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View Full Version : Fluid transition in and out of combat



NichG
2011-10-10, 07:06 PM
I'm designing a system based (very) loosely off of the 7th Sea system, correcting things I don't like about that system and introducing new mechanics and sets of things for a very different setting. One thing that bothered me about 7th Sea is its initiative system.

Every combat round everyone rolls a certain number of dice, and takes actions in order based on the numbers they roll. So for instance, someone with an action count of 3 would roll 3d10: 3,6,7, and would take action on phases 3, 6, and 7. You could hold actions for dodges or special maneuvers, use actions to move or aim (bonus to hit) or whatever, and it was sort of a little strategic mini-game around combat. The problem is, at the start of combat its very jarring and time-consuming to establish the order, and you do it again every round. I realized that this is even somewhat true in D&D though much less intrusive: once 'roll initiative!' is called, there's a very strong feel of 'okay, this is the part where we fight'.

So I'm trying to think of ways to have a combat and initiative system that doesn't have such a clear demarcation when combat starts.

One thought I had was to implement an initiative skill or stat that is only used when you're specifically trying to beat someone in a reaction time race. So if a villain is rushing for a button that will launch weapons of destruction and you want to get there first to stop him, its an opposed initiative check. But if you're fighting orcs, you don't make an opposed initiative check against random orc C who is over there fighting someone else.

An order of actions is still necessary so it doesn't come down to people trying to shout over eachother to act more, and thats the part I'm kind of getting stuck on. Normally during play, people who have an idea will say 'I try X', and the GM sort of rotates democratically between people who have actions (ideally), spending some chunk of time with each person or set of people that is roughly even. When it comes down to a fight or fast-paced situation, its important that each player (and enemy) gets about the same sized chunk of time on a fairly fine-grained scale.

My best thought so far is to have a separation between 'free time' and 'fixed time'. In 'free time' each person acts pretty independently and can take wildly different amounts of time with their actions that are smoothed over (so person A can search the room and person B can chat with the owner of the inn and person C can cast a divination spell, even if they'd take 10 minutes, 5 minutes, and 1 minute respectively).

'Fixed time' is any case where some element of the scene is on a clock. So if you're on a crashing airship, you're in fixed time since if you don't do something by time X, something bad may happen. Similarly, a fight would be fixed time, but so would a foot-race or a debate or any situation where there's an 'active' GM-controlled scene element. The transition to fixed time would involve the GM (hopefully somewhat subtly) start asking people 'okay, now what do you do?' and keeping each PC's actions restricted to an appropriate chunk of time.

Now, since 7th Sea has a lot of mechanics based on spending little bits of actions to interrupt, counter, etc, etc, that needs to be replaced somehow. My thought is that each character has a pool of interrupts at all times (an expandable character resource), and can spend from this pool in either fixed or free time. The pool refreshes by 1 (or some amount) every time the PC gets to act, and refreshes completely 'between scenes'.

Can you think of better ways to do this?

Glimbur
2011-10-10, 07:48 PM
The easiest way to do this is to take player actions clockwise (or counterclockwise) around the table with a stopwatch under the table/behind the screen. Give out poker chips to players (and major NPCs) as interrupt tokens. The DM could either put NPC actions in between PC actions or bundle them all at once; interspersing with PC actions is probably better. This doesn't regulate in-game time per character at all though.

It would be possible to seat players in order of character reaction time, and also give out a number of interrupt tokens related to character reaction time. This has the drawback of the same turn order every time things go to fixed time, but it has the advantage of being quick and easy.