Yet Another Combat Positioning System

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Calibron
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Yet Another Combat Positioning System

Post by Calibron »

So I've had the basic version of the combat positioning system for my project, Ruins & Rulers, fleshed out for a little while, and with the sudden upswing of abstract positioning discussion I thought it'd be relevant to share it.
Ruins & Rulers wrote:Movement in Combat
Unlike many games, R&R doesn’t measure distance in combat by feet, meters, or squares, but rather zones of activity; this is to better simulate the natural flow of movement that is inherent in just about any small scale fight. A zone can be roughly any size appropriate for a small scale battle, a city street, a closet, a wide open field, a tavern, or even the sheltered area behind the bar in that same tavern. Deciding where one zone ends and another begins has more to do with the attributes of a piece of terrain and physical barriers and demarcations than space or distance; for instance a 500 foot wide open field with no barriers or hazards would be one big combat zone, but a small cliff would have at least three combat zones, the ground at the top of the cliff, the ground at the bottom of the cliff, and the cliff face itself.

Obstacles and hazards can cause a combat zone to be split, for instance if we were to put a river right through the middle of our field in our previous example, or create a smaller combat zone inside a larger one; if there happened to be a pit full of acid in the middle of the aforementioned field it would create a small, and unpopular, combat zone within the larger field zone. That last point is important, because their are many powers capable of forcing someone to move from one combat zone to another. One normally moves around the battlefield by spending a Move action to go from their current combat zone to an adjacent one.

Speaking of zones within zones, many creatures and characters will have powers with a range of melee; melee powers can only be used once one creature has actively engaged another creature inhabiting the same combat zone in melee, usually done by spending a move action; creating a small zone within the combat zone they both inhabit. Once two creatures are in melee any other creatures that want to engage one of them in melee must engage both; if any further creatures want to engage any of the previous creatures in melee they must engage them all; as such any group of creatures in melee will essentially be a shifting blob of activity within any given combat zone. It is possible to have more than one mutually exclusive blob of melee combat, but generally a creature will only be able to join one at a time. The most basic way to disengage from melee combat is to simply use a Move action, though various powers and abilities will give other options; a creature cannot normally disengage from melee and engage in melee with another group or creature using the same Move action.

Many attacks will not have a range of melee, rather they will have a number indicating how many zones away can be affected by the attack, with a 1 indicating that the attack can only be used to affect the zone you inhabit, a 2 indicating that the ability can be used on your zone or an adjacent zone, and each higher number increasing the number of intervening zones that can be between your zone and the target’s zone by one.
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Post by Username17 »

This is far too sketchy to make anything of. How do people control territory, intercept characters, escape from harm, seek or avoid melee engagement? For that matter, how do people move from one zone to another?

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Calibron
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Post by Calibron »

Those abilities are covered by individual powers and are not things all characters can inherently do. Two of your questions are answered in the basic rules though:
You seek melee engagement in the most basic way by spending a Move action to engage one creature in melee or join a melee already in progress, you can normally only do this when inhabiting the same zone as you target; you also disengage from a Melee you are in by spending a Move action. You move from your current zone to an adjacent zone with a Move action. Come to think of it sometimes there's a wall you can't pass through, or a hazard you don't want to pass through, between your zone and an adjacent one that'll require you to take a less direct route through one or more extra combat zones; I'll need to find a way to mention that in the basic rules.

To split zones up, ala wall of stone, you need a power that let's you do this. To create smaller zones of nastiness within a zone or turn entire zones unpleasant, ala stinking cloud, you need a power that let's you do so. To stop someone from engaging in Melee with you, stop someone from disengaging from Melee, or generally move someone against their will you need a power that allows you to do that.

I can't answer questions about many specifics because I haven't written up the 100+ combat powers that'll be divided up between the dozen+ original classes. Any comments on what is there?
Last edited by Calibron on Wed Nov 03, 2010 5:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Any comments on what is there?
Well, what is there is not a system. So if you want us to comment on it, our comments will be scathing.

