Tiers and Levels

[Username17]

The Civilian Tier

Classes

• Blacksmith
• Sailor
• Guard
• Barbarian
• Farmer

Sample Abilities

• Stitching
• Baking
• Butchery

The Heroic Tier

Classes

• Paladin
• Sorcerer
• Rogue
• Warlord

Sample Abilities

• Diamond Dragon Style
• Conjuration
• Telepathy
• Invisible Blade

The Legendary Tier

Classes

• Demigod
• Gageteer
• Archon
• Ringbearer

Sample Abilities

• Titan Power
• General of Undeath
• Mind Over Matter
• Giant Robot

The Epic Tier

Classes

• Dragon King
• Forest God
• Lord of War
• Destroyer of Worlds

Sample Abilities

• Chronomancy
• Fecundity
• Kaiju
• Rulership of the Heavens

---

Meanwhile, there are several things you can do to abstract locations:

• Interfere with enemies who are trying to move or attack out of your location.
• Interfere with enemies who are trying to move or attack into your location.
• Move to other locations.
• Attack enemies in other locations.
• Attack locations (Area Effects).

Those topological results have clear analogs in each aforementioned tier.

-Username17

[Username17]

More on Abstract Locations.

A location has a Size. It's a number. Things that are in or affect an area have a Size as well. If the Size of something in the area is less than the Size of the area, the thing is treated as a point somewhere in the area - like an electron in a shell. If the Size is as big as the area, it affects the whole area.

What this means is that you can have area attacks that affect whole areas without having low level dudes blasting whole armies with their fireballs. Epic characters find epic battlefields and need epic firestorms in order to shell those large areas. What this also means is that very large monsters (like purple worms) take up entire areas (area 3 is the fucking purple worm).

Meanwhile, features of an area - like a closet or a pit trap or a sniping position also have a size. And those features normally have a Size that is smaller than the whole area. This means that you can use your fireball to blow up the guys who are sniping at you from a little tower even if you can't use that fireball to blow up the entire area it is in. It also means that giants can't hide in closets.

Assaults and Bombardments are the normal way you interact with your action. An assault is an action that moves you into the area you are using it on. Normally, you can use it in the area you are already in. A bombardment is an action that does not move you into the area it affects. It normally can't be used on the area you are in, which means that bombardments can be to some degree paralyzed by contesting the area they are in.

When you contest an area (or a feature) and take it, it stays yours even when you leave until someone else contests it. This means that the barbarian type who assaults area after area, running around stabbing fools in the face, has a real contribution - after he has assaulted three areas, he has "captured" two areas that the PCs aren't necessarily in anymore. This can force enemies to lose turns when their own target areas are contested but empty.

Burrowing creatures go to area zero, flying creatures to area 7. This means that a landshark can burst out of the ground or a harpy can swoop down at will. But taking off or burrowing back down requires an uncontested target area. If a dragon doesn't have some free space to work with, it can't take off, because it will never roll a 7 on its targeting die.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

That does seem like an elegant way to deal with combat involving flying or burrowing foes, but how do you deal with entirely aerial (or under water) combat, or characters being attacked by earth elementals in a lava tube?

[Kaelik]

That does seem like an elegant way to deal with combat involving flying or burrowing foes, but how do you deal with entirely areal (or under water) combat, or characters being attacked by earth elementals in a lava tube?

Well number two would be them using an attack that is a bombardment.

[Username17]

Setting up the battlefield is about as important as fighting out the battle itself. One of the goals I have is to produce a system in which the "pre-battle" and "post-battle" activities lead naturally one to the other so that players feel like their contributions matter and that they are accomplishing real in-world goals. But in any case, a battlefield where one or more of the basic areas (region 1 to region 6) are aquatic, aerial, or subterranean is something that is entirely possible. And there would be good solid reasons to do it.

