Modelling a Chase Scene

[nemedeus]

Not really Swords, but something that got me thinking:


youtu.be/gVgRlPGS69c

[Korbel]

Well, fortunately chases are usually quite easy to model in most systems.
For example there was a nice chase scene in the Betrayer of Asgard on D20 Conan RPG system (minor spoiler alert!): the party is attacked and one of the enemies grabs the treasure and runs. He gets a number of points representing his head start, depending on how fast PCs followed him (resolved combat, or maybe split up). Then the chasing PC must overcome obstacles during his pursuit, usually rolling some test (jumping, reflex, perception, and so on) and often making decisions, if he wants to take more risky, or simpler tests. If he makes the harder rolls, it lowers the thugs points. If he makes something easier, than no change. If he fails, than the thief gains more distance (points). There is a set number of events/obstacles and if you failed to lower his points to 0, then he got away.

[hector]

4th Edition D&D is probably the one that did this best, in my opinion - skill challenges. You can use Acrobatics to take shortcuts, Athletics to catch them up the old fashioned way or Endurance to simple keep running for longer than the other guy can. Knowledge Local or similar can be used to try to find quicker routes (a success doesn't count as a total successs, but gives a bonus to the following Acrobatics or Athletics roll); then a number of successes before 3 failures based on how much of a head start the person being chased has. Pursuit can use Survival, Endurance and Athletics in much the same way, while Sprinting is just a straight opposed Athletics roll.

4e wasn't my favourite game by any stretch, but that's one idea that I think does deserve to be kept from that system.

[EinBein]

Either this: http://roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=335

Or this: http://paizo.com/products/btpy8yst

[nemedeus]

It's not really an Idea they only managed to get right as late as d&d 4e though. My thought is "Isn't that what these numbers have always been there for in the first place?"
No offence meant, i just think it's weird d&d 4e would get the credit for that.

Also, ask Agamemnon, he'll tell you about Burning Wheel (probably), which has a Chases subsystem.
Wait, no. He said he hates Burning Wheel's subsystems. Nevermind.

Either way, it's got subsystems for chases, and also FoRKing (Field of Related Knowledge), which does the same thing as bonuses but in one check.

I'm sorry for being rude. I don't have the highest opinion of the big, much played systems out there. In my opinion, systems like EVERY D&D edition, The Dark Eye (the german D&D equivalent), Cthulhu, Shadowrun, and many others, all fail in numerous ways in terms of game- and/or rule design.
Sometimes i feel like Jake Norwood was the only one back then who ever really got it right.



Anyway, i do think a subsystem for chasing someone, on a level of detail similar (but probably still simpler) to the combat rules however they may be... that is a godsend.

In another forum, i once made a case for overtly specific rules for overtly specific in-game situations.
My argument was along the lines of "the narration informs the rules being used, and the rules being used reflect the the narration".

E.g., having special rules for radiation damage reflects positive on the interconnectedness of the rule-layer and the narrative layer.
In this example, the radiation rules needn't be so different from normal damage as to be unwieldy - a simple distinction in application/algorithm is suffice to make this distinction.

Ultimately, though, the best rules are intuitive ones. A designer on yonder forum told me once: "look closely at how the players use and interpretate your rules. do they make inferrences? how do these inferrences affect the flow of the game?"


...alright. That was a lot of tangents.

So here's a video where Lloyd talks about D&D 4e:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daksqex8zUE[/youtube]

[hector]

Never said that 4e was a good game - I was merely pointing out that it was the first game I came across which took the skills and actually gave a system to use them for subtasks within a larger goal that doesn't boil down to "Make something up, DM, that's your job".

[nemedeus]

Never said that 4e was a good game - I was merely pointing out that it was the first game I came across which took the skills and actually gave a system to use them for subtasks within a larger goal that doesn't boil down to "Make something up, DM, that's your job".

Like, compared to the tendency to have a set movement speed (both running and sprinting) in many games, instead of having a sprinting roll? I guess i can see that.

[Agamemnon]

Never said that 4e was a good game - I was merely pointing out that it was the first game I came across which took the skills and actually gave a system to use them for subtasks within a larger goal that doesn't boil down to "Make something up, DM, that's your job".