A position system exists so that people can have their position matter. If you have no zone of control and no ability to infringe on the movement of other people, then there's no reason to be one place instead of another place. You might as well just have people in the Near & Far sketch by Grover.

What you have there is that you want to melee someone so you decide to move into melee and then you melee them. Or you decide that melee sucks so you move out of melee and then you ranged attack them. That's not a system. Or at least, it's a system so uninteresting that it is shit.

You can't just handwave that special abilities will take care of everything that a location system needs to do and leave it at that. Because then the special abilities are your system, and you haven't really done anything except state that you are going to make a rule system for positioning. You know, any fucking day now.

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Post by TheWorid »

How does relative speed of combatants factor into this system? Also, are AoEs only limited by fairly arbitrary zone restrictions? That seems like an "argue with your DM" situation.
Calibron
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Post by Calibron »

Okay. I'll get back to you later then. For now I can throw out a few sample abilities off the top of my head to give you an idea of how things will function when they're done.

Push
Action: Major
Range: Melee
Target: All creatures in Melee
Source: Impact
Damage: #
Duration: Insant
Effect: All creatures in Melee with you are hit with waves of force and are pushed out of Melee.

Command
Action: Major
Range: 3
Target: One creature
Source: Stress(Psychic)
Damage: #
Duration: Instant
Effect: One creature of your choice that still has an action available this round that can be used to Move must immediately spend it and Move to a legal area of your choice. If the target has more than one action that would allow it to make a Move it chooses which one is expended.

Trip
Action: Minor
Range: Melee
Target: One creature
Source: Impact
Damage: -
Duration: Instant
Effect: As a reaction to a creature attempting to disengage from Melee with you you may cancel their movement while still forcing them to spend their action.

Blink
Action: Move
Range: Self
Target: Self
Source: -
Damage: -
Duration: 2 rounds
Effect: Whenever a creature attempts to engage you in Melee you teleport a short distance away and avoid entering Melee.

Attract
Action: Major
Range: 3
Target: Any creatures
Source: Stress(Psychic)
Damage: -
Duration: Instant
Effect: Cause any creatures you select to immediately take the most direct route, regardless of hazards, to one point in range of the power that you choose. Creatures move as far as they are capable of with one basic Move action. Creatures can be forced into Melee with each other if you so choose.

Awesome Blow
Action: Major
Range: Melee
Target: Any creatures
Source: Impact(Weapon) or Cutting(Weapon)
Damage: #
Duration: Instant
Effect: Any creatures you target are moved out of melee and out of their current zone into an adjacent zone.

Thicket of Blades
Action: Major
Range: Self
Target: Self
Source: Cutting(Weapon) or Impact(Weapon)
Damage: -(see Effect)
Duration: 1 round
Effect: Any time a creature attempts to engage or disengage in melee with you you may attempt to strike them, using # dice, and cancel their action if you get any successes. Remove one success when determining damage from these attacks.

Hamstring
Action: Major
Range: 1
Target: One creature
Source: Cutting(Weapon)(Precision)
Damage: #
Duration: Instant, Save Ends(all "Save Ends" mechanics in this notation mean a save is rolled at the end of the target's turn to relieve the effect)
Effect: Your target loses access to their Move action.

Ring of Fire
Action: Major
Range: 1
Target: Area
Source: Fire
Damage: #
Duration: 5 rounds
Effect: You either surround your current zone in a ring of fire that damages anyone trying to enter or exit it from ground level, or you create a smaller zone within your current one surrounded by a ring of fire that damages anyone trying to enter or exit it. When creating the smaller zone you may choose which creatures are inside or outside of the new zone. You may choose one creature that is directly in the path of the fire which takes damage immediately and directly after chooses to be either inside or outside the new zone; you must treat a Melee as a single creature leaving it either inside, outside, or damaged by the ring.

Wall of Force
Action: Major
Range: 2
Target: Area
Source: -
Damage: -
Duration: 10 rounds
Effect: You create a wall that blocks off one zone from another or splits one zone in half. When splitting a zone you choose who is on either side of the divide, but you must treat a Melee as a single creature, leaving it entirely on one side or the other. This power cannot block a zone off from another zone that surrounds it entirely. This power only effects creatures trying to enter or exit a zone at ground level.

