Adventure Song: Fighting Form
Feb. 15th, 2014 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI have some incredibly well-developed ideas and even rough drafts for other character classes, but right now I'm really focusing on getting the classic core four done, both because I think that's the bare minimum point at which it'll be worth playtesting and because I envision using them to help introduce the game to new players, using a sample Fighter character to explain the basics of combat, a Rogue to explain attribute rolls, stealth, and movement, a Wizard to explain power use in general, spell casting, and the advanced/explodier aspects of combat, and a Cleric to explain healing, recovery, death, etc.
The idea of starting by explaining how a Fighter fights (which is broadly the same as everyone else, though they use the most straightforward version most often) is a little weird and kind of counter to the way I conceive of roleplaying games, but I think it makes a lot of sense. The same d20 mechanic is used for everything else, and imaginary combat is like the iconic thing that roleplaying games are known for. They started with miniature warfare and sooner or later they usually come back to it. And compared to trying to explain rolls in general in terms of Charisma and Perception and Intelligence... well, "Do I hit this dude with my sword, or not?" is pretty easy to grasp.
And once it's been established how that works, we can talk about how other things come back to the same rules.
Anyway, that's in the future.
Of the core four, Rogues are the farthest from being complete. I'm making progress with them, and in fact I've got a rambly post in draft form about that progress, but this post is about Fighters.
See, I had a pretty major breakthrough with Fighters today. I realized that while I'd given up on making them a generic one-size fits all warrior class that could be customized into ranger, warlord, barbarian, and paladin, the collection of powers I'd come up with for them still reflected that kind of intricacy. And also that it severely undermined the benefit of having players "grow into" the game when the most basic fighting class at level one is presented with all these options that include forced movement, lingering conditions, et cetera.
So I made a decision to prune the branches and to simplify. The stuff that's being cut from the Fighter's power list isn't going to be gone, it'll just be reconfigured for its eventual home... with the Ranger and Warlord, mostly, though some of it might well be non-entry-level Fighter stuff. Because while the power structure is flatter than it is in 4E, it's not completely flat.
The stuff I kept as first level Fighter foo, I streamlined. Before, the Fighter's favored power type was "Fighting Techniques". Now it's "Strikes".
If I can't describe it as a Strike, it doesn't go under Fighters.
The starter set: Sure Strike, Powerful Strike, Quick Strike, Far Strike, Defensive Strike, Aggressive Strike. Six choices. They vary in complexity... Quick Strike essentially puts opportunity attacks back in the game, for someone who wants them, but Sure Strike and Powerful Strike are designed to be extremely newbie friendly, and you only need to pick one at level one.
No multiple target attacks, no battlefield control, no attack-and-move-and-attack-and-move combos, no multi-round combos. And just six choices. And at level 1, the one that you have is just a bonus and a Copper Token you can usually spend in response to a prompt written on the power ("When you make an attack roll and miss.", "When you make a damage roll and don't like the result.")
Does this make Fighters boring and pigeonholed like they were in OD&D? Well, not really, because as soon as you hit level 2 (or right away, if you're an experienced group and skipping the learning levels) you can pick your second combat power and it can be from any category. Any of those interesting powers that are going to end up under Warlord and Ranger are open to you, and most of them, the class-specific bonuses aren't actually class specific, they're tied to a feature that warrior classes share in common.
So you don't get penalized as a Fighter for taking "cross-class" abilities... but if you're a brand new player looking at what you've been told is the simplest class in the game, you're not presented with these wall-of-text abilities that make reference to rules that won't make sense until you've seen them in action. You've just got these six abilities with simple explanations: hit more often, hit harder, attack more, hit enemies farther away, better defense, better offense.
Also, because nothing about the Fighter's basic abilities actually depend on having a power that takes the Strike form, I'm thinking about loosening the requirement that they pick one at level one by adding a caveat "or one power that benefits from Warrior Training." New players reading through the chapter will be guided to these six really basic Strikes, power players can skip ahead and pick whatever, ah, strikes their fancy.
With this change, I think I can put a fork in the Fighter class and call it playtest ready.
The idea of starting by explaining how a Fighter fights (which is broadly the same as everyone else, though they use the most straightforward version most often) is a little weird and kind of counter to the way I conceive of roleplaying games, but I think it makes a lot of sense. The same d20 mechanic is used for everything else, and imaginary combat is like the iconic thing that roleplaying games are known for. They started with miniature warfare and sooner or later they usually come back to it. And compared to trying to explain rolls in general in terms of Charisma and Perception and Intelligence... well, "Do I hit this dude with my sword, or not?" is pretty easy to grasp.
And once it's been established how that works, we can talk about how other things come back to the same rules.
Anyway, that's in the future.
Of the core four, Rogues are the farthest from being complete. I'm making progress with them, and in fact I've got a rambly post in draft form about that progress, but this post is about Fighters.
See, I had a pretty major breakthrough with Fighters today. I realized that while I'd given up on making them a generic one-size fits all warrior class that could be customized into ranger, warlord, barbarian, and paladin, the collection of powers I'd come up with for them still reflected that kind of intricacy. And also that it severely undermined the benefit of having players "grow into" the game when the most basic fighting class at level one is presented with all these options that include forced movement, lingering conditions, et cetera.
So I made a decision to prune the branches and to simplify. The stuff that's being cut from the Fighter's power list isn't going to be gone, it'll just be reconfigured for its eventual home... with the Ranger and Warlord, mostly, though some of it might well be non-entry-level Fighter stuff. Because while the power structure is flatter than it is in 4E, it's not completely flat.
The stuff I kept as first level Fighter foo, I streamlined. Before, the Fighter's favored power type was "Fighting Techniques". Now it's "Strikes".
If I can't describe it as a Strike, it doesn't go under Fighters.
The starter set: Sure Strike, Powerful Strike, Quick Strike, Far Strike, Defensive Strike, Aggressive Strike. Six choices. They vary in complexity... Quick Strike essentially puts opportunity attacks back in the game, for someone who wants them, but Sure Strike and Powerful Strike are designed to be extremely newbie friendly, and you only need to pick one at level one.
No multiple target attacks, no battlefield control, no attack-and-move-and-attack-and-move combos, no multi-round combos. And just six choices. And at level 1, the one that you have is just a bonus and a Copper Token you can usually spend in response to a prompt written on the power ("When you make an attack roll and miss.", "When you make a damage roll and don't like the result.")
Does this make Fighters boring and pigeonholed like they were in OD&D? Well, not really, because as soon as you hit level 2 (or right away, if you're an experienced group and skipping the learning levels) you can pick your second combat power and it can be from any category. Any of those interesting powers that are going to end up under Warlord and Ranger are open to you, and most of them, the class-specific bonuses aren't actually class specific, they're tied to a feature that warrior classes share in common.
So you don't get penalized as a Fighter for taking "cross-class" abilities... but if you're a brand new player looking at what you've been told is the simplest class in the game, you're not presented with these wall-of-text abilities that make reference to rules that won't make sense until you've seen them in action. You've just got these six abilities with simple explanations: hit more often, hit harder, attack more, hit enemies farther away, better defense, better offense.
Also, because nothing about the Fighter's basic abilities actually depend on having a power that takes the Strike form, I'm thinking about loosening the requirement that they pick one at level one by adding a caveat "or one power that benefits from Warrior Training." New players reading through the chapter will be guided to these six really basic Strikes, power players can skip ahead and pick whatever, ah, strikes their fancy.
With this change, I think I can put a fork in the Fighter class and call it playtest ready.