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Mystical-man
2021-11-08, 05:46 PM
To explain what I mean, action economy is definitely a thing but when thinking about it more what's the actual cause of it? Like all things considered it's not linked to any defensive or offensive numbers so in regular dnd it might have no effect on AC, saves, hp, damage, DCs, attack bonuses and etc. and yet it'll still be a large effect on gameplay. I kinda wanna just work out exactly what the effects are that cause action economy to be a thing so that if you wanna fix it you know how action economy works so you know what to work with/against. So with that have a few ideas for a few things to contribute but would like to hear others:


- Easier to react to multiple effects
Basically in regular dnd one creature has one action each turn. All things considered it can only use this action for so much. There could be 3 spellcasters concentrating on a spell which applies an effect and 3 warriors behind cover. A single monster could only really get behind the cover of one of those warriors. A single creature might only really be able to attack one of those spellcasters and have a chance at ending one of those magical effects. Instead multiple creatures could spread themselves out and deal with multiple things at once. All three spellcasters might be attacked and all 3 magical effects could have a chance at being removed. All three warriors might lose the benefits of cover by a creature going around it.

- Reactions can occur more often as player effects occur
Basically put with multiple creatures their positions in initiative could be spread out, with this considered the time between a player going and an enemy going is lessened by this fact. Then from this enemies can react to effects faster than before. If you have 1 big bad boss it might lose the save to a spell which gives a condition and have to wait 6 turns since that's how many player turns there are in front of it's own turn. Alternatively if you have 3 enemies and then one loses a save to an effect then maybe 1 turn later a minion might run up to the spellcaster who is causing the negative effect on the big boss and do something to try and end that effect. Basically enemies can react and try to end effects as they appear rather than giving effects a chance to spread out for extended periods of time.

- Debuff Spirals
Basically speaking if you debuff 1 enemy of 5 then you've affected 20% of the enemies. Alternatively effecting 1 enemy in an encounter with just that 1 enemy means you've affected 100% of your enemies. This gets more effective once you consider how debuffs might stack over and over and then also how each debuff could also increase the chances of more debuffs to be applied. Then finally with this debuff spiral you also wanna consider how if you apply a debuff which lowers a monster's defence then there being just 1 big bad means that basically every attack or effect made after you benefits from the debuff you applied.

- Damage Earlier on
If you have designed an encounter where one group of 3 will deal 100 damage over the course of 5 turns and then alternatively in another encounter you had one creature do the same amount of damage over those turns then in general the distribution of that damage will be different for both encounters. In the one creature encounter it'd be 20 damage per turn. For the 3 creature encounter you could expect 30 damage initially, 20 damage once one creature dies then 10 damage once two creatures die. That distribution would be equal to the 20 damage per turn for just 1 creature but then consider then that means more damage will be dealt right at the start. Going to 0 at turn 1 is more damaging then going to 0 at turn 5.


Is this an accurate list of things or are some maybe not so accurate? Also if you have anything extra to add please do I'd like to hear it.

noob
2021-11-08, 06:40 PM
Simple factor: some actions can be countered by other actions or requires an action to be countered.
Ex: a spell(one action) can be countered by a counterspell(one action of the reaction type)
You need an action to escape a grapple.
The more bodies you have on one side the most likely they will be able to access those ways to deny actions or to use actions that would require the opponent to spend actions to deny or counter.
So when there is 4 characters on one side and 1 opponent on the other you can see how that will factor: the opponent does not have 4 actions to cast 3 spells and escape a grapple.

Telok
2021-11-08, 11:52 PM
To explain what I mean, action economy is definitely a thing but...

But what sort of a thing is it?

Are we talking about team A having more players on the field than team B? Are we talking that some characters/players get 4-6 real useful things to do in a combat turn while others get two and a 'maybe if the stars align & the dm is nice' useful actions? Is this about a party of 4 PCs getting 10:1 actions on a single bloated bag of hit points monster and you're annoyed they win fights? Is the D&D 5e goblin conga line problem part of this? Is this a D&D thing or do we care that games like Champions, ShadowRun, or Vampire have successfully dealt with characters & npcs having different numbers of actions in combat for decades?

"Action economy" covers a big actiony-wactiony ball of... stuff. Do we have a specific focus or are we just tossing in comments like "AD&D fighters get a full attack routine on anything in melee with them that doesn't either engage the fighter or cautiously withdraw behind its allies".