But the basic functionality of flight in either sense of the word is that you can spontaneously create additional regions to assault yourself into. Indeed, retreat is handled by having people assault into a retreat region and then assault themselves off the board entirely if their retreat isn't contested.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

But the basic functionality of flight in either sense of the word is that you can spontaneously create additional regions to assault yourself into. Indeed, retreat is handled by having people assault into a retreat region and then assault themselves off the board entirely if their retreat isn't contested.

I was about to ask, can you create your own nodes? If so, how much control do you have over the nodes you create?

Also, now that nodes in the area graph are actually the roots of trees describing features in each area, how does targeting work? Say there are two rooms (top-level nodes), that one of the rooms is divided into two closets and the main area (a tree rooted at that node), and that one of the closets is further divided into left and right sides. Now say there are units in every node. Where can the unit in the closet's left side attack into, and where can it be attacked from? Into any of the node's siblings (the other side of the closet)? Into anything connected to its parent (the other closet side, the closet itself, and the room, but not the other room or the other closet)? Into anything in its tree (the room and anything in it)? Into anything connected to anything in its tree (both rooms and anything in the one with the closets)? Or is it something entirely weirder?

[Username17]

A fundamental part of the game is adding features to regions or even features that are already in regions. It's basically like object oriented programming. Any region can contain as many features that are smaller than it as you want. And like a Russian doll, each feature could contain smaller features and so on. You theoretically could have a mouse hole in a desk in a closet in region 2. Or whatever. But being "in" a feature gives you a fixed effect for whatever it is (and possibly a different effect for having it not be contested, such as being in uncontested control of a ship's helm, which lets you pilot the ship).

But people in the same region can still assault each other without leaving the region. Even if they are currently occupying different features. And an area attack that has a size equal or greater than the size of the region would still hit both (subject to whatever bonuses or penalties to CAN that the different occupied features provided). Similarly, if either one is doing some sort of protective stance or whatever that covers the size of the region, they cover the whole region even from a feature (unless the feature itself prevents you from doing so, or the stance has a size minimum that is larger than the feature you are camping).

Battles can move. One person retreats into a new region and it fills with new stuff. An another character runs into the that and trades one of their own uncontested regions for the newly generated one.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

Neat. Would the inter and intra-nodal objects have standard classifications attached to their bonuses (like having a "barricade" bonus attached to a wall/door/pile of corpses/whatever)?

Also, when you say setting up the battlefield is important, do you mean that the players can affect things already placed in the battlefield, or that they can actively state things are in the battlefield in the pre-battle phase? For example, take a barfight. Would the GM lay out that there are tables, chairs, and a barstool in nodes 1, 2, and 3 and/or would the players get to do that as well?

[Username17]

So K an I had the chance to sit around bounce ideas off each other while he was hitting on my sister's friends. Currently, the concept of abilities is that you have four basic types:

• Melee A melee ability is used within your current region. You don't move and your target region is therefore somewhat meaningless. Thus, having melee abilities encourages you to be in regions that have enemies in them. It's important to note that "melee" doesn't mean that you're using one or another weapon - it just means that you are targeting within your region.
• Ranged A ranged ability is used on your target region, and does not affect your own region. Ranged abilities thus encourage you to camp in regions with no enemies in them, and encourage allies to help clear regions when you are there. They also benefit from you controlling more territory, since the more territory you have the more targeting choice you get.
• Assault An assault ability moves you into another region and lets you affect that region. This means that it can be used either to take territory or to attack distant enemies, or both at the same time. You can also assault Features of regions you are either targeting or in to contest them.
• Withdrawal A withdrawal ability affects the region you are in an retreats you into your target area.

Of those, I am fully happy with the name of "Assault." The other three are subject to change.

But anyway, how does that work? Well, I'm glad I asked. The idea is that different classes have access to different stuff. Sure, everyone has access to your basic actions:

• Retreat - Withdraw to target region. If target area is controlled, you can create a new region and retreat into that. Retreating from an uncontested retreat generated region makes you vanish from the combat altogether.
• Advance - Assault and contest a target region.
• Circle - Get a minor defensive bonus this turn, choose your target region next turn.
• Attack - Melee and attack something in your region with whatever weapon you happen to have.
• Poke - activate a feature of whatever area you are in.

