Posts Tagged ‘game hacks’

So, after last night’s D&D 4/e game — the end of the campaign — I was playing around with some thoughts about a new class. I should warn you, this post will be all stream-of-consciousness.

(Yeah, I’m tinkering again. And I’ll cover how tinkering is really procrastination in a future Doing The Work. Still, I feel like tinkering today as I recover from the damned plague I’ve had all week.)

I’m not going to use 4/e legalese here, because I don’t think the time for that is this early in the thought process. Also, I don’t follow Dragon much (but I do some), so if there’s something I should follow, please let me know.

High concept: a mixed-power character class, someone who enhances (I would use “augments,” but that’s clearly psychic territory) their martial prowess with spells, but is a force on his own otherwise.

Influences: Avenger, Rogue, Psion.

Gimmick: (All new classes have to have one, right?) The at-will powers are all martial in nature, akin to the Ranger or Rogue’s at-will mojo. The encounter & daily powers are mostly minor actions that alter the next attack this turn the character does — which I call a “spell chain” — by adding damage, typing damage, changing what they attack is based on, shifting before/after, etc. Such chains turn the attack from being Martial to Arcane.

The narrative explanation: these people tried to be swordmages, but didn’t quite have that in them. Still, they had the spark of arcane power in them, and learned a different technique — channeling their innate arcane talent into their attacks with a moment of concentration.

Let’s say this is one of your At-Wills:

At-Will * Chained, Martial, Weapon
Standard Action Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. AC
Hit: 1[W] + Strength modifier damage
Increases to 2[w] + Strength modifier damage at 21st level

Then you would have encounter or daily powers that would add or change your At-Will:

• Your next Chained attack this turn does an additional 1[W] damage, and all damage is cold.
• You may teleport two squares before or after your next Chained attack, as part of the attack.
• Your attack is changed to: Close burst 1, Target: two adjacent creatures
• Your next attack has the follow added: Hit: Target is knocked prone; and all damage is thunder.
• Your next attack has the following added: Miss: Half damage

etc.

Thus, if you used an action point or didn’t move, you could put two or even three of these minor actions before an attack, which means your attacks are rather different each time — once you get into paragon tier, at least.

(And yes, I think giving this power to affect basic attacks is too much — or, rather, it’s a Paragon tier feat to make your basic melee attack have the keyword Chained.)

So you can see where I’m influenced by the Psion, but instead of having a set augmentation path, I’m more about the protean nature of magic. You can switch it up each encounter. Which I think might prompt a working title: The Switchblade (I didn’t like Spellblade for this — too much baggage).

The way I see it, this has two basic paths the way all classes start: the Elemental Switchblade and the Dimensional Switchblade — the former getting buffs based on how many different types of damage are on the current attack (making it more badass if it does “cold thunder psychic” damage) and the other more badass based on how far it’s shifted or teleported this attack. Something like that.

I could also see this class being more Ranger-y, in that it could be a class that an also use ranged weapons.

I’m thinking the main stats for this are Strength (or maybe Dexterity, if this was a whatever-weapon class) for the obvious, and Intelligence for the way the path interacts with the class. This makes the Genasi an ideal race for the class, which I like — the protean class for the protean race.

Anyway, that’s the basic idea. Also, I think the name “Switchblade” sucks. I need a new working title.

Thoughts? Fire away.

- Ryan

In my D&D 4/e game, two of my three (yes, I only have three!) players are leaving in September. When I heard this, I told them that I’d like to see what paragon is like, as I’ve only seen lower-level Heroic. They were level 2, so we were going to level 11. We were also about to go on a three week hiatus thanks to mismatched schedules, so session before that was built as a chapter close — they were the City Watch, but the city was overrun by the undead, and they had to flee and fire-bomb it from airship.

For those familiar with my dragon-halfling war idea, the PCs were on a Halfling Flagship called Bahamat’s Doom — but they didn’t know the airship they were getting on was a Halfling ship, or the name of it. All they knew was “Man, we need to get to the Dragon Empire, where our new friends are!”  Two of there were (willingly and happily) psychicly bonded to a gold dragon traveling in a water ship below them, the Emir of Light. And they were on the ship that has killed dragonkind. They had a nice “oh, shit!” moment at the end of the session.

