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DalaranJ posted:How do you incentivize movement in combat, both in a game system, or in individual scenarios? Take a look at tactical games. A fairly recent and guiding example is 40k, which recently moved from 8th to 9th edition. The move from 8th to 9th edition also brought in a significant realignment in the ranged vs melee balance in favor of melee, even though melee actually got some significant nerfs. 8th edition had a somewhat infamous tendency to enable (and encourage) 'alpha striking,' aka damaging your opponent enough in a single (usually opening) turn that they cannot come back. This alpha striking meant taking tons of very potent ranged weapons, and usually little to no melee options since, well, who cares. While this could be reduced somewhat by making tables with more terrain, even tables that were considered 'balanced' could see matches where a side was taken out of the game practically without moving. Trusting mostly that goonhammer is smarter than me, the changes that have pushed things more toward melee: 1. Scoring. The focus of winning a game has moved from killing enemy units to controlling contested zones, and importantly one of the best tools for this is to have units that can push people off of zones very directly (which in turn means that the units you want holding objectives should be able to resist your opponents attempts!). In addition to just the general change in focus, some units are specialized in specifically holding contested objectives, and these units don't tend to be the best at killing. 2. Smaller armies. This would not necessarily change things but the way it interacts with (1) matters in some fiddly ways I won't get too in depth in. Suffice to say that armies are, in general, smaller, and the need for 'objective holders' (generally, balanced infantry with a bit of a focus on defense and mobility) has made it less possible to reach the critical mass of 'big gently caress-off guns' that push an army from 'ranged threat' to 'apocalyptic,' and armies that relied on just shooting the opponent to death without trying to take and hold terrain are basically just not even viable. 3. Smaller tables. The table size was decreased slightly, which rapidly knocks on to "it is much easier to get in your opponent's face." So shooting armies eventually need to take some sort of strategy for managing close in threats, and most of the options that work for defense work for offense and might as well try to exploit that, right? Another game (that I really want to play but haven't had the chance to and am cranky about that) that has an even more straightforward lesson is Saga. Saga armies basically just have elites, normals, and weak units. The elite and normal units are dramatically worse at shooting than they are at melee, like literally twice as good at fighting in melee. There are a number of reasons you'd want to shoot at enemies and some armies can get significantly more mileage out of it than others, but the incentives to get your dudes up in people's faces are high and an army that is shooting focused (aka lots of weak units) has some real weaknesses rather than just "the same abilities, but without as much risk." And a lesson from both of these games is that big bowling-ball style battlefields encourage ranged fighting. If you're worried about people not using terrain in interesting ways, part of what you want to do is make the terrain more interesting to engage with, which often means "more" of it (also Lancer has a cool set of things for this where there's a couple of pretty good tools for both players and GMs to kool aid man through walls). Basically, and this frankly goes back to (checks anthropology 101 notes) paleolithic combat, if you can achieve the same objectives at range as up close, go with ranged, there's less risk.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:00
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Unironic suggestion: Use mmo fights as a guideline for how to design tabletop mechanics. You'll of course have to simpify, but putting in telegraphed area of effect attacks and other reasons to move around will help.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:23
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Weird idea: Make movement mandatory. You literally cannot stand still.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:25
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I've been thinking a lot for a long time about how to make a tactical supers game, and so many tactical games seem to rely heavily on cover, which is not on par with the source material.
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Dec 28, 2020 20:06
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Reasons you might want to move in D&D 4E: - the artillery enemy is tearing you apart from afar - same, but from behind cover - the brute enemy is tearing you apart from close up - the brute enemy is tearing your buddy apart from close up, and you're the one with protective melee abilities - your buddy needs patching up, and your healing abilities have limited range - so do your buffing abilities - you're still the protector dude but you need healing and buffing which, see above - between your generally low HP and abilities that draw opportunity attacks, you're altogether too close to the action - the enemy has moved you to a bad spot where any of the above might apply - you started combat clumped together in a corridor and that enemy in the robes is fixing to hit you all with an area attack - the enemy in robes has placed a zone on you that will gently caress you up if you end your turn in it e: you plain get a bonus if you move in the same turn as your action, either from a class feature or a temporary buff e2: a buff or class feature gives you a bonus if you engage a particular enemy honestly a lot of that boils down to You Are At The Wrong Range To Use Your Ability so a solid interaction between different attack ranges and movement speeds seems to be half the, excuse me, battle My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 20:21
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honestly i'm increasingly inclined to just start putting Unreal Tournament / DotA-style powerups at distant corners of the battlefield, verisimilitude be damned
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Dec 28, 2020 20:27
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CitizenKeen posted:I've been thinking a lot for a long time about how to make a tactical supers game, and so many tactical games seem to rely heavily on cover, which is not on par with the source material.
