@doppelgreener I guess I meant it in a worrying-about-themselves sort of way. Like "as long as the two-legs have got those owls, they won't come after us."
> Local wild tawnies have been known to bring the tame show owls at the Rare Breeds farm “presents” – possibly because they worry about them not eating properly; possibly as sex bribes. (source)
On the principle that upvoting can mean "That's a good, interesting question," it makes a lot of sense to upvote a question that the mainsite can't handle in order to deal with it in chat.
@Gryzaldr My group is currently moving away from D&D-like games, but for high-adventure dungeon crawl type stuff we've been enjoying Masters of Umdaar; it's a free world using the Fate system, inspired by 80s laser fantasy like He-Man and Thundercats.
my group really wants something that gives the appeal of "Dodging" an attack while AC metigates damage, is there a system out there that currently does that
Fate mechanics, especially the flavour used in Masters of Umdaar, are tailor-made for players to have a lot of freedom in describing how they deal with a particular event.
I've no experience, but I always assume that if I want a bit more simulationism, that GURPS and its variants are holding down that end of the bookshelf.
@Gryzaldr Example: In Fate, attack actions are opposed with active opposition by the target (rolling Shoot vs Athletics, for example). Armour ratings are a separate mechanic which reduces the amount of stress you take if you fail to defend against an attack.
@nitsua60 I have experience with both, but not recent... and I remember playing a system that does that... so it might be one of them, or it might be some other system I've played in passing
my group recreated the star wars system RPG using the Pathfinder system, it went pretty well honestly, just switch out magic for force and it works the same
I'll take a look at Fate
I'll mosh togther a colaboration of PF, star wars, 13 Age and Fate.
well given what I said above, I'm moving away from D&D's "roll higher than AC" mechanic to make it dynamic with a rolled Evasion mechanic, or parry maybe
@Gryzaldr are you interested in there being defensive choices to make, or just making the rolls feel a little more opposed (as distinct from the feel of rolling against a static target number)?
> Armor reduces damage taken. There are lots of games that use this type of rule. The one I’ve played the most is Earthdawn. Let’s say I have a physical armor rating of 10. An ogre whacks me with is battle axe for 16 damage. 16-10=6. So I take 6 points of damage. ... A downside is that normal armor can be pretty impressive early on, but if the damage dealt out increases in higher level games, then it can become pretty useless. Of course that all depends on the power curve of the game.
I've played Earthdawn, so that may have been the one I couldn't remember
Then there's Great Ork Gods, where your success is determined by the difficulty of the task and how much the god who's in charge of the task hates you.
So in many systems AC is a single number that tries to fold together a couple of inputs, right? What if you deconvolve the inputs into separate defensive stats. Mobility, parry, luck, armor. Your stat in each determines the die species that you get to counter-roll; damage taken when you don't successfully defend harms that stat rather than (or in addition to?) character's health.
(This is feeling like I'm re-inventing already-existing very-crunchy systems...)
It's the link from Adeptus + my love of Traveller's damage-to-stats mechanic, hopefully making the choice of which defensive maneuver more than trivially-interesting.
I.e. if the choices are parry/evade/absorb, and we end up with each character always making the same choice (since that's their strong one), what have we really gained?
The problem I generally run into is that trying to give equal mechanical attention to each possible element actually dilutes the overall experience, as well as making combat take a lot longer.
@BESW That's one thing I love about Traveller's system. Damage to stats means that (a) you don't have the insanity of "an experienced infantryman can take a normally-lethal blow twenty times, (b) you can make really meaningful choices whose repercussions are easily-understood, (c) you're not adding a new set of numbers.
Conditions in various forms are a more dynamic way to absorb "damage" or "stress." There's still a "countdown" element, but it's wrapped in immediate and potentially long-term implications.
Even the d20 System's "wounds/vitality" variant, while it fails at being "cinematic," is a more dynamic way of interacting with the stress of being in combat.
In a recent game I've been loving armor's "points" are consumed on a per-encounter basis; any damage beyond the armor's points results on rolls on a really gruesome critical hit table. Psychic damage has insanity as its "armor." I.e. the only way you can survive experiencing some things is to already be screwed up in the head.
@Gryzaldr If you're looking to more narrowly model things like deflecting and dodging, I suggest you'll want to look into ways to de-abstract hit points a little: it's not just about changing the mechanic you use to defend against the attack, but about changing what a successful attack does to you.
