Play-by-post optimal system

[angelfromanotherpin]

So, in the 'Fuck It' thread, I mentioned not wanting to do a pbp game for 3.5 because it was too granular. Then I thought about systems I'd want to do pbp with and basically came up empty. Anything that wasn't too granular was too low-res. So I'm going to try coming up with something to fit the bill.

The first thing I want to talk about is of course combat. Getting people to declare actions round-by-round is excruciating, but just having everyone roll whichever skill their character uses for fighting one time is unsatisfying. I'm going to try taking a page from Dominions and use scripted combat. Hopefully a minimal tactical setup and submitting a sequence of actions in advance can be engaging and satisfying enough while resolving in a smallish number of posts.

Outside of combat, getting most tasks done in a single roll works well enough, but I think there are going to be enough situations where people are working together and/or where more than one round of rolls will be needed that I might go back to Frank's AOFD: Skill challenges and try to implement his suggested fixes.

More after sleep.

[Ancient History]

I've faced the same issue, and as you noted the problem is that most games put a lot of detail into combat, which can make it very cumbersome and time consuming. Combat scripting sounds like a good idea; as a general rule I would also suggest going with group initiative - nothing worse than needing to nag each player in turn.

[spongeknight]

In most systems you have plenty things to do on other people's turns, whether that includes attacks of opportunity, activating defenses or rolling soak. You really have to just roll that shit for someone else if you're doing a post, and in the case of activatable defenses ask the player when they would use them generally and do it for them. It kind of sucks, but not as much as someone going "wait, I would have done this other thing instead of what happened, re-do the post please" over and over again.

[Chamomile]

If you're doing an asynchronous system, there are two ways to do combat.

1) Combat is decided by one roll, tell your players to give it a solid paragraph of description when they make it. This basically means you're leaning more heavily on the "collaborative fiction" angle and less heavily on the "immersive roleplaying" angle. It's dead simple, though, and since option 2 below requires exploring ground that's not nearly as well-tread as what most homebrewers are used to dealing with, that's a non-trivial advantage.

2) Combat is like 4e, except without the obfuscatory cruft. Your classes' five moves of doom aren't something you have to assemble yourself, you've got a chart that's maybe five columns long, each column is one round of combat, and you use that move on that round of combat every single time there is any combat. You can do this either with low-complexity, the chart is given by your class and possibly level so the GM just looks up the level 9 Fire Mage chart and uses that, or you can do it with more complexity where there's a set of rules governing what slots you can put abilities into, how many times you can have a particular ability on the chart, etc. etc. Players can try to optimize their chart and can coordinate with other players to optimize party strategy as a whole, doing things like having the Cleric at the end of initiative (which should also be a fixed number, though you won't know in advance where the enemy lies in the initiative order unless you know in advance what monsters you're fighting) cast a buffspell on the Rogue right before he, at the top of initiative for the next turn, fires off his big crit attack.

You're also going to have to have some method to determine target selection. There's three options for that so far as I can see: Bottom-up, top-down, and WoF. Bottom-up auto-targets the lowest level opposition and works its way up, top-down auto-targets the highest level and works down, WoF we're all familiar with.

Is Koumei reading this thread? She's a pretty good designer and from what I can recall of what she's said in the past, this kind of combat is her jam, to the extent that she likes having combat at all.

[PhoneLobster]

A while ago a crazed idea came to me in a dream that would be very suitable for PBP sort of stuff.

Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING every Action your character could take would be a limited resource. And generally combat would be played with somewhat somewhat blind action selection in advance.

After some messing about trying to figure out if it could work and how it would work I figured that basically it would be best represented as a limited set of cards dealt to players, your character for the most part WAS your cards, your available actions would be your cards, instead of rolling dice your cards would include relevant numbers for determining attack/defense and possibly of multiple types. Once your actions are played they are gone, but new ones should be (sort of) easy to come across as rewards.

You start the game with, I don't know, a character that consists of a few sword attack cards, some run away cards, a vanish into the shadows card and a fire bomb card (or whatever), you walk into a combat you MUST select at least X cards to play, the combat then resolves your actions (and uses them up) in order until you are resolved out of it, through victory, defeat or fleeing. Presumably on winning combats or through looting exploration and quest rewards you'd get more and different cards to replace losses, presumably at the beginning of adventures you should get some minimum draw of cards based on your character archetype.

There were a LOT of implications and potential effects of all that, I could try digging the document I threw together on the idea up.

But all in all I think it would pretty well suit asynchronous play by post as a basic concept.

