Turn Order, Events, and Such - Ramblings

So been working on my battle tracker javascript program. Ran into a technical difficulty caused y an architectural choice. I developed the notion of secret tracker entries that controlled timed effects. These tracking entries would automatically do things like increment conditions and so on. The problem comes up with delaying. When someone has several tracking actions these actions happen automatically when their turn comes up, but a person who is delaying should be able to act before these tracking events go off. For example, Controller A puts an effect on a target that lasts until the start of Controller A's next turn. Striker B wants to delay but also wants to take advantage of this effect. What will happen with my current design is the the effect will turn off because Controller A's turn will start and Striker B will not act while this effect is on. Currently entries do not actually remove entries and just increment them so there is no actual problem in running combats, but this prohibits automatic removal and corrupts the underlying data model.

One possible situation is to have tracking events go AFTER the event that inspires them. This might make sense.

Anyway, this made me start thinking about various conditions and effects and I wanted to oput my thoughts in text.

There are essentially four types of persisting effects that I can think of: a condition you can save against, a condition that lasts until the end of your next turn, a condition that lasts until the start of your next turn, and a condition that lasts for the rest of the encounter. Everything else is an effect confined to your turn or action.

So the question becomes how do these effects interact with delaying and readying. Okay, readying is simple since you basically resolve your turn.. But delaying is a little more complex and forces you to look at the structure of a turn. A turn basically consists of three phases: a start, an action section, and an end. The Start includes ongoing damage and regeneration. The Action section includes your three basic actions and their effects. The End includes saving throws and the end of sustained durations.

A Delay action happens after you Start. This has some interesting ramifications. You can not avoid the ongoing damage by Delaying, but the ongoing damage for the next turn is put off possibly allowing you to be healed in the meantime. It also slows down any regeneration. Although this effect is of note it doesn't really matter that much in terms of durations. If something ends at the Start of your turn Delaying will not stop it automatically turning off when your turn comes up. The End phase is more complex. Effects beneficial for you and sustained duration effects end. (Another interesting effect is that Delaying is really unattractive is you have sustainable powers.) Effects that are negative only end when you take your Delayed action. The book mentions an enemy stunning you as an example, but that is a bad example because you can't actually Delay when stunned. Let's generate an example that is almost as bad. Let's say an enemy Blinds you UENT. Your action comes up and you Delay. The enemy's turn comes up and you are no longer Blind. You can then take you Delayed action while not Blind. So the 'you can't Delay out of harmful effects" actually only applies to harmful effects you put on yourself. Let's take a slightly better example, Heedless Fury gives you a -5 on all your defenses. If you Delay you keep this penalty until you take your action. This is also kind of a crappy example so I will generate a goo, but hypothetical example. Suppose you have a power that causes you to go blind UENT. When your turn comes up you can Delay because you can take actions, but you can not use the Delay to escape the Blindness unlike in the example above where you were Blinded by an enemy. Frankly, I am not sure if there are examples like this in the game, but I expect that this rule is 'defensive' to prevent a hypothetical abuse.

So one question: Can you launch UENT or USNT actions from a free, immediate, or opportunity action? I will have to keep an eye out for that kind of effect since it will impact the program. Well, you can definitely launch such an effect from a Readied action which is technically immediate, but it is modeled as a whole action by the program and it resets initiative so this works nicely.

Okay, back to software. If I change the architecture of my little program to not have 'tracking entries' but instead have effects tied directly to the Start and End this reflects the game better. My notion of tracking entries actually fits with 3.5 and not 4.0 since in 3.5 you have effects that essentially get their own initiative since you Delay to be out of synch with them.

When your turn comes up naturally all your USNT effects should turn off. You then have 3 choices. If you take your turn or ready an action ALL your UENT effects should turn off. If you Delay your positive UENT effects should turn off. If you either take your delayed action or you delayed action is lost when you go to the top of the order all your negative UENT go off. So you can actually have your UENTs go off right before your USNT would go off. Course you probably wouldn't have any USNTs because you didn't act.

Note, you can not Delay in front of yourself. This would allow you to basically allow you to skip your Start phase if you Delayed the entire round.

So this leads to each entry having a list of effects that can be triggered by specific FSM transitions. Back to coding!

Feat Choices

This is going to be more from a player perspective. I was looking through some of the feats and I took a quick look at the 'multiclass' feats. This is when I came across the multiclass leader feats. The multiclass leader feat gives you a a use per encounter of the basic healing power. This is very, very good. A feat you can take at first level that allows you to take a minor action to use a healing surge on yourself or another. Imagine a four player party: a defender, a controller, and two strikers. If each one took a multiclass leader feat at first level they would have twice as much healing as if they had a dedicated leader class.

The drawback is that you can only 'multiclass' to one other class. Once you have selected a multiclass feat to one class you can't choose another (unless of course, you retrain).

