Breath of the Wild physics interactions in tabletop

[OgreBattle]

So Zelda Breath of the Wild has a lot of fun magic:
https://www.gamesradar.com/7-ingenious- ... -the-wild/

Make ice, store and release kinetic energy (that killed Drizzt once), fan to make wind, bombs, magnets. It's there to inspire players to combine things in unexpected ways

D&D3e has fairly detailed 'physics simulation' and lots of one off spells, but I'm not quite sure how to resolve grease cast into a tornado, or casting a fireball into an upside down adamatine wok to use as a jump booster.

There any supplement to a D&D that does this well, a new game based around these kinds of (cartoony violence leaning) physics interactions?

[Iduno]

You would need to have a single set of rules that details how magic works first, then add a single set of rules that follows the first and also explains how they interact.

Edit: D&D has a lot of spells that have their own rules, because there are no general rules for spells. There are also spells that don't even have functional rules (do I get my BAB and attacks, or that of the monster I change into? It depends on if you want to be an octopus or dinosaur).

[MGuy]

Making a sort of physics engine is basically what I'm working on slowly right now. A lot of what you need is tags. A lot of them. Then rules for how things of different tags interact with each other. The items in BotW just gives you access to the various elements in that game and allows the player a way to interact with those sub systems. I think that you can do that for tabletop but as far as I can tell with what I'm working on there is a lot of writing you have to do around these interactions.

[K]

I’ve been thinking a lot about making a Divinity:Original Sin 2 system of interacting environmental effects.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Could you go on about your tags more, MGuy? I was going to try and hash out a physics engine for my Pokemon game, and I think having all the different types and weakness and shit could have interesting results if object HP actually fucking existed, and types are just a different kind of tag. I'm afraid that a section like this could go on for a couple dozen pages or something, too. How do you have a bunch of interactions like that, even with tags, without things getting bloated and unwieldy?

[MGuy]

Umm... You can't? I've just accepted that I've signed myself up for a whole fuckton of writing and that all I can do is try and find ways to mitigate the inevitable creep by streamlining the game in other ways.

So for instance the characters don't get a lot of access to that many tags naturally. Most of the tags are elemental or a kind of method or could be consider considered a spell school. PCs will ideally only get access to a fraction of these. That way the player is incentivized to learn the interactions surrounding the tags they have abilities for. I try to keep things essentially the same or simple as far as opposing tags. I try to keep out exceptions unless it's an actual ability hoping that the lack of circumstantial exceptions make things less confusing. I try to stay consistent with tag interactions even when the tags are different. I also try to keep a theme with certain tags so that once learned players and GMs alike might be able to intuit how these things interact in an emergent kind of way.

So for example the [Electric] tag. Electric abilities are negated by [Earth]. Means it is grounded by earthen objects and deals very reduced damage to earthen targets themselves. It is dispersed by [water] or [metal], meaning that upon impact elec abilities deal reduced damage to everything in contact with these things (I don't split hairs about conductivity). The wider the surface the more the damage is reduced (can be reduced to 0). Creatures made of these materials either are more susceptible to the secondary effects of an elec attack or have a reaction [usually listed on the creature]. Electricity only travels in lines and always travels from one point directly to another. Typical secondary effects include [Stun], [Pain], [Ignite].

There's a bit more to it as there are usually multiple tags to things but this is the gist m essentially all elec abilities are targeted attacks with instant effects. They might stun or agonize (a different kind of stun) a target and you can light your campfires with it. There's a more formal way that I have it written down in my notes but basically anyone who picks up a pikachu is going to intuitively understand what their electric attacks do and I'd imagine any time something happens I didn't expressly write out can be accounted for at the table without much fuss.