OldTrees1
2021-11-09, 12:10 AM
To explain what I mean, action economy is definitely a thing but when thinking about it more what's the actual cause of it? Like all things considered it's not linked to any defensive or offensive numbers so in regular dnd it might have no effect on AC, saves, hp, damage, DCs, attack bonuses and etc. and yet it'll still be a large effect on gameplay. I kinda wanna just work out exactly what the effects are that cause action economy to be a thing so that if you wanna fix it you know how action economy works so you know what to work with/against. So with that have a few ideas for a few things to contribute but would like to hear others:

I believe you are overthinking it (not that those thoughts are not useful):

Characters are allowed to act. Some games measure this in units of time. Other games measure this in units of actions. The abstraction of time into "actions" is what transforms the time economy (spend time to get outcomes) into an action economy (spend actions to get outcomes).

That is all the "action economy" is. It is merely the fact that characters are granted some number of actions to spend as their currency to act.

Now the impacts of the action economy (when it differs from a time economy) and the impacts of a time economy (when it does not differ) are much more complicated but also much more intuitive. YOU experience a time economy. Right now you are spending time reading this sentence. Some of you might be multitasking and thus do more tasks per second but with any downsides of that multitasking. An action economy inherits much of the time management lessons we learn IRL but also cuts time into discrete actions and then abstracts it away from strictly representing time. In some action economies there are actions you can take that refund you some actions. Often they refund with diminishing returns or at the cost of currency from another economy.



Edit:
Now how do you handle action economy? You are probably concerned about encounter balance (as a GM) or encounter advantage (as a Player). Encounter balance/advantage is the result of many economies. The action economy is merely one of the economies the opposing sides are bringing to bear. There is also the economy of limited resources (hp, mana, etc) being expended. The question is how much one side can leverage an local advantage (action advantage) into a global advantage (advantage in the encounter). Often this is a race as each side has their own relative advantages and they are attempting to convert their advantage faster than the other side does.

Case Dragon: The party has more actions per round but the dragon has stronger abilities. Those encounters are a race between the dragon's stronger abilities vs the party's greater number of actions. Which will dominate the health economy?

Case Earth Elemental: The party has more actions per round but the elemental has a huge initial advantage in the health economy. Will the party leverage their greater number of actions to a big enough impact to overcome the elemental's initial lead in the attrition of the health economy?

Mastikator
2021-11-09, 02:25 AM
Action economy is a consequence of being only able to a specific number of actions in a given time frame. It gives rise to the need to optimize your result over that time since you are competing with someone who also has limited actions / time. It's not unique to RPGs, Chess has action economy, Stardew Valley has action economy.

Actions that cost the enemy more actions than it cost you are strong because it lets you do more stuff, in chess if you check someone they have to make a move in response which may be non-developing, if the check comes with development then it's essentially FREE development. The same is true in D&D, you cast slow on your opponents and at least 2 failed their save = those two now may not be able to do stuff on their turn = you've created a free turn for your team in regards to those who failed the save.

I don't think you should try to work against action economy, the thing that makes games interesting and fun are things that give rise to action economy. Action economy is good actually!

Martin Greywolf
2021-11-09, 05:24 AM
Action economy is what happens if you have actions that are limited. More interesting question is, why is action economy so overwhelmingly important? And the answer is, it's an emergent property from the following:


you want a turn-based system with action to make TTRPG playable
you want to make a TTRPG that is at least vaguely based on real combat
Lanchester's laws


Lanchester's laws, more relevantly his second law, state that if you have two sides that can all attack each other at the same time with their full numbers, a linear advantage in numbers or power scales exponantially. As a quick example, if you have two equal sides, and one can attack twice as often, they will leave with four times the combat power left.

That means that even if you let players react to every single thing, e.g. make counterspells a free action and so on, action economy will still be a thing, because the man who can fireball twice as often is the man who will win.

This is made worse by what Lanchester's laws mean for your strategy - the way to win is to reduce the opponent's ability to hurt you as quickly as possible while preserving your own, and letting things snowball. This is knows as The Only Important HP Is The Last One rule, and as a result, having two actions to do 10 damage a piece to take out two goblin archers is very frequently more valuable than having a single attack that hits for 40 damage - and it also explains in mathematical terms why save or suck is so good: temporarily crippling enemy combat power lets your own snowball to a point where it is unstoppable. It depends on what you're fighting, of course, but still.

King of Nowhere
2021-11-09, 05:40 AM
It's very simple how action economy works.
Every time you attack, you hurt your enemy. If you can attack twice, you hurt the enemy twice. The effect is equivalent to dealing double damage.
Or, you cast a spell twice and the opponent must resist both times; it's like having disadvantage on the saving throw.

Quertus
2021-11-09, 06:51 AM
Action economy is a logical consequence.

