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FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-04, 09:16 PM
Another small part of a system I'm trying to build from scratch.

In the game I'm designing, I want to give characters action points of different flavors:

Physical Action Points cover anything that you do with your arms or upper body, such as attacking, blocking, casting spells with physical components, etc.

Movement Action Points cover anything you do with your legs or general posture, such as moving, dodging, feinting or kicking.

Thought Action Points cover anything you do with your head, such as talking or casting spells.

I'm associating the actions by body part so that they work in with the wound system- severe wounds to certain body parts with give you a penalty to your action points.

The number and type of actions you get depend on character build choices; for base line, expect level one characters to get one of each, with one extra they can assign at will.

Your action points describe what you can do in a single turn. You use them for all of the obvious, normal actions (like attacking, moving and casting spells) that you take during your turn. However, you can also use them for certain off-turn actions - primarily Active Defenses. Action Points renew at the end of your turn, not the beginning; this allows for two things. First, single-turn stun effects can happen by directly removing a character's actions points, as they won't regenerate until the end of their next turn. Secondly, it means that players are free to spend all of their remaining action points on their turn- rather than leaving some in reserve for off-turn actions they're not sure if they'll need to take.

Defenses in this system come in three forms- Active, Passive and Resistances. "Resistances" apply as straight damage reduction to all attacks- armor and most magical defenses apply there. "Passive" defenses give you a chance to entirely avoid (or avoid the worst of) all attacks of a certain type- however, Passive defenses are very difficult to get bonuses to.

Finally, Active Defenses allow you to spend action points off-turn, to get a better chance at avoiding certain attacks. Right now I have four Active Defenses planned- Dodge, Block, Parry and Counterspell.

Dodge allows you to spend a movement point to get out of the way of a ranged or melee attack, as well as certain spells.

Parry is only available with certain weapons; it allows you to spend a Physical Action Point to attempt to deflect a melee attack. You can add your own attack bonus to your Parry roll, and a sufficiently high success may give you a free counterattack.

Block allows you to spend a single physical action point to take an attack to the arm, rather than more vulnerable body parts. Unlike the other active defenses, Block is certain to succeed- but you still take the hit. However, you can get extra armor on the blocking arm in the form of a shield, and arms get a little bit of natural resilience.

Counterspell lets you spend a mental action point to attempt to disrupt the casting of an opponent's spell. By default, you can only counter spells targeted at you, but with additional investment, you may protect your party as well. As with Parry, sufficiently high successes may allow you to do more than simply negate your opponent's spell- you may be able to redirect it, or inflict some form of backlash on the enemy caster.

I'm hoping that this system will allow some more interesting patterns to emerge in combat. For instance, in a battle between two evenly matched fighters, one of them may be forced onto the defensive - repeatedly spending their Physical Action Points to block or parry opponent's attack, and being unable to make any of their own. This would continue until they found some way to break the pattern- risking a hit in order to get back on the offensive, getting support from an ally, using a feint to trick their opponent into resisting an attack they were never making, or turning the tides with some sort of free counterattack.

What does everyone think?

Grod_The_Giant
2013-02-05, 12:20 AM
Intriguing. It could be fun. I'd be a little worried about trying to keep track of so many different kinds of AP, though.

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-05, 01:00 AM
Intriguing. It could be fun. I'd be a little worried about trying to keep track of so many different kinds of AP, though.

True... maybe counters for that? Technically, it's not any more types of actions than D&D uses- it's just that they're spread out over a round, rather than just a turn.

DracoDei
2013-02-05, 03:24 PM
How is kicking not a form of attacking? Or is it? In which case an offensive-focused character is almost certainly going to want a good kick attack for when they start a turn in melee range (or if they end up with more move actions then they need to get in range).

Speaking of which, how do you see the number of actions available scaling over the character levels? How many levels do you see the game being designed to cover well? For instance, D&D covers 5 to 20 levels well, depending on who you ask (almost nobody thinks that epic level play works well... any yet I haven't seen anything covering fixing that per se... I think I may start a thread on the subject.)

