Breath of the Wild physics interactions in tabletop

[Grek]

But then you're making the whole player party premise irrelevant. You don't grab a sword/staff and go with your allies to explore the dangerous dungeon to slay the mighty dragon, instead you just get a bunch of hirelings to build up an army of killer mecha and nukes and bury the obsolete dragon inside their obsolete dungeon that has zero interest for you since you already attained ultimate power by finding the system's exploits whitout need of any pesky courage or adventuring.

There may be some sweet spot where there's a "universal magic engineering" system that's as equally as viable as adventuring, but unless you can dedicate centuries of real world time to fine-tune it, then the scales will inevitably shift towards one direction and make the other side irrelevant.

You can have magic be systematic and explicable without it being something that spoils adventures.

Take Eldrikinetics as an example from the Gramarie system itself. It's the magic of propulsion, both for vehicles and for projectiles. Thematically, a specialist in that builds magical vehicles that convey the party from destination to destination, and also has a big brass gun that launches spears through people. The actual implementation was fairly rubbish, but conceptually there's nothing wrong about an enchanter-style character who has a enchanted carriage and pea shooting blaster and who eventually levels up into having a flying machine and a much better blaster. They fact that your character uses the same skills to create a rail line from the Shire to Gondor in between adventures changes the setting, but it doesn't particularly invalidate the adventure part of it - it just means you're now doing the Eberron thing where 'a roc is decorating its nest with your stolen train car' is a valid adventure seed.

The basic core of that problem is one that a lot of D&D designers just never address. You have to figure out why your characters are going out and being adventurers and then make sure to never write in anything which solves that 'why' in a way that avoids the players doing some adventuring. That's not a difficult design constraint to work with, but for whatever reason it's one that many people fail to realize exists in the first place.

[deaddmwalking]

That's why it's called MAGIC and not science.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I think it's important to establish what magic can and cannot do. While it 'breaks the normal rules' of the setting, there should be some rules that it MUST follow.

If I have a genie that grants me 3 wishes, is it reasonable that I should be able to wish 'every intelligent being in the multiverse is now an elf' and 'no further wishes will be granted'? What makes that valid or invalid?

Since we rely on the setting to help us provide a shared narrative, it helps to know what is or isn't possible. If something appears to break the established rules, there should be a reason for it, not 'magic follows no rules at all'.

In our heartbreaker, we wanted to make it clear that magic was not intelligent - you can't have magic write you a term paper. You could use magic to summon/bind an intelligent being and make it do the work for you, or you could potentially magic-up a pen and paper and have the pen take dictation, but it can't THINK for itself. That helps inform our thinking about what is a valid target (generally the people the caster can see, but not people he can't see) and what types of effects are appropriate.

[Foxwarrior]

have the pen take dictation, but it can't THINK for itself

Computers can play Go better than grandmasters using an intuition-based approach to strategy rather than a logical one, but they're still pretty bad at speech recognition. I'd hazard a guess that most people have very little idea what "THINK for itself" actually means, what the limitations of that are. If a pen can take dictation, can a teleporting eye that parses all text answer Contact Other Plane questions with the most pertinent information written down anywhere? Given reality, taking dictation might be a harder problem

[deaddmwalking]

Given reality, taking dictation might be a harder problem

Agreed, and I thought about excluding it as an example. In our system, we would know that would have to be an example of a Concentration spell and the caster would themselves need to know how to write. Effectively, the pen isn't smart enough to know language or written characters; the caster would be mentally directing the efforts as part of the spell.

[deaddmwalking]

Given reality, taking dictation might be a harder problem

Agreed, and I thought about excluding it as an example. In our system, we would know that would have to be an example of a Concentration spell and the caster would themselves need to know how to write. Effectively, the pen isn't smart enough to know language or written characters; the caster would be mentally directing the efforts as part of the spell.

And now i'm reading an article on Rational Magic Systems

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I've taken this thread to heart and I'm getting to writing up some basic physics for my game. My general goal is that this should encompass most forms of involuntary movement, from rolling a rock down a hill to flinging someone into a tree.

Here's the basics:

• - Objects travel at 4 different Speeds, up to 300+ kmph. There are numbers for how quickly each Speed can range per round, and an object will become 1 Speed slower every round unless it's maintaining its momentum somehow.
  - Objects also have 8 Sizes, ranging from Mini to Gigantic.
  - Collision Damage is always equal to an object's (Speed x Weight) + Size Bonus. Because this is a Pokemon game, Collision Damage is the same Type as the object inflicting it.