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Dec 28, 2020 20:29
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The new year's resolution thread is up: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3953007 The forum description has been put through. It takes a little while for it to show up for some Radium reason or another. I went with a mashup, I hope you love it.
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Dec 28, 2020 20:49
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:honestly i'm increasingly inclined to just start putting Unreal Tournament / DotA-style powerups at distant corners of the battlefield, verisimilitude be damned
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Dec 28, 2020 20:50
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mellonbread posted:Make sure the game's action economy doesn't punish movement. If moving takes away your ability to attack, the optimal decision is to sit in place and keep attacking, rather than sacrifice potential damage to improve your position. Yeah, this is why the 3.x/3.5e group I was in during high school basically looked at the 'you can only take a 5-foot step if you want to Full Attack' rule and was like "that's loving stupid". It certainly made combat more deadly on both sides, but it also helped bring melee damage up significantly closer to caster damage, and made the casters have to think about their positioning more too, because if a target could close distance to them and put a lot of damage into their squishy wizard face, it changed the decision-making logic a lot.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:00
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Ratoslov posted:Weird idea: Make movement mandatory. You literally cannot stand still. This is rondo of steel for the ds. You attack by moving through enemies, and each one you move through, you attack on the way. Tanks keep you from moving past their area of control. It could absolutely work as a system.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:12
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Leraika posted:Unironic suggestion: Use mmo fights as a guideline for how to design tabletop mechanics. You'll of course have to simpify, but putting in telegraphed area of effect attacks and other reasons to move around will help. I've done this several times in my FATE games and it works beautifully. You do have to simplify things a little but the idea is to make sure there's terrain aspects for them to use to "hide" from otherwise lethal attacks and then forcing them to move around as no place is safe to stand for very long.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:15
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Kyrosiris posted:Yeah, this is why the 3.x/3.5e group I was in during high school basically looked at the 'you can only take a 5-foot step if you want to Full Attack' rule and was like "that's loving stupid". What might be interesting (though would take a rework of all the above) is a system where characters get "pushed" around in the form of moving backwards or the side to dodge incoming attacks. Possibly even giving the characters a choice between backing up or taking damage, so that the whole thing becomes player facing rather than just the numbers that say you move around. In a "real swordfight" the ability to give ground in response to an enemy attack is a big part of not getting hit. Having room to maneuver is like a little HP bar that you use up by retreating, while being cornered increases your odds of being hit. The risk is you could end up weakening melee combat overall, by making it harder to deal damage when the other guy can organically scoot backwards rather than get hit.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:17
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CitizenKeen posted:I've been thinking a lot for a long time about how to make a tactical supers game, and so many tactical games seem to rely heavily on cover, which is not on par with the source material. Ignoring like, "dark and edgy" superhero stuff, the physical locations of people in superhero stories matters quite a lot, but you're right that "hiding behind cover" is not something that superheroes generally do, since frequently they are the cover. There's two styles of situations that would demand a lot of movement manipulation from players that I see in a lot of superhero media off the top of my head: 1. Collateral damage. The Green Goblin is tossing around bombs like a maniac and there's civilian's about, how do you keep those civilians safe? Moving the civilians, moving the bombs, negating the damage of the bombs (either destroying the bombs or putting up barriers between the bombs and the civilians), and stopping the Green Goblin are all tactical options but players will have to figure out how to balance those competing options. 2. Interceptions. The Joker's got laughing poison that he's going to pour into the city water supply, and you've just caught up to him near the water distribution. It's a maze and how do you get ahead of him, especially with him throwing distractions in your way? In this way it's not really the players taking cover nearly so much as the enemies.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:18