Player versus DM

The nature of D&D is a little weird. The DM is essentially a host. His job is to set up the game, tell the story, and make sure people have fun. In this sense the DM is playing together with the players so they can all have fun. But a large part of D&D is tactical wargaming. The DM creates battle scenarios and takes on the role of the enemies. In this sense the DM is playing AGAINST the players. This leads to a little confusion about whose side the DM is on.

In battles, a DM is supposed to make it fun and challenging and not to just crush the players. He has to make it tough enough so that there is challenge, but not so hard that the PCs have no chance. You want to occasionally fudge things so the PCs can survive, but you don't want them to feel like their are no consequences and they can't lose. In a fight they should be struggling to win and being forced to think. A lot of time my players think I am out to get them because I naturally take on the side of the monsters I am controlling. I remember one time playing Champions and a character was attacked on the sewer. I rolled the damage, 4d6. I got a 23 which is an amazing roll so I yelled out "Yes!" and players reported a look of glee on my face. I then realized that 23 points of damage was enough to instantly kill the poor character...

But this adversarial relationship can be dangerous and can infect other parts of the game. Some players go take playing against the DM outside the realm of just combat encounters and engage in excessive complaining, rules lawyering, power gaming, and even attempts to cheat. Now there is a place for complaining, rules lawyering, and power gaming (though not cheating), but any of these behaviors taken to an extreme can be problematic. A player might feel triumph at tricking the DM on some rules point or trying to out argue with a DM or even wear one down with complaints to get their way. A player feeling like they are competing against not just the DM, but the game designers can seek out rules exploits as a way of showing how smart they are and how they can easily disrupt a game. Some DMs may enjoy this kind of behavior since it is something they can 'play against', but as the rules have solidified and grown more defined from first to fourth edition and general rule of "the DM is always right" seems to have weakened in many peoples minds, and the notion of 'beating the DM at the rules' seems to have strengthened.

My personal style is non-competitive. It is one of the reasons I like D&D. I play games to have fun with other people and not to crush or dominate them. So as a DM I don't like having an adversarial relationship with my players. I am working so that you can have fun and having a player complain or try to mess up my game makes it not fun for me. In the past I have let players reduce my enjoyment, but as I have observed myself over the last decade of DMing I realize that one of my chief weaknesses is losing energy. In the beginning I put in a lot of work, but later on I slowly run out of steam and do less work. One big culprit in this is any reduction in enjoying the game. Basically players who I feel are trying to compete against me make it not fun and make me less interested in playing.

In the past I have not been proactive about dealing with this. I would let people stay who weren't enjoyable for me to DM because I needed players and didn't want to be a dick by kicking out people, but I now understand that this doesn't really work. My biggest DMing gap in my post college life was partially due to just being worn down by a player. He wasn't a bad guy, but he made it less fun. Maybe I should have talked to him about this, but I am not sure what I would have said. I think it would have come down to me saying, "Stop complaining, it is making it not fun for me." And he probably would have said that I should stop doing things that made him complain.

Anyway, my post college gaming has been about finding people to game with and becoming friends with them instead of finding friends and gaming with them. This reduces the complications of 'you can't kick out a friend' so I have freedom to say who is in my game and to not use this power to exclude people who aren't going to be fun to play with is something that I have to do to make the game something I will continue to want to do.

Quests

So fourth edition introduced 'Quests' that give you experience and rewards. This idea is most likely borrowed / partially inspired by MMOs. The typical usage is you meet someone who has a task for you. You complete this task, return to them and get a reward as well as experience points. In my own game I am taking a little different approach.

I am trying to make my game very story oriented so I decided to use the quests to essentially spur the characters along their own plotline. Instead of being given generic quests by NPCs I am simply assigning them experience for goals that they basically have anyway. One aspect of this is to have very large rewards for very serious and important goals. This focuses the players on the goals of the characters and rewards people for working on their storyline. This also gives me some room to adjust experience in case one person lags behind. I can focus the story on them and increase their experience point bonuses from their story.

Multiple mobs and Initiative

So the way initiative tends to work is that each player rolls a separate initiative and each type of mosnter rolls an initiative for that entire type. The reasons behind this are mainly bookkeeping ones. In a large battle where you are fighting maybe 20 guys that is a lot of initiative entries to track. Also you would have to match up for initiative entry to a particular participant instead of just having them all go at once and not worry about which entry matches which figure.

Well, finding the figure on the board the matches your data entry has become much more important given the number of individual effects. So I need a solution for this. I was planning on a series of lettered or colored tokens.

But this opens a new question. When the cost of tracking data entry to unit goes down would you want to roll a separate initiative for each member of a monster type?

