ADOM RPG

[DrPraetor]

https://www.adom-rpg.com/samples/

I'm not sure how much it resembles the ADOM video game (which is one of the http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment. ... roguelikes ) - it appears to be a D&D 3E/5E hybrid which doesn't do many favors for Fighters.

In the ADOM RPG, high-level fighters can and do learn spells, and almost certainly join the Thieve's Guild to learn those abilities as well, so I'm not sure how well this is reflected in this particular game engine (I'm guessing: you end up dual-classing.)

[Omegonthesane]

In the ADOM RPG, the premise of such a depth of lore and story based content in a god damn roguelike caused me to resent the premise and hastened my switch to Crawl Stone Soup before I got to the point where a toaster running a roguelike was no longer my most portable entertainment device.

[Harshax]

Looking closely at the Fighter sample-pages, I'm surprised that fractional iterative attacks would be a design decision for a modern RPG.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Honestly the only thing I would care about in an ADOM TTRPG is a robust monster-eating subsystem. "Yuck! But it feeds."

[DrPraetor]

Thomas Biskup tells me that the Martial Skill Point you get at each level is a bigger deal than it sounds - being roughly equivalent to a bonus feat in D&D 3E.

I'm not sure I buy this ("Single Weapon Skill" is a stackable weapon focus / weapon specialization) but it does put this class in some perspective.

[TheCreatorOfADOM]

Looking closely at the Fighter sample-pages, I'm surprised that fractional iterative attacks would be a design decision for a modern RPG.

What exactly do you dislike about them? I personally e.g. find them much less troublesome than all the fiddle modifiers you get from dozens of special feats and minor powers starting with 3e?

And they allow for much nicer power scaling?

For a while I had been considering to use the 3e system (with -5 difference between attacks) but it also required calculations with different numbers all the time - so from a usability point of view I prefer the fractional attacks. (and as they don't come up all the time I do not really see any problem).

Feedback welcome!

[TheCreatorOfADOM]

Thomas Biskup tells me that the Martial Skill Point you get at each level is a bigger deal than it sounds - being roughly equivalent to a bonus feat in D&D 3E.

I'm not sure I buy this ("Single Weapon Skill" is a stackable weapon focus / weapon specialization) but it does put this class in some perspective.

You can see a draft version of the martial skills in our latest blog post on archetyping: https://www.adom-rpg.com/2019/01/02/the ... chetyping/

[Username17]

What exactly do you dislike about them? I personally e.g. find them much less troublesome than all the fiddle modifiers you get from dozens of special feats and minor powers starting with 3e?

I can't even tell if you are being serious here.

The "3/2" attack progression was terrible and people made fun of it in the 1970s. People knew it was bad before I was even born. There's famous comics making fun of it in Dragon Magazine, because everyone knew it was awful. There is a famous comic in Dragon Magazine that is just a fighter and an orc preparing to do battle and the fighter saying what the attack exchange order is going to be. That's it. The rule is so bad that simply saying it straight as it actually works was considered to be punchline - and they were right because years later I still remember that comic!

You can do that sort of thing to be ironic and hipsterish or something, the weird fractional attack progressions is a legit part of gaming history and you're free to reference that for comedic effect. But if you try to claim it's good I immediately have no respect for your ideas.

And I say this as someone who has no love of 3e's Full Attack paradigm. The attack at -10 was a dreadful idea and marks a big reason why warriors simply can't keep up in the double digit levels in 3rd edition.

Whether warriors are able to pull their weight has a lot to do with damage output ratios to expected enemy hit point piles. Fighters got a huge nerf in the switch from 3rd edition to 3.5 when a bunch of random mid-level monsters got more hit points. And just generally, monsters getting Constitution bonuses in 3rd edition made warriors much weaker and much more obviously weak than they were in any version of AD&D. So I couldn't say by looking at the Fighter you got there whether it's garbage trash in the context of the monster manual it is faced with. But the idea of using the "3/2" and "5/2" attack progressions seriously in the 21st century is certainly laughable trash.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

Feedback welcome!

