Superhuman vs. Regular Human Combat Mechanics

[s3kt0r]

I'm in the process of developing a RPG and am getting in a bit of a stick with the combat mechanics.  I need a system that allows for superhumanly fast actions.  In other words I don't want a system where the fastest character is just put first in the turn order, but he is allowed to take more actions than a slower character.  Also, I would like the amount of actions that can be taken to go up gradually, instead of just given them a whole other action phase.  I came up with a system that I generally like.  The basics of it can be found in a reply I made here:

A different take on initiative...?

One problem I see with alot of games is that when the differences in speed between characters is large, the faster characters either get many actions bunched together before or after the slower characters.   I think with my system I can find a solution for that, but I would like to hear what other ideas are out there.  I really think the system should be as easy and fluid as possible without having to refer to charts or do anything that requires alot of math.  Any thoughts?  I'm not really familiar with some of the more obscure indie RPGs, so explanations would be welcome.

[Callan S.]

I think one reason is that more turns means more thinking time and longer combat. If the fast guy can do three attacks in a row, he just does them. If other's have attacks dispersed between them, each time you go to each player, they have to consider the moves others made, before they can then do their turn. Just a thought.

[Andrew Martin]

I think one reason is that more turns means more thinking time and longer combat. If the fast guy can do three attacks in a row, he just does them. If other's have attacks dispersed between them, each time you go to each player, they have to consider the moves others made, before they can then do their turn. Just a thought.

Multiple attacks that happen all at once seem to match what happens in superhero comics where the Flash does all his "umpteen-zillion" attacks at once, then the supervillain makes his one attack on the Flash.

[s3kt0r]

Superhuman was probably a bad choice of words.  I'm not looking for a way to imitate superheroes, such as Flash and Superman, that's a little faster than what I'm looking for.  Think more along the lines of Spider-man.  Fast, but still manageble.  Batman would still have a shot of getting a hit in even though he moves at "normal" speeds

I guess, look at it this way.  Say, if each combat round represents one second of real time and for the sake of illustration, I can pull the trigger on my gun once per second.  The quickest human might be able to do it twice in the same amount of time.  A character with superhuman quickness might be able to do it 3 times and on and on.  These would be easy to represent.  You'd just give each one an extra combat round.  But, how do I represent the gradations?  How do I represent the people between me and the fastest human who may be able to shoot their gun three time in two seconds (or 1.5 times a round) and so forth?

Plus, there has to be a way so that the faster characters actions are not going to bunch together before or after the slower characters.  One game I've played for a while that deals with faster than normal characters is Shadowrun.  One of the things I've always disliked about that game was that really fast chracters can do about 3 - 9 seconds worth of actions while the slower sit around and twiddle their thumbs.

Now, the system that was mentioned in the thread referenced above takes care of alot of this and I think I can even figure out a simple way to spread out the actions so they don't bunch up.  My thing is, it might be a little more complicated than I wanted.  Any thoughts on that?  I may have to explain a few things better.  Let me know.  But basically, the question is this: are there any systems that anyone is aware of that meets these requirments and does so in a somewhat seamless manner?

[M. J. Young]

Well, I read it on the other thread and thought that Multiverser doesn't do it that way, and now I'm reading it on this thread and thinking the same thing. I don't think I'd have called what Multiverser does especially innovative in this regard, but it might be worth considering.

The game uses a relatively long one minute combat round, so it is quite common for characters to get multiple attacks, particularly with high-tech weapons. Examples in the book range from fractional attacks (medieval siege engines for example) to something like 270 attacks in the minute. To determine the order of the attacks, the referee considers two factors:

[*]the ratio of the number of attacks the fastest attacker on each side gets to each other[*]initiative overall.[/list:u]

Initiative is based not on who gets the most hits but on a randomizer which favors the side with the better chance to hit. Thus if one guy is a monster with the sword but gets only six attacks in the minute and he's up against a guy whose gun can fire thirty times in that same minute, the roll is made against their chance to hit, and the guy with the sword has a good chance of getting his first (and possibly fatal) blow in before the other guy can aim and fire his weapon, not because he's faster but because he's better. Since there is a randomizer involved (in short, a side must roll under its chance to hit but over the other side's roll to win the initiative) it is possible for the underdog to hit first, but more likely that the superior combatant will do so.

Then the ratio comes into effect. With six hits against thirty, if the initiative goes to the side with six attacks, he/they will strike once, and then the opponent will attack five times, and so through the round, one, five, one, five, one, five. Reverse this and the side with thirty attacks gets to make the first five before the slower side gets one hit, and so on through the round.