If I have 4 people chopping vegetables, and you have two, all things being equal, my team will chop twice as many vegetables in the same amount of time / will chop vegetables twice as fast.

Saying, "I want to do something about action economy" seems tantamount to saying, "I want to do something about my game making sense".

And there's plenty of games out there that don't make sense. But why should we want to have nonsense as a goal?

Satinavian
2021-11-09, 07:59 AM
Action economy is what happens when you want every person involved to have a meaningful contribution. If everything someone could contribute is meaningless, his actions are as well. If somone is powerful enough do solve everything by himself, it doesn't matter, how many collaborators he has.

NichG
2021-11-09, 08:20 AM
Action economy is a logical consequence.

If I have 4 people chopping vegetables, and you have two, all things being equal, my team will chop twice as many vegetables in the same amount of time / will chop vegetables twice as fast.

Saying, "I want to do something about action economy" seems tantamount to saying, "I want to do something about my game making sense".

And there's plenty of games out there that don't make sense. But why should we want to have nonsense as a goal?

The case where action economy would stop working that way would be if metered opportunities were more important to the flow of events than the chance to act.

For example, take something like a strategy game or city builder where maybe you can click and give orders as much as you want, but you're bottlenecked by the rate at which taxes come in. Or if we take the cooking analogy, the dish needs to spend 30 minutes in the oven no matter whether one person or ten people prepared it.

So if you really wanted a game that made sense and didn't have action economy issues, you'd need a game which is about each side in a conflict collaboratively taking advantage of shared opportunities which they don't have the ability to create through their actions, only to exploit.

A combat example might be a game with much more limited target engagement rules, so only one character can effectively attack or affect a particular target each round. It doesn't make sense at skirmish level, but if each PC controls a unit of 100 troops, then it makes some sense that two units can't double up so easily.

Xervous
2021-11-09, 01:20 PM
Action economy is something far down at the fundamental level. In order for an action economy to be a quantifiable thing you need a default mechanical limit on actions taken by a given generic agent, and a way of either breaking the default for that agent, lowering the limit on another agent, or having the possibility that - at any time - one group of able agents might outnumber another.

Bridge does not enter a state where action economy can be observed because there are always two teams with two hands, each hand always playing one card per trick.

Futbol games can have all manner of momentary shifts in action economy. Two guys with a breakaway facing down the goalie. One guy receiving a kick in the midst of 5 defenders. A player is ejected and the whole team must play a man down.

Tabletop games with a party of characters pitted against a single creature are starting from an imbalanced action economy. But we need to step back and ask what is the point of the singular monster? If the monster functions with the same limits as the players and needs to be statistically challenging you’re looking at a lot of coin flip deaths (which is not by itself a bad thing). The answer most games come to is allowing the singular monster to play by different rules.

Glimbur
2021-11-09, 03:51 PM
Banner Saga has strict alternation between sides for its turn based combat. Characters are... chosen randomly for the side, or based on when they last went or a speed stat or something. But what this means is a debuffed enemy can be valuable to keep alive, so the enemy turns are less dangerous. The health/armor system plays into that too,
more damaged units also do less damage. Just another way to poke at the action economy.

Pauly
2021-11-09, 03:57 PM
Action economy has little to with the numbers per side. Economy is usually defined as a rate per unit, not a total per side.

What causes action economy is:

(1) when different actions have differing effects despite having the same cost.

Casting Fireball and Magic Missile have the same action cost. Since Fireball does more damage and effects more enemies, FB is more action efficient than MM. Whether FB is the better tactical choice is a different matter.

(2) Freebies.

Feats such as Cleave and Evasion give free actions. Rules such as Attack of Opportunity and Backstab give free actions. Putting yourself in position to take advantage of freebies causes action efficiency.

(3) Mapping/geometry
If you’re using a battlemap then the layout of the map and grid affects action efficiency.
A simple example, if you’re using square grid and diagonal movement is permitted then diagonal movement is always more action efficient than moving in straight lines.
Being able to map the most efficient path causes action efficiency. Being able to use terrain to your advantage causes action efficiency. Whatever grid you’re using will create opportunities for efficiency.

4) artificial limits.
Turns represent a slice of time and there is a limit to what a character can do in any given slice of time. Game time does not flow continuously. A common limit is you can move X and take an action, but if you move X+1 you can’t take an action. D&D (iirc) allows a major action and a minor action per turn. So it is always more efficient to run a series of major action/minor action turns rather than continuously take major actions or minor actions.