Like, wounds/vitality effectively gives you a small bar of HP that regenerates slowly but is hard to affect because you've got an ablative buffer that regenerates faster which most attacks have to get through first before they hit your HP proper.
If you lose all your ablative "vitality," you automagically get debuffs representing being run-down and tired.
If you get hit with an attack that directly targets your "wounds" points, you can be taken out very quickly without losing any vitality at all.
Then there's conditions, like the Fate Toolkit or Lady Blackbird offer.
Or Great Ork Gods, where there's a totally different god to roll for depending on whether "You die" is the immediate thing you're checking for or not; most of the time you have to fail some other action like defence and then see if you die. Attacking, defending, and dying aren't tied to the same mechanical action.
In Shadowrun, successes on an attack roll are opposed by successes on a dodge roll - you can either completely dodge an attack, or just reduce it. Then, armour gives you a number of automatic successes. Then, you roll Body to resist damage (so tough guys can shrug off the blow). Anything that's left then gets applied to your wound track.
Or Monster of the Week, where you've got tracks for Luck (fill that up and Bad Things start happening to you), Harm (fill it up and you die), and Experience (fill it up and you gain a new feature) that can potentially all get triggered by the same roll.
And Don't Rest Your Head uses a particularly vicious variant on stat damage.
(actually there are two wound tracks - mental & physical. Fatigue, unarmed, & other "KO" effects apply to mental. Overflow from mental goes onto physical.)
Great Ork Gods has me survive until such time I fail a roll against He Who Guards the Gate, and then I die. Great! Fate has me collect actual narrative consequences or conditions. Fantastic! Lady Blackbird just has my character Angry, Unconscious, or other palpable things, one of which is "Dead" (as in when you see someone go off a bridge, but didn't see them hit the ground). Brilliant! I even took "dead" once when I had a less dangerous option available, because it was such a fun prospect.
Cthulhu Dark has me go off the deep end bit by bit, and then start sabotaging the very investigation I'm participating in as a way to stay in there. Beautifully twisted! Roll for Shoes doesn't even care about this concept so we can do whatever. I can work with that! The idea I'm most happy with so far is just handling injuries narratively and having them add difficulty when relevant, which I'm quite happy with.
Relevant to all of this, the most boring part of Fate for me is stress, which operates like HP (lose some points temporarily, and nothing happens). I'm very interested in playtesting the Conditions variant BESW linked.
One somewhat surprising conclusion I reached was that "boring" hit points serve a purpose of regulating how long a fight lasts, and therefore how much cool stuff those engaged in a fight get to do.
@Magician I'm reading now, and am reminded (again) that one thing I'll be experimenting with in Fate is upscaling impacts of things.
@Magician Hmm. In a game like Fate I still feel as though damage should have an impact. That's not to say we should go straight to Consequences - Conditions provide a great middle ground. The "random bad rolls" are usually bigger than 2-3 stress, they're more like "My dice show three minuses, my opponent rolled ++++" and that's only happened a couple of times. Plus there's no "undesirable result." Bad things happen to my character = good things are happening for me.
Ummm. Folks, when someone's new to the site and not quite getting it, "Welcome and here's the [tour]!" is a good place to start. Then get into what they're doing wrong: after you've established that the site's ethos is both accessible and unusual.
Without that you're just some stranger telling them that the way they do things everywhere else is, in your opinion, incorrect.
... and how they responded was pretty ridiculous and stand-offish, so when they couldn't see the problem with being totally abrasive, I just walked away from that.
The Stack is aberrant both in the kinds of behaviour it expects and the degree to which that behaviour is established on an institutional level rather than merely a cultural one.
@doppelgreener I think there's a measure to stress that we may be ignoring in play.
> Maybe you twist away from the blow just right, or it looks bad but is really just a flesh wound, or you exhaust yourself diving out of the way at the last second. (ARRPG 117)
Atomic Robo also describes stress boxes as a measure of how many "last-second saves" you can manage "before you’ve got to face the music."
@BESW While we're on this track, something comes to mind: way back when, Mercia got dragged through the desert. She (somehow) took only 4 harm from it, I think after a very good roll on her part. I had a choice between taking a Medium consequence, or spending a fate point and only taking a Mild consequence. I was even weighing up whether it should be a Severe consequence.
