The Gaming Den

Imagine two options:

• Option One: You have 10 different powers that are either used up or come online over the course of battle. Either way, you use your favorite of the available moves each turn which changes in a predictable manner such that you use all ten in the same order every battle.
• Option Two: You have only 6 different powers, but you roll a die to determine which are available each turn.

Which has more variety? Obviously the second one. ot just because in 5 round combats the second guy is going to have 20% more power usage, but also because a randomized power order produces seven thousand seven hundred and seventy six possible combat orders in 5 combat rounds instead of one.

Now, that's an extreme fucking case. The character does not have enough choice to make it engaging. But despite having almost halved his options, variety has gone up by almost eight thousand times. That's a step in the right direction. If at each person had 2 or 3 options at each Tide of Battle result (still less than 20 powers), it would be very much more interesting than if the players had completely free choice and a hundred powers each.

Open choice is paralytic, and frankly not even desirable. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a better game because the laws come in and screw you on weird shit. You should have variable limitations on your actions every round. It makes the game more interesting.

Luke can't shoot his missile at the death star core until a shot is lined up. He can't fucking do it. Colossus won't throw Wolverine if he doesn't think the ledge will hold his weight. And frankly, filling that kind of information on the fly is part of what makes the game interesting. Justifying why you don't use your super move is a point of interest.

The Tide of Battle system even lets some moves go off all the time. Krillin can always kick a dude in the face even if he can't get off his stupid insta-gib. If Iron Man always has an EMP pulse, then he can always use it. But there should be moves that have to get saved for an as-yet unknown future point, because otherwise it turns into 4e. And that's terrible.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:I
[*] Option Two: You have only 6 different powers, but you roll a die to determine which are available each turn.[

Eww. I proposed something a tad less frequent than that, which means (within your categories) I'd push for about 10% to 20% of your Option 2 and near none to 5% of your Option 1.


Reason for disagreement with Op1: I doubt those 10 powers could be used successfully in specific order with every battle, nor would many players desire to.
While some degree of spamming is inevitable, I thought the goal was to at least reduce it... not eliminate entirely.

The option should be there for people that, say, enjoy playing as Pikachu in Brawl, pushing Down + Special for a big "PIKAAA!" Thunderbolt every second.

Sure, it's annoying, but it gets about the same job done as someone with a more creative and diverse repetoire... if not accomplishes less in the same amount of time (predictability -> easy to time and block or evade)

In fact now that I think of it, one could allow and yet mechanically and numerically discourage power spamming by applying a limited hit or damage penalty for occurrences repeated more than (example) 2 times in a row.

Frank,
Your second option provides incredible amounts of variation, but it seriously impacts player choice. Players like choosing things.

We can incorporate randomness in an escalating availability system by asking the players to make some kind of escalation roll periodically with success increasing their pool of powers according to some underlying system (suggestion: access to all powers with a particular variable <= your current escalation level). Allowing the user to burn future power for benefits in the short term is always a good option for tactical variety.

You might choose from one of the following options for additional variety in the system.

1. You can overstep your normal availability limits at the cost of temporarily losing access to some of the powers you can use right now
2. Every power beyond a set of basic attacks carries the risk of forcing you back down a level, with increasingly powerful attacks providing increasing risk
3. You can use better powers by expending access to powers, be it through powering up a normal power or by using specially designed powers that you must make the sacrifice to use

You can also throw in certain effects that can increase your power access at the cost of some other resource. Perhaps you expend an action to stand back and catch your breathe, carefully watch the battle, or do some ritual preparation. Maybe you need the special power to see the phlebotinum to do that.

Whilst far more constrained in terms of variety than your second option, it should be sufficiently variable that you should see the same patterns repeating reasonably infrequently once you factor in differing opponents, terrain and other things.

NineInchNall wrote: In such a set up I can see people going through predetermined action patterns to maximize the effectiveness of each maneuver, if you will. In the end, on that path lies the feeling of sameness that bugs me in the first place with the 4e power scheme.

Well possibly, but I don't think the choice is always going to be obvious, since moving the sliders is going to be based in part on the monster's abilities. So while it's probably easy to get a positional advantage on a slow ogre, it's going to be difficult if not impossible to achieve and maintain good position against a swarm of bats. In many cases it's probably not going to be worth the actions to try it.

So while one party may decide to continually try to vie for one type of slider and use the best moves related to that slider, that trick may not always work, and likely it might sacrifice positioning on the other sliders, allowing enemies to screw you over with their own set of super moves.

