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[Andres]

New Piecewise RTD?  Instant... PTW.

((This is a test thread; he wants to play with his system a bit and make adjustments before making the actual thread. Hence the fight.

By the by, if Dumbo doesn't show up I'm willing to take his place and stab anyone else who wants to in the kidney.))

If he's not here by tomorrow, then you're in. Make a sheet, just in case. Just stats, qualities, weapon nature.

He'll also want the rest of the stuff with the sheet, but don't fill them in.

[Ruludos]

He'll also want the rest of the stuff with the sheet, but don't fill them in.

((As in, the name and such in there but left blank?))

[Andres]

He'll also want the rest of the stuff with the sheet, but don't fill them in.

((As in, the name and such in there but left blank?))

Yep.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Ahhhhh sorry guys, extenuating circumstances involving staying over at my brothers left me without access to Internet.
But I have access now so give me a second.
Oh shiz no choice now except to PARRY MOTOR FLUCTUATIONS.
40 essence on speed.
Edit: Oh, question, is essence use instant? So you go 'I use X essence' and cuts just open up all over you body or do you actually have to take time to impale yourself?

[piecewise]

Oh, so Essence isn't strictly required for magical attacks. That's cool. Reading the rules, it doesn't seem like injury is necessary to give bonuses to physical stats.

Charge Dumbo, putting 60 Essence into Speed (max roll). Aim to cut off his head, using 4 Essence to cover my blade in a thin sheen of energy to improve its cutting power (min roll) and 4 Essence into improving Strength (max roll).

EDIT:

Yes, as long as you have essence, no matter how damaged you get, you'll come back.

Shit, now I don't know if I want to play an Ichigo clone or an Alucard clone.

EDIT2: Do we get required secondary powers? For example, if I'm running at 100 MPH with Essence-boosted Speed, will my knees break due to not having enough Resilience to handle the extra force I'm applying to the ground?

Ahhhhh sorry guys, extenuating circumstances involving staying over at my brothers left me without access to Internet.
But I have access now so give me a second.
Oh shiz no choice now except to PARRY MOTOR FLUCTUATIONS.
40 essence on speed.
Edit: Oh, question, is essence use instant? So you go 'I use X essence' and cuts just open up all over you body or do you actually have to take time to impale yourself?

Oh good, you're both here. First I'm gonna have to roll speed to see which one of you actually goes first...And Dumbo actually goes first.

Remember, I roll speed in the beginning for initiative. It's unconnected to the speed rolls for actually performing actions, though you can dump essence into it.

So now Dumbo will do his action and Andres, you will do yours. Dumbo's speed roll was 8, so andres, in order to react to his action, to block it or dodge or anything like that, you'll have to roll 8 or higher on a speed roll at the start of your turn. You can dump essence into that as well.



Oh and Dumbo, you only use essence through injury for magic, not for physical actions. And you actually have to cause the injuries; but since combat turns are about 5-10 seconds long, I generally assume you can cause them then act. I mean, stabbing yourself only takes a second.

[Andres]

Ok so now what? I've already put Essence into Speed so I should be able to block his attack. What are we waiting for now?

[piecewise]

Ok so now what? I've already put Essence into Speed so I should be able to block his attack. What are we waiting for now?

Well, you put essence into speed for an attack? Your previous turn and his were both under the impression that you went first, but you don't. He rolled higher on the initiative speed roll.

Honestly you should both ignore your original posts and act as though we're starting now, and that he won initiative.

I feel like there might be some misconceptions as to how this works.

[Andres]

Ah, I think I understand now. First I thought there was one Speed roll governing initiative and combat and most recently I thought there were two: one for initiative and one for combat. Now I see that there are three Speed rolls: one for initiative, one for attack, and one for defence, each one modifiable by Essence.

To be honest, it's not a good system. Initiative only has to do with rolling a higher number, the difference between those numbers not mattering. If Person A rolls an 8, Person B will go first regardless if he rolls a 10 or a 100 by using Essence. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the Essence used is entirely to make sure Person B goes first. If Person B then wants to charge Person A with an attack that's hard to react to, he'll need to put another 100 Essence. Person A somehow reacts to it and begins his own attack. Person B will then have to put in another 100 Essence to boost his speed and allow him to react to the new attack.