[Lokathor]

Edge of the Empire has a lot of problems, but it does initiative in "slots". Everyone on each side rolls initiative, then you sort them, then you take away all the names and just have it be PC or Enemy in each slot. So a slot comes up, someone who hasn't gone yet can take a turn. Repeat until all slots that round have finished. Seemed to work when I ran a PBP of it.

[Josh_Kablack]

You don't need a whole 5 moves of doom script. You can make asybchronous work with basic stances and until statements:

"I fight cautiously, prioritizing my own safety, until any of the other pcs goes down"

"I go full agressive, willing to take hits in order to deal damage, until I am down to half my HP"

"I fight protectively, keeping the orcs away from the duchess until help can get here"

Obviously you'd need to flesh out a bunch and do exhaustive lists of stances, and you'd want to work things so that it would be generally advantageous to stay in a stance rather than to set short-time triggers for changes.

[OgreBattle]

Here's my thoughts on a short list of stances that are very broad in scope:


Engage: Focus on attacking a particular target and pursue them if they try to withdraw. Ex: An assassin leaping at the king.

Cover: Focus on helping an ally, intercepting foes coming for them. ex: the king's guard moving to intercept the assassin.

Withdraw: Focus on defending self, moving away from danger. Ex: The king escaping the assassin as his guards cover him.

Secure: Focus on a particular area, attacking enemies there or entering it but not pursuing them out of it. Ex: The gate guard standing ready to stop the assassin in pursuit as the king with one of his guard covering him rushes past.



Any given action in a melee could be described as fitting into one of those four stances, though I prefer to call it 'focus' as it's about focusing on a foe, focusing on an ally, focusing on yourself, focusing on an area.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I think you probably want something like Mafia, where you have turns that rotate at specific real times.

• Players talk among themselves and declare actions during the turn. They can change their declarations whenever they want during this time.
• When the "bell rings", everyone's declared actions are locked in and resolved.
• Once action resolution is completed, players are told what happened, and the next turn begins.
• NPCs have their action declarations for turn n+1 determined as part of the resolution of turn n. Or maybe they just move on a separate turn that happens between n and n+1.

Yeah, it's simultaneous-declaration, but the declarers are frequently all on the same team, and unlike the tabletop, you've actually got the time for people to WIFOM around.

You want the actions players declare to be fairly broad, as opposed to the intricate detail of D&D, unless you're definitely in the case where NPCs have a separate turn and all the players are always on the same team. Either way, declared reactions are almost certainly a no-no.

[Wiseman]

I have a few specific rules I play by when running PbP games.

1. There is no rolling of initiative, whoever posts first goes first.

2. You do not roll for anything that happens outside of your turn, the DM or other players will roll those (saving throws as a prime example).

3. If you go too long without posting in a fight (generally a day or two) you will be cardboarded.

[angelfromanotherpin]

This dropped off my radar, mostly because it was an entirely abstract exercise; I had nothing in mind I wanted to run as a pbp game. That's changed. I want to give Carcosa a try.

Carcosa is a setting book/adventure seed about which not much can be said that isn't a spoiler, and I'm going to ask anyone who's read the book not to spoil it here. You could probably infer from the title that it's Lovecraftian, although it is much closer to the pulp tradition where the protagonists grit their teeth and hew through shapeless flesh than to the cosmic horror tradition where people go mad because of racism. It was written to be used with retroclones; Lamentations of the Flame Princess seems to be its first choice if for no other reason than it veers into that property's R-rated sensibilities.

Now, LotFP is a terrible system, it's a retroclone with a few updates (like 'attack bonus' and higher-is-better AC). But the AD&D setup has a lot of the sort of thing I'm looking for: group initiative, minimal tactical concerns, and so on. I was originally thinking of doing something more like a ground-up design, but fuck it, life's too short. What I'm looking at is an AD&D/3e hybrid. AD&D low-granularity, 3e consistency and transparency.

What follows is an in-progress draft, a ruleset that is geared towards a very specific scenario and is fairly restrictive because of it. Critiques/suggestions/etc welcome.

I. Ability Scores
Modifiers as per 3e. Players pick one of the following arrays:
a) 18, 13, 12, 11, 10, 7
b) 16, 16, 12, 11, 10, 8
c) 15, 14, 14, 13, 12, 11

Race
The brand of Sword&Sorcery that Carcosa is really only supports human PCs (at least to begin with). +1 feat, +1 trained skill.

Class
Carcosa as written only allows two classes: Fighter and Sorcerer. The Fighter is the standard class (LotFP Fighters are even gimpier than AD&D Fighters), and the Sorcerer is a custom class that is very similar to a Fighter; it has a few extra bennies and also gains levels 50% slower. That's obviously unacceptable. I propose a single class which is a pulp Sword&Sorcery style fighter/rogue, to be customized with feats. The ability to perform Sorcerous rituals can just be a feat. Advantages to this method include not having to balance different classes against each other.