Like, compared to the tendency to have a set movement speed (both running and sprinting) in many games, instead of having a sprinting roll? I guess i can see that.

It's been so long since I've really used a set movement speed for anything I had almost forgotten that it was a common convention at all. Skill rolls are definitely the way to go, and far more interesting.

[nemedeus]

Like, compared to the tendency to have a set movement speed (both running and sprinting) in many games, instead of having a sprinting roll? I guess i can see that.

It's been so long since I've really used a set movement speed for anything I had almost forgotten that it was a common convention at all. Skill rolls are definitely the way to go, and far more interesting.

It's just one more silly testament to p&p RPG's wargaming origin; one of the many long unchallenged concessions to D&D.

Ugh. The more i think about it, the more i resent D&D, and the fact that what's probably more than half of all the people in the hobby never played and never will play anything else than D&D, even though every new edition is just another clever way to reach a newly discovered game-design dead-end.

[Agamemnon]

Like, compared to the tendency to have a set movement speed (both running and sprinting) in many games, instead of having a sprinting roll? I guess i can see that.

It's been so long since I've really used a set movement speed for anything I had almost forgotten that it was a common convention at all. Skill rolls are definitely the way to go, and far more interesting.

It's just one more silly testament to p&p RPG's wargaming origin; one of the many long unchallenged concessions to D&D.

Ugh. The more i think about it, the more i resent D&D, and the fact that what's probably more than half of all the people in the hobby never played and never will play anything else than D&D, even though every new edition is just another clever way to reach a newly discovered game-design dead-end.

I have rambled before about my appreciation for early D&D. The stuff written for the game right up until AD&D2e was actually extremely good at the kind of game-play it was intended to produce. I think that's why the OSR movement is coming back in force now. After AD&D2e the move changed from Sword & Sorcery crypt-crawling to a focus on a more heroic adventure fiction style RPG, and that's where D&D falls apart. Unfortunately, D&D is a case of a hammer trying to make everything a nail. There are cases when you just need a screwdriver.

[nemedeus]

I have rambled before about my appreciation for early D&D. The stuff written for the game right up until AD&D2e was actually extremely good at the kind of game-play it was intended to produce. I think that's why the OSR movement is coming back in force now. After AD&D2e the move changed from Sword & Sorcery crypt-crawling to a focus on a more heroic adventure fiction style RPG, and that's where D&D falls apart. Unfortunately, D&D is a case of a hammer trying to make everything a nail. There are cases when you just need a screwdriver.

You mean, the likes of which Lloyd talks about here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdo5ErnXH3E

[Agamemnon]

I have rambled before about my appreciation for early D&D. The stuff written for the game right up until AD&D2e was actually extremely good at the kind of game-play it was intended to produce. I think that's why the OSR movement is coming back in force now. After AD&D2e the move changed from Sword & Sorcery crypt-crawling to a focus on a more heroic adventure fiction style RPG, and that's where D&D falls apart. Unfortunately, D&D is a case of a hammer trying to make everything a nail. There are cases when you just need a screwdriver.

You mean, the likes of which Lloyd talks about here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdo5ErnXH3E

Honestly, I disagree with about 80% of what he actually says there, and another 10% is due to the book he's using. The original D&D white box game came out in 74, and had expansions in 75. Those expansions already alleviate the problems he's discussing with weapons, for instance. The book he's holding was the Blue Holmes (1977) book that came out simultaneously with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line Player Handbook. AD&D really didn't introduce "new" rules, so much as codify and compile all the rules from the first six mini-books and various Dragon Magazine articles into three volumes - Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, and Monster Manual. The Holmes Basic Dungeons & Dragons book was released at the same time as an introductory book in order to get you into playing D&D and later up-sell you to the Advanced books. It literally even recommends buying said books in the text. Much of the actual content was stripped out in the name of space - you can only progress to level 3, variable weapon damage is out, etc.