To make it more interesting, perhaps, time-based actions are treated separately. That is, whether it's casting a spell or starting some high-tech equipment or launching a missile, if the performance of the skill requires that a sequence of tasks which take a specified time be completed (or if it involves what we call time-rate skills such as running, where the task begins and continues toward completion and so is partly accomplished as each second ticks), initiative still determines who starts first, but the second side gets to start its time-based actions (and time rate skills) between the first and second attacks regardless of who has those attacks. Thus looking at our example, with thirty-six attacks between the two sides, those attacks will occur roughly once per two seconds. Someone on the side having the initiative gets to start his action at zero, simultaneously with the first attack, while someone on the other side starts it at aught one, half way between the first and second attacks.

Footnote: time is flexible to this degree. Within the round, attacks are rounded to the nearest second (either seconds per attack or attacks per second) to reference against time based actions, even if that means the round plays out to fifty or seventy seconds, but from round to round each round is treated as being exactly a minute long.

Thus the system generally avoids your problem of the faster side having all its attacks up front. As long as both sides are using targeted non-time-factor attacks, the side that goes first never gets more than half of its attacks before the other side unless it has only one attack.

I thought everyone did this. Certainly if I had three fighters who each had three attacks per round in D&D and they were fighting each other, I would normally have them take turns, one and one, unless there were a compelling reason to do otherwise.

Although Noon has a point: it is easier to hand the player the die and tell him to roll his twelve attacks, and then turn to the opponent to have him roll his twelve. Multiverser suggests a couple of shortcuts for combats with lots of attacks, notably involving doing several sequential rolls and summing the damage, but specifies that in that circumstance the side that has to wait is guaranteed its opportunity to strike back.

Any help?

--M. J. Young

[John Kim]

I thought everyone did this. Certainly if I had three fighters who each had three attacks per round in D&D and they were fighting each other, I would normally have them take turns, one and one, unless there were a compelling reason to do otherwise.  

The problem that I think S3kt0r is getting at is this: what if you want more finely-graded distinctions of speed?  i.e. Suppose Anne is only 20% faster than Brett.  So Anne gets 6 attacks to Brett's 5.  Now how do we alternate between their actions?

One result of this is a phased action system -- exemplified by the SPD chart in the HERO system.  I believe that GURPS has a similar 4-step chart for multiple actions to a turn.  Lots of wargames use similar charts.  The problem with this is that it can get darn complicated.  

A another solution is to randomize.  So instead of a fixed pattern of extra actions, Anne just has a 20% chance each turn of getting an extra action.  The problem is that a streak of good luck or bad luck can be hard on believability and/or on player fun.

[s3kt0r]

Thank you, John.  That expresses what I'm driving at a little better.  Another factor to add too, is that a faster character should have the ability to make not just more attacks in a round, but more actions.  Meaning a faster person can also reload, ready a weapon, open a door, etc. more times over the course of combat than a slower person.  I'm trying to devise a system that allows for finer degrees of gradation in speed during combat, but before I run with it, I'm curious if there's simpler solutions.

Thanks for the input so far, though.  It's helping me think down different roads.

[M. J. Young]

Another factor to add too, is that a faster character should have the ability to make not just more attacks in a round, but more actions.  Meaning a faster person can also reload, ready a weapon, open a door, etc. more times over the course of combat than a slower person.

This actually strikes me as counter-intuitive. I don't see characters as "faster" versus "slower", but rather faster at this and slower at that.

Multiverser does cover that, allowing you to use the time in the round any way you like, and providing ways to determine the speed at which anything is done. But just because you're fast at using your weapon (which indeed does include faster attacks and faster reload) doesn't mean you're faster at running across the room, or that you're faster at reacting to the new guy coming in through the window.

Yours seems a considerably simpler system. Merely give every action a value and declare how many action values a character can make in a round. Thus if it takes one value to fire and three values to reload, and character one gets ten actions in ten seconds and character two gets fifteen, character two will be able to fire faster and reload faster. Character two will also be able to run faster, start the engines faster, open the doors faster, spot the intruder faster, and everything else.

--M. J. Young

[Andrew Martin]

Another factor to add too, is that a faster character should have the ability to make not just more attacks in a round, but more actions.  Meaning a faster person can also reload, ready a weapon, open a door, etc. more times over the course of combat than a slower person.

This actually strikes me as counter-intuitive. I don't see characters as "faster" versus "slower", but rather faster at this and slower at that.

I agree with M. J. Young, as this matches my own personal experience in learning new skills and getting better with previously learned skills In my S game system, I have higher skill being able to do more actions (be "faster"), than lower skill.

Which leads to an interesting point about "realism".

[HMT]

I think that the question of whether more skilled characters should perform actions in less time (and the proper way to implement that feature mechanically)  is deserving of its own separate thread. [This posted has been edited after the fact.]