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Another way to encourage movement in combat is to give bonuses rather than penalties. Instead of using up your Move action (which you also use for drawing potions or switching magazines or whatever, so it's better to hold still), let an Attack be either an Attack or an Attack With Move, the latter giving you a bonus to defense, or a charge bonus, or letting you trigger a cool combat move that uses motion (Wall Flip, Distracting Feint, etc.), or set up a flank or enfilade. Also use environment stuff even if your game doesn't explicitly support it mechanically. Someone should go bar that door the enemy reinforcements are coming from; or go yank the cord on that computer that is uploading the Mega Virus from; or get up those stairs so they can wave to our allies over the wall that we're still alive so please don't shell our position; or grab some grenades from the open grenade crate; or untie the NPC ally who can immediately help us in combat; or shut the vents that are letting the nerve gas into the room. Don't make a PC lose more than one action, give them a real choice between using an action to interact with the environment in a way that is probably but not definitely more advantageous than hitting an enemy for damage this round. Gaming works best when players are making interesting choices, but don't have so many choices that decision paralysis comes in. "Should I attack the baddie or untie our ally" is interesting; "should I attack the baddie, or spend three rounds untying our ally, or two rounds opening a grenade crate, or one round barring the door, or use my attack action to drink a potion, or try to group up with the other PCs so we can get an AOE buff onto all of us, or use my encounter power, or try to push an enemy into the fire, or spend 2 rounds on the radio calling for backup, or or or" is bad. So I try to set up an encounter with maybe one significant environmental hazard (a drop, or an open fire, or an area of unstable floor), maybe one interactive piece (door, prisoner, gadget, gear, etc.) and some passive terrain (a spot with cover, or two spots with difficult terrain, or a narrow spot in the middle, or a balcony) and that's it.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:29
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Yeah avoiding overload is super important. Another thing I thought of is you can make players move by having mobile enemies, who will be out of range unless pursued or who can find cover that has to be destroyed or charged. I think Tulip's idea of "Superheroes ARE the cover" is extremely on point, setting up things/people in need of active defense is how you get heroes to hustle.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:32
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Dec 28, 2020 21:33
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Besides just penalties or bonuses to move I'd say especially in a super hero game it makes sense if doing things moves people. Like the stronger the blow the further it moves an enemy away, so you need to move to close the distance. Damage mitigation like dodging should also move characters out of (or into) position. Also if designing a world for the ruleset -rather than trying to make a generic ruleset for all flavors of comic books- say the heroes are supported by a watch tower or shield like organization that will teleport aid into an encounter they detect, but they aren't 100% precise, so you'll get a notification of where those buffs, gear, and resources are dropping but then need to get to it. Or have the PCs all get their own NPC helper(s) and buy what sort of goods and help they get as part of their super group creation. Use similar handwaves for dangerous terrain, or as others mentioned have the combat create those hazards. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 21:41
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Coolness Averted posted:Besides just penalties or bonuses to move I'd say especially in a super hero game it makes sense if doing things moves people. Honestly I'd even push it to "attacks push enemies" as the main thing they do, with inflicting meaningful harm (at least on other supers) requiring some sort of resource expenditure.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:50
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Leraika posted:Unironic suggestion: Use mmo fights as a guideline for how to design tabletop mechanics. You'll of course have to simpify, but putting in telegraphed area of effect attacks and other reasons to move around will help. Protip when you're doing this: make sure your table understands those tropes before you do encounter design utilizing them, no matter how obvious you think it might be. I run a high-level D&D game for young folks who were, at the time, mostly 13-15, who of course play video games 24/7. I threw a boss fight at them which relied heavily on telegraphed AoEs that I thought would be perfectly obvious to anyone who'd played Undertale. Nope, that was the closest that table has ever come to a TPK. They were genuinely astonished when the giant six-rayed beam template emanating from the lich started to rotate (meaning the closer you were to him, the more danger you were in), and the pairs of crackling energy orbs linked by glowing lines were suddenly shooting lightning bolts between them, etc.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:52
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Surprised on reviewing old threads that we don't have any thread for CP2020/RED at all. Not enough interest to sustain one?
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Dec 28, 2020 22:36
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SkyeAuroline posted:Surprised on reviewing old threads that we don't have any thread for CP2020/RED at all. Not enough interest to sustain one? Is there anything to be said for the system?