But you'd also have your own personal WoF block that would mostly be based on your class. And those classes would specialize in various tactics.

• Grenadier - As a gageteer/demolitionist, you have a number of Melee and Withdrawal maneuvers on your list which allow you to blow stuff up and lay barbed wire and the like. You help increase the controlled territory by making it harder for enemies to take territory your team has taken.
• Necromancer - You get a squad of pokemon. Instead of acting yourself, you can order your skeletons/spirits/golem to assault your target area. In this way you can spread yourself out and control more territory.
• Warlock - you get a bunch of ranged attacks with large areas. You nuke very hard, but you would like other players to clear your region and seize empty regions so that you can get your fireballs off reliably.
• Bard - with the ability to recite ancient words of power to transform things into other things, your primary means of contesting territory is simply to fill regions with brambles and the like in order to make the territory enemies have hard to hold onto or undesirable.
• Illusionist - You can make things seem like other things. What this means (aside from your ability to murder stuff with phantasmal killer and Poke terrain features at range), is that you can change targeting information. That is, you can fiat that everyone in region 2 gets to target region 3 next round, and so on.
• Berserker - you get super special shark kung fu. This allows you a number of special Assault maneuvers. Including, but not limited to, assaults that target entire regions as you run around stabbing things with your serrated blades.
• Scout - you get a number of melee and ranged attacks, couple with a large number of withdrawal attacks. But your big deal is pathfinding - the ability to choose your next target area as a rider on many of your other Scout actions and spotting - he ability to allow an ally to use your location as their target as a rider on specific other actions.

Meanwhile I'm pretty happy with the basic mechanics of finishing moves. They literally just end a dude, but they have CAN limits. So if you are sitting around with a bunch of wounds on you, it becomes tense just to watch the enemy roll their WoF - because if Flesh to Stone comes up as a possibility, you are out.

Other attacks will normally have an Attack Roll (figure a base chance to-hit of about 75%) followed by a Saving Throw. Saves really want to be on a curve, so 3d6 looks pretty good for that. To-hits might as well be on a d20. Saving Throws almost always fail, but you need to fail by more than 5 to get a level 2 effect and more than 10 to get incapacitation. So the default attack would be a 6+ to-hit and then a 16+ to Save for no injury.

What does all this mean? It means writing up a lot of abilities. Holy crap. Like, several hundred.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Ooo, this means that chase scenes continue as long as minions or hazards pop up and contest your retreat zone, and you escape when those are exhausted.

-Crissa

[Username17]

Ooo, this means that chase scenes continue as long as minions or hazards pop up and contest your retreat zone, and you escape when those are exhausted.

-Crissa

Yeah. And you can do the infiltration minigame on the normal battlefield. Things have to be modified slightly for the social minigame, but they can run on the same principles of Saves and effect levels. Successfully cowing the crowd with a demonstration of power could easily be analogous to a level 1 or 2 effect.

Another thing this lets you do is to have giant monsters like a Kraken as a boss monster. He takes up multiple regions at the tiers you are intended to be awed by his power (Heroic), so he's going to have different areas with different base CANs. This in turn means that your attacks to the body can't take out the Kraken in one hit. Heck, they can barely damage the body at all, because it needs like a 6 or 7 to save - all you are hoping to accomplish is to get a level 1 injury in there. But the tentacles have a much worse save bonus, so you can rack up injuries there. So chopping tentacles off can be a valid tactic - you blow up the little bullshit and that reduces the save bonus of the kraken body, and eventually you can do some stabbing to the head.

Morale of enemy units can be handled in an analogous fashion to the Kraken's body. Losing goblins puts injuries on the morale of the unit. Which can later in the battle be broken completely.