HD: d8, BAB: Good, [/b]Saves:[/b] All Good, Skills: 6+Int mod.
Proficiencies: All non-Exotic weapons, all armors and shields.
Level 1: Shock Attack +1d6*
Level 2: TBA
Level 3: Shock Attack +2d6
Level 4: TBA
Level 5: Shock Attack +3d6
Level 6: TBA
Level 7: Shock Attack +4d6
Level 8: TBA
Level 9: Shock Attack +5d6

*Sneak Attack doesn't really fit, partly because there isn't really flanking and partly because I don't want all the players to go monotonously TWF, so Shock Attack will be similar to Sneak Attack, but distinct.

Skills
Ugh, skills are hard to do quick-and-dirty but also still any good. I'm just going to start with a skill list and fill it in later. Rather than fiddling about with skill ranks, everyone has 7+Int mod 'Trained Skills' and can trade one trained skill for two 'Half-trained' skills.

Appraise - Comes up too rarely, trap option.
Balance
Bluff
Climb
Concentration - Tends to be autopass/autofail anyway; replace w/Fort save or something.
Craft
Decipher Script - Combined with Speak Language
Diplomacy
Disable Device
Disguise
Escape Artist
Forgery - Never comes up, trap option.
Gather Information - Too narrow, incorporate into other socials.
Handle Animal
Heal
Hide
Intimidate
Jump
Knowledge(s)
Listen
Move Silently
Open Lock - part of disable device
Perform
Profession
Ride
Search
Sense Motive
Sleight Of Hand
Speak Language
Spellcraft - part of relevant knowledge skill.
Spot
Survival
Swim
Tumble
Use Magic Device
Use Rope - Comes up too rarely, trap option.

Feats
Feats are going to be ground-up redos so as to be compatible with a much more abstract combat sysyem than 3e's. Also, one of the AD&D-esque things that Carcosa does is have high mental stats give you a tiny chance of getting extremely random psionic powers. That's pretty dumb, so I'm going to put psi powers in as feats that reward/require high mental stats.

Sorcerer: Requires both Speak Language and Knowledge (Arcana) at least half-trained. You can perform Sorcerous rituals.
Tank: At appropriate decision points in combat, can choose someone in your part of the battlefield to 'tank.' If tanking an ally, attacks and effects that target that ally target you instead; if tanking an enemy, they can only target you with attacks and effects.
[Psionic]: Still not sure what these are going to look like. May rip off Koumei's Dungeon Crusade stuff.

Gear, how-do-fight, and how-do-not-fight after sleep.

[Blicero]

I would be interested in seeing how someone who is not a grognard run Carcosa. The setting definitely presents some compelling ideas, even though I think its take on hexcrawling presentation is structurally flawed; many of its aspects (such as the aforementioned psionics system) are Bad Ideas. As an example of the latter, are you just throwing out the "Dice Conventions" altogether?

Played by the book, Carcosa the setting is obviously going to be pretty lethal. Are you going for that, or will things be a bit safer? If lethality is a thing, have you considered keeping rolled-for ability scores? Super-lethal campaigns are one of the few times rolled-for ability scores are an okay idea.

[angelfromanotherpin]

...are you just throwing out the "Dice Conventions" altogether?

Yes. I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the idea, but it's insanely cumbersome and unnecessarily player-disempowering. I think you can achieve a similar effect with some much less noxious measures.

[Blicero]

Yes. I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the idea, but it's insanely cumbersome and unnecessarily player-disempowering. I think you can achieve a similar effect with some much less noxious measures.

Yeah, I am part of the camp that thinks introducing additional sources of randomness that are not intended to advance a specific design goal is not an inherently bad idea (although it often is a bad idea, obviously). I also enjoy the tragicomic aspect of some of what the "OSR" has done. But you need to be careful to not dick over players too much.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Played by the book, Carcosa the setting is obviously going to be pretty lethal. Are you going for that, or will things be a bit safer? If lethality is a thing, have you considered keeping rolled-for ability scores? Super-lethal campaigns are one of the few times rolled-for ability scores are an okay idea.

Hm, missed this edit earlier.

I haven't made any decisions re: lethality yet, but I'd be opposed to rolled ability scores either way because I don't want players to have an incentive to suicide their characters.

[Tannhäuser]

What are you planning on doing about sorcery?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Nothing (except by making the Sorcerer quality a feat instead of a class). I want to see how the players engage with that element.