Polearms are OP because you can wield a shortspear with a shield and get the massive DV progression of a weapon category clearly intended for two-handed weapons AND the shield's DV without downsides.

Oh wait, you were asking about the P&P version.

[OgreBattle]

And they allow for much nicer power scaling?

Feedback welcome!

If you want iterative attacks, I like the Trailblazer system

It goes...

Earl levels: 1 attack at no modifiers
Later: 2 attacks at -2 modifier
Later: 2 attacks at no modifiers

It's does the "I attack more at high levels" thing, simple to remember.

I'd also discard all the D&Disms of weapons and combat as they're based on what some history wargamers could find in a 1970's library. 2010's has a ton of knowledge from centuries old living Japanese traditions and western reconstructions of fight books.

So for me I prefer "Dual wielding hand and a half swords for an EXTRA ATTACK at X modifier!" to not be a thing. I'd rather see "dual dao, dual rapiers, arming sword and buckler as my waist weapon sidearms for when I drop my greatweapons, or need to fight in narrow winding dungeons"

Like wielding a 120cm longsword or two 90cm arming swords should give you the same number of attacks, then some passive modifiers.

[Harshax]

A Fighter's 'Attack Action' should just be a single die roll, with level appropriate variable-damage and a pool of points that they can spend each round as the player sees fit. Let the fighter spend his pool to increase Armor Class, Hit Probability, Damage Output, Apply Status effects like trip or disarm, Increase DC of resisting Status Effects, and apply the attack to additional threatened opponents.

Toss out all the pages wasted on charts listing variable damage for weapons. That kind of fapping to stats isn't why people sat down to play fighters. Just keep important bits that effect choices in the mechanic above: reach, damage types (slash, pierce, bludgeon) and situational modifiers like whether a bill-hook increases the DC to resist being unhorsed by +2.

Not only will you give a player the ability to make tactical choices round-by-round, you also handle players who just want to swing a sword for xDx damage and get on with the game. Lastly, and probably most important, you'll have simpler math for designing what a level appropriate monster should look like based on the min/max/average damage output of the Fighter.

[Username17]

A Fighter's 'Attack Action' should just be a single die roll, with level appropriate variable-damage and a pool of points that they can spend each round as the player sees fit.

The logic for giving warriors multiple attack rolls at higher levels is the same as it was 45 years ago, and is a reasonably strong argument to this day. At higher levels, turns are more complicated. There are more henchmen on a bigger battlefield. Monsters and characters are more complex and have more abilities active and at their disposal. The amount of time it takes for your turn to come around again is longer. So the disappointment of having your action crap out because you rolled a 2 is a bigger one.

If it's going to be two minutes until your turn comes around again, rolling an attack and missing and handing the dice to the next player is totes fine. If it's going to be 20 minutes, you'd like another chance and maybe some rider effects that take effect anyway.

-Username17

[TheCreatorOfADOM]

A Fighter's 'Attack Action' should just be a single die roll, with level appropriate variable-damage and a pool of points that they can spend each round as the player sees fit.

The logic for giving warriors multiple attack rolls at higher levels is the same as it was 45 years ago, and is a reasonably strong argument to this day. At higher levels, turns are more complicated. There are more henchmen on a bigger battlefield. Monsters and characters are more complex and have more abilities active and at their disposal. The amount of time it takes for your turn to come around again is longer. So the disappointment of having your action crap out because you rolled a 2 is a bigger one.

If it's going to be two minutes until your turn comes around again, rolling an attack and missing and handing the dice to the next player is totes fine. If it's going to be 20 minutes, you'd like another chance and maybe some rider effects that take effect anyway.

-Username17

And I have an even simpler one: It's a lot more fun to be able to roll for multiple attacks if you are a fighter - especially compared to others playing rogues, wizards or whatever. So for me in addition to the excellent argument give above the "fun factor" is extremely important.