Rampage
Action: Major
Range: Melee
Target: Any creatures
Source: Cutting(Weapon) or Impact(Weapon)
Damage: #
Duration: Instant
Effect: You strike any creatures in Melee with you that you choose.

Those are some of the kinds of effects concerning movement that I had in mind. If there's nothing constructive that can be said about the bare bones of my positioning system then I'll come back later; by that point I'll want to try recruiting some volunteers to help me write up the hundreds of powers that'll make the game go.
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Post by Username17 »

Even that isn't helpful, what are the resource management systems being used? What are the success chances? If you have a push power, is it literally impossible for someone to catch you? What the fuck?

Basically, you have to explain a couple things:
  • An explosion goes off, like a fireball or something. Who is in the area, and why?
  • You want to stop someone from getting to point B. What power do you have to do that?
  • You want to engage someone in melee combat and they want to get to point B. Which of you succeeds, and why?
  • You want to engage someone in melee combat and they want to escape from you. Which of you succeeds, and why?
  • You want to shoot an arrow at an opponent. Do you have a line of fire to them? Is there cover?
  • Someone wants to sneak past you. Do you hear them? Why or why not?
Those questions are what a positioning system is for. Your system as presently configured does not answer any of them and is therefore completely without merit.

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Calibron
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Post by Calibron »

I wasn't planning on throwing out the whole system for scrutiny since it isn't codified yet and many of the ideas are sloppy, but okay:
Ruins&Rulers wrote:Unstructured Notes
D10 dice pool system, accrue hits on an 8,9, and 10 re-roll 10s ala WoD.

Every character, and likely every creature, will get a Major, Move, and Minor action every round. A Major action can be traded in for a Move action or a Minor Action, and a Move action can be traded in for a Minor action.

Use a randomized system for ability availability, this can go two ways; One way is to have people choose which abilities, as few as three at first level and as much as seven, to have available at the beginning of any of the given minigames, and at the end of their turn have them roll a d10, with different numbers/groups of numbers corresponding to different abilities, to find out what new ability/abilities will be available next turn for them to be able to be use; The other way is to have people simply build a deck of cards with powers on them and have them discard from their hand when an ability is used and draw a new card every time a card is discarded. Allow limited amount of reserving abilities to be used when needed in a non-random fashion.

Health and Healing
Instead of hit points, as many tabletop or video game rpgs use, R&R makes use of a condition track that reflects a creature’s state of health. There are five conditions a creature can be in, most of the time this will be Healthy, but once you start getting attacked you will almost certainly end up in one of the other four conditions: Winded, Bruised, Wounded, and Unconscious.

A creature will be knocked down from Healthy to Winded when an enemy rolls one success on an attack, Winded to Bruised with two successes, Bruised to Wounded with 3 successes, and Wounded to Unconscious with 4 successes. A creature doesn’t necessarily have to get knocked down to each condition before being pushed farther down the track; if an attack gets enough successes one or more conditions can be skipped or bypassed to go straight to a worse condition on the track. To bypass condition tracks take the normal highest threshold and add one to it for every additional condition bypassed, so going straight from Healthy to Bruised would take 3 successes while going from Winded to unconscious would take 6 successes.

Going farther down the condition track hurts your offense, but not your resistance to further harm or ability to flee. Being knocked down to Winded imposes a 1 die penalty to offense, Bruised 2 dice, and Wounded 4 dice. While still in the midst of a battle a character that has been knocked down to Winded still hasn’t taken any real wounds and can get them selves back up to Healthy by spending a Move action during their turn; a creature that has been taken down to Bruised or worse can’t heal while still in battle without the use of certain special abilities. If a creature manages to get out of a fight as only Winded they immediately change back to Healthy.