If the system is set up right, I think it can get away from 4E syndrome. Perhaps there will be staple tactics in any given fight assuming you know all the monsters stats, but most of the time, you won't.

FrankTrollman wrote:Luke can't shoot his missile at the death star core until a shot is lined up.

I think the difference is that Luke does things that open up the core shot move. I'd rather see the player building up to a move then using it rather than waiting till the dice come up boxcars.

I assume all of the moves you're proposing for random use would be of similar power. If not rolling that six right at the start of the fight would cause rocket launcher tag and rolling 3- for a few turns would push things towards padded sumo.

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My favourite solution presented thus far was the idea of having finishers give you a defense penalty. Yes you can open with them but its not necessarily a good plan against decent opponents.

Having moves be more effective if the target has a status effect on them also helps. That produces a multi move combo. Then allow moves that do less damage but remove some status effects on you as a combo breaker. I figure that'd be dynamic enough.

Doesn't Lego shoot the arrows at the oliphant in order to open up access to the 'climb colossus' ability?

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Doesn't Lego shoot the arrows at the oliphant in order to open up access to the 'climb colossus' ability?

Sure, but 5-out-of-6 times his desired Climb Colossus performance won't suddenly swap out for a Shield Ride or Shoot Orc In Face attack.

Nor is he limited to only one or two Slay The Mutant Elephant attacks a day; he can do it as much as he fucking wants.
He just doesn't need to in the movie because they ran out of elephants.

variety has gone up by almost eight thousand times

Actual variety? Or purely aesthetic variety? Because, I'll say it again, if your goal is simply variety for the sake of aesthetics, you can achieve it entirely through describing a power differently each time you use it.

In fighting games, many new players think that "pro skill" is all about pulling off difficult input combinations and doing a big variety of combos. Repeating the same move or throwing someone out of their big complex combo is "cheap". But actual pros don't care about any of that - they play to win, and if repeating the same kick is the right tool for the job, that's what they'll use. That doesn't mean the fights become uninteresting - it means the suspense is in seeing who can outpredict and out-time the other, not watching someone do a fancy combo.

While I think random factors are an important part of combat, especially for preventing preset attack patterns, making power access random is just to big a sledgehammer fix, and destroys actual tactics in the name of looking more tactical.

FrankTrollman wrote:Option One: You have 10 different powers that are either used up or come online over the course of battle. Either way, you use your favorite of the available moves each turn which changes in a predictable manner such that you use all ten in the same order every battle.

You don't use all ten in the same order, because eeach battle is different. If you win initiative, then you might well start with a damaging/stunning attack to gain maximum benefit from that. If you lose initiative, you might prefer to enter a defensive stance and do some probing attacks to gain bonus knowledge. If the player before you uses up the last Red token, you might choose to go for a Green/Blue combo over the next two rounds, rather than your normal Red/Red mid-battle play.

In other words, we are already injecting randomness into the system with hits and misses, and with the unpredictability of other players and monsters. We don't necessarilly need to add more with Winds of Fate to ensure that we don't have predetermined attack patterns. It's a trade-off, though. Winds of Fate is a very simple way to inject variation, and some of the other ideas we're throwing around are more complicated and require more tracking.

A lot of talk was had on fighting groups of enemies, so I assume the "standard D&D 3.x scenario" of 1 enemy (which I didn't even consider that standard, but whatever) might well be rare. And the moment we're talking about a different combination of 1-6 (or hell, more, but I grant that if you fit 10, there'll be repeats) enemies/fight, and powers used don't change just with that, I think there's some serious issues going on that a bunch of dice won't solve. And besides, it's starting to sound like, you, Frank, got a trauma or 2 from 4E, which actually must not be true given Fantastic!, but then WTF?

sigma999 wrote:

Crissa wrote:Doesn't Lego shoot the arrows at the oliphant in order to open up access to the 'climb colossus' ability?

Sure, but 5-out-of-6 times his desired Climb Colossus performance won't suddenly swap out for a Shield Ride or Shoot Orc In Face attack.

Nor is he limited to only one or two Slay The Mutant Elephant attacks a day; he can do it as much as he fucking wants.
He just doesn't need to in the movie because they ran out of elephants.

Actually, he totally does. There are lots of elephants in that battle and he only kills like one of them. Most of the rest of the battle is him running around shooting orcs in the face. In fact, not only does he have to wait for the tide of battle to happen to put him in a position where he can climb an oliphant, once he's on an oliphant he spends some time dueling with Dunlanders until the tide of battle gets him to place where can get a shot off at the oliphant's neck.

That's totally the opposite example of what you were going for. He fights some dudes, then does something impressive, then he fights some more dudes and does another impressive thing. His mega stunts very clearly have some sort of opportunity limiter on them.