Depending on how strict one is about communication between PCs/players in combat, everyone is going to want at least a little spellcasting so they can have something to do with their head action.

"Action Points" is a confusing term because it means something very different in D&D, which is the "language" that most people in these forums "speak natively". Not saying you should change it, just warning you.

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-05, 04:36 PM
How is kicking not a form of attacking? Or is it? In which case an offensive-focused character is almost certainly going to want a good kick attack for when they start a turn in melee range (or if they end up with more move actions then they need to get in range).

So, I know that decision is kind of weird- I have a couple of reasons for it. First, wounds apply to specific body parts, and one of the effects of wounds is penalties to actions - wounds to the leg limit movement points, so I generally put anything that you do with your legs in the "Movement" category. Secondly, kicking seems like it would interfere with your ability to take other movement actions, in a way that, say, swinging a sword would not. Finally, I want kicking to be something extra and semi-tricky, that you could use to get an edge when you were otherwise matched point-for-point. If it used physical actions, it would either be better than your normal attack, and replace it entirely, or it would be worse, and it would never be used.


Speaking of which, how do you see the number of actions available scaling over the character levels? How many levels do you see the game being designed to cover well? For instance, D&D covers 5 to 20 levels well, depending on who you ask (almost nobody thinks that epic level play works well... any yet I haven't seen anything covering fixing that per se... I think I may start a thread on the subject.)

So, that's kind of a loaded question- I'm probably gonna start another of these threads about it, but I'm trying to limit myself to one thread per day.

The short version is that I'm trying to focus on Breadth-over-Depth leveling; as your level increases, you get more options, but you don't get that much better at executing the options you already have. So, a 20th level fighter won't be that much more powerful, but will be significantly more versatile, and be able to turn a wider variety of situations to his advantage.

Specifically, I'm having leveling be very, very simple- every level, regardless of class, you get a single Ability, which would be the equivalent of a good feat, a hefty investment in a skill, or a small set of spells (Basic Fire, Advanced Metamagic, etc.) Your "Class" would just be a starting set of abilities, with some allowed variation. Stat and Action Point increases would either be purchased through abilities with level prerequisites, or be given at set levels. That's all very prone to revision, of course.

Right now I'm using "20th level" to describe a high-level character, but that's completely arbitrary- characters could level as long as they wanted, though eventually they'd get kinda identical.




Depending on how strict one is about communication between PCs/players in combat, everyone is going to want at least a little spellcasting so they can have something to do with their head action.

So, a few things to that.

First, yeah, I figure that sooner or later most characters would get at least some magic use- this is written for a magic-heavy setting, and with the magic available, people will want it. However, there's an Ability buy-in for spellcasting, so you might not want to go for it right away.

There's one other part of this system that I didn't get into - "Stances and Trances". These describe states that your characters goes into, where they're constantly sacrificing some number of action points in order to get a continuous benefit. Trances is just the term for expressly mental/magical Stances. For example, "Detect Magic" would be a 1 Thought Action trance.

One of these Stances would be a "Combat Awareness" one, where you sacrifice a mental action point for a bonus to defense. There would also be some Trances specifically intended for martial characters- giving your weapon a flame enchantment, thickening the air around you to slow incoming attacks, etc.

Most actual spells would have a physical component; eventually, mages could buy this off with an Ability, at least for specific classes of spell, but that would probably be more investment than a dedicated fighter would want to make. Without that ability, mages would usually be expected to cast one spell per turn- but, that might be a more powerful spell that required multiple thought actions, or they might be maintaining a trance at the same time.

Anyway, hopefully fighters will have enough other stuff to do with their Thought Action that they won't all be rushing to be spellcasting every round, as well.


"Action Points" is a confusing term because it means something very different in D&D, which is the "language" that most people in these forums "speak natively". Not saying you should change it, just warning you.

Thanks for the heads up... I can't think of any other good terms for it, though. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Grod_The_Giant
2013-02-05, 04:39 PM
I've seen the term "action points" used this way for computer rpgs, at least. You're probably fine.

DracoDei
2013-02-05, 08:52 PM
Your answers cleared up any concerns I had. I was more pointing out implications than problems per se.