In 1981, another edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons came out (affectionately known as Moldvay Basic or B/x) came out as its own stand-alone game. Where the prior was meant to give you a taste of the game and up-sell you, this was meant to be its own line of material and remains something of the standard for a long time. Other versions of Basic D&D come out later - in 83, Mentzer's version (eventually dubbed BECMI) changes some things and winds up providing rules to go all the way to like.. level 36 or something ridiculous.. and in 91 All of the mentzer stuff is compiled into a single volume Rules Cyclopedia.

I still play Moldvay Basic as our pick-up game - though at one point we switched to a modern OSR revamp of it called Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which adds some neat lovecraftian horror to it. If you know how that family of systems is supposed to work and what it's supposed to do, it's the best system for doing it, bar none.

I'll have to sidebar this essay for another day, however, or Higgins' editing will catch up to my editing an then he'll give me the annoyed face again.

[nemedeus]

I'm familiar with LotFP. I downloaded the Free Edition, the one with no pictures in it.
When i saw that it's just streamlined D&D... well, of course i was a little disappointed (I love love LOOOOVE lovecraftian cosmology... Don't remember seeing much of it in LotFP, but its possible that i have skimmed over those sections).

I guess levels and the D&D paradigm character classes are just not really my Jam. Also, i thought about Armor increasing your opponent's difficulty to hit you for an earlier version of my own system once. i would say, except with thrusting attacks, it really does make little to no sense.


All in all, i think Lloyd has made a lot of good points in the course of his RPG-related videos. But naturally, i never had the opportunity to play D&D. I mean, i never had the opportunity to play most any of the games out there.



On a sidenote, I don't remember how LotFP does weapons. I assume they aren't like described here?

[Agamemnon]

The LotFP Rules & Magic Free edition is the current one, I believe. LotFP is a subtle beast though, and you wouldn't notice a lot of the changes unless you were already familiar with Basic D&D. The core mechanics are largely the same, but a lot of little tweaks really change the flavor.

Combat is a bit more brutal, as HP is lower overall. Classes are way more specialized as a rule - only the fighter gets better at combat, the specialist is actually the best "thief" interpretation I've seen. The spell lists of both cleric and magic-user have been highly tailored and specialized to better represent their archetypes. They also do a pretty good job of making the resource management part of the game useable, as opposed to some other editions where they wanted to fool around with weights and the like.

I don't mind character classes, as a whole. It depends on the kind of game you're playing and what the goals of that game are. For old-school D&D, broad character classes are perfect, because you are by definition all playing very specialist kinds of characters who are out to do dangerous things in dangerous places.

Insofar as weapons, every full edition had some form of variable weapon damage rules. The blue Holmes book was an odd exception simply because it was more akin to a quick-start guide than a complete game. LotFP actually does weapons in a way I can apprecaite, simply because they have streamlined the lists quite a bit. They have more categories of weapons, if I recall. Minor, two-handed, polearms, etc. This always suited me pretty well, given that in the D&D universe the majority of weapons went completely unused and very few people knew or cared about the difference between one 1d10 polearm and another.

[nemedeus]

Apparently i would do good to read it again!
(Damn, i'm not even finished with Burning Wheel yet ...)

I don't mind character classes, as a whole. It depends on the kind of game you're playing and what the goals of that game are. For old-school D&D, broad character classes are perfect, because you are by definition all playing very specialist kinds of characters who are out to do dangerous things in dangerous places.

One Idea i always had was "Reverse Class" (This is going to be about Advancement again).

Instead of starting out at an archetype and then gradually individualizing your character, the reverse class would be an archetype you develop your character into.

For example, say there is a "class" called Diesel Knight. They have some ability requirements, like having a certain stat at a certain minimum value, owning a certain Trait etc.
Let's say they need Strength and Willpower at 5, they need to have a Mechanics skill at 4, and they need to have the "Armor Acclimatization" trait.

So as soon as my character has reached these prerequisites, he can join the ranks of the diesel knights to
- acquire Diesel Armor, a powered armor type of thing powered by diesel
- unlock new abilities to learn
- etc.


Now of course, i soon saw the danger or the lack of use of this concept, so it never went anywhere.
I guess if i ask "what does it add to the game", the answer would maybe be flavor and possibly atmosphere.