-Username17

sigma999 wrote:IGTN: You don't mean randomly chosen defenses, right? Because that's.... odd.

Not really randomly chosen defenses, no.

Suppose you're a wizard-like character, and your defenses are:
Impenetrable Marble, which summons an invulnerable force field around you. When you cast it, you also get to roll some dice, and if you roll higher than the damage total you ignored, you get your Marble back on your next turn.
Egami Rorrim, where you retroactively turn into an illusion, which is dispelled by the attack, but opens your enemy up to a counterattack
Vicious Portal, where you open a small, short-range portal in the path of the attack, re-targeting it.

Once you use one of these, it's used up until either the fight ends, or you recover it. Impenetrable Marble might have a 1-in-6 chance of coming back online every turn, while you can bring Egami Rorrim back online by spending an action to re-summon your mirror image, and Vicous Portal sometimes comes back when you use space-based attack spells (you also have to roll for it). Some defenses might not work against certain kinds of attacks; Vicious Portal might not work against ranged attacks, for instance, while Egami Rorrim doesn't work against area attacks.

A dragon might have, instead of those:
Iron Tail, where it spins its tail in the path of the attack, deflecting it harmlessly and allowing the dragon a free attack
Fire Eater, where it simply eats a magical attack, making its breath weapon temporarily stronger
Mithral Wing, where it bounces a ranged attack off of its wings
Solid Smoke, where the dragon intercepts your attack with its breath.

To get them back, the Dragon might have to wait a number of turns proportionate to the damage blocked (Iron Tail), use its breath weapon a certain number of times (Fire Eater), make a certain die roll, retrying every turn (Mithral Wing), or spend an action on recovery (Solid Smoke).

But, basically, the idea is that you get your enemy to exhaust their defenses on your medium attacks (weak attacks, if they exist, exist to set up your medium attacks to become more dangerous), so that you can bring out your big gun and win the fight. Of course, sitting around with one defense left and not using it while being pounded with medium attacks has to be bad too; maybe long combos on the same target grant bonuses, so a point comes up where blocking a medium attack to break the combo, and then eating a big attack, is actually tactically advantageous over continuing to eat medium attacks. Alternately you can just be forced to use defenses when being pounded on heavily enough (instinct overcoming discipline).

FrankTrollman wrote:Open choice is paralytic, and frankly not even desirable. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a better game because the laws come in and screw you on weird shit. You should have variable limitations on your actions every round. It makes the game more interesting.

Luke can't shoot his missile at the death star core until a shot is lined up. He can't fucking do it. Colossus won't throw Wolverine if he doesn't think the ledge will hold his weight. And frankly, filling that kind of information on the fly is part of what makes the game interesting. Justifying why you don't use your super move is a point of interest.
-Username17

Frank, are you kidding me? The Judge system was the most irritating aspect of the FFTA games. Read some player reviews--people hate that shit, no matter how balanced it is.

I'm all for balance and variety but when it starts ticking people you're trying to entertain off you should rethink your methods.

FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, he totally does. There are lots of elephants in that battle and he only kills like one of them. Most of the rest of the battle is him running around shooting orcs in the face. In fact, not only does he have to wait for the tide of battle to happen to put him in a position where he can climb an oliphant, once he's on an oliphant he spends some time dueling with Dunlanders until the tide of battle gets him to place where can get a shot off at the oliphant's neck.

That's totally the opposite example of what you were going for. He fights some dudes, then does something impressive, then he fights some more dudes and does another impressive thing. His mega stunts very clearly have some sort of opportunity limiter on them.

Yeah, actually most movie characters in any kind of sword fighting or martial arts movie spend some time doing basic maneuvers inbetween doing something awesome.

Most movies if anything use a charge up system similar to Chrono Cross, where you've got to attack using basic attacks to gain points that can be used to cast spells or use other specials.

Some movies also use limit breaks where a character who gets beat up can use his super move.

FrankTrollman wrote:Open choice is paralytic

It's why I can't play chess. At all. I freeze up when put in front of a chess board.

This is me:

NineInchNall wrote:It's why I can't play chess. At all. I freeze up when put in front of a chess board.

Eh, Chess isn't arbitrarily expansible. Though I'm biased for liking it.

Lago wrote:Frank, are you kidding me? The Judge system was the most irritating aspect of the FFTA games. Read some player reviews--people hate that shit, no matter how balanced it is.

This is why FFT gets four stars, and FFTA gets five stars. People hate having restrictions placed on them, but they hate getting bored of their tactical choices even more.

