I think the last messages of Garyjohnson, cobewebbed , and karilles about introducing a social mecanic (simple I hope) could dicrease the importance of combat and avoid unbalance things as suggested Gary.
It's not a bad idea,
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| Author: | hermes421 [ Fri Jan 30, 2015 3:24 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unbalanced in DW |
I think the last messages of Garyjohnson, cobewebbed , and karilles about introducing a social mecanic (simple I hope) could dicrease the importance of combat and avoid unbalance things as suggested Gary. It's not a bad idea, .
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| Author: | Kharille [ Fri Jan 30, 2015 4:28 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unbalanced in DW |
Hm, wonder whether we should start a thread on adventure ideas. I mean, in computer games its simple, fetch this, fetch that, kill this, kill that. In an rpg there must be more elements like defend this, defend that, destroy this structure, deliver message its not all combat.... And interaction rpgs... can it be structured? I remember WFRP supplements, I think they had some adventures taking place in the fictional Middenheim where you were supposed to uncover some plot. Seems complex. Weren't all the adventures in book 1-6 all about combats and traps? Maybe less so book 6 but even if you avoided combat most of the time, seems you had to deal with the big gaping maw beast at the end. Maybe a trickster class, looks based professional could talk his way out of that one?.... |
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| Author: | hermes421 [ Fri Jan 30, 2015 7:29 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unbalanced in DW |
garyjohnson wrote: Dragon Warriors struggles to balance the fighters (who have a steady level of firepower that can be used all day) with the spellcasters (who have a much higher level of firepower that can only be used for some of the day). I just wanted to know if somebody found a sweet and simple system to balance fighters versus spellcasters? I ve rereaden the topic on the encounter with the Duc darian and I was wondering the question. Most of the time, for beating a sorcerer, you must kill him very, very early, or make him use all his Magic points. Just very quick ideas (I did not reckon the advantages and the problems of it): - if his current life is only 75% of his maximum, the pain makes him fails his spells in 25% of times (I didn t think about the numbers, you can suggest some); and so on - if he is hit just before launching a new spell , he fails his spells in 30% of times (etc). If he was hit twice a row.... and so on. If you have suggestions... |
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| Author: | Cobwebbed Dragon [ Fri Jan 30, 2015 9:02 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unbalanced in DW |
hermes421 wrote: I just wanted to know if somebody found a sweet and simple system to balance fighters versus spellcasters? I ve rereaden the topic on the encounter with the Duc darian and I was wondering the question. Most of the time, for beating a sorcerer, you must kill him very, very early, or make him use all his Magic points. Killing sorcerers quickly or catching them when they have no MP is always a good trick, but dependent on luck, and there's enough of that in combat anyway. Role-playing solutions could include ingratiating oneself with the sorcerer's apprentice or maid or someone else close to the sorcerer (or otherwise infiltrating his household), slip him a sleeping draught, or slip on a ring of psychic chains, etc. Then there's always a quest to find something that will counter the sorcerer's magic or cut off the source of his magic, etc. But maybe it's not quite as black and white as the characters have been led to believe - the characters have the sorcerer at their mercy, but then he spins them a plausible tale that causes them to question the righteousness of killing him (and would a knight kill a defenceless person anyway...?) If you're looking for a game mechanic solution, you need to decide what MPs represent. In my campaigns, a sorcerer channels energies from other realms to effect his spells. His magic points represent his resistance to the blasphemous corruption exposure to these energies causes. When his MPs are gone, he could still cast spells, but accrues 'Taint'. If you want to deter the sorcerer from being heavy artillery, you just rule that indirect spells automatically cause at least one point of Taint. If Taint ever exceeds the sorcerer's Psychic Talent, the sorcerer slowly starts mutating into a Hellion, the mutations growing as the Taint increases. The physical mutations quickly mean the sorcerer can no longer mix in normal society, he becomes an outcast, which only serves to further isolating him. |
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| Author: | Cobwebbed Dragon [ Fri Jan 30, 2015 9:09 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unbalanced in DW |
hermes421 wrote: I think the last messages of Garyjohnson, cobewebbed , and karilles about introducing a social mecanic (simple I hope) could dicrease the importance of combat and avoid unbalance things as suggested Gary. You could take it a step further. For example, combat has Attack and Defence, but also Health Points. Resolving social encounters with only a single roll of the dice doesn't really provide the same focus as combat. However, you could assign social health score to a social encounter, to represent the specific difficulty of changing someone's mind, talking a guard out of arresting you, haggling with a merchant, etc. The 'social combat' then gradually erodes someone's conviction (on either side). I've not used this mechanism myself, but it could give social encounters comparable table time as combat? |
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| Author: | garyjohnson [ Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:31 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unbalanced in DW |
It's definitely important to decide
I talk a lot about conflict resolution, not combat resolution, when I talk about game system design. Resolving conflict tends to be a part of the game where people want random elements, such as dice-rolling, because that way there's an impersonal method of working out which of the five or six people around the table gets to decide how things are resolved. In many games, however, combat gets very detailed conflict resolution mechanics, while social conflict gets simplified conflict resolution mechanics, if any. For example, making someone like you is often a single dice roll in most systems - whether that's a check against Looks in Dragon Warriors, or Diplomacy in 3rd edition D&D, or Charm in 5th edition HERO System. Beating someone unconscious with a club usually requires many more dice rolls - initiative, attack, armour bypass or damage, and so on. That said, it's not necessarily as simple (or complex) as making social interactions have the same degree of mechanical complexity as combat. Another facet of this design challenge is that, in many games, social interactions are resolved narratively, and not mechanically. That is, the people around the table interact with each other, and decide (individually or collectively) how the story plays out. This occasionally happens with combat as well, in my experience - particularly if a play session is running late, and everyone agrees that the PCs are going to win, so why spend 2 hours rolling all those dice to confirm that outcome? What I think people tend to unconsciously and uncritically accept is when a game system has many mechanics for combat, but not for social conflict. There's no good reason why combat with NPCs to resolve a conflict should be privileged with so much more detail than, say, negotiating or persuading those NPCs to change their position and resolve the same conflict. One of the things I like about Dave Morris' concept of stature is that it lends itself more to narrative resolution mechanics for all situations, including combat. When your noble knight has stature 5, she's likely to succeed in all her endeavours against her lower stature rivals - whether that's defeating all comers in the lists at the jousting, ignoring the poison in the enchanted apple that's supposed to turn her heart away from her loyalty to the king, or surviving the leap into the moat from the tower to escape the stature 8 sorcerer who poisoned the apple. It's a different way of thinking about conflict resolution, and one that is more explicitly narrative in mode. Cheers, Gary Johnson |
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| Author: | garyjohnson [ Sat Jan 31, 2015 7:36 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unbalanced in DW |
Here's a page on my website where I discuss these sort of issues in more detail: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~pelari/potestas/introduction.htm Cheers, Gary Johnson |
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