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[Nadaka]

Considering that I have written and maintained an online die roll and recording website since?... I don't remember when, either 2003 or 2005? I have used a computer quite a bit in gaming. More than I want to in fact, would love to be able to game in person more often.

http://nadaka.us/DiceBox/Roll.aspx for anyone interested

[anzki4]

By the way, what would be correct forum area to post "looking to play tabletop RPGs online"-thread? Or something like that.

[Glowcat]

By the way, what would be correct forum area to post "looking to play tabletop RPGs online"-thread? Or something like that.

I see a lot of those games and requests in the Forum Games section. Some are PbP while others are session-based using one of the Online RPG tools.

[Glowcat]

Resurrecting my thread for a specific question:

Preferred action order system, time/tick or initiative turn-based?

This is one thing I've been wrestling with in my homebrew and I'd like to hear some opinions on which system is overall better or worse in practical gameplay, alongside perceived advantages or disadvantages. I recall at least one person didn't like the time-step system in Exalted because they found it difficult to keep track of.

One problem I've found with designing time-step systems is that it's difficult to represent all that can happen in a moment of time properly while accommodating other actions (e.g. swinging a heavy weapon over X seconds, judging when an arrow would hit the target given a velocity of X meters/second and what happens if the target just walks out of the way, and then figuring out how mid-battle conversations go... all at once). For projectile travel and speech I just further abstract it right now since keeping track of specifics, such as arrow current location along with its attack roll, is too much of a pita in real games. Should I even bother holding PCs to the time-scale when they are giving each other mid-battle instructions or similar communication? I guess if I do it'd make Telepaths extremely valuable for battle coordination and quick responses to unfolding events that the entire party doesn't notice at once.

To its credit, time-step systems allow for quicker actions and weapons to really gain an advantage over slower opponents and the... how should I put this... the flow is more constant with time-step compared to the jagged action bursts between characters in a pure turn-based system. The version I plan to use gets rid of a lot of the turn-based flaws by hybridizing, but it still has some irregularities that could pretty much vanish if I went full time-step. The combat system I'm developing is also very timing dependent which helps me lean towards time-step a bit more despite its issues. No matter what this is going to be a pretty crunch-intensive system. It has to be if I'm to create something that other systems don't already do better.

[Draco18s]

Go the initiative route.  If you really want to make it closer to a time based system, check out what Alpha Omega did.


I thought there was another chart for this, but I guess not.
The part we're interested here is the leftmost column (stat) and right most column (active segments).
Basically, as your reaction went up, you acted more often.  Shooting a gun or swinging a sword took your whole action (and you'd act again in your next active segment).  Casting spells took up a certain number of seconds (each segment is 1 second), so if a mage had a reaction of 16, they act in segment 3 and cast a spell, taking 4 seconds to cast.  In segment 1 the spell would complete and take effect and the mage would get his next turn (in segment 1).  If he instead cast a spell that took 1 second to cast it'd complete in segment 4, but he couldn't act again until segment 6.

Large bore weapons (mortars, etc) took a certain number of complex actions to reload.  So a guy with a 16 could reload a mortar in 12 seconds, whereas a guy with a reaction of 22 could do it in 8 (but would end up waiting for his 10 reaction companion to fire the damn thing 4 seconds later).

This route might be too complex for your needs, but it's a hybrid of the two systems.
The Dice Pools thing you see here is confusing, but I'll give it a once over.  Before segment 1 (and after segment 6) your dice pool of 6 dice refreshes to full (or possibly less than 6 dice, if the stat is below 12).  You only get these 6 dice over your entire turn, so if you have 100 reaction and 6 active segments, and want to make an attack in each, you only get 1 die to do it.  The upside is, you always take your largest dice first.  So if you have a 26 in agility (for firing guns) you get 1d8,5d6.  You take 1 die from  your pool in segment 1: 1d8.  1 die again in segment 2: 1d8.  1 die in segment 3: 1d8....
Or you take 3 dice then in segment 4: 1d8+2d6, and stand around segments 5 and 6 doing "non-dice" actions (talking, moving, etc).

