The Gaming Den

Okay, that makes sense. And it actually would be reasonably intuitive if you had a graph sitting in front of you to look at, since you could see "Oh, every path from A to B passes through a link that's at least Far, so A and B are far."

souran wrote: 1) Does combat have to be "tactical" to be complex enough to remain interesting over a long campaign?

Nah. Not every combat has to be Street Fighter. Combat just needs to be quick and meaningful enough for people not to feel like it's a grind, and not take it for granted.
Kinda elusive

D&D grew out of miniatures wargaming and so even in versions of D&D that were not explicitly miniatures driven (say 2E) the game was highly tactical assuming very detailed positioning.

These games can clearly have tactical depth because they are very similar to the wargames that drive them.

I read an interview with the Tomb of Horrors guy. He said it was like a wargame scenario that players tried to Win. He even directly mentions videogames as a modern equivalent, a challenge to overcome.
The fun of tabletop is having all the resources of your imagination to beat the game.

Could you make a pen and paper RPG that had engaging combat play that was highly abstract. Especially in a dice pool type system what would it take to make it playable, interesting, deep, and quick enough that people don't get board?

I want to create one.

2) Have you played such a game?

Bang!: The Bullet comes to mind in terms of engaging, simple gameplay.

"Classical" type heroes of the Greek/Mesopotamian/Chinese mythological mold who adventure and fight in a world that hates that they exist.

This is going on a tangent, but even more recent western stuff like 15th century Italy had superhumanly strong guys smashing mountains and tossing cows in their naked paladin rampaging.

What would a medium/heavy dice pool game with highly abstracted combat look like?

Riddle of Steel, except the balls are metaphorical.

Phonelobster, why should all nodes be connected to all other nodes? Here are three nodes from a really simple combat graph:

N0: Far end of a small mausoleum that T-junctions off a hallway. Contents: sarcophagus; three ghouls.
N1: Doorway into the mausoleum. Contents: Stonerock Axebeard, Dwarf Fighter.
N2: Further down the hallway. Contents: Thirdlegolas, elf ranger and surfing champion; animated tower shield hoverboard.
Why should there be a traversable edge between N1 and N2? Shouldn't the ghouls have to go through N0 (the doorway and the fighter) to get to nodes in the hallway?

(I'm not sure how bbcode handles the font in code tags, let me know if that diagram is an unreadable mess.)

He's not saying all nodes are connected to all other nodes, he's saying that there needs to exist a path between any two nodes. The path doesn't have to be a single link long, but there has to be SOME path. It has to be possible to get from N1 to N2 SOMEhow. In technical language the graph is connected but not complete.

Ah, gotcha, nevermind then.

Yeah, PL's system (and all systems like it) works very well in the mausoleum with door model. Or really any battlefield with defined choke points. Every character who is not in the choke point has a distance to the choke point, and a character in the choke point is as far from any creature as they are from the choke point. You need less distance vectors than there are battle participants and it's easier to track than cartesian coordinates.

Where it (and all similar systems) become intractable is when the four player characters are fighting a skirmish in the woods against a necromancer with a troll bodyguard and some skeletal swordsmen and archers. Because that is 28 distance vectors you have to track unless the skeletons spread out in which case it is a lot more than that. And when someone moves, seven distance vectors change and it's not at all obvious how that would happen.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:And when someone moves, seven distance vectors change and it's not at all obvious how that would happen.

Well the idea with this one is that you break all the links off the moving element.

All (non-moving) elements that will no longer be connected must now add a new connection (almost any will do, but some additional rules here on which connections to redraw could avoid potential confusion and create a more usable diagram, the shortest possible link is probably the best rule to apply for which link to reconnect with) with a distance calculated according to the graph prior to the moving element's removal.

The moving element then reconnects to the element it moved "towards" with a distance somehow determined by however your move mechanic works (probably a +/- 1 increment of the distance calculated to that object prior to breaking your moving element off the diagram).

That IS complex. And DOES in some bad cases involve redrawing a whole bunch of lines.

But it is a solution that results in all elements remaining relatively stationary except for the moving element. Which is largely the whole point of the model I put together.

Now the only way to get simpler than that is to limit/abstract your mechanic further so that you no longer have as many potential clusters or in general have a less "free" amount of positions. So for instance having ONLY one "Near" position, ONE "far" position etc... and EVERYONE who is at a certain distance are all "at" that distance.

One way to think of more limited "relative" positioning system like that might be a series of concentric circles, where the center circle is "On top of" the next is "Near" the next out is "Far" and then the furthest is "Very Far". Your system would then measure ranges such that shooting from Far to Very Far or from Far to On Top Of would MEAN something, but shooting from Far to Far similarly probably means something involving the range feeling, er, farish... And only WHICH ring you are in matters, and where around "the ring" you are is basically purely cosmetic.

And effectively every combat ever then becomes a sort of big pile on as all the melee guys drop into the single big centre of every map and all the ranged guys try to orbit out into the further rings.

You could do various similar variants of cut down relative positioning systems with ladders, rings, or multiple concentric circles for each PC, etc...

But in the end the model I put together with the relatively complex exploding octopus of a diagram as the number of elements increases... is, I think, pretty much the minimum complexity required from a mechanic where in you have some form of "true" relative positioning in between every single element mapped without sacrificing a lot more of your relative positioning detail for speed/simplicity.

And it's not an especially good level of complexity when you realize most people considering a relative positioning system are trying for something "rules lite" that will be "easy to just describe without drawing". And unfortunately... the exploding octopus kinda requires some accurate drawing...

OgreBattle wrote: This is going on a tangent, but even more recent western stuff like 15th century Italy had superhumanly strong guys smashing mountains and tossing cows in their naked paladin rampaging.

What would a medium/heavy dice pool game with highly abstracted combat look like?

Riddle of Steel, except the balls are metaphorical.

Not sure I get the Balls things exactly, however you've peaked my interest of these 15th century Italians picking up mountains among things, what game is this?? Sorta reminds me how the video game "The Darkness" is based on a comic book hero, that could like fly in the atmosphere and rip steel ships apart.