5) IGO-UGO turns.
IGO-UGO is where one character takes it complete turn while the rest of the world is in stasis. This allows complete planning because the environment is static and predictable whilst the character takes his or her turn.
Alternative systems are randomized turns and plotted simultaneous movement. Randomized turns are where the next actor is chosen randomly. This significantly reduces the predictability element while technically not changing action efficiency does reduce it’s impact on player decision making. Plotted simultaneous movement is usually only found in vehicle combat systems, but can also be found in dueling systems where players choose a card for their stance in combat and the difference in the cards effects the result of that round of combat.

dafrca
2021-11-09, 08:34 PM
Action economy has little to with the numbers per side. Economy is usually defined as a rate per unit, not a total per side.

But doesn't the number add actions per round so to speak or am I not understanding the idea correctly?

One side has six "units" with 3 actions each and the other side has one "unit" with 3 actions. Both sides have a rate of 3 per unit but the one side is not the same as the other.

Of course if you say I am convoluting different things here then I will accept that because I am not saying I understand the action economy idea 100%. :smallsmile:

Pauly
2021-11-09, 08:49 PM
But doesn't the number add actions per round so to speak or am I not understanding the idea correctly?

One side has six "units" with 3 actions each and the other side has one "unit" with 3 actions. Both sides have a rate of 3 per unit but the one side is not the same as the other.

Of course if you say I am convoluting different things here then I will accept that because I am not saying I understand the action economy idea 100%. :smallsmile:

It’s the difference between efficiency and volume.

Let’s take an example a party fighting a dragon.

The party has many more actions it can take. It has the volume advantage
The dragon’s individual actions are much more effective. It has the economy advantage.

For the party to win it needs to shift the economy action advantage. It can do this by:
Spacing - preventing the dragon’s AoE attacks effecting too many players.
Buffs/debuffs - making their actions more effective and/or the dragon’s less effective.
Use of space - making the dragon move, which is the least efficient use of action the dragon has available.

dafrca
2021-11-09, 10:32 PM
It’s the difference between efficiency and volume.

Let’s take an example a party fighting a dragon.

The party has many more actions it can take. It has the volume advantage
The dragon’s individual actions are much more effective. It has the economy advantage.

For the party to win it needs to shift the economy action advantage. It can do this by:
Spacing - preventing the dragon’s AoE attacks effecting too many players.
Buffs/debuffs - making their actions more effective and/or the dragon’s less effective.
Use of space - making the dragon move, which is the least efficient use of action the dragon has available.

Ah so sort of number of actions vs the "value" of those actions. So the Dragon uses one action but kills three of the party then the one action was quite effective and valuable to the dragon. Does that sound right?

Pauly
2021-11-10, 01:11 AM
Ah so sort of number of actions vs the "value" of those actions. So the Dragon uses one action but kills three of the party then the one action was quite effective and valuable to the dragon. Does that sound right?

Exactly.

Some extra points I’ve thought if that affect action economy

6) buffs (and debuffs)
These act as multipliers to the effect of your actions. The duration of the buff, the acton cost of triggering the buff and the amount of the buff will affect how economical a particular buff is. Items that grant permabuffs are very good. Generally speaking a small effect long duration buff is best for long encounters and short sharp buffs are best for quickly resolved encounters.
What I've said about buffs applies to debuffs as well, just in the reverse.

7) wasted actions.
Anything that causes enemy actions to be wasted boosts your relative action economy. Spell resistance, immunities, damage soak etc. all cause enemy actions to be wasted. Making the enemy waste actions while you waste none is a source of improved economy.
Generally speaking movement is the least efficient action. Forcing the enemy to spend actions for moving while you don’t gives a source of economic advantage.

noob
2021-11-10, 02:33 AM
It’s the difference between efficiency and volume.

Let’s take an example a party fighting a dragon.

The party has many more actions it can take. It has the volume advantage
The dragon’s individual actions are much more effective. It has the economy advantage.

For the party to win it needs to shift the economy action advantage. It can do this by:
Spacing - preventing the dragon’s AoE attacks effecting too many players.
Buffs/debuffs - making their actions more effective and/or the dragon’s less effective.
Use of space - making the dragon move, which is the least efficient use of action the dragon has available.

