Haste and Extra Actions Tangent

[Josh_Kablack]

So rather than get bogged down in the nostalgic Haste 3.0 vs 3.5 edition skirmish in the other thread I got to thinking about design paradigms and heartbreaker spitballing.

My thinking is that instead of having a spell to grant extra actions, leveling up itself could grant improved currency in the action economy.

There are a couple ways to do this:

As level increases any given task requires a lesser action type. This is present in piecemeal parts of 3e and 4e. In 3e, drawing a weapon went from a move action to "part of a move action" at +1 BAB, and Quicken Spell allowed a character to cast a previously standard action spell as a Swift Action. And a bunch of skills had things like fast mount/dismount where at a +N bonus something went from move to free or somesuch. In 4e, a lot of individual class powers allowed a character to make a Move or Shift as a Minor or Free Action and a number of higher level powers allowed a character to make an attack as a Minor action.

However I am imagining a system where these things are not handed out piecemeal, but baked into the core combat system. So for example something like "make a single attack" would start out as a Standard Action at 1st level; but at level N, it would drop to only requiring a Move Action, and at level 2N, it would drop to only requiring a Minor action. Likewise "Move your speed" would start out as a "Move Action", but at level N it would drop to only requiring a Minor Action. Obviously, you'd want to rename that action type to something other than "Move Action" to reduce confusion.

You could either do this strictly by level and hand out the action discounts all at once to enforce tiering. Or you could try to balance classes around having different action discounts come online according to different level components. Which is to say that you could have the reduction in action cost for a single attack tied to BAB, the reduction in movement costs tied to skill ranks/bonus in Athletics or Ride or something, and other action discounts tied to caster level or the like.

So long as you never let anything drop to less than a Swift / Immediate action, this approach has the advantage that characters are limited in actions per turn. While they may get to the point of attacking with a Minor attacking again with a Move and attacking again with a Standard - but to make those three attacks they are forfeiting movement and potion quaffing and a player's time needed to take their turn will be limited in duration at the table even at the highest level.


A character's number and type of actions are determined by level (or by a level component like BAB). This was how multiple attacks worked in 2e and 3e, where as a fighter got to higher level they got to make additional attacks, but it really wasn't used for much else.

Again, I am envisioning this as being much more widely applicable. So in this setup, your starting PCs get something like 4e's Minor + Move + Standard, can trade actions down freely. Then at level N, they get an additional action, which starts out as a Minor, at level N+1 that additional action upgrades to a Move and at level N+2 it upgrades to a Standard action, and then after another N levels things repeat. So you'd end up with an action progression per level which looked something like:

1 Minor 1 Move 1 Standard
2 Minor 1 Move 1 Standard
1 Minor 2 Move 1 Standard
1 Minor 1 Move 2 Standard
2 Minor 1 Move 2 Standard
1 Minor 2 Move 2 Standard
1 Minor 1 Move 3 Standard
2 Minor 1 Move 3 Standard
1 Minor 2 Move 3 Standard
etc, etc.

This is a dramatic increase in effectiveness, as in 5 bumps upward, characters are now both attacking and moving twice as fast - making them likely substantially more than twice as effective on the battlefield - even if nothing else is gained with level. But the good news there is that it allows the sort of drastic power scaling D&D-type fantasy is supposed to support without requiring much strain on the RNG or HP / Damage scaling. The deal where the boss monster from the first session of the campaign is a suitable horde monster halfway through happens pretty easily here without needing to inflate things past the numbers on the die or to require triple digit addition and subtraction.

The bad news is that handing out additional actions as levels increase means that each individual player's turn will take longer as levels go up and each player will have a longer wait between each of their turns. And that would have to be dealt with either by further complicating with out-of-turn interrupts to keep players engaged or by handing out abilities to try to streamline higher-level action, such as auto-hit or no-roll damage and movement which didn't require counting grid squares

[Kaelik]

I guess my real question is, why would you want to?

Doesn't it make much more sense to balance 9th level spells for one casting per round, and 1st level spells for one casting per round? Instead of 1st level spells being balanced on the assumption of one per round, and 9th level spells on at least twice.

I like swift and immediate actions. But things that are going to be immediate or swift actions should really in the vast majority of cases be clearly going to be used for that from whatever the first level you get them is.

[OgreBattle]

You'd need to rebuild the game from the ground up to incorporate it.