This means that a full 100 Essence is somehow not enough to boost a magical girl's power for a full five seconds. She'll need to use three times as much Essence to get a 100 Essence boost throughout a full turn. Even worse is that three player actions are required every turn by the same player. That tremendously slows down the game and that's just with 2 players. With more players and a monster to fight the game would go at crawling pace.

My recommendation is to allow players to boost their stats at the beginning of the turn and that's it.

Put 15 Essence to increase my defence Speed roll (max).

[piecewise]

Ah, I think I understand now. First I thought there was one Speed roll governing initiative and combat and most recently I thought there were two: one for initiative and one for combat. Now I see that there are three Speed rolls: one for initiative, one for attack, and one for defence, each one modifiable by Essence.

To be honest, it's not a good system. Initiative only has to do with rolling a higher number, the difference between those numbers not mattering. If Person A rolls an 8, Person B will go first regardless if he rolls a 10 or a 100 by using Essence. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the Essence used is entirely to make sure Person B goes first. If Person B then wants to charge Person A with an attack that's hard to react to, he'll need to put another 100 Essence. Person A somehow reacts to it and begins his own attack. Person B will then have to put in another 100 Essence to boost his speed and allow him to react to the new attack.

This means that a full 100 Essence is somehow not enough to boost a magical girl's power for a full five seconds. She'll need to use three times as much Essence to get a 100 Essence boost throughout a full turn. Even worse is that three player actions are required every turn by the same player. That tremendously slows down the game and that's just with 2 players. With more players and a monster to fight the game would go at crawling pace.

My recommendation is to allow players to boost their stats at the beginning of the turn and that's it.

Put 15 Essence to increase my defence Speed roll (max).

Yeah, it appears there are some misconceptions here.



Step 1. Roll speed for initiative
Step 2. Whoever gets first on the initiative ladder goes first, doing whatever act they want and putting essence in wherever they want.
step 3. Whoever got second goes, doing whatever they want, etc. However, in order to be able to react to someone higher in the initiative ladder, they need to roll a speed roll equal to or better than the person they're reacting to. The degree of the roll, in terms of how much higher it is, determines how much time they have to react. Someone who rolls equal to or only a bit higher than the needed number will only have an instant to react, while higher numbers have longer. So Someone who rolls low will have time to put up their guard or maybe try to parry at best, while someone with a high score could try to block and then retaliate, or something similar.

In terms of turn order there's only two rolls that matter; the first initiative roll and the "react" roll if you want to react to the person who went first in the initiative ladder. These rolls are completely unrelated to any speed rolls for actions. You seem to be conflating them somehow. Also, you seem to think that they'd need high initiative and high speed to be hard to react to. High numbers in either of those would be fine. I mean, if you get really high initiative, chances are that the person won't even be able to react in time to do anything. While if you just have high speed for an attack, then it makes the target number for a defensive roll harder too. Either works.  And he also couldn't even put essence into speed to react to someone reacting to him. If he boosts his physical movement speed at the start of the turn, then it stays boosted the whole time. He would use the same boosted speed both for his attack and his defense against a swing coming in.

Does that make sense or should I do an example turn?

[Andres]

I think I understood, but an example turn would probably be for the best in case I misunderstood.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Look, I didn't know the rolls for initiative were seperate and I assumed from Andres saying he wanted to make an Ichigo character that his speed would be through the roof.
Yeah, I agree, an example turn would be nice.

[piecewise]

Alright, lets do an example:

So lets say we got ourselves two characters: Stabby and Clubber. They want to murder each other for reasons that don't matter.

First, we roll initiative, which is a speed roll. Stabby has 15 speed while clubber only has 5. Neither add any essence. Stabby Rolls 12 while Clubber rolls 3, meaning stabby is first and clubber is second.

Stabby decides that he wants to take one of his many knives and huck it at Clubber's head. Thats a Dex Roll to aim and a Strength roll to throw. Now, If we assume they're about 100 feet apart,  thats a task of roughly 7-9 difficulty, something that someone could do with a good amount of practice.  Stabby has a good amount of dex (20) so he decides not to use any essence on that, but he has very little strength (7) so he decides to pump a whole 30 essence into the throw, so that if he hits, it does some serious damage. He gets an 11 for dex and 34 for strength.  In other words, he's throwing that knife with Olympian level accuracy and as fast as a bullet. His action is done.