That is just not how the action economy term is used.
Action economy counter-intuitively is often used as in "the business of getting more actions through either allies or tricks like summons, time stop and the like" or as in "you are richer in action count than the opponent"
You are talking about action value rather than action economy.
In the end action economy (as in getting more actions than the opponent) usually prevails if there is actions that requires the opponent to spend an action to counter or get to be in a real disadvantage(actions such as grappling, debuffs so debilitating that you either have to remove it or just do nothing in the fight) or actions the opponent does that can be cancelled merely with one action (spells getting countered by counterspell for example)

Quertus
2021-11-10, 06:29 AM
Banner Saga has strict alternation between sides for its turn based combat. Characters are... chosen randomly for the side, or based on when they last went or a speed stat or something. But what this means is a debuffed enemy can be valuable to keep alive, so the enemy turns are less dangerous. The health/armor system plays into that too,
more damaged units also do less damage. Just another way to poke at the action economy.

"Oh great and mighty Dragon, you have made a grave error: you have engaged us with 10 of your kobolds, rather than attacking us alone"

If I ever play Banner Saga, I'll have to be sure to bring along a group of useless enemies / research a "summon enemies" spell / otherwise play with this silly action rule.


The case where action economy would stop working that way would be if metered opportunities were more important to the flow of events than the chance to act.

For example, take something like a strategy game or city builder where maybe you can click and give orders as much as you want, but you're bottlenecked by the rate at which taxes come in. Or if we take the cooking analogy, the dish needs to spend 30 minutes in the oven no matter whether one person or ten people prepared it.

So if you really wanted a game that made sense and didn't have action economy issues, you'd need a game which is about each side in a conflict collaboratively taking advantage of shared opportunities which they don't have the ability to create through their actions, only to exploit.

A combat example might be a game with much more limited target engagement rules, so only one character can effectively attack or affect a particular target each round. It doesn't make sense at skirmish level, but if each PC controls a unit of 100 troops, then it makes some sense that two units can't double up so easily.

In the "city builder" (StarCraft, Warcraft), having 4 cities against 1 is still a big advantage. And I really do think 200 people can shoot at 100.

But the oven, and the "rate of taxes", does give me the general idea that not everything allows the utilization of numbers to produce action economy.

Are their RPGs that (unlike Banner Saga) logically produces such a scenario by virtue of the premise?

JNAProductions
2021-11-10, 06:55 AM
"Oh great and mighty Dragon, you have made a grave error: you have engaged us with 10 of your kobolds, rather than attacking us alone"

If I ever play Banner Saga, I'll have to be sure to bring along a group of useless enemies / research a "summon enemies" spell / otherwise play with this silly action rule.

In the "city builder" (StarCraft, Warcraft), having 4 cities against 1 is still a big advantage. And I really do think 200 people can shoot at 100.

But the oven, and the "rate of taxes", does give me the general idea that not everything allows the utilization of numbers to produce action economy.

Are their RPGs that (unlike Banner Saga) logically produces such a scenario by virtue of the premise?

Banner Saga is a videogame, Quertus.

Pauly
2021-11-10, 07:28 AM
That is just not how the action economy term is used.
Action economy counter-intuitively is often used as in "the business of getting more actions through either allies or tricks like summons, time stop and the like" or as in "you are richer in action count than the opponent"
You are talking about action value rather than action economy.
In the end action economy (as in getting more actions than the opponent) usually prevails if there is actions that requires the opponent to spend an action to counter or get to be in a real disadvantage(actions such as grappling, debuffs so debilitating that you either have to remove it or just do nothing in the fight) or actions the opponent does that can be cancelled merely with one action (spells getting countered by counterspell for example)

What you’re describing is how action economy is measured in D&D. That is a function of how D&D slices time into turns and what it allows you to do in a turn.
I’m talking more generally since the OP wasn’t D&D specific and this is the general forum. I did use D&D examples purely for convenience as that is the system most people understand.

NichG
2021-11-10, 09:02 AM
In the "city builder" (StarCraft, Warcraft), having 4 cities against 1 is still a big advantage. And I really do think 200 people can shoot at 100.


I meant more SimCity, Cities: Skylines, etc. You can pause those games and click as much as you want to set up buildings and zones, but even with infinite actions-per-minute as a player, other things determine the pace at which the city grows and sometimes you just have to wait. And a higher population in those games doesn't translate to more actions per unit time that you can take. There is an economy in those games, but it's bottlenecked by something other than the rate of actions being taken.



Are their RPGs that (unlike Banner Saga) logically produces such a scenario by virtue of the premise?