1 Minor 1 Move 1 Standard
2 Minor 1 Move 1 Standard
1 Minor 2 Move 1 Standard
1 Minor 1 Move 2 Standard
2 Minor 1 Move 2 Standard
1 Minor 2 Move 2 Standard
1 Minor 1 Move 3 Standard
2 Minor 1 Move 3 Standard
1 Minor 2 Move 3 Standard
etc, etc.

Having 8 steps to your character's action economy growth is a lot. If it's a D&D3e like system it could just be 3-4 distinct steps of action growth:

level1-5: 1 minor 1 move 1 standard
level 6-10: 2 minor 1 move 1 standard
level 11-15: 3 minor 1 move 1 standard

So the extra minor actions are added at a level considered breakpoints for 'realistic'/'heroic' style play. This could also tie in with BAB (if you are keeping that system), so warrior-types 'naturally' get haste before magic users.

Another thing to consider is how this will affect turn length, having more actions at higher levels can bog down the pace of the game.

[ishy]

What kind of impact are the actions supposed to have at different levels.

For example something like:
4 standard actions to kill equal level enemy at level X
4 standard actions & 2 move actions to kill equal level enemy at level X+
4 standard actions & 3 move actions & 2 minor actions to kill equal level enemy at level X++

[RobbyPants]

The bad news is that handing out additional actions as levels increase means that each individual player's turn will take longer as levels go up and each player will have a longer wait between each of their turns. And that would have to be dealt with either by further complicating with out-of-turn interrupts to keep players engaged or by handing out abilities to try to streamline higher-level action, such as auto-hit or no-roll damage and movement which didn't require counting grid squares

Another side effect is that you can accomplish more in each turn, and going first likely becomes even more important. So, instead of casting one save-or-die, you're casting three.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Here's an even more fundamental question that needs to be asked:

Do we really want people to have more actions a round as they level up? I mean, while it is loads of fun to combo separate big effects, there are a few huge stumbling blocks that you can't really solve just with relentless playtesting.

• Option paralysis. This is the brick wall to the idea. If you're naive about implementing the system, you can increase selection time by a factorial.
• Resolution time It's not a huge deal, especially if you gate extra actions to higher level (the stage of the game where system mastery is assumed and people just accept longer turns) but it's still a concern.
• Space issues. I think that it's pretty obvious that in order to avoid the sheer boredom of attack + attack + attack or Fireball + Lightning Bolt + Fireball, you need to have enough powers (or at least a way to spice up combos) to actually make a multiple-discrete-action system worthwhile.

I do think that it's cool as fuck for a wizard to demonstrate their superiority over lesser mages by opening up with a brutal Wall of Force + Acid Fog + Summon Monster 8 combo. Unfortunately, even if you could handle the balance problems you still have the much more basic interface problems. Maybe the interface problems could also be solved, but it'd require a complete reworking of the D&D engine.

[Pedantic]

Here's an even more fundamental question that needs to be asked:

Do we really want people to have more actions a round as they level up? I mean, while it is loads of fun to combo separate big effects, there are a few huge stumbling blocks that you can't really solve just with relentless playtesting.

• Option paralysis. This is the brick wall to the idea. If you're naive about implementing the system, you can increase selection time by a factorial.
• Resolution time It's not a huge deal, especially if you gate extra actions to higher level (the stage of the game where system mastery is assumed and people just accept longer turns) but it's still a concern.
• Space issues. I think that it's pretty obvious that in order to avoid the sheer boredom of attack + attack + attack or Fireball + Lightning Bolt + Fireball, you need to have enough powers (or at least a way to spice up combos) to actually make a multiple-discrete-action system worthwhile.

I do think that it's cool as fuck for a wizard to demonstrate their superiority over lesser mages by opening up with a brutal Wall of Force + Acid Fog + Summon Monster 8 combo. Unfortunately, even if you could handle the balance problems you still have the much more basic interface problems. Maybe the interface problems could also be solved, but it'd require a complete reworking of the D&D engine.

Would this work better if it was handled more like Contingency, and you had to prepare scripts ahead of time? You could instead give characters the ability to learn specific action or ability combos as they leveled up, and then ship the work of picking abilities to fill those combos to homework between sessions.

That leaves an interesting choice between using one of our valuable combo-slots for your highest level nova abilities, or filling them with lower level abilities that you can use multiple times, and potentially does something with the glut of low and mid level spells that are largely irrelevant at the higher levels.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If that's how you want to use Combos, to make them pre-selected actions rather than something you construct on-the-spot in response to emergent situations, then why don't you just have a bunch of premade powers that have the same functionality? For example, rather than just having a combo of Wall of Force + Acid Fog, you could just have a singular 'Acid Enclosure' spell.

