On the subject of D&D...

...I'm going to be restarting my online group(s) in the near future, with a couple of changes. For one thing I've been thinking about an abstract combat system that will allow most of the awesomeness of 4E but without requiring a battle map. This should make combat faster, eliminate problems with players who have slower connections not getting map updates on a timely basis, and allow me to host the game from anywhere, even my laptop.

The system I'll be using is inspired by a "positional" system I read, though the movement and distance calculations are simplified from the one that served as the original model. I've also come up with some quick and simple ways of resolving stunts involving forced movement and figuring out how many enemies you can catch with a blast or burst (and how to know if you're going to catch an ally in it).

I'm sending a draft to some of my gaming friends to see if they can spot any hideous glaring holes in it. If it looks good, I'll put it up and see what other people think.

It's basically a series of modifications to the 4E combat rules, so it looks kind of complicated when all laid out, but I think the end result is simpler than the system it's modifying. I'm going to be rewriting my draft a bit even before I get feedback to make it more readable... after thinking about the first version I hammered out, I realized it will read better if rather than an unorganized series of "replacement rules", it gives the basic movement/positioning rules and then gives the nitty gritty details in terms of things like how to read a power card.

The Abstract Combat Mapless Encounter System - First Draft

Under the theory that more eyes are better than fewer, I've decided to post the draft of my abstract combat system for D&D. This system owes a debt of inspiration to the "SARN-FU" system (detailed here), for showing me a good model for handling abstract distances. My original plan was to use SARN-FU, but I had a few issues with it:

• The movement system is unnecessarily mathematical and precise. If things are abstract, let them be abstract. My system has more of a fudge factor when it comes to movement and distance.
  
• The flanking system (though refreshingly simple) seems like it would be brutal in combats with large numbers of enemies.
  
• I wanted to have clear guidelines for adjudicating bursts and blasts, to keep them from either being total DM Deathtraps ("Oh, too bad... you hit your entire party with a fireball. Again.") or laser-guided multiwarhead for the players ("I position my fireball so that it hits every Kobold but misses all of us.")
  
• Likewise, I wanted rules for doing interesting things with forced movement that didn't turn pushes and slides into the equivalent of a Green Lantern Power Ring.
  

While I started out just adding rules for blasts/bursts and forced movement stunts to SARN-FU, when I was finished the only thing it had in common was the basic idea of using relative distances, so a new name (and better acronym) seemed to be in order.

This has not been playtested. It has not even been thoroughly checked by anyone who isn't me.

( Cut for nerdery that may or may not be relevant to your interests. )

Some Explanations, or What I Was Thinking:

It would be the DM's job to keep track of where everyone is and give an overview of the combat field every round. This should ideally be presented in a visual form that players can refer back to, rather than having to keep the whole battlefield in their head. My thought is that for an online game, I would describe the battlefield positions in a block of text and for an offline game I would list the clusters on a white board or a sheet of paper.

The change to flanking (that you can't flank while being flanked) is to keep the number of flanks going on at one time, since each one is something that has to be kept track of (unlike in a tabletop game, when you glance at the board and see that your opponent is flanked.) The flanking rules and boxing in rules together are designed to create a sense of a dynamic combat with warriors jockeying for position, as tends to happen in 4E tabletop games. They also give more meaningfulness to the "shift" mechanic, since so many powers allow free shifts.

Guarding is meant to allow Defenders to do their job without the game devolving to something even worse than "I shot you!"/"No, you didn't, you missed!" -- "I stood in your way!"/"No, you didn't!"

Campaign Supernova

So, again, the reason I've devised abstract combat rules is that I'd like to resurrect my long-lapsed online gaming group(s) with them. Probably not with all the same players, since people's availability and interest may have changed. Though the campaign settings will be similar, I'm going to be doing a reboot on the story... not just because it's been so long but because I feel like I can do better.

The Sunday campaign was going pretty well, I feel. The players were engaged in the plot. There were challenges beyond combat. It was rough in the beginning as people found their way in the world, but things had really come together by what ended up being the last session, with some collective problem solving and magical archeology going on.

The Wednesday campaign, the "tavern" campaign, was more of a mess. I packed way too much stuff into the first outing. This was because I knew it would be interrupted by travel and I wanted to get things well underway before then. The problem was one of inertia: a fully laden freight train takes much longer to get underway than something a bit more streamlined.

The first adventure had two factions of mysterious motives and methods, and there was the underlying mystery behind the campaign itself, all present at once and with not enough clear delineations between them. Despite the fact that I was trying to convey the two factions opposing each other, players were still relating clues they found at one faction's campsite to what the other faction was doing.

The adventure was also just too big in scope. It was combat-overland trek-combat-combat, which was so the opposite of what I wanted it to be.

When I was talking with gamingdragon about what I'd do differently, I thought about giving the players a more comprehensive campaign briefing instead of letting them find out what's going on gradually. In the course of that conversation I realized that the size of the first adventure really was the problem. It doesn't need to be big and complex and sprawling across the countryside... it should be something local and immediate. I'll be using the "Dungeon Delve" model as an example. I don't want players to have too many mysteries to ponder at once and I don't want to take them away from the tavern for so long.

This isn't to say that the Wednesday campaign wasn't fun, just that I wasn't accomplishing my goals as a DM. There were some great moments in every session. They just tended to happen in or around combat, and there wasn't much plot progression. I think the narrative rather than map based approach will help there (Wednesday had one player who had trouble connecting to the map server, and several players who were getting severe lag in their map updates).

I think using the abstract system will also speed up combats so they don't last as long. There will be less to take in. You can deal with your options (approach that enemy, back away, etc.) in the abstract instead of dealing with the minutia of counting squares. It should be more like the old style of figure-out-what-you-want-to-do-and-say-it that most people are used to. (I tend to do that even when I'm tabletop gaming, but I realize some people see the pieces and the board and they default to moving pieces and rolling dice.)