I don't know the extent to which they exist, but it wouldn't be hard to design one. Basically have some resource that just requires time to build up, can't be hoarded arbitrarily, and which scales the power of actions faster than linear. So e.g. a mage can safely channel 1 mana per round into a spell up to a cap set by the spell's complexity, but the power of the spell scales as mana^2. Physical characters have Stamina, which is a quickly regenerating resource that they can spend on martial maneuvers or add bonuses to attacks and the like, but when they run out they're stuck with movement and basic attacks. Put the game on a hex grid so characters can only have six neighbors in melee, and make firing ranged attacks and spells use much stricter line of sight and firing into melee rules than D&D, and have targeting uncertainties for AoEs which means you can't safely shear off the corner of a melee blob. Also in general give everyone ways to be flexible in how many actions a round they take, so if someone does get an extra action from somewhere it's like a 20% buff not a 100% buff.

Also, if even minor damage comes with a debuff and is slow to heal, then sending your entire army in against an AoE user will be wasteful compared to sending a smaller squad.

Glorthindel
2021-11-10, 10:26 AM
"Oh great and mighty Dragon, you have made a grave error: you have engaged us with 10 of your kobolds, rather than attacking us alone"

If I ever play Banner Saga, I'll have to be sure to bring along a group of useless enemies / research a "summon enemies" spell / otherwise play with this silly action rule.


It does create weird counter-intuitive behavoir, where instead of finishing off nearly-defeated foes, the optimum strategy is to weaken foes to the point where they present a negligible threat, then leave them on the field to take up turn slots in the enemy combat order.

That first fight when you are still getting used to the mechanics and you foolishly wipe the chaff monsters off the field only to watch the one big guy tear through your entire group like an insane beserker, because he now gets to go after every one of your own men is a mistake you only make the once.

[Note for those who haven't played the game: In Banner Saga, units have two "stats" - an armour value and a strength value. Attacks are made using the strength value, and if the strength exceeds the armour value of the target, it inflicts that much damage to the targets strength value (which doubles as its hit points). So, once you have done enough damage to reduce an enemies strength value below your own units armour values, you can safely ignore it and leave it to take up turn slots that the actually dangerous enemies could have benefitted from if it had been dead. Special skills slightly changes this, and you can choose to 'attack' a characters armour instead to reduce its armour value and make future attacks more effective, but this is the general principle]

OldTrees1
2021-11-10, 12:03 PM
"Oh great and mighty Dragon, you have made a grave error: you have engaged us with 10 of your kobolds, rather than attacking us alone"

If I ever play Banner Saga, I'll have to be sure to bring along a group of useless enemies / research a "summon enemies" spell / otherwise play with this silly action rule.


If I were GMing Banner Saga (I know nothing about it except from this thread) then I would resolve it one of a few ways:
1) The Dragon brought along a single kobold mob enemy. Many bodies but 1 actor. That means the encounter can have the dragon, the lair, and the kobold swarm as 3 actors for the initiative.

2) When Quertus brought along some useless enemies it became a fight with 3 teams. Each team would take turns but the Dragon and the PCs would not start sharing initiative merely because Quertus brought along some extra enemies.

3) If Quertus learned a summon enemies spell, I would work with them and they would get one of 2 options (unless Quertus has some further innovations in that discussion)
A) Quertus summons a 3rd team and it becomes a 3 way fight. Consider summoning an uncontrolled demon in the middle of the PCs vs Dragon fight.
B) Quertus summons an enemy and convinces the Dragon that it is one of their team. This would be a variation on any of the action economy debuff spells like Confusion/Hold Monster/Slow in D&D. It would be balanced accordingly.

Stonehead
2021-11-10, 12:13 PM
I'm a little confused what the question's asking. If it's just "What causes action economies to emerge", it's basically intrinsic to there being actions.

In the context of rpgs, I only ever really see the action economy brought up when talking about how solo boss fights are very hard to pull off against a party of 4, because the boss gets 1 turn, and the party gets 4. In that context, the cause is anything that the boss can't just scale-up to counter.

So, HP damage I don't think is a cause, there are lots of video games and board games that pull off 1v4 fights by just scaling up the 1's hp. The monster manual typically doesn't scale up hp like this, because that would make a monster fun to play against at party level + 3, but pretty boring to fight at party level. Still, if you look long enough, or build a pc, or are willing to homebrew, you could pull of a 1v4 boss fight if hp was the only thing you had to worry about, regardless of how that damage is distributed across the fight. The real offenders are stuns/paralyzes/anything to skip turns or actions, especially if they have half effect on a successful save. If everyone gets 1 turn per round, the only way you could scale up a boss to work against multiple turn skips would be to make them resistant or immune, but there are plenty of spells that still inflict partial effects on successful saves. Can't really do anything about that.

The problem gets especially bad in DnD, because after a few levels, spells don't become "lose a turn", they become "lose a turn/level", the only way to have a chance as a solo boss against such a party would be to take out the wizards before they have a turn to act, which isn't fun for anyone.