So if you succeed on defending against an attack, you casually lean back from the sucker punch and smirk at the thug. If you fail on a defence and cross off a stress box, you might roll with the punch or dodge it in a very embarrassing way. If you fail your defence and take a consequence or are taken out, that's when you get a black eye or a broken jaw or are just cold-cocked.
Given that whole "take a consequence when it makes sense" rule, we could've gone straight past all that: "You've just been dragged through the desert by a sand worm." "Yup." "Under the desert's surface. Down into it." "Yup." "A desert made of glass." "Mmhm." "While you were tangled up and strapped to the outside, just barely hiding behind a wound you'd made." "Yeah." "I think that's a moderate or severe consequence." "I think so too."
I suspect I have a little leg up because of going into Fate through DFRPG, which was a lot more fiddly and weird and I felt like I needed to study it deeply and interrogate people about how it worked before I could do anything with it myself.
Core is a lot less daunting in its composition and presentation.
yeah, it's felt a lot more natural to just pick it up and go, and I never felt I needed to ask anyone anything much about it until I one by one started uncovering various things like this.
> What Hit Points Represent > Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one.
d20 srd. Not like that's a novel idea, it's just in practice people tend to ignore it.
Yeah. Especially when you're rocking double digits of hp and attacks can lop off between 1 and triple digits at a go, abstracting it into a narrative neitherland can be appealing.
Stress is easier to narrativise in practice simply because there's less of it knocking around.
@Magician HP is great, but it's difficult to qualify into what's really going on. In a world where ordinary civilians have, say, 12hp, and I'm a hero with 300hp, and I just got hit by a Bolt of Fire that dealt 60hp of damage... what's just happened to me? What actual impact just occurred, that I feel or that others see? What, especially, is different to if I got hit by that Bolt of Fire for 5hp or 160hp?
I could wing a description but very little of it will actually matter. The attack itself in a game like D&D just usually comes down to "you take damage! from fire! a bolt of it!", and the HP rules don't give me much guidance in how it should be qualified, described, understood, etc.
@Magician Well, first off, I was taking issue with stress before. Second, Fate's a game where absolutely anything I say is an immediately invokable or compellable fact that manifests as an aspect the moment anyone decides they want to do something to it. My vampire dodges by jumping out of the window. "So you're outdoors then?" "Uh... crap."
(One of the things I liked about 4e was that its at-will powers tended to have conditions attached to them, making the attacks not just a tool for moving the combat clock.)
But, yes - behind stress comes consequences, which are qualified. If I write down that my leg's broken, now I know exactly what that attack did. That Bolt of Fire would force me to take "singed" (from a weak bolt), or "second-degree burns" (for a particularly good one), or something even worse or tangential like "stomach wound" or "absolutely terrified" or "bleeding out".
I can't choose for my fireball to deal 5 less damage so it sets my target on fire; I can choose for my three-shift fireball attack to deal 1 less stress and set my target On fire (boost).
There's more direct interaction with the other mechanics of conflict.
(And, yes, the level-scaling thing with HP is... often difficult to narrativise.)
All of that is on my mind, yeah. There's also the fact that stress only happens three times tops - it's a buffer before the real meat of combat starts happening. In games that feature hp, usually the hp damage is the meat.
@Magician so to be clear, "you take 1 stress" and "you take x hp damage" aren't that different at all - but the environment around what's happening there is radically different, and I'm happier with stress because there's so little of it before interesting things happen.
stress specifically is still something i'm discontented with, because of it not being qualified unless we say so. but it's good to be reminded of how it's used - that we do describe something happens - and I also got reminded (such as with the thing with Mercia) that we might sometimes say "I don't think stress can be used here."
e.g. Mercia got dragged through the desert at the end of combat: ticking off her 2-stress box was not be an acceptable resolution unless another source of harm was immediately on it way.
The point I was trying to make in the blog post was that hit point "buffer" before something changes narratively allows us to explore the combat scene on its own. To show off the coolness of our characters and their opponents.
The interesting part is not the damage or how it changes the next scene. The interesting part is the scene itself. The fight, the banter, the props, the explosions.
@doppelgreener The question is, how soon you want to get to them. Without stress, there'd be immediate consequences. But that means there's a single round of combat.