[TheCreatorOfADOM]

What exactly do you dislike about them? I personally e.g. find them much less troublesome than all the fiddly modifiers you get from dozens of special feats and minor powers starting with 3e?

I can't even tell if you are being serious here.

The "3/2" attack progression was terrible and people made fun of it in the 1970s. People knew it was bad before I was even born. There's famous comics making fun of it in Dragon Magazine, because everyone knew it was awful. There is a famous comic in Dragon Magazine that is just a fighter and an orc preparing to do battle and the fighter saying what the attack exchange order is going to be. That's it. The rule is so bad that simply saying it straight as it actually works was considered to be punchline - and they were right because years later I still remember that comic!

I guess I made a mistake by looking for an intellectual exchange... *sigh* I always fall for the old Internet trap. When will I learn?

But getting back to your "kind of point" above: Not sure how old you are but it might be I played during the time before you were born.

Nobody I ever knew (and I knew many gamers) laughed about that rule during those days. There were far more complicated rules. In those days we rolled for initiative every round (often for every single combatant) (with a d10, and then you had weapon speed factors, casting times in segments, ... and that's just vanilla AD&D).

And the order is trivial: #A: 3/2 -> sequence 1/2/1/2/1/2/... How complex is that? #A: 5/2 -> 2/3/2/3/2/3/... Again: Pretty trivial. Except for number-retarded people. But they can't add numbers in any cases... so they probably died in their first fight.

And you can be sure that in practice none of the players ever forgot what the next number of attacks would be (neither did the GM). It just didn't happen. And as you usually don't have many battles with new combatants entering the fight every round, the sequence usually remains pretty static (not to mention that most combatants didn't have fractional attacks anyways).

Another surprising learning from those days is that combat got slower and slower after 2e.

But the idea of using the "3/2" and "5/2" attack progressions seriously in the 21st century is certainly laughable trash.
-Username17

Please try again again with an intellectual argument. Troll or man... that's the question.

[TheCreatorOfADOM]

A Fighter's 'Attack Action' should just be a single die roll, with level appropriate variable-damage and a pool of points that they can spend each round as the player sees fit. Let the fighter spend his pool to increase Armor Class, Hit Probability, Damage Output, Apply Status effects like trip or disarm, Increase DC of resisting Status Effects, and apply the attack to additional threatened opponents.

Design-wise to me the problem is that this probably also would apply to all NPC fighters and a subset of monsters... and then this becomes incredibly fiddly and annoying.

Do you know any system that works the way you describe above and that actually is fun to play? (serious question, no flame intended). I tried a couple of "ultra-flexible" or "ultra-realistic" systems over the years and all of them quickly caused headaches because all the point-juggling completely ruined the pacing of combat.

As far as I am concerned combat should be over in a couple of minutes... and not this dreary shit that started in 3e and then became even worse in 4e where a single combat round might take 10-20 minutes.

Before 3e we needed that much time to finish a fight between 10+ highly varied combatants and that's the speed I'd like to see in a fun game system (personal opinion naturally - but that's the opinion behind my design approach).

[TheCreatorOfADOM]

And they allow for much nicer power scaling?
Feedback welcome!

If you want iterative attacks, I like the Trailblazer system
It goes...
Earl levels: 1 attack at no modifiers
Later: 2 attacks at -2 modifier
Later: 2 attacks at no modifiers
It's does the "I attack more at high levels" thing, simple to remember.

Interesting suggestion... I didn't know that approach so far. I'll consider it. Thanks!

-2 might be a bit too low for a d20 based system as far as I am concerned though. Maybe more like -4. I need to think about that.

[DrPraetor]

Frank and I started playing with this:
https://hub.retroroleplaying.com/2012/0 ... riant.html
back in, as they say, the day (we're both from California.)

Some things are obvious: it isn't intellectual to deny the obvious.

