Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Setting the Stage for Your Mind Theater

A drop-in replacement for (two-sided) B/X combat (it's probably missing a few things and I've not playtested it yet).  This is inspired by the video game Thea: The Awakening (which is very cool).

Think of characters (or groups of minions) as cards.  We're going to play them, between the party and the DM.  Each side has the characters they control, and the order they are played is mechanically important.

--

Cards may melee attack, missile attack, or cast a spell; (or) in addition they may actively defend.

If a card defends it receives a -2 AC bonus.  Characters with a shield add this bonus to allies behind them.  "Behind" means that a character is further away from the attacker than the actively defending character is.

A card may only melee attack the enemy card on either side that is closest to it.  Magical and missile attacks may attack "further" targets, but at a penalty.  Healing spells (friendly touch) may only be cast on the nearest friendly on either side.

Once all cards have been played, combat is resolved missile-magic-melee as normal, evaluating character actions in order of play.

So in addition to the description and narration of combat, we end up with a row of cards on the table, and they were played "left to right", representing the order those characters' actions will be resolved (edit: and just as importantly, who those actions can be directed at).  There's a lot of interesting tactics in where you play what kind of characters (mobs of Goblins are one card, and so are fragile Magic-Users), in terms of both offense and defense.

--

Determine Surprise as normal.  Distance is determined, and the side which has Surprise gets a "free turn" and then Initiative is rolled for round 2 if necessary.

Initiative: roll a d10 for each side.  The difference is the number of points the winning side has.

Each character class has a number of points that represents how costly it is to play that character during the first action in an encounter.  For now, think of it as generally how quickly the class can act in combat.

  • Cleric: 3
  • Dwarf: 3
  • Elf: 2
  • Fighter: 2
  • Halfling: 1
  • Magic-User: 4
  • Thief: 1
(Not sure what to do with monster points yet.  HD doesn't seem to work.)

When a card is played, its intended action SHOULD NOT be announced--and may freely change up until the card's action must be evaluated.

Combat proceeds as follows:

  1. The side with initiative may spend its points to play any number of characters before the other side plays anyone.  (This is one way to shield your Magic-User from melee.  If you have, say, 6 points, you can play Magic-User and then Fighter, shielding the caster.)
  2. The second player plays a single card, and card-laying alternates 1-for-1 from there.
  3. Resolve combat from "left to right" (played card order): missile, magic, melee.  Melee can only target the closest enemy card on either side of it.  Missile and magical attacks may do the same with no penalty, but may suffer a -2 penalty for each additional "range" to attack further targets.  Note that intervening characters actively defending add their bonus.
  4. Actively defending with a card must be announced when it is attacked (or when a character behind it would be attacked), and this may not be done if the character has already acted during the round.
Follow-up posts with some testing shortly.

No comments:

Post a Comment