[Glowcat]

Unfortunately that doesn't fit very well with my combat system. I'm going to a style of combat that is very reactive and looser with regards to who can act at any time, with the primary drawback of rapid actions being subsequently increased difficulty as you lose balance and leave yourself vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed. When heavily pressed in combat it's only barely possible to pull off actions you're extremely competent with, and considering offense against skilled opponents is pretty much out of the question until you've recovered. It's the unique feature that made me decide to create my own system instead of simply using an existing one. I've already got a good idea of how I'll do both initiative-based and time-step combat so I was looking more for a general feel towards those. Information about how other designers do combat is always nice though. I'm trying to fashion something both easy to use and yet deep, with feints and non-standard combat moves (like a quick weapon pommel or shield slam) being vital to throwing your enemy off guard.

[Draco18s]

The magic system in AO worked a bit like that.  There's a hugely complex chart for casting spells (there's a giant list of effects and tells you which of the difficulty bars it uses)

Simply though:

1) Range
2) More targets / AoE -> harder
3) Damage dealt / damage healed
4) Duration (combat/non combat; non-combat-duration spells don't stick around in combat, combat durations were in cycles and hard to get very high; e.g. 36 seconds was worth +11 difficulty, equivalent to 240 non-combat minutes or hitting 20-30 targets)
5) Little Modifier (+1 unit worth of effect on "small" spells for a modest difficulty increase; +5 mod is +10 difficulty)
or Big Modifier (+1 unit worth of effect on "big" spells, for massive difficulty increase; +1 mod is +10 difficulty)

How long a spell took to cast was based on this difficulty number (and that also indicated how much Endurance was expended), but you could increase the difficulty of the roll and reduce the casting time +2 per 1 second reduction (and a corresponding increase in Endurance, if the difficulty jumps up enough).

[Glowcat]

I've got something vaguely similar although based on a "charging" system. Basically I've got it where your spell starts at a bare minimum of power and you can overcharge over several actions to build up points which you spend on improvements like damage, number of targets, auxilliary effects, spell projectile velocity, etc. Better casters have larger dice pools to build points so they can access the improved effects quicker and by spending less of the "mana" equivalent. The only real limit to the overcharge is that you cannot actively defend yourself while building it and eventually your mana will run dry. Ritual spells work similarly but involve many casters contributing to a single pool.

[Nadaka]

Do not go with the tick system. in 1997 I designed my own system called Pair O' Dice that used a "real time" tick based initiative system. It was slow and unwieldy even with initiative aids.

[Glowcat]

Do not go with the tick system. in 1997 I designed my own system called Pair O' Dice that used a "real time" tick based initiative system. It was slow and unwieldy even with initiative aids.

What made it slow and unwieldy?

[Sensei]

What happened to cunning warriors who use their wits or play with their enemy's mind during a battle?

That would be a warrior who has enough INT to get the Combat Expertise feat, which unlocks a lot of other interesting feats. I always called them "Warrior College" warriors.

[Glowcat]

What happened to cunning warriors who use their wits or play with their enemy's mind during a battle?

That would be a warrior who has enough INT to get the Combat Expertise feat, which unlocks a lot of other interesting feats. I always called them "Warrior College" warriors.

3rd Edition did try a limited approach but I don't feel like it really succeeded. Then again, going by the OOTS discussions it seems 3rd Edition just dropped the ball entirely with warriors until ToB.

[Sensei]

ToB?

[Glowcat]

ToB?

Tome of Battle

I stopped playing right around when 3.5e was coming out so I can't really comment on the changes. Despite a few Int requirement feats fighters were still mostly based around Strength and raw damage when I left. None of the Int feats really encouraged you to continue investing in Intelligence past the prerequisite because you needed to focus on more valuable stats.

[Krelian]

I used to master/storytell the game Exalted. Pretty fun mechanics, plus a very interesting setting.