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Dec 28, 2020 22:47
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SkyeAuroline posted:Surprised on reviewing old threads that we don't have any thread for CP2020/RED at all. Not enough interest to sustain one? A single game has to be pretty big to sustain an ongoing thread all on its own. Even the old/new World of Darknesses are jumbled in together in a single thread, with occasional bouts of Scion and Trinity talk.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:01
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SkyeAuroline posted:Surprised on reviewing old threads that we don't have any thread for CP2020/RED at all. Not enough interest to sustain one? Nobody's made one, so if you want it, make one. You don't have to worry about doing a huge intro post or anything, and it'd probably get attention if you link it in the 2077 thread.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:02
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That Old Tree posted:A single game has to be pretty big to sustain an ongoing thread all on its own. Even the old/new World of Darknesses are jumbled in together in a single thread, with occasional bouts of Scion and Trinity talk. Kinda figured as much, just feels weird regardless of board to sort subject-specific stuff into the chat thread, but having seen other games' threads die might be for the best here.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:04
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Not everything has to be a megathread, yeah. It'd probably be a healthier forum if we had more churn.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:12
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Wrestlepig posted:Nobody's made one, so if you want it, make one. You don't have to worry about doing a huge intro post or anything, and it'd probably get attention if you link it in the 2077 thread. yeah there's no committee or approvals process for making a thread. If there's too little interest then the thread just falls to page 10. If there's no thread yet it's because nobody so far has cared to, but if you want it you can make it.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:19
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'm a broken man because I could do this abstractly in seconds but have no idea how to make it graphically. I'm very interested for when someone smart comes in and explains. If you can do it abstractly, Graphviz can render it for you. https://graphviz.org/
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Dec 29, 2020 03:04
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SkyeAuroline posted:Kinda figured as much, just feels weird regardless of board to sort subject-specific stuff into the chat thread, but having seen other games' threads die might be for the best here.  You don't need a huge effortpost or anything just make a new thread and start posting about your fun game. Or if you're super worried about it not dropping back past page 2 make it an all-encompassing cyberpunk RPG thread. Way more people need to do this.
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Dec 29, 2020 04:11
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Or if you're super worried about it not dropping back past page 2 make it an all-encompassing cyberpunk RPG thread. That sort of thing is okay if you're making a short-lived thread for just looking at how different games handle different cyberpunk themes or whatever, but don't do this if your purpose is to actually talk about CP2020/Red. Every other major cyberpunk game on the market already has its own thread (Shadowrun) or belongs in a system megathread (PbtA/BitD cyberpunk games) instead of being lumped in with 2020. It's also perfectly fine to make a thread and not have it permanently on page 1. Also is great advice but if you're making a thread to get people to talk about something niche or obscure, it's on you to put enough effort into the OP to pitch your thing to whoever is opening the thread for the first time. Your OP shouldn't be a 2000 page epic but it should at least cover basic stuff like a brief description of the setting and system, some discussion of the game's history and importance, and some links to where you can buy it.
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 04:28
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Xerophyte posted:Generating a random node diagram is easy enough but generating them so they both look organic and like that exemplar is relatively difficult. If you're a programmer then the general term you want to google is "random graph". Specifically you'd be looking at generating a geometric graph, where the points are distributed in space and then randomly connected according to their position. The problem is both generating a nice set of points to begin with, and selecting the random edges according to some model that ensures they both look nice and all hang together in the end. It's a couple of hours of work, I expect. You can transform a white noise distribution of points into a blue noise distribution using Lloyd relaxation, which gets you the nice set of points, then you can generate the Delaunay triangulation (which you have to do anyway for Lloyd's) and adapt the reverse-delete algorithm to cull an arbitrary number of edges from it without disconnecting the graph. I was loving around with a space 4X sort of thing a couple of years ago and did this exact thing to generate a galaxy of star systems connected by a wormhole network. Finding the Voronoi cells/Delaunay triangles is the hardest bit.
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Dec 29, 2020 06:36
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Zorak of Michigan posted:If you can do it abstractly, Graphviz can render it for you. https://graphviz.org/ This is loving cool as all hell. I have no practical need for it but I want to find one.