Here's where it comes together:

• -When a heavier object collides with a lighter object, the lighter object continues to travel with the heavier object and takes collision damage. When a lighter object collides with a heavier object, the lighter object stops travelling and takes collision damage unless the heavier object is weak to the lighter object’s type, in which case the lighter object travels through the heavier object and inflicts collision damage onto it. When an object collides into an object of the same Weight Class, it bounces off the object and they both travel half the remaining movement of the colliding object, both taking Collision Damage and resisting it one step.
  -When a creature has an object collide with it, it may spend an Interrupt Action to react to it (you get more of these as you level up). They may try to stop the object, dodge out of the way, or destroy it. In all cases, the DC is equal to the object’s Collision Damage.
  --Stopping an object requires an Athletics check. A Critical Failure means you do not stop the object in any way. A Normal Failure means you stop the object, but suffer Collision Damage. A Normal Success means you stop the object and resist Collision Damage. A Critical Success means you stop the object and take no damage.
  --Dodging an object requires an Acrobatics check. A Failure means you do not dodge it. A Normal Success means you may move to the nearest chosen square that the object would not collide with and resist Collision Damage. A Critical Success means you may move to the nearest “safe” square and take no damage.
  --Destroying an object requires a Combat check. A Failure means you cannot react in time and the object hits you. A Success means you are able to make a Struggle Attack against the object. If you bring the object below 50% HP, it stops moving and you take no damage. If you do not, then it continues moving and hits you.

This is all rough stuff that I wrote up today, so I'm wondering what y'all think of it. I can work out the math on my end, but what I really want to know is what I'm missing or if anything is obviously dumb or inaccurate. I'm relatively pleased so far, since by RAW, a fully tweaked-out Gigantamax Machamp can throw shit upwards of 800 meters per round, which happens to correspond to Speed 4... so I think I have rules for pokemon launching boulders almost over the horizon? But also rules for Pokemon punching rockslides apart to save their team?

[MGuy]

I don't know what to think of all this without seeing more of the system. I do wonder what generates the TN for the Athletics checks and about how likely is someone likely to be able to stop/dodge these things?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well, there's a lot more where that came from, but I can answer your question now.

Like it says, the DC for the Athletics check is simply equal to how much Collision Damage you would take. Speed ranges from 1-4, Weight from 1-7, and Size Bonus from 1-8. I figured an object's weight should influence its damage more than its sheer size.

Let's say I'm handling a lamp on a stairwell and you walk underneath it and I fuck up and make the lamp fall on top of you. It won't have much room to fall faster than Speed 1, and it's just a lamp so its Weight is 1. A lamp would be a Tiny object, making its Size Bonus 2. Putting all this together, its Collision Damage is (1 + 1) x 2, or 4 damage. This sets the Athletics DC at 4. Skill Ranks scale from 1d6 to 8d6, and the typical baseline for your average person would be a 2d6 (Untrained). You have about an 8% chance to fail the check entirely. A "Critical Success" is when you clear the DC by 6 or more, so you would have an 16% chance to harmlessly block the lamp with your body. Someone actually trained in Athletics at level 1 could have 4d6 (Adept) Athletics, making it impossible to fail the check and giving them a 10% chance of taking any damage at all. As I finish this example, I suddenly realized that 4 damage isn't enough to hurt most creatures anyway, so if a lamp fell on you and bonked you on the head, it might sting, but it wouldn't deal enough damage to really matter. Lamp-based combat is not viable.

However, let's say I deliberately throw that lamp at you and I'm a 1st level character, with +5 in all my stats. On top of the 4 damage it would normally deal when colliding with you, I also add my Attack stat to the Collision Damage, making it harder for you to block/avoid it. If I didn't invest anything into my Attack stat, that would be an extra +5 damage. 4 damage won't get past most thing's defenses, but 9 damage might. In this specific instance, while a lamp falling on a PC wouldn't be a big deal, having a lamp thrown at you can fuck you up.
With a DC of 9, that makes our Untrained Athletics character only have a 27% chance of a Normal Success, and makes Critical Successes out of the question. They have an 8% chance of completely eating shit with a Critical Failure.
Our Adept Athletics character now has a 5% chance of failing their check, and will only score a Critical Success 44% of the time.

I don't want to word vomit too much, but I think it works out alright on the lower end. The maximum Collision Damage can be (without getting into throwing shit around) is 36, which means that someone with maxed-out Athletics (8d6) will pass checks to tank boulders and flying houses about 6% of the time. I'm thinking about letting you add your Power bonus (which ranges from 1-8 and can be doubled if you have super strength) to Athletics checks to tank objects, which would mean that a superpowered Machamp that's rolling 8d6+16 would pass the same checks 96% of the time, but that's what I expect that absolute extremes of the system to represent.

I, uh... hope this doesn't seem too scatterbrained. I don't want to sit here and explain the entire system to you and overload you or something.

[MGuy]

That answers the question fine. This answers the question well. I only have one more question that pops out at me and that's how the weight ratings. How's that translate into an actual range of weight?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I thought I had that written down, but I don't. Here you go:

• Weight Class 1: 0 - 25 lbs; 0 - 10 kg
  WC 2: 26-55 lbs; 11-25 kg
  WC 3: 56-110 lbs; 25-50 kg
  WC 4: 111-220 lbs; 51-100 kg
  WC 5: 221-440 lbs; 101-200 kg
  WC 6: 441-880 lbs; 200-400 kg
  WC 7: 881+ lbs; 401+ kg