---

Which brings us to a thing about completing adventures. Adventures are things where you are attempting to accomplish stuff. Generally you are conquering or liberating something. In short: a war. And that in turn means that you want to accomplish something over its course. Dying for your team or even making some other sonofabitch die for his is basically meaningless - the goal is to get the cattle or the silver mines or the halfling freedom or whatever. And winning battles adds to that. And committing atrocities penalizes you on that.

In short, you are confronted with a relatively simple moral choice: capturing enemies is in general making it more difficult to win the battle because webbing a target doesn't harm the enemy morale very much. But it puts you in a better place for the adventure, because you don't drive up your Atrocity Score and you have prisoners to trade back for additional concessions. On the flip side, in-battle atrocities like Mortal Kombat fatalities make it easier to win the battle (harming enemy morale super hard), but makes it harder to win the adventure (because you drove up your Atrocity Score).

Demons, therefore, are good at winning battles, but bad at winning wars.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

Intriguing. How does the Atrocity score influence the course of the adventure?

[Crissa]

I was totally imagining how the recent Prince of Persia movie could be modeled with this system...

-Crissa

[Draco_Argentum]

Okay, the idea of bombarding shit with meteor storm or whatever is awesome.

The atrocity angle is cool. How does that play out when you fight demons or something else that won't negotiate though?

[CatharzGodfoot]

The atrocity angle is cool. How does that play out when you fight demons or something else that won't negotiate though?

Oh, demons or paladins will negotiate. They're just difficult to negotiate with.

[Username17]

Okay, the idea of bombarding shit with meteor storm or whatever is awesome.

The atrocity angle is cool. How does that play out when you fight demons or something else that won't negotiate though?

The zombie uprising is weird on several levels. First of all: they have essentially infinity morale. You can only win an engagement by hacking them all to pieces. Secondly, they have essentially limitless war fatigue - no particular number of defeats will end them so long as they can still mount an attack. They have a third limit, which is logistical. You have to raid them until they fall apart to win.

So atrocities are fairly useless against the zombie uprising, because they don't break. But winning or losing isn't super important so long as you take some of them down each fight. So the idea is basically that the zombies will overrun your position several times, causing the players to have to "lose" the terrain repeatedly. Each time falling back to a new battlefield and buying times for the civilians to retreat.

The Demon army is a bit different. They have a high (but not insurmountable) war fatigue, and are rather cowardly. There is a good chance that if you don't murder grind or capture them all, that they will just keep coming until you do. And they will atrocity like crazy if they get that opportunity. So breaking them early before they have a chance to use Heartripper or Swallow Whole is very attractive. Tactically speaking, tearing their soul in half or ripping their skulls out of their body is very attractive because it brings the battle to a close before it starts getting lethal for the PCs. And strategically it's probably n acceptable risk, because you likely weren't going to get an early settlement anyway.

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

But you'd also have your own personal WoF block that would mostly be based on your class. And those classes would specialize in various tactics.

Have you and K sorted out what you would like your "base classes" to be, and at what Tiers these classes will be placed in?

[Username17]

But you'd also have your own personal WoF block that would mostly be based on your class. And those classes would specialize in various tactics.

Have you and K sorted out what you would like your "base classes" to be, and at what Tiers these classes will be placed in?

To an extent.

We're focusing on the Heroic Tier, because it is the assumed starting point. The Legendary tier is going to be populated by stuff based on the Justice League (cartoon version or possibly the Generation Lost miniseries, which is pretty good). The Epic tier is going to be populated with pretender gods from Dominions.

