Kapow! Cover
Posted by Joshua on Jun 23, 2010
This is a first stab at a cover to my Kapow! RPG
Kapow! Playtesting Continues
Posted by Joshua on May 10, 2010
We’ve been playing Kapow! and overall I’d say it’s going well: the players seem to be engaged and having fun. At the end of one session, in which as a result of one of his character’s Complications it was revealed that unbeknown to him, his character had a 20-year old daughter, Doug gave it a big thumbs up and said “This is a great comic!” And Wendy has praised the clarity and concision of the combat cheat-sheet.
One thing that hasn’t gone quite as well, or at least has caused me to rethink one of the basic rules, is what happens to a character’s defenses when they are Hindered. Where other games like Champions have status conditions like Stunned, Knocked Down or Blinded, Kapow! has the more generic Hindered. It’s simpler, in the sense that it’s one status condition to cover everything instead of separate rules for each kind of thing that can interfere with the character’s ability to act effectively, and it’s less debilitating than some in that you can still act while Hindered. Losing a turn due to a status condition gets boring pretty quickly, particularly if as in most games it can happen over and over so you end up spending all your turns standing back up or recovering, only to be stunned again on the villain’s turn (sometimes called “chain-stun”).
I wanted to avoid that, and to avoid the “Death Spiral” effect where getting stunned or damaged makes you more likely to get stunned or damaged in the next round, so that once you start to lose you’ll probably be defeated if you don’t run away. So in Kapow! not only can you can still act while Hindered, albeit at a penalty, being Hindered doesn’t reduce your defenses. For many, if not all, superhero defenses that makes a lot of sense: if you’re invulnerable, even if you’ve been temporarily blinded or glued to the spot with webbing you’re still just as hard to knock out. And in play it means that just because you’ve gotten hit and are suffering from a penalty to your attack, you’re not on the verge of losing. For some defenses, such as acrobatics where if you’re tied down or dazed you really ought to be easier to clobber completely, it makes less sense, but sometimes playability trumps what passes for realism in comic books.
The problem that play-test revealed is that the players really expect to be able to soften up the villain’s defenses by Hindering them so that follow-up attacks by their companions stand a better chance…but that’s not how the rules work. One of my design principles is that if players keep misremembering a specific rule, that probably means you should change the rule to match their mental model of how things ought to work instead of trying to beat it into them that they’re playing it “wrong.” Fixing it to match the way the players think it works, though, could cause a ripple effect through the rest of the rules in order to balance things out (for instance, I don’t want to make Powerhouse characters, who are designed to have fewer but more powerful actions weaker than fast, nimble Jack of All Trades characters…but if they had to keep spending their limited actions on shoring up their defenses they could be).
What Doug suggested, and we’ll probably go with at least to test next session is that we make what the players are attempting one of the combat maneuvers. So the rules for defense would stay as they are, but the players would have the option of deliberately trying to weaken a target’s defenses just as they were (repeatedly) trying in our play-test sessions… but there would be a built-in penalty for doing so since trying to weaken the target’s defenses would preclude trying to KO the target with the same attack. In addition, Weakening the target’s defenses would only last for the next attack (or maybe the next round, we’ll have to experiment); that way Powerhouses wouldn’t have to spend all their time undoing the weakened defenses. The characters could act deliberately to set them up for a more devastating attack, but they would have to keep doing it to continue to get the benefit, and the slower characters wouldn’t be unduly penalized by forcing them to spend their time recovering from being weakened.
I may also emphasize that certain defensive powers (like acrobatics, or heightened senses, or super-speed) really ought to be taking the Disadvantage “Can Be Hindered” to represent the fact that they’re much easier to interfere with than, say, being invulnerable, or being able to become intangible. It’s possible I should swap it so that by default defenses are affected by being Hindered, but you could take an Advantage “Can’t Be Hindered” for characters with defenses that don’t really involve being maneuverable or having heightened awareness of attacks…my gut is that being really tough and able to withstand a beating is a bit more common as a defensive superpower, particularly when you include villains, than being really nimble or having great reflexes, but I could be wrong. Comments are welcome.