Telok
2021-11-10, 02:22 PM
I'm a little confused what the question's asking. If it's just "What causes action economies to emerge", it's basically intrinsic to there being actions.

In the context of rpgs, I only ever really see the action economy brought up when talking about how solo boss fights are very hard to pull off against a party of 4, because the boss gets 1 turn, and the party gets 4. In that context, the cause is anything that the boss can't just scale-up to counter.

Mostly I think its a problem for modern D&D and D&D knockoffs. The supers games I've played all handled it, the harder sci-fi games made it an intentional feature, and games with stunt rules & decent metacurrency seem to handle it OK.

In AD&D, Shadowrun, Traveller, Vampire, etc., getting 4:1 advantage is not just a good thing to do, its supposed to be that way and an almost sure win. In Champions & other supers the speedster puts lots of build resources into having many actions while the brick puts lots of resources into super high defense. That balances out in the party and the GM hand crafts the 4:1 villian fight to produce a good traditional supers fight.

Quertus
2021-11-10, 05:46 PM
Banner Saga is a videogame, Quertus.

Oh. :smallredface:


It does create weird counter-intuitive behavoir, where instead of finishing off nearly-defeated foes, the optimum strategy is to weaken foes to the point where they present a negligible threat, then leave them on the field to take up turn slots in the enemy combat order.

That first fight when you are still getting used to the mechanics and you foolishly wipe the chaff monsters off the field only to watch the one big guy tear through your entire group like an insane beserker, because he now gets to go after every one of your own men is a mistake you only make the once.

[Note for those who haven't played the game: In Banner Saga, units have two "stats" - an armour value and a strength value. Attacks are made using the strength value, and if the strength exceeds the armour value of the target, it inflicts that much damage to the targets strength value (which doubles as its hit points). So, once you have done enough damage to reduce an enemies strength value below your own units armour values, you can safely ignore it and leave it to take up turn slots that the actually dangerous enemies could have benefitted from if it had been dead. Special skills slightly changes this, and you can choose to 'attack' a characters armour instead to reduce its armour value and make future attacks more effective, but this is the general principle]

That sounds like it has a lot of game to it for only having 2 stats.


If I were GMing Banner Saga (I know nothing about it except from this thread) then I would resolve it one of a few ways:
1) The Dragon brought along a single kobold mob enemy. Many bodies but 1 actor. That means the encounter can have the dragon, the lair, and the kobold swarm as 3 actors for the initiative.

2) When Quertus brought along some useless enemies it became a fight with 3 teams. Each team would take turns but the Dragon and the PCs would not start sharing initiative merely because Quertus brought along some extra enemies.

3) If Quertus learned a summon enemies spell, I would work with them and they would get one of 2 options (unless Quertus has some further innovations in that discussion)
A) Quertus summons a 3rd team and it becomes a 3 way fight. Consider summoning an uncontrolled demon in the middle of the PCs vs Dragon fight.
B) Quertus summons an enemy and convinces the Dragon that it is one of their team. This would be a variation on any of the action economy debuff spells like Confusion/Hold Monster/Slow in D&D. It would be balanced accordingly.

Your level of sanity is normally great, but it kinda ruins my joke about how counterintuitive the system is. :smalltongue:

Maybe I should have talked about shapeshifter golems (think trans guild currier) and the power of the "infiltrator" prestige class, that lets you consume the opposing team's actions rather than your own.

Duff
2021-11-10, 05:52 PM
As others have alluded to but not outright said
"What do you see as the actual problem?"

Is it "A single powerful monster goes down too fast"
"When the powerful party takes on a village of goblins they die the death of a thousand cuts"
"As a GM i get bored as the whole party pound on my big monster and I just write down ever smaller numbers until it's my turn again"
"My players get bored when it's not their turn and the monster stands there doing nothing"

Pauly
2021-11-11, 12:41 AM
Another factor in action economy is how the game treats unused actions.

A) Use it or lose it. Standard for most games. Failing to use all your actions all the time is a waste
B) React to the enemy. Some games allow a character to spend an action in their turn to react during an enemy’s turn. Most common example is overwatch. Reaction moves are usually more powerful than regular actions. Anyone who’s played a game where the battle ends up being everyone in cover with overwatch will know this.
C) Cumulative actions. You can ‘bank” effort in one turn and then complete the action in the next turn providing conditions are met. This breaks the use it or lose it artifice, but comes with the cost of bookkeeping.

Tanarii
2021-11-11, 10:51 AM
You're taliking about concentrating defense (hit points) and offfense (damage outpu) in one enemy instead of 5.