Just for starters, 2-1 attack schemes require you to keep track of which round of combat you're in. That's actually a big pain at the table.

It also invites you to do stupid things like -
* attack twice
* cast a fire bolt, instead of attacking
* attack twice

OR, if your attack routine is 1-2 instead of 2-1, it invites you to -
* encounter the door
* start fighting goblins, so that you get 2 attacks on the first round of combat

and so on.

The whole situation in which odd and even numbered combat rounds are different is, yes, obviously bad design. It also doesn't get you anything - why do you need more granularity in number of attacks you can get? Why do you think fighters need to be -4 to hit instead of -2? The difference depends on how often you hit, but if you hit 50% of the time, then attacking twice and hitting 30% x 2 = 60% of the time is a piss-poor bonus. Fractional attacks per round don't come from any serious consideration of the mechanics, they were thrown into some version of AD&D by people who didn't do the basic math.

Related but slightly different topic:
In general, the wargame roots are bad if your default expectation is that each round of combat involves making one or even two individual sword thrusts. Combat rounds should be long enough to fence with a guy, which means you can give fighters special abilities in which they do final fantasy limit breaks and such; which is also about the 5 seconds it takes to run 50 feet or so, and otherwise makes more sense.

[Harshax]

The logic for giving warriors multiple attack rolls at higher levels is the same as it was 45 years ago, and is a reasonably strong argument to this day.

In the bad old days, fighters got to throw lots of dice, while the spell caster's single action was Save or Die, Save or Suck, Lots of Damage or Half lots of Damage, with situational Saving Throws that nulled damage entirely.

Iterative attacks flies in the face of the whole theory of action economy. Each player gets one action to do something significant. Giving the fighter iterative attacks just gives a player more chances to fail: Multiple chances to whiff at stabbing someone in the face, or multiple chances to prevent a fighter from doling out their full damage potential. Given that the RNG in d20 has auto-fail and auto-success at both ends of the spectrum, taking more turns at bat isn't the same mathematically as having one chance to succeed at higher probability or one normal chance to have greater effect.

Even if the Player/Boss NPC mechanic was to give fighters extra dice of Advantage, that could be spent on the To-Hit roll, or spent on the Damage Roll, this would still be more tactically interesting, expedient and most of all fair, than resolving iterative attacks.

In the bad old days, Druids could amass an army of furry allies and on that player's turn we'd spend all fucking day rolling dice for minions that could only hit on a 20. This was so problematic, that I'm positive that it was a point of discussion in the early days of 3E. Then again, I drink. My point being, the difference between a Druid with a bunch of psycho-bunny allies ganging up on a single ogre and a Fighter with iterative attacks is only skin deep.

I know I've digressed from the original point that fractional iterative attacks are fucking stupid, but I had a moment of insight halfway through my second glass of Glenfiddich and wanted to write it all down before I forgot.

[Username17]

I do like that he thinks he has to explain how D&D worked in the 80s to me. It's cute.

But basically the bottom line is that if you don't have enough self reflection about your gaming nostalgia to admit that treating odd and even combat rounds as sufficiently fundamentally different that people's expected damage output can double or half isawful, then your nostalgia glasses are too colored to make objective decisions. That's bad because it's just very obviously extremely bad. No one has seriously proposed such a system in this decade, the decade before that, or the decade before that, because it's obviously terrible. It was one of the many things people assumed that 2nd edition AD&D would fix in 1989 and it was a major disappointment when it did not.

The second bottom line is that whether extra attacks need to be gradualized at all has to do with what expected damage outputs are compared to the defenses and hit points of level appropriate opposition. Attacks don't exist in a vacuum, offense progressions only matter in the context of the defense progressions of team monster. When you're designing the Fighter progression, you should be looking at the back end - the expected damage per round - not the front end of whatever collection of attack bonuses, damage bonuses, extra attacks and so on that the class writeup grants.