It’s An Honor Just to be Nominated
Posted by Joshua on Jan 18, 2010
The Core Mechanic: 375 Blog Post Nominations to Open Game Table!
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers has five posts nominated:
- Reducing Dice Rolls for Random Encounters
- Skill Challenges: Threat or Menace?
- The Rule of Cool: A Useful Tool
- Keep Your Filthy Narrative Out of My Roleplaying
- RPGSystems and Granularity
Thanks to whoever nominated them. It really is an honor when somebody goes to the trouble of singling out even one of my posts as being worth people’s time to read. I really wasn’t expecting as many as five.
RPG Combat and Concentration of Fire
Posted by Joshua on Dec 14, 2009
Whitehall Paraindustries: Freedom From Hitpoints, Part II
There’s a serious problem with this approach however- if you attempt to use any system that resolves combat as a matter of attrition, you will bring Single Target Focus into being.
That’s the core problem with attrition, it means that you can only win by slowly removing a resource of your opponent- and that means the best way to win is to focus all your methods of resource removal on one target until it’s gone
See, I think Single Target Focus is realistic. I would argue that throughout history a big chunk of tactics boils down to the offense trying to get multiple attackers on a defender and the defense trying to prevent that from happening. Concentrating fire works, whether it’s Greek hoplites wielding pikes so anyone approaching had to deal with two or three spears at once, to phalanxes trying extend their fronts or position themselves to outflank each other at the corners, to a wedge of cavalry charging a thin place in the line, to fighter jets maneuvering two-on-one in a dogfight. To the extent you want to spread attacks around, it’s to cover all the foes so they can’t do that, not because you can make good progress simultaneously everywhere.
Where a lot of RPG combat seems to me to be unrealistic in this respect is that players have supernaturally effective Command, Control, and Communications so they can always perfectly coordinate concentrating their fire, picking optimal targets based on how wounded they appear, switching targets as soon as they’ve downed a foe with no wasted effort, as if the players were a hive-mind. Early D&D dealt with this by having much more war-game-like rules for things like having to declare all your targets before any combat resolution, hard-and-fast zones of control so you couldn’t bypass enemy units, absolutely forbidding archery fire into melee or at point-blank range, strict resolution of the order of attacks so that all movement happened before any archery fire before any melee was resolved, making it difficult or impossible to disengage, and so on. Under these conditions, you were encouraged to balance concentration of fire against the chance of wasting attacks and the requirements and limitations of maneuvering.
There are “fixes” that you can make to encourage combatants to spread their attacks around, such as the ones Brian discusses in his post, e.g. a “Death Spiral” so that you can severely degrade somebody’s combat effectiveness well before you can eliminate them which encourages you to do that to as many foes as you can before you settle down to actually defeating them (Savage Worlds has something like this, with a Shaken result being sufficient to keep them from attacking while being a lot easier to achieve than eliminating them completely), but it’s not clear you really want to do that. Besides sometimes introducing their own problems, they strike me as addressing the symptom instead of the cause. You can encourage players to spread their attacks around instead of concentrating their fire, but they’re still going to be coordinating their actions with uncanny precision which to me is the real thing that makes the combat feel more like a game than a chaotic battle.
Mostly I live with it, because the cost of fixing the command and control issues seems to me to be too high in terms of limiting the players’ spontaneity, and my players (with perhaps one exception) are emphatically not interested in anything that resembles miniatures war-gaming. I sometimes rein in the table-talk to prevent them from spending excessive time coordinating what should be split-second decisions, but mostly allow them to fight like a well-oiled machine.
Death In Stonehell
Posted by Joshua on Nov 24, 2009
The kids lost another party member in Stonehell last Friday, and almost lost a second, when all three triggered a magical trap at the same time; I maybe should have been more generous and picked one of the three at random to deal with it, rather than dealing with each of them separately. On the other hand, this way they did get the treasure… and the way they play it seems pretty likely that they would have kept trying it until all three had a turn anyway.
The one whose character died was a little upset, but got over it quickly enough when he rolled a replacement character, a Fighter with 16 Str and 15 Con.