Here are some upsides:

AoE protection:
5 creatures take potentially 5* as much damage from an AoE.

Damage degradation protection:
5 creatures rapidly do less damage as they die, 20% less per death. 1 creature does full damage until it dies. That's significantly more damage, if death of the 1 occurs at the same time as death of the 5th.

Willie the Duck
2021-11-11, 11:55 AM
As others have alluded to but not outright said
"What do you see as the actual problem?"

Is it "A single powerful monster goes down too fast"
"When the powerful party takes on a village of goblins they die the death of a thousand cuts"
"As a GM i get bored as the whole party pound on my big monster and I just write down ever smaller numbers until it's my turn again"
"My players get bored when it's not their turn and the monster stands there doing nothing"

Yeah, I'm not entirely clear what response OP was attempting to get. I'm assuming not just a definition of action economy.

My best guess is 'why is action economy such a hot topic on discussion boards and what action economy issues instigate such teeth-gnashing?' To which I'd say your scenarios are a big factor. Also several D&D-specific issues like:
"my 3e divine-metamagic-plus-nightsticks CoDzilla build effectively has 3-30 combat buffs cast before the scenario even starts,"
"my 5 polearm master build always has a use of their main action, bonus action, and often reaction actions each round, while your barbarian usually just has something in their main action,"
"My ranged build always has an action which changes hp of the opposition while your melee-only build spends many rounds running up to thing or not even being able to reach them,"
"because of the 5/15-minute workday, my full-caster can fill all 6 rounds of combat we expect to have each day with a (or even more than one) high-powered spell response while your martial character has a slow-and-steady action output that would overtake the caster in effectiveness in a long, drawn-out slog of a day scenario that we don't actually end up doing."
And so forth.

Telok
2021-11-11, 02:56 PM
C) Cumulative actions. You can ‘bank” effort in one turn and then complete the action in the next turn providing conditions are met. This breaks the use it or lose it artifice, but comes with the cost of bookkeeping.

Add "aiming actions" & "wind up for a power hit" to this. I think the Warhammer games do the former and the haymaker move in Champions is the latter.

Stonehead
2021-11-12, 12:33 PM
You're taliking about concentrating defense (hit points) and offfense (damage outpu) in one enemy instead of 5.

Here are some upsides:

AoE protection:
5 creatures take potentially 5* as much damage from an AoE.

Damage degradation protection:
5 creatures rapidly do less damage as they die, 20% less per death. 1 creature does full damage until it dies. That's significantly more damage, if death of the 1 occurs at the same time as death of the 5th.

Interestingly, the two kind of cancel out. With an AoE attack, if you deal 20% of the enemy team's health, you end up with 5 enemies at 80% health, not 4 enemies at 100% health.

Tanarii
2021-11-12, 02:10 PM
Interestingly, the two kind of cancel out. With an AoE attack, if you deal 20% of the enemy team's health, you end up with 5 enemies at 80% health, not 4 enemies at 100% health.
The comparison should be 5 enemies at 16% of total hps left each vs 1 enemy at 96% of total hps for an AoE. Which makes picking off the enemies with single target damage at 16% of total damage required much easier to knock out 20% of their outgoing damage much easier, instead of needing to do 96% to reduce it all the way to 0. On top of the fact that the single AoE did 20% of total damage required instead of only 4%.

Simple example would be 5* 100hp instead of 1*500 hp, with a 20pt AoE. That leaves you with 5*80hp vs 1*480hp.

(Hit points don't actually scale that way of course, since they're counterbalanced by other action economy factors.)

Stonehead
2021-11-12, 08:24 PM
The comparison should be 5 enemies at 16% of total hps left each vs 1 enemy at 96% of total hps for an AoE. Which makes picking off the enemies with single target damage at 16% of total damage required much easier to knock out 20% of their outgoing damage much easier, instead of needing to do 96% to reduce it all the way to 0. On top of the fact that the single AoE did 20% of total damage required instead of only 4%.

Simple example would be 5* 100hp instead of 1*500 hp, with a 20pt AoE. That leaves you with 5*80hp vs 1*480hp.

(Hit points don't actually scale that way of course, since they're counterbalanced by other action economy factors.)

No yeah, I just mean that you can't both deal your aoe damage to all the enemies, and reduce their action economy by taking some of them out early. I guess in practice you'd probably take out the wizard before you take out the fighter but still, I thought it was kind of interesting.

Also, if we're comparing fighting 1 enemy to fighting 5, I think creatures typically have a single-target attack that deals more damage than their AoE, although, admittedly not typically five times stronger.