[Marhault]

Hello, s3kt0r.
(And, for that matter, hello Forge.)

I read your post describing the chip based initiative system.  I think you have a very cool idea going there.  It actually brought to mind a game with an initiative system that solves this riddle fairly well.  That game being Deadlands.
A summary:
Each player makes a roll based on his or her Quickness stat.  The degree of success allows each character to draw a number of cards from a normal deck of playing cards, the more the better.  The GM then counts down from Ace down to Deuce, with each value representing a combat phase.  Each player acts on any phase for which he has a card.  Thus a slow character might act once, but he is just as likely to go at the start of the round as at the end, or anywhere in between.  This system pretty handily avoids bunching actions, provided there are enough characters involved in the battle.

This could be done in a similar fashion with dice.  Each character rolls a certain number of dice (with a fixed denomination, d12 would approximate the Deadlands system pretty well, but d20 would result in fewer ties) based on their speed stat (Dex, Quickness, whatever) then count down.  Each player acts on the phase corresponding to the dice they rolled for initiative.

As for the "faster at this, slower at that" part of this, you're right, it isn't exactly "realistic."  Thing is, realism isn't always what you're going for.  A character being "faster" at everything is both acceptable and fairly common as far as RPG mechanics go.  If you try to make things too realistic, sometimes you wind up with a inordinately complex mechanics system.

[Andrew Martin]

Welcome to The Forge, Marhault.

[Funksaw]

Well, let's think about how to represent "fast"

You could represent Fast by giving characters more actions per round.

You could represent Fast by letting Fast characters go first.

You could represent Fast by letting Fast characters have attacks closer together.  

This might be a bit complex, but why can't you do all three?

You'd have to come up with some sort of phase system like Hero (or better still, some sort of initiative system that counts UP, but there could be three stats: "Initiative, Speed, and Reflex.'  

During play, the GM counts up from 0.  

Initiative determines the first round the character goes on.  A character with an initiative of X makes his first action on the count of X.  

Speed represents the amount of actions that a character may take in a round.  A character with a speed of Y makes Y actions per round.

Reflex determines how quickly those actions can be taken.  A character with a Reflex of Z takes actions on the counts of X, X+Z, X+2Z, X+3Z, X+4Z, etc.

So, say you had a fast character who had an initiative of 3, a speed of 3, and a reflex of 2.  His action chart would look like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Whereas a characteer with an initative of 2, a speed of 4, and a reflex of 5 would go

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

It's a bit of a big bite to put into a game though.

-- Funksaw
[/code]

[Mike Holmes]

There was a thread recently on how to do a system like Funky is describing.

I think that this can be done, but there are common pitfals that have to be avoided. More importantly, this places a lot of emphasis on speed in general, when that might not really be important to play. It's interesting how, in Hero System the way to make a speedster character is to abstract out many of the actions by buying powers autofire.

I almost wrote a rant about the currency effects of speed in such systems. Speed is problematic in the extreme in terms of pricing in such a system because it's effects are not additive, but multiplicative. If, like most systems, the currency is there to guage combat prowess, the problem is that the damage production of a character is a multiple of the number of times he acts per unit time. So how can the cost be additive. A more accurate system in terms of guaging effectiveness would be to multiply all other costs by the effect of speed.

This is why in Hero System on the low end, things tend to break down in terms of cost. If you can't have a much higher level of effectiveness per round, then you can't make up for an increase in speed. An "agverage" human has a speed of 2. For just 20 more points, he gets twice as many attacks doubing the effective value of all my other abilities. That just doesn't balance. Worse, it doesn't represent the marginal differences in real human reacion time.

I often "solve" this problem by raising the base speed, thus reducing the potential proportional gain per unit of speed pruchased. But this only serves to slide the curves to different points, and make other strategies more prominent.

More recent systems realize that modeling of this nature isn't particularly realistic (it's interesting, just not realistic), and model speed in as part of other abilities in ways that balance. In TROS, it's part of your combat pool. In Hero Quest, it's just another ability which adds like any other to the propensity for the character to win contests that would involve it. Just a couple of examples.

Mike

[s3kt0r]

I appreciate the feedback on this.  I've been away so I haven't been able to respond.  

I guess primarily, since my game isn't going to be exactly "realistic", is that the faster characters also percieve time as going a little slower, almost Matrix-like.  So they would be able to react faster than normal characters.  Although, I will probably alter that a tad for melee combat, which I haven't fully fleshed out yet, since that is more of a skill-based action.  

I think Marhault has something in the Deadlands system.  It's not exactly what I'm looking for, because it takes away the non-turn-based feel I wanted, but it's helping me think down a different line.

Thanks alot guys.  These comments are really helping.