PRO

• One danger in tactical battle is focused fire or multiple attacks done without being able to react. When all the enemies go at once they can basically unleash one massive attack before anyone can react. Interleaving actions prevents this massive build up of actions that occur without the option for attacking. In 4E this kind of thing is even more dangerous because monsters may have synergies or powerful encounter attacks that all go off at once.
• Like the above item, bunching the initiatives of a type can give them some options that players can't stop. A flood of minions can easily surround and flank characters who are even slightly over extended. They can also easily all move into position and then delay Going from being unflanked to having multiple enemies flanking you with some kind of bonus can again lead to the one super turn effect. Now, you could delay to get create this effect, but you would at least have to make some minor sacrifice to obtain it.
  
• Because the players know that a monster type goes as a group they can meta-game out the number of different types. In one encounter in Dungeon Delves that had a more powerful type mixed in among minions and they were supposed to delay their initiatives to match the slower group. So if you want to 'mix' groups you take an initiative penalty which seems stupid.
• This gives the option of having some units delay or ready and thus splitting the initiative. You could implement a 'splitting' function in the current tracker, but just having each monster having its own initiative order seems like a cleaner solution.
  

CON

• Tracking that many initiatives is a pain. Well, the initiative tracker with a few minor modifications can fix this problem. You just end up with a lot of entries and have to match the entries to figures on the board. See the next item.
  
• Tracking a data entry to a specific figure can often be a hassle. But it is a hassle that you really have to solve seamlessly for 4E anyway.
  

So in making this list of pros and cons I have convinced myself that IF you have a good system for tracking individual participants and for automatically doing bookkeeping (like rolling initiative for 10 guys and placing them in initiative order seamlessly), it is best to have a separate initiative entry for each unit in the battle.

So the steps I need to undertake are to modify the initiative tracker to generate numbers for large groups and label each group with a fixed letter and produce a series of easily useable tokens with letters.

Wishlists and Finding Items

So one thing that was done new in some 4e games was to use a character generated wishlist of items. The idea is that when you generate treasure instead of generating a completely random item you pick an item from a list of items that your players want. The benefit is clear. When you find a magic item it is exciting and cool. I have been in plenty of games where most of what you find is essentially magical junk that no one will use.

This issue got worse in 3rd edition since you could craft stuff. Your collection of items would include mainly the crafted stuff that you really wanted and maybe a couple of items you found that were useful to you. In early editions that had no real item crafting rules you really had to adapt to what you found, but also since you couldn't craft the items themselves could be extremely powerful.

So the things you want in a treasure generation system:
A) Magic items are not useless. They won't be just tossed into a sack for later sale with the players going 'bleh' i.e. toss that +1 Guisarme into the Bag of Holding.
B) Found magic items will be better than crafted items. (not a big problem in any edition of D&D)
C) Finding magic items won't be like checking off an entry. There will be a sense of 'Ooooh, what does it do? Who can use that best?'
D) Finding magic items will force decisions about what item to use and what strategies to use.
E) Random found magic items shouldn't overwhelm cool or plot specific items.
F) Magic items should have a 'found as part of the game' feel and not a 'found in the books' feel.

In regards to point E, I remember my high school game where I had a living metal blade crafted by a sentient metal creature we had helped. Later on we picked up a +3 sword. I really wanted to use my living metal weapon, but the +3 was better.

So in formulating a plan I have come up with the following. Magical treasure will almost always be a higher level than the players. Exceptions to this will include stuff like, 'Hey these orcs are using magic formed blades from the mystic forges of Placewhere. Lets check out Placewhere!' This will help reduce the whole dump-the-plus-one-guisarme-in-the-sack issue. Also, I will probably randomly roll up the items, but I will roll maybe 3 times and pickout the item that seems most suited to the PCs. This way magic items will still have a random discovery feel and be surprising, but they won't be utterly useless or not fit in.

Gear of Legends

So if you read descriptions of enchanted items that have appeared in game materials and fiction a lot of times the 'story of the item' is not so much concerned with the crafting of the item than it is with the heroics achieved with that item. For example, the mystic gauntlet is the one worn by Jichael Mackson when he battled a horde of zombies. The implication of many of these stories is that the greatness of the deeds done with this item rub off on the item itself and inpart it with specialness. Objects become special/enchanted because of the great things done with them.

Fourth edition does some interesting stuff with magic items. It makes them basically requried gear for scaling purposes although 'found' items can still be overpowered making them somewhat special. It is a heavily slot based system. I think I have written in a previous post about how slot based system mimic video games instead of fiction and are kind of suspect. They also emphasized artifacts as the 'special' magic items that add to the story.

I digress a little bit. My basic point is that if you like the idea of the greatness of a deed rubbing off on gear you can have have a system where gear essential gets experience. Systems like this have been brought up before, but a simple way to handle this kind of thing is that every character gets x% of his experience is residium to enchant/enhance the gear he was using. No ritual is needed, just an extended rest. This way even the plain items can have a little more character. Instead of swapping out gear, you can keep the weapons you started with and they begin to develop a history. "With the blade a avenged my father when I was a boy. I have followed that path of vengence and the blade that slew your minions will now slay you demon!"