I don't think there is a way to reduce how expansive things get but I believe that by making it intuitive, being consistent in how I do the interactions, and limiting how much access any one character gets to all of this I make it easier for players to navigate everything. I intend to sacrifice simplicity to promote emergent gameplay.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

So for example the [Electric] tag. Electric abilities are negated by [Earth]. Means it is grounded by earthen objects and deals very reduced damage to earthen targets themselves. It is dispersed by [water] or [metal], meaning that upon impact elec abilities deal reduced damage to everything in contact with these things (I don't split hairs about conductivity). The wider the surface the more the damage is reduced (can be reduced to 0). Creatures made of these materials either are more susceptible to the secondary effects of an elec attack or have a reaction [usually listed on the creature]. Electricity only travels in lines and always travels from one point directly to another. Typical secondary effects include [Stun], [Pain], [Ignite].

Are you fucking with me, man? If I may translate:

So for example the ELECTRIC type. ELECTRIC moves are negated by GROUND. Means it is grounded by earthen objects and deals no damage to GROUND targets themselves. It is resisted by WATER or STEEL, meaning that upon impact ELECTRIC abilities deal half damage to everything in contact with these things (I don't split hairs about conductivity). The wider the surface the more the damage is reduced (can be reduced to 0). Creatures made of these materials either are more susceptible to the secondary effects of an ELECTRIC attack or have a reaction [usually listed on the creature]. Electricity only travels in lines and always travels from one point directly to another. Typical secondary effects include Paralysis, Vulnerability, Burning.

[MGuy]

Mostly alright. "Resisted" would be more fitting for Ground in this. Water and Steel types I'd say would be vulnerable in Pokemon terms to electric attacks.

Edit: Looked it up. Steel types aren't weak to electricity. I disagree with pokemon on that choice clearly.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well yeah, clearly your physics and Pokemon physics work differently, but I think the general idea is similar, no? Obviously you can't shoehorn everything into all 18 types, but you can shoehorn a lot into them, I think. Of course, you also seem to have other tags beyond that, but those can be represented by other things.

[OgreBattle]

I’ve been thinking a lot about making a Divinity:Original Sin 2 system of interacting environmental effects.

Looked it up, it's really solid! Never knew that about the series. Having tags that interact with each other (soak in oil so now flammable, water puts out fire, etc.) is a starting point

For a tabletop game I figure it's better to abstract things away from 6 second 5ft squares so folks don't argue about skeleton passing railguns.

You then don't need exact angles for turtle shell/lightning bolt rebounds but you can still get something that feels good

-----

That SAME "7 elements" system could be revisited for resilience to common effects like heat, cold, electrical conductivity, falling, soakiness,

[Iduno]

I’ve been thinking a lot about making a Divinity:Original Sin 2 system of interacting environmental effects.

Looked it up, it's really solid! Never knew that about the series. Having tags that interact with each other (soak in oil so now flammable, water puts out fire, etc.) is a starting point

And putting out the fire usually creates steam, which blocks visibility and conducts electricity into a electrical storm.

It does drag out the length of fights, and gets real repetitive if you always have the same toolbox. It's a good system, but they need to cut the number of fights by half or more.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I thought the game ended too early, I fucking loved getting into fights in D:OS 2. I wiped out entire towns just because it was so fun.

EDIT: I'm not going to fix that ^

[Iduno]

I thought the game ended too early, I fucking loved getting into fights in D:OS 2. I wiped out entire towns just because it was so fun.

EDIT: I'm not going to fix that ^

Did you play single-player or multi? It's possible that this system is just better in a single-player format. We quit playing because we'd get through like 2 fights and go to sleep way too late.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

... I just thought the first one had co-op. Didn't realize the second did, too.

[K]

To add more to this issue, some of the best DnD spells are the ones that play with the physics of the game.

Stone Shape has uses as weird as opening doors to creating weapons, but the ability to do weird shit with terrain features is a major issue. Shatter can be devastating in a building. Wall spells can be used to make bridges, fortifications, and buildings.

Lots of DnD spells do this in a low-key way. Fireball had 2e legacy text in 3.x about starting fires, even mentioning that it melts various materials.

Shrink Item has been hands-down one of the weirder environmental spells. It literally lets you keep bonfires, lave pools, and various other environmental effects in a form that can be carried around in your pocket.

Transmute Rock to Mud and Transmute Mud to Rock are basically a builder's fantasy. Getting spells like Move Earth, Fabricate, or Minor Creation as a spell-like ability means big changes in a single action.