If you ask people if they'd rather be able to use their limit break over and over again whenever they wanted, they'll tell you that they do. But in reality, if you actually give them this ability they will become disenchanted with the game much faster. Tactical limitations increase enjoyment, even if people chafe at the limitations themselves.

-Username17

Frank wrote:This is why FFT gets four stars, and FFTA gets five stars.

I'm not even going to ask for a cite because I know what I'm asking for is impossible. FFT has problems FFTA doesn't irrespective of the nature of how powers are selected.

People hate having restrictions placed on them, but they hate getting bored of their tactical choices even more.

As I said earlier, that kind of thing can be glossed over by the audience if the choices between your attacks are Minigun Elbows and Shoulder Cannons, but not if it's between Shoulder Ram and Fastball Special.

It breaks the simulation if you're allowed to hopscotch down the hallway to Dr. Doom or paint your backpack black whenever you feel like but not for something as fundamental to an action hero like not being able to throw a teammate whenever you feel like. That kind of cognitive dissonance works in a videogame where the audience knows ahead of time that there are concessions to reality for the choice of gameplay and you're not allowed to skip down hallways or change your character's clothes anyway, but it doesn't work for a roleplaying game.

FrankTrollman wrote:If you ask people if they'd rather be able to use their limit break over and over again whenever they wanted, they'll tell you that they do. But in reality, if you actually give them this ability they will become disenchanted with the game much faster. Tactical limitations increase enjoyment, even if people chafe at the limitations themselves.

A-fuckin'-men. Most people don't really know what they enjoy.

NineInchNall wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Open choice is paralytic

It's why I can't play chess. At all. I freeze up when put in front of a chess board.

This is me:

Even without just brute-forcing the correct calculation of moves from the beginning, Chess is not an open game. In the beginning and endgame, there are mathematically provable ways to show which moves will end up screwing you over. A big draw of Chess is selecting good moves and continually whittling away poor ones from your arsenal. While it seems like grandmasters like Bobby Fischer know a great deal of openings and whatnot, what he has done is actually eliminate a lot of bad or questionable ones from his arsenal.

FFTA's law system sucked. Most people just walked around until they got the laws they wanted, because nothing sucks like having BANNED:Your weapons or BANNED:Hurting the enemy.

I really don't see the appeal of random rolling powers. It is not like there is any more choice presented, you have just gone from choosing your best power for the situation to choosing your best power for the situation as limited by your roll. It means that people who are rolling well that night not only don't tend to hit but can never even choose a cool power and it still lets Sailor Moon turn the enemy to moondust on the first round, it just happens randomly.

Doesn't it just suck when, after 6 adventures, you finally have a combat with a mutant elephant and the action dice simply refuse to roll better than 4?


Seriously, though, how do you combine ability-mandated tactics (this ability only works on big creatures, this ability works at a range) with randomized 'tactics' (you can only use this ability 33% of the time)?

It seems like you want some sort of pyramid, where you have a bunch of more specific abilities with high probabilities and a few general abilities with low probabilities, but that leads to analysis paralysis (because when you roll a 6, you have to weigh whether to use a situationally useful power and ignore your roll or vice-versa).

If it worked the opposite way, high-end abilities would hardly ever get used.

You could, for example, throw out increasingly large numbers of moderately to highly specific abilities at the lower chances and general abilities at the more probable end. So when you're fighting tree people you'll be throwing a bunch of fire darts and occasionally busting loose with a defoliance spray spell.

Whacky stunt shit needs to get spaced out through the battle or it doesn't feel like a whacky stunt. And the game suffers when that happens.

-Username17

Whacky stunt shit needs to get spaced out through the battle or it doesn't feel like a whacky stunt. And the game suffers when that happens.

The whacky stunt shit also needs to be intentional to some extent, otherwise it doesn't feel like a brilliant Chess manuever or a risky stunt dodge when you most need it, it just feels like you rolled one of the badass effects on a Rod of Wonder.

I mean, it's awesome in God of War or Kingdom Hearts II to use one of the action commands when they pop up but if they happened automatically rather than requiring player input they would be nowhere near as fun. The final sequence in KH2 was one of the most badass stages in history, but if the game took control away from you during that time and just automatically had you do all that crazy shit it wouldn't be one of those things people will talk about for years on end.

There are other alternatives than "random abilities" and "use your limit breaks all the time" though. A system where you have a small reserve of rapidly recharging power achieves the effect of spacing out your big moves throughout the fight. And if people keep using the same moves, then either give tactical reasons not to, or else just flavor them differently each time.