So public chin scratching on whether it would be better to grant extra attacks with an initial penalty that went away over a few levels or whatever is not particularly heartening. Expected damage output calculations don't take very much time, and you should be able to do them with a solar powered calculator in less time than it takes to write a post. Whether an attack bonus or penalty is warranted or not is simply an answerable math problem and not a question of "feels" at all.

The question at hand is as simple as "What is six times nine?" and public discussions about how you feel about the question rather than simply answering it makes it sound like you haven't done any development work on this project at all.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Huh. I always thought that the fractional attacks was based on you fighting, not based on the round count itself. Eg: If you have 3/2 attacks, you get 2 attacks, then 1 attack, but if you skip a round of attacks in between to drink a potion you still have to take a round of just 1 attack.

[Whipstitch]

Troll or man... that's the question.

It's understandable that maybe you think you're being dismissive of a guy who's being brazen enough put the fact that he's trolling right in his handle, but Trollman is his for reals last name so what it really does is come across as sorta grade school.

[maglag]

The second bottom line is that whether extra attacks need to be gradualized at all has to do with what expected damage outputs are compared to the defenses and hit points of level appropriate opposition. Attacks don't exist in a vacuum, offense progressions only matter in the context of the defense progressions of team monster. When you're designing the Fighter progression, you should be looking at the back end - the expected damage per round - not the front end of whatever collection of attack bonuses, damage bonuses, extra attacks and so on that the class writeup grants.

And what's exactly the expected damage per round in, say, 3rd edition?

Because some monsters may easily end with more HP than the whole party put together.

But then that raises the question of what happens when PC fighter meets NPC fighter. Does it come down to whoever wins initiative pulverizing the other? Does that mean an NPC fighter 4 levels lower will still pulverize the PC fighter if they win initiative because the PC fighter has less than 1/4 the HP of brutish monsters of their level?

Expected damage per round only works when you have expected HP values, not when the desigers are throwing whatever HP values they feel like.

[OgreBattle]

And they allow for much nicer power scaling?
Feedback welcome!

If you want iterative attacks, I like the Trailblazer system
It goes...
Earl levels: 1 attack at no modifiers
Later: 2 attacks at -2 modifier
Later: 2 attacks at no modifiers
It's does the "I attack more at high levels" thing, simple to remember.

Interesting suggestion... I didn't know that approach so far. I'll consider it. Thanks!

-2 might be a bit too low for a d20 based system as far as I am concerned though. Maybe more like -4. I need to think about that.

That depends on how many negative modifiers you expect, what kind of target numbers are expected, and all that.

Yeah, looking at what kind of opposition will be tangled with is super important, if monster armor class (or whatever you wind up calling defense numbers) rockets up super fast then -2 could even be too much.

How complex would you say your game is? How long is a player turn expected to last (does it very greatly between swinging halberds and slinging illusions?), how many rounds is a 'level appropriate' encounter suppose to last?

How long does it take to make a lvl 1, mid levle, max level character? How many decision points are there (attribute, equipment, 'feats', skills, class abilities, etc.)

[Whipstitch]

Does that last maglag post count as another own goal? I can never even really tell what the intent is anymore.

[DrPraetor]

It would be perfectly reasonable to give fighters the ability to:
[*] Make a normal attack in one round, learning your opponents weaknesses.
[*] Make a super attack the next round, against the same target.

This has some elements in common with the 1-2 attack pattern, but:
[*] It isn't dissociative gibberish. Given a 1-2 attack pattern, are the characters unaware that they are twice as stabby every other 5 seconds (you'd think people would notice); and, if not, is the player supposed to pretend not to know for tactical reasons? If they are aware, what the hell do they think it means?
[*] You don't encounter doors.
[*] The payoff had better be bigger than just rolling your generic action twice. Like, hit once for increased damage automatically, then roll to hit as-normal again.

Within that design framework, next-round-super-strike is fine; although I think it makes more sense as a power for Assassins than for Fighters (Frank proposed this at some point but I don't remember when or where.)