Interactions between spells has been a core issue with every big game, but I think there is definitely a place for it. Not only will it make adjudicating games easier, but it forces the designer to keep the number of effects smaller and better in order to keep interactions down.

[Iduno]

Lots of DnD spells do this in a low-key way. Fireball had 2e legacy text in 3.x about starting fires, even mentioning that it melts various materials.

I remember the grease spell in AD&D being explicitly flammable, but it's been a few years. I also remember it being explicitly not flammable in some other edition, but can't find a reference for that either.

[K]

Lots of DnD spells do this in a low-key way. Fireball had 2e legacy text in 3.x about starting fires, even mentioning that it melts various materials.

I remember the grease spell in AD&D being explicitly flammable, but it's been a few years. I also remember it being explicitly not flammable in some other edition, but can't find a reference for that either.

Over the years, DnD has gone away from spells interacting with the physical environment. Remember, Fireballs used to fill a volume and Lightning Bolts bounced.

I guess its easier to adjudicate if spells act like most video games spells and don't interact with the environment, but I'm bounced enough lightning bolts in Baldur's Gate to tell you that its damn fun.

[OgreBattle]

It does drag out the length of fights, and gets real repetitive if you always have the same toolbox. It's a good system, but they need to cut the number of fights by half or more.

The Mario Method is to not give players that much access to create the effects inherently, but require them to search the scene for A to add to B or C elements. Resident Evil alchemy follows a similar logic for scrolls and potions.

So it's pulling up a raddish to throw at a POW block, picking up a bomb to blow up something else, kicking a shell down a lower elevation boxed in area for it to bounce into a switch

Death Stranding has blood grenades (ghosts are damaged by protagonist's bodily fluids) that leave a persistent cloud, and if you fire a bullet through said cloud it becomes blood infused to hurt ghosts. So in that case your opening attack (throw a grenade) 'unlocks' the potential for anti-human weapons to hurt them for a brief time, has a nice rhythm to it.

[Orca]

I never actually used it, but there's a weird homebrew system for D&D 3.x which looks sort of like this - Gramarie.

[Dean]

I was really curious about the Gramarie stuff. It seemed like a really interesting direction to take for a games design but it was so dense I didn't really get too deep in it. Then I decided if something was too rules dense for me it was probably literally unusuable to anyone I've ever gamed with.

Still if anyone has a good grasp on it I would be really interested to hear someone's take on Gramarie. It looks like Grek really figured it out top to bottom at one point.

I like the idea of building your system as a bunch of crazy chemical and physical interactions. If there are lessons to be learned from the Gramarie design for how to or not to do that I'd love to hear em.

[Grek]

The Gramarie system is interesting, but ultimately unsatisfactory as a rules set. There was an attempt to reform them into something more usable a couple years back, but it fizzled out due to the chronic problem on Giant where literally everybody is a massive flake (including me). If you want to look at the latest playable edition of the rules (for a very loose value of playable), check this thread.

I'm going to divide my overview into Unforced Errors (things that Kellus could have easily done well, but messed up on), Forced Errors (things that Kellus couldn't have fixed without redoing large segments of the 3.5 ruleset) and Good Insights (things that you'd want to carry over into a different rules system). But first, a brief note on terminology. Gramarie is the name of the system. Gramarist is the base class that uses it. A Principle is a thing that a Gramarist can prepare (read build) during downtime and then use the rest of forever. A Discipline is a skill tree of Principles, with each Gramarist being a specialist in one and only getting partial access to all the rest. An Anima is a special bonus you get the option to apply to your Eldritch Blast for knowing a particular principle.

