The Gaming Den

I'm writing my own game because I'm cool like that. It's basically D&D with different focuses. Theres much less character building and more choices to make during gameplay, by having several option to choose from at any time. If its not clear, its not a problem because I understand myself.
If I'm here, it is because I'm having trouble fleshing out a bunch of abilities, namely for martial artists. These classes (two classes so far, and I plan to add one eventually) work by having a common pool of special attacks, they just have different class features. In essence, they work the same way.

Martial artists works by doing combo attacks, which are a bursts of micro attacks launched immediately after an initiator attack, which deal small damage and empowers a finisher move. The goal is that, since it is not guaranteed that you will be allowed to pursue your combo, the player might want to stop and do the finisher immediately instead of trying to do a long combo chain.
I have stuff for combos, that's not a problem, it is the other special abilities that annoys me. I originally wanted to have several "stances" that would be inspired by real life kung fu styles, but I thought that would have been too specific and I just decided that they would have finishers based on famous moves. So far, I have dragon kick, palm strike, and I plan to find a name for one finisher that will initiate a grapple, and one that, well, looks like a kamehameha without the actual laser beam.

Well, long text is long, what I want is help figuring out what would a dragon kick do in a game. I don't want it to just deal damage, I want to to have a special, distinct effect. It is entirely conceptual, I don't need numbers.
In fact, I have no idea what to do with all of my finisher special attacks.

If I'm not clear, which is highly probably, feel free to ask for clarification. Also, thanks in advance.

VinnyBoy wrote: Martial artists works by doing combo attacks, which are a bursts of micro attacks launched immediately after an initiator attack, which deal small damage and empowers a finisher move.

This sounds super tedious and annoying. How can you resolve bursts of micro attacks quickly?

Well, long text is long, what I want is help figuring out what would a dragon kick do in a game. I don't want it to just deal damage, I want to to have a special, distinct effect. It is entirely conceptual, I don't need numbers.
In fact, I have no idea what to do with all of my finisher special attacks.

There is no way to answer that without knowing what comparable abilities do.

Here are some youtube responses when I searched dragon kick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ful0-xCVrBM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ1mUGI-7T0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CicNhdKBA5c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzL5cuhKvsA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yXeRf58agw

so some sort of flippy kick thing. possibly with fire.

Oh, well, for the burst thing, its rather "easy", although I haven't tested it. Basically, every time you roll high enough on the attack dice, without modifiers, you can follow up another combo attack that adds a bit of damage. Monks are limited to 2 combos, the other guy can get to 3 combos. The player can decide to do a finisher attack at anytime.

As for my dragon kick thing, well, like I said, I'm only looking for conceptual ideas. For instance, I read that this move was used to quickly kill an opponent, so a dragon kick have a may kill instantly an opponent left with little hit points. Well, that's what it does for now.
To give an idea, it deal 1d8 damage + str, 2d8 on a critical hit. A critical hit will also deal 1d8 "death damage". If the character is left with that much hit points after applying normal damage, it dies instantly.

Hit points scales very differently in the game I'm writing. A powerful warrior starts with as much as 17 hit points, but gains only 3~4 per level. A spellcaster would have about 6 to 10 hit points, and gains 2 per level.
Edit: I just felt like it was important to point that out.

Your combo trigger will have a mathematical solution for the optimal number of times to use it before switching to the finisher. You'll either be reducing the number of rounds your opponent survives or you won't.

Most risk-reward systems will do that, even if the solution changes based on the end damage number you're after (10 or 5 vs a Wizard, 17 or 9 or 6 vs a warrior) it's still going to be obvious which one to try for.

Note that your damage is crazy high vs hit points and you'd just hit and finish for effectively 3d8+Str+Str, only you get to add more in the middle if the first one rolls low so it's even easier to kill people. Bigger HP or lower damage is needed to make it interesting at all.

tussock wrote:Your combo trigger will have a mathematical solution for the optimal number of times to use it before switching to the finisher. You'll either be reducing the number of rounds your opponent survives or you won't.

I'm aware of that, and other people said that to me already. I "think" I somewhat prevents that out by adding effects that are more than just damage so most special attacks. For example, the "blaze" combo chain's second hit change the finisher's damage type to fire, and the third hit adds a burning effect to said finisher, potentially setting the enemy on fire.
There's another thing where the combo attacks are actually just part of a single, slightly more powerful attack.
This means that any damage reduction shouldn't apply to combo attacks since the main blow was already reduced by it. This being said, nearly everything have a damage reduction.

I should have mentioned the damage reduction bit, it's a rather huge chunk of a character's survivability. A warrior wearing a common starting armor would have around 5 or 6 point of damage reduction. A monk would have around 3.

Anyway, yeah, I still probably need to find ways to make these combo fun.

Do you any kind of documents for this? It would be much easier to help you if you could say, post a link to your rules so as to allow for us to see what niches are already covered, and where additional resources may be needed.

Oh yeah, actually, I suck at that. Where could I post it online?
Also, I need to clean it up a lot before I can post it, otherwise it will just be a bunch of numbers and sometime texts.

If you have a gmail account google drive is free.

That is what I use but someone else may have a better suggestion.

Well, this be my document only about techniques for warriors, tricksters, and monks. Note that it is massively incomplete and beta, and riddled with grammatical mistakes and worse.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B95c25 ... sp=sharing

If theres anything you dont understand, ask. I'll post other stuff later.