Healing Surges
Healing Surges have a variety of uses, the chiefest among them is granting creatures the ability to quickly recover from damage. If a creatures condition is Bruised after battle then that creature will have to use a Healing Surge, or special ability, to get themselves back to Healthy; a Wounded creature normally needs to spend one or more days recuperating in order to get back to Healthy. If rendered Unconscious in battle a creature must wait 1d10 rounds before spending a Healing Surge to be able to act again and even then the condition they have upon awakening is Wounded; if you have no Healing Surges left while Unconscious you must rest for 8 hours before regaining consciousness.

Giving yourself a reckless surge of power when damaged in combat is another ability that spending a Healing Surge can activate. When you have taken damage in combat, that is slid down the condition track to some condition other than Healthy, you can spend a Minor action and one Healing Surge to remove the dice penalties you get from having a non-Healthy condition until the beginning of your next turn, but gaining the offense of being Healthy also makes you just as vulnerable; regardless of what your condition is it will only take an enemy attack 1 success to push you down to the next worse condition while under the influence of this effect. Healing Surges are also sometimes required to use especially powerful attacks.
Partially because it sucks to have your actions accomplish nothing and partially because of the way the damage system works two equal level opponents will almost always be throwing down enough dice to be nearly guaranteed the one success/hit that is required to get the non-damaging effect of their abilities to activate.

Fireball or explosion's AoE depends on the power. It could effect a whole zone, several zones, all the creature's in a Melee blob, or just one dude.

There are a number of ways to stop a dude from getting to point B and you could have any number of them available to you at any given time, or none of them: use a reactive power like Trip, seal off point B with a wall or a hazard, surround Dude with a wall or hazard, relieve Dude of his actions, immobilize Dude, blind Dude so he can't find point B, just kill Dude. Really you might as well ask how a high level D&D wizard stops someone from getting to point B.

Engaging someone in Melee always works if the target doesn't have a power to counteract the attempt.
Frank Trollman wrote:You want to engage someone in melee combat and they want to get to point B. Which of you succeeds, and why?
Whoever goes first gets to do their thing relatively unhindered. If melee guy wants to pass to another zone(assuming Point B is outside the originating zone) as well as engage in Melee with moving guy then he'll have to either use two actions or possess a power or inherent quality that allows him to do so. If moving guy wants to disengage from Melee and move to another zone he's going to have to use two actions or possess a power or inherent quality.

The next question can be answered similarly. If aggressor goes first then they can just engage in melee if both aggressor and target are in the same zone. On their turn target can spend their Move action to disengage and there's nothing aggressor can do about it with a power to stop target. If target goes first they can leave the zone and deny the aggressor the ability to engage in Melee with them with a single Move action. If a target continuously flees from an aggressor at the same pace then either party can declare a Chase which is a mini-game separate from regular combat with its own mechanics that are not relevant to the current discussion.

If your arrow attack has the range to reach the target then it has line of fire. A distance of 3 zones can mean very different things in settings as different as a forest and an underground labyrinth. The power level at level 1 in this game can be roughly equated to wizard level 5 or 6, it should be well within the player's willing suspension of disbelief that their supernaturally powerful and skilled characters can do something like ricochet an arrow off the walls of a cave in order to hit a target around a corner.

Stealth is covered in one of two ways, the first and more important is a separate mini-game that's more abstracted and focuses on infiltration, the second, which is the one that would be used during combat at all is a single skill check not unlike those used in D20.

Also in case the answer to your push power question isn't obvious from the new information provided in the quote: A creature that knows a push power won't have it available every round due to the WoF mechanic for power availability.
TheWorid wrote:How does relative speed of combatants factor into this system? Also, are AoEs only limited by fairly arbitrary zone restrictions? That seems like an "argue with your DM" situation.
Casual overland speed has no effect on combat movement.

Edit: Oh, and it's important to note that essentially everyone will have at least one or two non-Melee powers available at all times and only a very Melee-heavy list of powers known and a quirk of fate concerning the WoF will leave someone with no available ranged powers on any given round.
Last edited by Calibron on Wed Nov 03, 2010 10:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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