Unforced Errors

• Initially, Kellus did not particularly care about combat balance for Gramarists. His idea was that the Gramarist would be totally useless in combat, but a king out of combat. Cue principles like ALCH 101, which lets you spend 30 minutes to alter the hardness, hit points per inch of thickness, break DC or heat capacity (as in the joules per kelvin science number) of eight cubic feet homogeneous solid material, or GEOC 101 which lets you take hundreds of pounds of metal and use it to modify soil conditions in a 500' radius. While that probably has some value in architecture or as a rice farmer, you can do basically fuck all with that on an actual adventure. We eventually talked him into giving Gramarists a sneak attack level Eldritch Blast and attaching a combat ability in the form of an anima to every principle, but the basic assumption that combat was a sideshow for this system is baked in at the core and never really got exorcised.
• The material costs are bonkers. Let's say you're an Arcanodynamics specialist. You take ARCD 101, the most basic principle in the skill tree, and use it to build a healing ray, which is the most basic thing you can build with the system. This requires a cubic foot of wood to take in 'puissance' (the system's term for mana points) and a cubic foot of fucking silver to push it out as healing. A cubic foot of silver weighs 655 pounds and costs 3275gp. So not only will you not be able to afford to build it until level 4 at the earliest, you'll need a horse and a cart just to move the thing if you don't also take the principle that lets you make bags of holding.
• Did I mention the bags of holding? Gramarie gives you very early access to certain things (invisibility, extra-dimensional spaces and teleportation, AoE save or loses) for no readily explicable reason. If you take the right feat, you can shit out a bag of holding with 8 cubic feet of storage space and no mass limit with 2 minutes of downtime. There is no justification for this, no balance argument, it's just something the designer thought was cool and added without doing a proper editing pass. In your new version, you'll want to tune things a lot more finely to the expected challenges and capabilities of a given level.
• New tiers of principle unlock at levels 1, 7, 14 and 20. In D&D, things tend to scale such that they improve every other level or possibly every 3rd or 4th level if they're something that isn't supposed to scale very fast. Scaling every 7 levels is shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to trying to balance things. It would be like having a spellcaster who goes from having 1st level spells from levels one through six and then unlocking a selection of 3rd through 5th level spells at level seven. Likewise, the DCs are 5 + 5 per principle known in the same discipline or occasionally the skill check used to prepare the principle instead of something sane like 10 + 1/2 HD + Int.
• The Prestige Classes which use this system are all of the Mystic Theurge line of thought where you're expected to take 3 levels in Gramarist and 3 levels in Incarnate or Psion or Shadowcaster or whatever splatbook nonsense and thereafter get a class that advances both progressions. This has exactly the problems you'd expect, where if you play it 'correctly' you're three levels behind everyone else and if you find early access you're basically twice as good as everyone else.
• The rules occasionally produce divide by zero errors. The classic one is YGGD 198. For those not familiar with the system, that's the principle that creates a pair of permanent fields with 5' radius, each of which may be attached to an object or to a point in space. When activated as a standard action, the principle swaps the contents of each field while maintaining the orientation, velocity and relative position of everything inside. What happens if you attach the first field to one end of a 10' pole and the other field to the opposite end? Fuck if I know, but whatever answer you give, it's going to produce an ugly exploit or break not only physics but geometry.