There's other concerns with Conditions that mean I wouldn't just plug it in care-free, but that's something else I can go into later.
So I'm not saying "remove stress, do nothing else." I am saying stress has some boring results I'm not totally satisfied with, and I hope we can recognise those are different sentiments.
@Magician But, also, to this message saying "without stress, there'd be immediate consequences": if we mean the regular dictionary word, meaning 'a thing of import has happened now', then yeah, awesome, that's exactly what I want. If you mean capital-C mechanical Consequences, awful! Not what I want to go for. See @trogdor's comments about why consequences-only isn't a good solution.
So to rephrase: "Without [a hp/stress buffer], when you attack or try to affect someone harmfully, immediately there would be a palpable and consequential change in the scene that is worth noting and paying mechanical attention to." Yes! Beautiful! Great!
Think of an action scene in an action movie. How often does the narrative of the protagonist change as its result? They may get cuts and bruises, but frequently they're exactly the same moving forward.
If we're using the specific example of ARRPG as a baseline for our narrative expectations, being bulletproof is significant because it means he's immune to the stress of many conflicts.
We're talking about a mechanic that lets you buffer against anything meaty happening. Your choice of example character and setpiece is a character who's nearly invulnerable to most forms of physical harm (being built like a tank and bulletproof), combating things to which he is physically immune.
He's a bad example. Yes, he gets up and dusts himself off afterwards. He'd do that with or without stress, though, because while being ploughed through buildings and fighting dinosaur zombies he's taking no damage at all. Stress isn't the thing that bought us time to examine the setpiece.
@doppelgreener I think 300 hp doesn't mean that some bandit can stand and poke this hero with a knife for an hour. I tend to see hp as aggregate of different body/mind resources that represent current state of the character. This could be stamina, will to fight, body physical state: wounds and bruises. That helps narrative.
What I do take your scenario as a good example of is that the fight itself can be cool. Which I agree with. Doesn't mean it's necessarily improving things to have actions have no ramifications for a few turns. I don't need my warbot's first hits to do nothing so we have time to appreciate how cool they are - we could also appreciate how cool they are if their first attack has some immediate ramifications.
For example: peasant hit with fire bolt just burned to ashes. Hero could leap sideways and got few burns. But he used some of his stamina, he endured some amount of pain and it reflected as physical and as mental damage. Mechanicaly it would result in loss of some hp.
@doppelgreener There can absolutely be a narrative ramification. You can still be tossed across the room without gaining a mechanical thing beyond abstract hit point loss.
Now, he continues fight. Each blow which he recieves mechanically, in narration can be represented not as physical damage, but as loss in resources: tiredness, pain, willpower to fight at the brink of breaking.
@trogdor I will say, I'm concerned that conditions being pre-defined seems like it's going to hamper the creativity our group has been applying to consequences and artificially limit the kinds of fallout we have to deal with.
The 13th Age Owlbear threatens to rip your arm off. That's the cool thing it does. Except it actually rarely does it. But encountering it is still exciting/terrifying.
My players remember conflicts as being dire out of proportion with their chance of failure, if the effects of failure were conveyed as being sufficiently dramatic.
Ideally, and this rarely happens, same should go for other fights. Yes, most of the time you'll just lose hit points/gain stress. But potentially, you could have gained a consequence/wound/whatever, and that threat is, hopefully, enough.
Mainly the reason I've been thinking so much about consequences and compels and stuff is that I've had a character who's been consistently immovable and invulnerable. The one big consequence she took was a decision we made after playing another game entirely. The compels I had in mind for her never became relevant. I've been trying to figure out what's been missing and my learning about it has come in big and infrequent movements.
For instance, it was relatively recent that I learned our primary GM had experienced a lot of trouble actually seeing what I wanted to get out of her. Before that, we learned we were all on very different pages about the kind of story we were telling. Much more recently I've had my perspective shifted quite significantly on how and when consequences get involved.
I'm also running a new character who's a regular human being with multiple relevant and exploitable issues, though that's because I'm happy with where my previous one is and her arc's at a good place for pause.
We're also experimenting with less fate points, because we have fairly short sessions, and as a GM I've been experimenting with using my fate points more - and putting the other players in situations where they have to use theirs.