[Josh_Kablack]

Here's an even more fundamental question that needs to be asked:

Do we really want people to have more actions a round as they level up?

While both YES and NO are reasonable answers to that question, D&Ds most common answer of "only some characters" is not reasonable. Giving out haste and double-specialization or grand mastery or octupus bootblade fu and rods of quicken spell and partialcharge pounce or rain of blows plus solitaires or minionmancy results in a number of exploits that are idiosyncratic enough to harm suspension of disbelief.

[Kaelik]

Very little can ever be done about Minionmancy to make it not supid, but the solution is just have quickened spells take swift actions, and for everyone to have something to do with swift actions, and to not make monsters like the Choker or Chronotyrn.

[name_here]

It is my experience from video games that extra actions are always really goddamn powerful, and being able to get extra actions is almost always the most important consideration. I am highly dubious of splicing it into a system not already designed to have it, because it's a big enough balance problem in ones that are.

[OgreBattle]

You could do it as an initiative pass thing where level appropriate threats have the same amount of passes as you, but higher/lower level threats have more/less actions.

So at low levels a party can fight a lone werewolf as a boss monster with more attack actions than them individually. But a bunch of levels later werewolves come in packs and the party members have more initiative passes than them.

Yesterday's boss that attacks twice as fast as the paladin is tomorrow's minion that the paladin cuts down two at a time.

[Eikre]

Extra initiative passes is an attractive idea, maybe.

Using it to scale monsters will fuck your game quick. Let's say a level 1 PC deals 10 damage per attack and has 50 HP. You want a group of four of them to face off evenly with a level 5 monster that attacks twice as fast. Okay, so that guy deals 20 damage per attack, has 200 HP, and gets two initiative counts. That's probably going to be fine.

Then they get to level 5 and they, themselves, have 200 HP and deal 20 damage per attack. Now it's taking them ten hits to murk an equally powerful guy where it used to require only five. There is no difference in speed; two turns in one round is exactly as fast as two rounds with one turn per, when everybody has them. So now you're just back to being a 4E fuckface whose end-game fights take twelve hours to conclude.

If you're going to give people extra actions, you need to consolidate them. Two back-to-back sets of actions will never take as long to resolve as two separate initiative counts. It's a matter of cognitive drag. Every time you pass the turn to a new player, he has to stop fucking around on his phone, evaluate how the board-state has changed in the wake of the last person's turn, come up with a strategy, announce it, and break out all dissimilar resolutions tasks into different processing chunks. You really wanna pay that cover charge as infrequently as possible.

[rapa-nui]

I think Lago hit the main reasons why I generally dislike additional actions as a leveling mechanic. It can also get thorny to balance, but I think the pragmatic objections are more important. Maybe not everyone is like me, with the attention span of a gnat, but I hate it when I have to wait more than a few minutes before I get to do stuff.

A way I can think of to add combos without having to add extra actions is to create 'delayed' and/or 'debt' actions.

Delayed means that on turn 1 you do X, little or not much happens. Then on turn 2 you do Y and by combining X with Y you get some synergistic effect (think Unreal Tournament shock combo).

Debt is like a Pact from MtG. You Do both X and Y this turn, get your synergistic effect, but then on turn 2 you are much less effective. And yes, I know this can be broken as shit because debts don't matter if your enemies are dead.

[Insomniac]

I think you absolutely, positively have to give martials meaningful ways to use magic and interact without things like AC/HP.

Let's say casting a spell or interacting with the magic system is 3 to 4 times more effective than swinging a sword. That is probably the minimum baseline.

You could very easily get people interacting with the magic system in a meaningful way just completely blowing out martials. Especially a fairly non-optimized martial versus somebody who is decent at interacting with magic.

You might have made magic users another whole order of magnitude powerful. If you think Quadratic Wizards are bad now, imagine if they can get more actions and also layer and wave contingency spells as core assumptions of the game. I think that this would almost make a 3.5 or Pathfinder game Ars Magica. You might not even be able to pretend "Swing the sword 10 times" makes anybody more than a consor or grog.

[Josh_Kablack]

Yeah the objections being raised here make me think that my first suggestion where all characters get the same action, but various given tasks can be accomplished by higher level characters using with lesser action types is probably a better way to implement something like this.

So you could do this the easy and uniform way with a progression that just improved the type of action each character got along the lines of:

Start Level: Minor, Move, Standard
Low Level: Move, Move, Standard
Mid Level: Move, Standard, Standard
High Level: Standard, Standard, Standard

Which keeps everybody to three actions, but still gives higher level characters advantage in the action economy.