Forced Errors

• The entire thing is hooked into the 3.5 skills system. This produces stupid results whenever the 3.5 skills system produces stupid results which is pretty much every time that the players are allowed to touch it. You might argue that Kellus didn't have to use the 3.5 skills system if he didn't want to, but the idea here was that a sufficiently talented Ranger could interact with a desert generating iron pole erected by the bad guys simply by virtue of being good at Survival without actually needing to invest anything into this subsystem. If Gramarie had been built for a game with a good skills system, this would have been a huge win.
• D&D does not have a good answer for how to handle downtime. Normally you can resolve this problem by ignoring it and declaring that anyone who wants their elf to spend a 100 years farming in order to afford a vorpal greatsword can go fuck themselves. But the whole point of this class is that you do stuff during downtime in order to create permanent gadgets and gizmos that reshape the world around you. If you can't take a weekend to excavate the top of a mountainside, install anti-gravity boosters on the bottom and a giant fucking cannon on top, what's the point of even playing this class? (The example given is a feasible project for a 7th level character in this system.)
• The entire system does not play well with more traditional classes. What happens if you cast Warp Wood (a spell that twists wooden objects into useless shapes) on a Wooden Transformer (a device that has to be made of wood, but can function in literally any shape)? Can Detect Magic detect Gramarie (which is the result of a Supernatural Ability)? How does Sleep (which effects creatures based on HD) effect a dude in a biostructure (which is technically a creature with one HD per inch of thickness) venom costume? This sort of thing is endemic to new systems and can only be solved by writing them in as part of the core content of the game.
• Low level Biollurgy is fucking awful. This is because the basic premise of the displine is that it lets you make permanent robot/mutant/frankenstein's monster style minions in your lab and have them do stuff for you. Giving that power to a 1st level character has been historically problematic, so Kellus didn't. But the result is that your first level Biollurgy specialist can do nothing useful beyond hitting people with Eldritch Blasts and healing them with his once/hour healing anima. Similar problems are present for low level Alchemitrists, Geoccultists and Eldrikineticists - they're all mid to high level concepts which don't really have a narrative place at first level, so they get fuck and all to do until their character concept becomes power level appropriate.
• Imachination is broken. This is the discipline that handles illusions. While having an invisibility cloak is obviously something you want in a project about magitech, there is no way to let the players build permanent invisibility cloaks at level one and have that be remotely balanced. And the system only gets worse from there, since illusion is inherently a Save or Lose sort of effect, so the idea that you can hand make a dozen pain beams that threaten an equal level PC in an afternoon inherently swings the Man vs Society conflict toward Society, or at least toward whoever can recruit the most hirelings to hand out SoL weaponry to. In a system where Society was already expected to win and this sort of thing is baked into the system, that's fine. But that's also Not D&D, which means you can't really do this sort of concept in 3.5.

Good Insights

• The basic idea that your device can be in whatever shape you want, as long as it meets certain minimum mystical requirements and respects the physical constraints of the material itself is a good one. The thing where your ship's engine can look like a car engine or a rocket at the back or a nosecone or just a giant ball in the center of the thing is cool. Even the thing where you include long ass cords on all of your transformers so that you can plug them into one another at a distance tickles a certain munchkin/engineering itch. You wouldn't want to use the exact material requirements (asking for your flying machine to contain eight cubic feet of gold is retarded) but the basic idea that your device has to have at least X pounds of iron in whatever shape you want is good.
• The concept of the bubble is a good one. When you prepare a principle with a bubble, you draw a 5' radius sphere around a particular object or point in space. The region effected can be a volume of whatever shape you like, as long as the whole thing fits inside that 5' sphere. Essentially, you can cut volumes out of the effect at will in order to fine tune what parts of the device are effected by which bubbles.
• The concept of an object reference (where you attach a magical effect - generally a bubble, but sometimes something else - to an arbitrary object that you then carry around with you) is a good one. I would go so far as to say that you shouldn't include spatial references (where the effect is instead attached to a specific point in space) at all. Make it so that if someone wants to have an effect somewhere, they need some sort of stone obelisk or magic crystal or whatever anchoring it there for non-technical and non-magical characters to interact with using their thumbs. Let people pry the magic ruby out of the altar and carry it around with them. It'll be cool.
• The concept of puissance (where X acid damage = 1 puissance = Y rounds of fuel for an engine that moves you Z' per round) is an excellent tool for enforcing a sense of equivalent exchange and getting the players to try to tap into weird energy sources like gong power or elephants in hamster wheels or to using portals to build a perpetual motion machine. Ditto for the concept of a 'transformation limit' which imposes a level-based (well skill based, but you'd want it to be level based in a good version of this system) limit on how much puissance you can use on any one thing in a given round. This prevents your perpetual motion machine from converting puissance stored up over the last month into a book bomb style eleventy billion damage super blast.
• Kaleidomantics includes 'filters' which are magically created indestructible forcefields which are intangible to everything except for a one or two specific materials and to other filters of the same type. This is a very interesting collection of properties which I feel is a must for any sort of magic physics system.
• The basic idea of an anima - an action-sequence application of a more general magical principle that is typically used in downtime ritual contexts - is a cool one. The name is stupid. But the idea has legs and gives you an excuse for all of your enchanters to have something they can do even without their gear. It also means that if you have a particular ability that conceptually has mostly downtime applications (like making invulnerable stone walls or magically growing forests) that character has an associated personal level ability which is conceptually the same power being used on a more limited scale.