Overall I enjoy Fate and our games of it a lot. These issues are small and don't disrupt my enjoyment of our games. But the common thread feels like there's stuff missing and I want to work on that.
Bearing a golden halo of light, a child-like @BESW raises above the rounded, bunny-flocked hills of SE.Tubbyland. A speakerphone on a pole whirs up from a bunch of daisies and begins the morning announcement, and, in @trogdor's voice: "Time for SE.Tubbies. Tiiiime for SE.Tubbies."
@nitsua60, @Shalvenay, @AshleyNunn and @Mxyzplk bounce out over a hill with their toys and begin an elaborate dance. "Nitsu!" "Shalvenay!" "Ashley!" "Mxy!" They call out, waving their arms here and there.
They run up a hill speckled with windows and jump down a hole which leads to a slide, whirling them around i…
2
These are the stories of SE.RPG. As it was written, so it is now.
I think it's kinda weird to get pinged with unsolicited and sometimes violent real-person fanfiction about oneself, but others in the chat seem to enjoy the interludes so I haven't said anything.
But targeting me alone for a meme about overachievement in games I don't even play makes me uncomfortable. Please don't.
I do think that Fate's faces/places concept is one solid tool for "situations, not plots" campaign prep; when I read it in DFRPG's citybuilding chapter I was very happy because it was a formalisation of a practice I'd stumbled into myself a few years before.
I look at some of his stuff as it comes out, but I've never done a backlog trawl or anything.
Just to make it clear: in my approach I do not set up a list of 6 F/Ps - I just use it to remind myself that there should be a "face" for every narrative function.
There is only my confusion. I've been rebranding to Ziggurat, as it should be.
they can reason with the sphinx if they reach the final floor. they need to go fast about it, as the Sphinx is a thaumophage (it subsists on magickal energy) so if they don't want her to punch the clock they will have to feed it. To gain that energy and buy themselves time they would need to do deal with city's hostilities.
Ultimately the players can ditch the sphinx plot if they want to or ignore the city's problems, but either has dire consequences.
Yeah, there is this famous Polish XIX century peasant conscript unit, the Scythemen (Kosynierzy) who had the motto of Feed and Protect (Żywią i Bronią). They were instrumental in building Polish national identity.
@BESW Meet new people... Once per session you can gain 1 Fate Point when you meet a person from unfamiliar cultural background and learn something new about them.
@BESW ...and kill them! Once per session you might spend a Fate Point when you successfully attack a new kind of enemy with Fight to automatically place "Reconnaissance in force" aspect with a free invoke.
These are quite punny pair of stunts. I would assume one depends on another.
@BESW After some consideration this is not a mechanically reasonable stunt. It costs 1 Refresh and gives you 1 Fate Point per game. It would have to be per scene or more than one to be worth taking.
@eimyr A friend of mine's suggested that a stunt should on average give you 2 fate points of benefit per session. It's OK if it gives you alternately 4 and 0 fate points of benefit. That depends on the length of a session though, naturally...
I mean, if you're a redneck in the army and you go and actually learn something about a new culture then maybe it should be rewarded with sudden awesome inspiration
Here's a couple of stunts for another (full-time, not new-starter) character we were working on, called Royland Blackstar:
> The Ballad of Eternity. Once per volume, you may roll Rapport against a difficulty of +4 to summon the Dragon of Rock [who is another character altogether]. On a success with style, you get a free invoke on his Concept, or can give up that free invoke for an out-of-character boon from rocking out so impressively. Royland’s out of commission channeling the Ballad while the dragon’s present. The dragon stays around until the end of the scene, or until the Ballad ends.
> The Lesser Ballad of Only A Few Minutes. Once per issue, spend a fate point to have the Dragon of Rock partially manifest: its wings, claws or teeth, breath, tail, etc. Pick one of the Dragon’s skills and one of its stunts; you now have these for the rest of the scene. (Use the Dragon’s own skill rating.)
Royland Blackstar's an interstellar rock legend on the run from an anti-musical force out for his life.
Once per major plot arc (as in, every few weeks) he can summon the Dragon of Rock. It's so awesome he should never just do it every session, it'd get old. Each issue though, he can partially manifest that dragon, and we'll get a cool reminder of what could be just around the corner.
Were I to give this to an NPC I'd probably do the Sailor Moon thing: you can draw out this ginormous manifestation of your powers once, and then you die.