Now it's Clubber's turn. Remember, actions are not carried out till the end of the turn, they're all considered to be proceeding at the same time. So clubber has the opportunity to defend himself, assuming he can react. Now, if you remember, clubber has really shit speed (5) so there's no way he can match Stabby's 12 speed initiative roll without using essence. Now, he really doesn't want to take that knife to the goddamn face, so he decides to pump 25 essence into speed, just so that he has at least a roughly 50% chance of succeeding. He rolls a 17, which is good enough to react in time and since it's roughly 30% better then Stabby's roll, he has a fair bit of time to work with in his response. He decides to dodge the knife, he's got 30 speed for this turn so he's within the limit needed to dodge something flying at ballistic speed; might as well put that essence to use. Now, the difficulty of dodging something moving at ballistic speed is between 21 and 30, we'll go with 25 here. Clubber doesn't add any more essence to his speed and just goes with it as it is. He rolls a 24. Now, this is a failure, but only just. As such, he dodges most of the way out of the way, taking only a minor injury, suffering 7 essence loss.


ALTERNATIVELY

If Clubber had just botched super hard and rolled a 1 on his speed roll for dodging, then he would have taken the blade straight to the head and taken a full 91-120 essence damage, since a knife to the brain is generally fatal.

ALTERNATIVELY

Clubber could have decided to simply allow the knife to hit him, releasing that 120 essence, with the intent of instantly forming the spilled essence into a spell. For this, he would basically say something like "I let the knife hit me and then use the essence released to fire a summoned I-beam straight at Stabby"  In that case we'd look at his courage stat, add the spilled essence, roll to see if he succeeds on the spell, and then roll clubber's dex (aiming the spell) against Stabby's speed for that round (15, because he didn't add any essence to it) to see if he can aim it well enough or if stabby will dodge it automatically.


There's somewhat of an interplay here of the fact that going first can allow you to totally overwhelm someone and make it so they never get the chance to react, but also means you're open to counter attacks.

Questions?

[Andres]

So why can't Stabby add Essence to his Speed to get a better initiative? Why can't Clubber? Clubber is capable of boosting his Speed to astronomical levels every turn but apparently he will always be on the defensive no matter what.

Also, the system you have would make it take a very long time for a full combat phase to end. Let's see what the posts would be here...

Stabby: I engage combat with Clubber.
*wait for GM to post*
GM: Stabby engages combat with Clubber. Stabby rolls 15 and Clubber rolls 5 for initiative.
*wait for Stabby*
Stabby: I pump 30 Essence into Strength and throw a throwing knife at Clubber.
*wait for GM to post*
GM: Stabby rolls 11 for Dex and 34 for Strength.
*wait for Clubber*
Clubber: I pump 25 Essence into Speed.
*wait for GM*
GM: Clubber rolls 17 and is capable of dodging the knife.
*wait for Clubber*
Clubber: I decide to dodge the knife.
*wait for GM*
GM: Clubber rolls a 24. The knife hits him and does Minor Damage. Clubber loses 7 Essence.
*end combat round 1*

There were a total of 7 times where the game was being held up because everyone had to wait for Clubber/Stabby/GM to post. Every single one of those times could've taken hours. This is compounded by the fact that players could be in a different time zone to other players of the GM. Again, this is just a single 5-second round of combat between two players and depending on time zones, it can take several days to complete. Getting a full combat phase with multiple rounds and especially if more than two players are involved is impossible. You're going to have to streamline the combat system.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

No, no, that's good.
Wait, actually, I do have a question, say I wanted to use my wind affinity to send myself rocketing into my enemy, would that be purity or courage?
Also, fun fact Andres, if I just ran at you and got about a 13, I would reach you in about 14.35 seconds, that's Usain Bolt speeds.
In any case, let's go charge (5 essence to max speed roll and 10 to min) at full speed, looking to impale her.
Edit: Well, this is PvP, while most of the game would be against GM controlled enemies, though that's still a bunch of actions.

[Empiricist]

((Just an odd thought: since the Yami can basically shrug off any attack aside from one that impacts their core and can attack without limit, whilst the Magical Girls will end up destroying themselves if they continuously attack without hitting due to essence expenditure, does this mean this is sort of like a reverse bullet hell? ))