alexandraerin | Entries tagged with acme system

I'm going to post the transcript from last night's session later... I want to be wide awake when I use search-and-replace to format it, so I don't end up with weird errors like I did last time when I threw it up more or less immediately.

A single combat round went slower this time than it during the test. A lot of that was me. I think in retrospect I probably should have broken the session off at 11 instead of plowing on, because my brain does get fatigued and that makes it hard to do the spatial reasoning stuff. At the very end I almost skipped one player's turn and also forgot the fact that you can't take actions after a charge.

I think part of the slowness was also the battlefield... I was experimenting with adding difficult terrain, and the way I did it was describing the bottom of the quarry as being full of difficult terrain that would make movement take longer (because you'd have to go around it or through it, with a net effect either way of taking extra actions to get anywhere). Not very exciting in excecution. By the time we got to the end of the round I'd stopped penalizing movement, and I'm not going to do that when we pick it up next week.

I think difficult terrain can have a use in an ACME game, but it's got to be a relatively concrete thing... a big patch of it you could use to dissuade a shifty monster's chosen tactics, or that is on a direct line between you and some enemy archers. It has to be placed deliberately, in other words, so that it can have a deliberate impact. Otherwise it's just "movement takes twice as long", which makes the first round a wash.

The other thing I learned is that the halve monsters HP/double up their attacks thing might make the fights go quicker but it can also prevent any of the individual monsters from sticking around long enough to show what they can really do. Since I'm making a point of making each NPC in a fight distinct from each other (Goblin circus performers in the test, elemental animals in this session) to make position tracking easier, this can be a bad thing because each one's got some interesting tricks to show off and the fight can lose something based on which ones drop in the first round.

So instead of double attacks and halve HP, I think I'm going to leave their HP alone. This will mean that the typical monster is between a standard an elite, which means I'll be splitting the difference on experience. This will result in fewer opponents in a standard fight, which is something I want to do anyway, and one of the reasons every fight has at least one elite in it.

I'm also thinking that since the players end up waiting for their turns, I'm going to make "intro text" for each fight that I can post here giving a better description of the foes they're facing and better hints about their capabilities (who looks fast, who looks tough, etc.) I generally favor giving more information over less, but trying to put it into a scrolling Skype window can be tough.

...went pretty well. There were some connection issues that may stem from my current set-up that will have to be addressed one way or the other.

At one point my east-west aphasia did lead to a momentary confusion about how many zombies were still undead and kicking, but all in all the test went better than I expected in that area. I know how I made the mistake and can watch out for it in the future. It was also in the more complex of the two battles that I staged.

(I had four planned, but with the connection issues things took about twice as long as they should have.)

The ACME rules seemed to work well. There was some distance-fudging and some judgment calls involved, but that was expected. Nobody pulled out a power that made me go, "Wait, how can this be applied?" I rarely had to think before answering when somebody asked who they could reach.

One thing I had planned on doing but forgot about (and that

moofable, who observed the session to give me a neophyte's perspective on the proceedings, noted to me that this would helpful) was giving a textual update of the combatants and their positions after each round and after major changes/upheavals. That I think would speed things up for the players and help prevent errors on my part.

Those are procedural things that can be easily fixed/improved. I think the rules are playable and ready. I have some concerns that it might be too easy to target blasts with the narrow/wide rule, but ~~it's not something I think needs immediate adjustment. It'll take repeated play to really determine that, and the best way to do that would be to "go live" with the rules and play them repeatedly.~~...actually, I have been thinking about this since the test ended, see below.

The connection was really bad by the time we gave up (and right before a big climax: giant zombie bear versus

kynn's spirit bear) so I didn't get to have a whole big breakdown session at the end or anything, but I think the playtesters enjoyed it. I'm sure they'd agree that getting a text summary of the battlefield would help.

For running actual games the connection thing might be an issue... I could solve it by making the games text only instead of voice, or by taking a computer downstairs where I can plug it in directly to the router. I'll take a look at both solutions. Now that I know the rules are playable I'm getting eager to start.