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Dec 29, 2020 06:50
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Tell me your coolest terrain ideas, they can be more then just difficult terrain, but like pain terrain, stun terrain, heal terrain, any kind of terrain really that makes cool encounters? I think this is general enough that even games with no push/slide/shift mechanic could benefit from varying up the battlefield in little ways.
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Dec 29, 2020 08:32
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A reactor core with rotating wall segments around it, so that different areas of the room are bathed in damaging radiation, while others are safe. Logs and other debris floating down a river. Everyone fighting atop the floating objects has to continually run upstream to avoid being swept over a huge waterfall at the end The outer hull of a spaceship in the middle of a battle, where random segments are subject to strafing runs, debris strikes, and decompression events from inside (all foreshadowed a turn in advance)
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Dec 29, 2020 08:40
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Boba Pearl posted:Tell me your coolest terrain ideas, they can be more then just difficult terrain, but like pain terrain, stun terrain, heal terrain, any kind of terrain really that makes cool encounters? I think this is general enough that even games with no push/slide/shift mechanic could benefit from varying up the battlefield in little ways. Terrain that lets you walk through to teleport from point to point, terrain the boss uses to telegraph attacks off of (for instance, drawing lines from the terrain to the boss that does dmg when the attack goes off), terrain that lets you temporarily leave the field and return on your next turn (maybe with some side effects), terrain that lets you add your rolls to your allies to combine your attacks, terrain that rebounds enemies away if you've activated it to control it, terrain that 'falls away' into a pit platformer style if you stand on it too long
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Dec 29, 2020 08:44
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I ran an encounter once where the entire battlefield was a big web hanging over a chasm, and a giant spider was gradually dragging the whole web into its mouth. There was also one where the battlefield was being approached by an airship on a bombing run, represented by a line steadily moving across the battlefield to represent the range of their munitions, and the players and their enemies were scrambling to get to their transport and get away.
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Dec 29, 2020 10:25
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Boba Pearl posted:Tell me your coolest terrain ideas, they can be more then just difficult terrain, but like pain terrain, stun terrain, heal terrain, any kind of terrain really that makes cool encounters? I think this is general enough that even games with no push/slide/shift mechanic could benefit from varying up the battlefield in little ways. A ship in heavy waves. A lot of the "terrain" starts on one side of the map, slides across to the other side on round 2, stays on the other side on round 3, slides back on round 4, etc. Or it just changes sides each round. Give it its own initiative number if that's a thing in the game. Some deck cargo can't slide all the way across because it meets a solid barrier, or falls into an open hatch, or whatever. If you're on/in the stuff that moves, you move too. If it would smash into you, probably you get a chance to end up on it instead of getting smashed. Not just boxes and barrels sliding across the deck, but ropes and rigging swinging too, giving you different movement options. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 12:06
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Lemon-Lime posted:That sort of thing is okay if you're making a short-lived thread for just looking at how different games handle different cyberpunk themes or whatever, but don't do this if your purpose is to actually talk about CP2020/Red. Every other major cyberpunk game on the market already has its own thread (Shadowrun) or belongs in a system megathread (PbtA/BitD cyberpunk games) instead of being lumped in with 2020. It's also perfectly fine to make a thread and not have it permanently on page 1. This is all good advice. I agree it's good to have a fleshed out OP, especially for a narrow thread like one just about Cyberpunk. Just remember that it's okay to start with a bare-bones OP and add to it over time. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. You should make it because I want to talk about Cybergeneration - the spinoff about cool teens with nanomachine powers! Updating with some significant content in the OP is also a good reason to bump your thread if it's fallen back a page or two! Procrastination pays off again! whydirt fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 14:38
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:A ship in heavy waves. I did one once where the battlefield was a sort of crumbling plateau being held aloft by giant skeleton hands, and each turn a few of the bone fingers would slam down across the battlefield, anyone still under them taking damage and being knocked prone. As the fight kept going, more and more fingers went down every few turns, until the fight included "Attack a finger to stop it from falling because the entire rest of the map will be smushed."
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Dec 29, 2020 17:02
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:A ship in heavy waves. That's a genius idea, and it's making me think of one of my favourite gimmick levels in Overcooked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owjEw-ytzwg&t=31s
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Dec 29, 2020 19:22
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