The Gaming Den

Figuring out balance points for the various maneuvers is probably where you want to start with maneuver lists. Once you can figure out how many axes you have to work with (speed, difficulty, damage, pop, and "other", for example), you could weight the various aspects with points, developing a way for players to generate moves to populate their lists based off of point values.

From there, you could have things where XP/levels give you extra points to add to moves, or you could buy a new list. List generation itself could be scheduled so that you have X points for the whole list (distribute among moves as you see fit), or Y points per maneuver on the list (forcing moves to balance against each other individually rather than in aggregate).

If WoF is how you're going to do it, you really ought to also consider wrestling pacing and giving options for easy mode moves like "Irish Whip into Turnbuckle". As a genre, matches start with the light stuff and only later move towards the heavy stuff; powerbombs don't come out in the first three minutes unless it's a squash match. It doesn't look like just having two lists is going to cover that off.

You could combine CAN with WoF pretty easily. Have a list that goes 1-9, and you add a modifier to the roll as your CAN increases. If there's a big enough gap between your opponent's abilities and your own, you start out with a +1 or +2 modifier on the roll. Or if you're taking a dive to curry favor with the wrestling masses, since you're basically running the show and don't want them to revolt, which I'm told is what happened that one time Ray Mysterio Jr. wtfpwned Kevin Nash in 30 seconds way back when WCW was still a thing.

FrankTrollman wrote:Chokes and other holds actually work super well with a WoF roll. You have certains types of moves that will get you out, and if you don't get the right options for a round you just sit there and get choked. It is much more immersive than just having an escape roll every turn.

How do you define a move as "escapes a choke"? I would be very careful with how you define such moves in general: no one wants to sit around and roll dice to get a move that escapes just as much as no one wants to roll escape rolls.

mean_liar wrote:How do you define a move as "escapes a choke"? I would be very careful with how you define such moves in general: no one wants to sit around and roll dice to get a move that escapes just as much as no one wants to roll escape rolls.

I imagine it would be a rider effect that gets ignored if you're not being choked when you roll it. So, for example, if you're Super Burny Torchalator Infernace Guy (wrestling names are not my forte), you might have a move that's "Light Myself On Fire" which makes you on fire for one round, and normally you use it to turn your other moves (which would probably mostly be various *holds) into much nastier versions of their mild mannered selves, but when you're already in a chokehold it can force the other guy to break his hold or take a bunch of fire damage.

Basically you're going to want grabbed to be a major status effect that is handed out frequently. And then, like in Lunch Money, you have effects that escape from grabs.

-Username17

I don't think it's especially enlightening to say that some moves escape grabs without a "why". It's clearly an effect, and in most cases a rider effect. But that's pretty awfully empty. To me, the answer as to why a move escapes a grab or not is rooted in mechanics, and that further implies that mechanics ought to be established to form a basis of reference. Talking about maneuvers in the abstract isn't particularly helpful.

My own conclusion was to have fundamental measures of maneuvers be:

Speed: how fast they execute
Risk: how much additional damage you might take if you fuck up
Difficulty: why you're not pulling this move out from the starting bell, ie. a requirement that somehow an opponent's injury status affects this move's success chances
Damage: self-explanatory
Other: everything else, to catch everything cool the above bare-bones concepts don't capture

The idea is that you then have a common understanding of why a particular move escapes grabs: because that particular Other trait means it does slightly less Damage/has slower Speed/is Riskier/etc. Weighting the various axes will provide the ability to measure move and list performance, even without a point-buy move generation system.

I would say that framework establishes the best chance of moving forward with design, as the combat system is going to be intrinsic to at least half the game. Abstract discussions are nice, but they tend to spin wheels more than provide actionable answers.

I think you're going to want to retain some kind of feat/trait system, a list of neat-o tweaks for characters that moves past their movelists (which you will want compartmentalized as much as possible).

For example, Salamandro should have some kind of feat for when he's in a Volcano match (and Sic Semper Piranhus would have one for a Marsh match), and there should be some way to track valets and mouthpiece managers, and that sort of thing. No one wanted to wrestle Mankind in a hardcore match (or Boiler Room match) because that was his arena. That kind of tip-of-the-hat to the genre seems best accomplished through feats.