Now, we all knew the action would take place back in the city they came from, as they went to go kick a god’s ass and deal with the evil Eladrin mayor. But, I didn’t just want to say “and now you’re back!” or anything like that. I wanted to model a bit of a feel like “hey, you really just spent 9 levels being badasses in the Eastern Continent — what happened?”

So I came up with this Montage system. It’s simple:

• I have an index card for every level with a situation on it.
• Each player has 6 six-sided dice.
• I describe the situation that happened.
• They each describe something they do.
• All of them roll their dice, totallying them up.
• The highest gets to endcap the narration, and in the case of PvP (two people saying they’re doing opposing things), they decide which one actually succeeded.
• The winner hands me one of their dice, so they have fewer going into the next one.

The result was better than I had hoped for. They had a rich story of what happened, with new plot threads and hooks that wouldn’t have happened if I just simply asked “hey, what did you guys do there?”

I’ll describe all nine situations, for those interested in how I used this specifically. After that, I have a question, one prompted by a discussion I had with Leonard Balsera regarding what it means to “play” Fourth Edition.

Read the rest of this entry »

While hanging out with two of my three local Race for the Galaxy crew on the 4th, I had a weird idea for a hack. We played it last night, after playing two disappointing games of Race (disappointing to everyone, including the winners) and one okay game. (I’ll get to the disappointment later.)

The hack comes from the Eastern Front expansion for Memoir ’44 — the Russian player has to play his orders in a queue, so that on any given turn he’s playing whatever orders he placed last turn and playing orders for the following turn. This causes all manner of chaos in a game, because while you know what your next move is, you don’t know what other people will do before that turn is played and how that will change what you’ll do with the orders you’re about to play next — and if what they do completely invalidates or makes impossible that move.

In a word: exciting.

I wanted to see what happens with you take that to Race. The hack works thusly:

• Each player takes all the phase cards for their color, including the two-player cards
• At the beginning of the game, after you have your initial hand of four cards, place two phase cards face down — one at the edge of the table and one just further in towards the center.
• At the beginning of each round, reveal the further-in phase card as your play for that round.
• At the end of each round, put the phase card just played back into your hand, push the remaining face-down phase case further  in towards the center. Then place your next phase card face down in the just-vacated spot.

We played with this variant, and within a couple rounds I found a new joy with Race — it was this sense of beautiful chaos that left us playing a game more based on hope than on reading each others’ faces and situations to draft off their likely choice. “I have no idea what any of us are doing! This is awesome!” I exclaimed. My comrades felt a similar sense of excitement.

This isn’t the sort of thing we would play often, but it seriously took me out of a funk with the Race games we played earlier that evening, giving it a refreshing feeling and making me rethink habits I’ve fallen into with the game. If you’re looking to mix it up a little, try this variant — and see how it reveals things about how you play Race that you night not have otherwise done.

One of the players, Aaron, said something interesting about this variant after we played. We’ve become so used to playing the game as a competitive display of mind-reading and predicting that by engaging in this variant, he felt like it became a true solitaire game again. We were playing so strongly to our next draw because we couldn’t really predict what someone else would play. I would agree, at least with the first time play — not dissimilar to first times playing Race. What didn’t feel like solitaire was the shared sense of awe and chaos that we all felt, and since we all seemed to enjoy that to one degree or another, I accepted that the mutual sense of bewilderment we all had made it feel less solitaire, and more of a “we’re all in this crazy mess together” sort of experience. Take that how you will.

(Onto the disappointment. We decided to pick starting worlds from the nine rather than do a random draw, and because of that we wanted to focus our play in a particular direction. Naturally, our card draws didn’t support that, so we all felt disappointed by the game. After that, we played a game with random draw and the game felt a little better — cleansed some of the funk from our earlier games.)