[Kellus]

This is the best thing to an autopsy on Gramarie that I’ve seen. I would say that Grek hit it pretty much right on the head. The project was vulnerable to a bunch of different failure modes, which included but were not limited to:

- Forcing the system to do things that it really wasn’t designed to do
- Forcing the system to interact with other subsystems I had created for other projects rather than with the base rules of the game
- Lack of consideration for combat applicability and downtime
- Including things first because they were cool and secondly because they made a cohesive whole
- GitP flakiness and not having enough time to devote to the system as it sprawled. This led to other people having a better understanding of the whole scope than I did. At that point I could have either tanked my degree to work on developing it full time, or I could just let it loose and let people have whatever fun with it they could.

With all that said, gramarie was an exciting project to work on because the whole time I could tantalizingly feel that there was a unified system just out of reach which would satisfyingly give the feeling of being a scientist discovering “principles” of magic with the certainty of natural laws. I no longer believe that this is possible within the confines of a system that wasn’t originally made to be encoded as such.

EDIT: Note that this was also at the time of the 4E heyday, and was a visceral pushback from me against everything it represented.

If the system has any value to people in the future, I hope that it’s to propagate the idea that magic *should* be more like open ended engineering and less like a Vancian spell slinger. I just don’t think that is feasible to achieve in a satisfying way in Dungeons and Dragons.

The other thing which I actually hope the system can be helpful for as written, is as a set of DM world building tools to give consistent rules behind things that would normally be handwaved. Following the rules for KALD filters or IMCH illusions or ARCD transformers with the things you put into the world mean that players can learn to understand how they work and, if not learn to create them, then at least learn consistent rules for how they function. This is a step I hope towards the reduction of Tea Party game interactions.

Thanks for the interest in the system. Sorry for the late reply, someone just sent me the link.

[Username17]

If the system has any value to people in the future, I hope that it’s to propagate the idea that magic *should* be more like open ended engineering and less like a Vancian spell slinger. I just don’t think that is feasible to achieve in a satisfying way in Dungeons and Dragons.

Every existing edition of Dungeons & Dragons has had a ramshackle hodge podge approach to its magic physics. And indeed to its everything else. There's lots pf things you'd kind of want to have that really need to be in there on the ground floor if they are to exist at all. Some examples of cool ideas that appear in the PHB but are not integrated into the game mechanics on a sufficiently foundational level to be built off of include things like True Names and the idea that Lead Stops Divination.

I don't think Dungeons & Dragons has to stop being recognizably Dungeons & Dragons in order to have a consistency to its magical effects. It just needs to be less half assed about people writing a bunch of stand alone effects.

-Username17

[maglag]

If the system has any value to people in the future, I hope that it’s to propagate the idea that magic *should* be more like open ended engineering and less like a Vancian spell slinger. I just don’t think that is feasible to achieve in a satisfying way in Dungeons and Dragons.

Every existing edition of Dungeons & Dragons has had a ramshackle hodge podge approach to its magic physics. And indeed to its everything else. There's lots pf things you'd kind of want to have that really need to be in there on the ground floor if they are to exist at all. Some examples of cool ideas that appear in the PHB but are not integrated into the game mechanics on a sufficiently foundational level to be built off of include things like True Names and the idea that Lead Stops Divination.

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

I don't think Dungeons & Dragons has to stop being recognizably Dungeons & Dragons in order to have a consistency to its magical effects. It just needs to be less half assed about people writing a bunch of stand alone effects.

-Username17

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.

[OgreBattle]

I figure it's not a matter of making a "this is what magic does..." but just having "this is what fire, falling/high speed collisions of variable mass, freezing, electrocution, evaporation, magma, foundations shattering does"

There's also things like Bellepheron using a block of lead at the end of a spear and sticking down chimera's through, chimera's fire then melts it and chokes to death... how the heck do you go about doing that without every animal fire breathing monster getting choked by everyone with a spear and block of lead.