round, they cannot attack everyone on your team, so at least one person on your team is merely at the same multiplier as them the following round...the smaller team starts losing ground pretty quickly. Balancing that so that it remains "fair" (or even so that it favors distributed attacks) overall sounds pretty tough, especially if you want to cope with multiple sizes of battles.

(Prepare for possible gibberish, as this is the best I can type this out without taking up way too much space)
Well assuming focus fire VS spread fire continues (and simultaneous resolution of damage/effects for no other reason than demonstration). Spread Team brings all members of Focus team to 1 point in round one, 2 points to 3 members on round two, and brings two members to 3 points in round 3 by which point the effects they are striking at should be considerably better than the opposing teams. Granted they are down to 2 members (assuming 4 "hits" kill) but if 3 point attacks involve things like being disarmed or knocked prone or other things of that nature that's basically a 1 turn penalty to the 2 members of the opposing team who would be at rank 3. Which would start to be the round where 2 Full health people with no points would start to look better against 4 people, two of which have very low health and very high opening scores.

Don't get me wrong I am aware that I have not single-handedly solved the focus fire problem with this one hotfix but it does give another resource and benefit to spreading your attacks out.

I would also point out that a full solution to this issue really ought to be able to handle battles where the two teams do not start out at equal size. If you've got a 6 vs 3 fight, do you want that to break up into two 1-on-1 matches and one 4-on-1 slaughter, or into three 2-on-1 matches?

I would find both of those solutions perfectly acceptable. I don't exactly care which one they do as long as the answer isn't always "6 on 1 or as many as required until a death occurs then move on"

Also: if "you can only be damaged once per round" is unacceptable, why is "you can only have your CAN/morale/damage multiplier/whatever increased once per round" more acceptable? Just sounds like sleight of hand to me.

It is sleight of hand. I ran a number of possible concepts by player groups and that one seemed to be received as having much higher versimilitude . I don't care why I just care that it does.

Additionally I do like the idea that you posted about resurrection. It points out that there could be a few abilities or ....quantities that troops could produce under certain time schedules that could make it more valuable to try to eliminate many people at once. If I find something that doesn't feel to gamey I will post it