Playtesters: If you have any comments, questions about why something went a certain way, or other feedback, feel free to drop it here.

Update on close blasts: after some time reflecting on how well

gamingdragon was able to use Howl of Fury as a minion cleanser, I've decided that the "narrow blast" mechanic does give players too much of a "shotgun scalpel" without giving enough up. Catching three enemies in a Close Blast 3 isn't a bad deal most of the time.

So to fix that, and more closely emulate how blasts get dropped on the map in regular play, it's going to work like this: you can pick one adjacent character (or "empty square") and say it's the origin square. Anyone else who's adjacent is safe. After that, it'll be resolved using the threat rules and common sense about who's where. There wasn't a time in the game that a blast was used where I didn't have a good enough sense of who was where to know if the Wizard was inside the tent pissing out or the other way around, as it were. In most situations where it wouldn't be possible to figure out who would or would not be hit (because everyone's all bunched up), it wouldn't be possible to drop a Blast 3 and not hit allies anyway.

Basically I overthought things. Blast doesn't need a lot of special handling, and the handling I used made it more powerful than it was meant to be.

Since I'm testing the ACME system tonight, here are a few topics that the initial rules posting didn't really deal with:

"The Nearest Enemy"

Some abilities only affect the nearest enemy. In the standard game, this means you can pick an enemy that no enemy is nearer to than you... i.e., if you're adjacent to three, you pick one. If two enemies are both five squares away and none are closer, you pick one. In this same spirit of simplicity and generosity, the ACME system lets you decide which of any enemies at the same approximate distance is the closest, so long as none are known to be closer.

For example, if there's a whole cluster of enemies at close range, and none nearby, a Ranger may declare any of the enemies in the cluster to be the Hunter's Quarry. But if one of those enemies is guarding another, then it must be assumed that enemy is closer, having put itself in the way. The Range would have to move to "go around" to get into position.

Enemies can also be explicitly arrayed in ways that foil this. If a cluster of goblins is described to be warriors encircling a goblin mage, then the goblin mage will never be the closest enemy.

In short, the question of "who's the nearest enemy" is resolved with general generosity towards the players, and specific exceptions based on common sense.

Narrative Style

In the absence of an actual battle map with grid squares on it, it can make more sense to describe things in terms of feet. With a grid square being about 5', then "Far Range" constitutes within about 50', "Close Range" about 25', and so on.

Jockeying For Position

You can spend a Move action to accomplish anything you might normally do by moving, even if you don't have a clear Point A and Point B you're moving between. For instance, if you're a Warlock who is engaging enemies at Close Range, you can say "I move to get Shadow Walk." If there is some ambiguity about which enemy or group of enemies really is closer to a character they can spend a Move action to resolve it to their liking. If they had to move immediately before to get into that position to begin with, it can be assumed that they positioned themselves accordingly already.

In other words, the use of Move actions is interpreted to represent all the jockeying for position that might normally go on.

Specific situations may engender common sense exceptions: if for some reason there is no room to move around, (the Warlock is standing on top of a crumbling stone pillar, for instance), then a Move action can't be used to represent such "abstract maneuvering".

Summoning and Conjuring Into Position

When you use a summons or conjuration, you can place the creature/effect anywhere within its range, as normal. This means you can drop it adjacent to an ally or enemy (or both, if they're nearby to each other), you can place it directly into a flanking position with an ally, etc. If there's a question of how many enemies in a cluster you can get a conjuration or summoning to be adjacent to, it's resolved the same way a Burst 1 would be.

Zones

Determining who is inside a zone when it is created is the same as determining who is inside a burst/blast. If the zone is created by a power which uses a burst/blast attack, anyone who was targeted by the attack is within the zone. Once a zone is in play, it's assumed that movement into it will be voluntary or forced... not accidental. There is no "Oops, you forgot there was a giant roaring fire covering half the battlefield." on either the PC or NPC side. The zone becomes a terrain feature for combatants to hide behind, hide inside, avoid, push each other into, etc.

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!"