Or you could go kinda oldskool where action types don't change with level and make everything customization based where you would get stuff a lengthy list of stuff like:

task: Draw a Weapon: (normal) Move, (Attack bonus of +1 or better) Minor Action, (BAB +1 or Better and Quick Draw Feat: Free Action

task: Mount a Horse: (normal) Move Action (Ride of +10 or better) Free Action

task: Stand up from Prone (normal) Move Action (Kip Up Feat) Free Action

task Move your Speed (normal) Move Action (Athletics of +10 or better) Minor Action

task: Make a ranged attack (normal) Standard Action. (Rapid Fire Feat): Minor Action; (Rapid Fire Feat and +10 Attack bonus) Swift Action

[OgreBattle]

Do you expect the pacing of combat to change significantly from low to high level? Like would the point where you can throw three standard actions out be balanced out by characters having porportionately more hitpoints at that point or do you want people to die 3x faster?

[Insomniac]

The standard boss battle is already funky, mainly due to one shot kill effects and status condition and movement lockdowns. How does a higher level foe fight groups of enemies? Would a Party of 5 really be able to do 12 more standard actions than a high level foe?

Wouldn't this mean that parties would jusf jack whatever mechanic determines who goes first and then bury their enemies in a flurry of potent abilities?

[Josh_Kablack]

That's pretty much how boss battles played out in 3rd edition somewhere after 6th level. The PCs either had Leadership / summon spam and/or haste effects and/or wildshape pounce / octopus fu shenanigans and/or dual wielding plus rapid attack feats plus multiple attacks due to BAB and/or feat combos such as Whirlwind + Cleave or Combat Reflexes + reach.

Similar things could happen in 4e, but weren't quite so common, since Paragon tier games were rare and you needed a dedicated multi-attack build with its own specific combo sequence chart, and the errata kept changing how your feats and items worked, but it wasn't hard to build a fighter or a dedicated striker who could nova for 10+ attacks in a single round by mid-paragon tier.

1e and 2e had similar things happen to attack rates, mainly with with Darts, Double Specialization, Kits and Grand Mastery. A brief web search turns up a 2e hypothetical max optimization on another forum where dual 18 stats and a bunch of dumpster diving cheese yields a rate of fire of 46 arrows per 2 rounds (12+34 alternating).

My whole point in this thread is that it's probably better to make such gains in the action economy explicit and universal rather than implicit and piecemeal. And yeah, how your action economy works is a massively important design consideration which you need to adjust both your table time expectations and your combat engine's other numbers to balance around. If everybody gets roughly the same actions per level, then you can at least attempt to do that. If instead the 6th level Druid is getting to pounce for 5 attacks plus a pet Wolf, the 6th level archer ranger is getting to rapid shot for 3 attacks plus a weaker pet wolf, and the 6th level cleric is swinging a mace once .... you really can't even begin to balance out the math.

[OgreBattle]

How about instead of getting more actions, you get better minor/swift actions to use against lower level threats?

For melee, you go from having "full attack" as an action, to "pounce", to "dash-through-multicut."

That's where I'm leaning now after all the discussion in this thread that points out the many ways initiative passes can be clunky to deal with. I figure something like where your standard and full actions deal level appropriate effects while minor/swift action are more for knocking out hordes of weaker foes.


Say a level X Death Knight has his standard action death sword attack that hits hard, but can also spend a move action to send dark energy bursting from his body. The energy burst wouldn't do much at all against a level appropriate encounter but would send a group of lower level knights trying to flank him sprawling, and kill goblins outright.

There should also be more universal, readily available maneuvers for strong dudes to use against weaker guys,
things like D&D3e's trample maneuver should be something anyone can use on things smaller than themselves:

As a full-round action, a creature with this special attack can move up to twice its speed and literally run over any opponents at least one size category smaller than itself. The creature merely has to move over the opponents in its path; any creature whose space is completely covered by the trampling creature’s space is subject to the trample attack. If a target’s space is larger than 5 feet, it is only considered trampled if the trampling creature moves over all the squares it occupies. If the trampling creature moves over only some of a target’s space, the target can make an attack of opportunity against the trampling creature at a -4 penalty. A trampling creature that accidentally ends its movement in an illegal space returns to the last legal position it occupied, or the closest legal position, if there’s a legal position that’s closer.

Trampled opponents can attempt attacks of opportunity, but these take a -4 penalty. If they do not make attacks of opportunity, trampled opponents can attempt Reflex saves to take half damage.