For the Heroic Tier, we want there to be more than 11 base classes. Having less than 11 classes was just way too painful to go through for 4e and we don't want to do it. How many more than 11 is pretty much up in the air. The magic types are supposed to stay tactically distinct, but we aren't wedded to any particular number. So right now we have (colors given vague M:tG equivalents for ease of expression):

• Green - Sample character is a Bard. You get to speak words of power that turn things into other things. Tactically this means that you get Druidic mainstays like Entangle and Rock to Mud as well as MoM mainstays of Web and Cracks Call. Contest Regions by making them be shitty enough that your enemy abandons them.
• Blue - Sample character is an Illusionist. You get to control the vertical and the horizontal. This lets you get a bunch of redirects that you can use to call targets for allies or screw up targeting for enemies.
• Red - Sample character is a Warlock. You get fire and lighting. Blow things up, with magical flames. Listen to Dragonforce. You get a lot of very damaging ranged attacks, some of which let you hit big areas and potentially clear regions. Basically the classic cloth wearer, since there is a clear vulnerability when the enemy actually gets into your region.
• Black - sample character is a Necromancer. Necromancy gets "soul manipulation" which means you get role protection on your pokemon and also gives you the power to do various emotion control and puppetry on enemies. Necromancy does not get death waves, if you want to contest a region you need to send skeleton armies or something similar to go take it.
• White - sample character is a Grenadier. You get to say "You activated my trap card." a lot. You can set actual traps and explode people who enter regions you are or were in.

And that's where we go off the rails with M:tG analogies, because there are still more characters that don't fit into those categories. I suppose the Scout or maybe Rogue could be looked at as martial versions of the Illusionist, but the Assault based classes have no clear analog amongst the more "casterish" classes.

The Berserker sample character is all Shark Totemish. You get a very aggressive set of maneuvers where you get area assaults and attacks that get enhanced benefits from attacking wounded enemies.

The Paladin sample character is more grindy. You get to combine your region with your target region, punish enemies for leaving the region with you, and draw fire to yourself.

But that's really abut as far as we got. We nailed down about 9 classes that seem like they'd play really distinctively, and we want at least 3 more.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

I have nothing to add to the rules discussion, but it sounds like you're looking for ideas for classes. Therefore, throwing one out: the Warper, a Green/Blue controller. Works by creating, destroying, merging, or moving regions and features. Example defense: run away from a contested region by moving the feature you're in to another region. Example attack: merge two regions to shove a bunch of mad guys into a raging inferno that the Bard started a few rounds ago.


Also, it sounds like targeting will be mostly random (except for the illusionist's ability to paint targets and a few specialty laser-guided choose-your-own-target attacks). Is that correct? I just want to make sure I'm not a little confused.

[Username17]

I am indeed looking for ideas for classes.

Also, it sounds like targeting will be mostly random (except for the illusionist's ability to paint targets and a few specialty laser-guided choose-your-own-target attacks). Is that correct? I just want to make sure I'm not a little confused.

Basically you roll a targeting die that determines your target region. Unless you have some other effect going off (like having Circled last turn), you can have your abilities affect either the target region or the region you are in. If the target region is uncontested, you can choose another region. So "taking territory" makes it easier for your side to target the things they want to target.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Do you have a definitive definition on contesting somewhere here? I get the general idea, but I haven't been able to find a specific definition.

IE, can you assault a region that an enemy is in, but that region is not contested even with both of you there?

If I claim a region somehow, then move out, then someone else moves in, is that region contested, or just their's? Okay, same again, only this time I'm a grenadier and use something?

[Orion]

What happens if the number of regions gets wonky?

Flight and Burrowing create regions that are *supposed* to be unable to be rolled. But what about the "retreat" region?

[virgil]

You have a better idea how this would work and whether they fit, but here's some random ideas...

Wall-mancer: Uses terrain manipulation to create/reduce/divide regions, possibly splitting up people if they're not sharing a feature.

Elocator: Improved movement into and through different regions, including moving with people attempting to leave your region; possibly able to haste/slow/teleport others to give them similar benefits. This might be treading on the illusionist's role though, mechanically

White Mage: Debuff cleanser, heal damage both reactively and proactively, fortify controlled regions with buffs

[Orion]

Just so we're clear, the targeting roll is different from the winds of fate roll, you're rolling two dice per turn?

So let's look at a heroic character like the Warlock. At level 5 the Warlock probably gets something like:

Level 1: Choose a Destruction power
--Sample Character: Hellfire

Level 2: Choose a Self-Defense Power
--

Level 3: Choose a Vexation Power

Feature	Hellfire	Shadow	Plague Wind
Direct	Meteorite	Smokescreen	Cloudkill
Aggressive	Fireball	Majesty	Blood Boil
Harrying	Bloodseeker Flare		Stinking Cloud
Positioning	Fire Lash		Gust
Reserved	Rocket Jump		Afflict
Turtled	Fire Hand		Paralyzing Palm

Fireball: Ranged 2 Wounds
Rocket Jump: Withdraw 1 Wounds
Meteorite: Ranged 1 Finisher
Fire Lash: Ranged 0 Wound+Stun
Fire Hand: Melee 0 Wound
Bloodseeker Flare: ranged 0 finisher ignores cover/concealment

Smokescreen: Surround yourself with a feature 1 that gives -4 to hit to all attacks that target a subset of the feature.
Majesty: Anyone attacking you this turn gets a persistent to hit debuff
Discorporate: Assault into any uncontested region
Blindness: Ranged 0 blind
Desu
Desu

Cloudkill: Ranged, feature 2 wounds every turn
Stinking Cloud: Ranged, feature 2 sickens
Bloodboil: Ranged 1, targets take DoT
Afflict: Ranged 0 sickens
Gust: Ranged 1 targets can't assault or ranged next turn
Paralyzing Palm: Melee 0 "finisher" paralyzes briefly

[Username17]

What happens if the number of regions gets wonky?

Flight and Burrowing create regions that are *supposed* to be unable to be rolled. But what about the "retreat" region?

The Retreat Region is also supposed to be unrollable. If your target region is contested, then your retreat is cut off until you fight your way through or use some action or ability to bypass that. This also means that if you leave disposable minions behind, you are very likely to get away since the other enemies will get bogged down fighting them while you book it.

Where it gets a little on the odd side is where you can actually roll up regions that do not currently exist in the battle. And then you get to straight up add one by interacting with it. Regions can be removed from the lists by having them be added to another extant region, and some battles simply do not start "complete". In either case, you can end up with a battle where there are regions with enemies in them, regions with your folks in them, and then straight up undefined regions. And if you decide to interact with them, you can generate a new region with new features, and even have some control over that (after all: you are the one moving the battle). In this manner, a battlefield can move and expand over time.

What I'm iffy about is the act of straight dropping regions from the battle. Because people are totally going to want to do that. Once a region has a barbwire fence an no enemies in it, you'd probably rather just run away and fight elsewhere. Preliminarily, I'm thinking that if you go contest the retreat region someone made, you can bring it back into the normal region rotation by sacrificing a region you own outright to the unrollables.

Do you have a definitive definition on contesting somewhere here? I get the general idea, but I haven't been able to find a specific definition.

Nothing is nailed down in solid text yet. The idea is that if you assault something or withdraw into it then you are contesting it. And if no one else is contesting it, it's yours (and uncontested for your team). It gets complicated by people using abilities that specifically contest or don't contest regions. But the general idea is that if you are in an area you are contesting it if your enemies are also there or owning it if they are not. And you keep ownership of an area until someone else successfully contests it even when you go elsewhere.

---

I'm also having problems modeling Attacks of Opportunity in a way that isn't super complicated. My gut idea is that actions should impose some kind of numerical value to how easy it is to get in or out of your region after it is used. And that Assaults and Withdrawals will have associated Maneuver values that would determine whether such presences nailed you or not. This would make the maneuver value on Retreat and Advance super important - because abilities strong enough to control those could seriously cramp the style of basic enemies (who would often be simply using basic maneuvers anyway).

Wall-mancer: Uses terrain manipulation to create/reduce/divide regions, possibly splitting up people if they're not sharing a feature.

Region division could be the inverse of area attacks - both newly created regions have to be at least as big as the size in the division ability. So if a feature was big enough, you seriously could just divide it down the middle.

-Username17