Master of Combat

[icycalm]

I'll be posting here rules as we encounter the need for them, or as they occur to me. I have pretty much the whole ruleset in my head, but I am so busy with other tasks that there's no way I can sit down and write it now as if I am writing a rulebook, so it will all have to be jotted down in this thread randomly, and once the game has been running for a few months, and I've assembled most of the rules here, I can see about presenting them more methodically. Ultimately of course this will be merely a chapter (though a pretty big one) in the Ultimate Edition ruleset.

Any questions, post them here.

[icycalm]

SriK and Chev just posted some emojis in the Skeleton King’s Crypt roleplaying channel on Discord, and I cleared them. You wouldn’t post emoticons or random comments in Fantasy Grounds chat, so the same applies to Discord RP channels. In fact Discord is merely the communication layer of my Cult Engine Zero. That’s right, it’s time you learned the truth, I coded Discord all those years ago to power the very first Battlegrounds engine. So as implied in the InfiniEngine™ design document [ > ], CEZ has some more life left in it after all.

[icycalm]

I’m getting near to being ready to run Black Fang's Dungeon. One major issue I foresee is that, unlike Skeleton King's Crypt which was an extremely rare (maybe even unique) single-character scenario, Black Fang is a standard 4-character one, which has massive repercussions of how we’ll run it with Cult Engine Zero, meaning Discord. Skeleton King moved at an exciting fast pace because it was just SriK and me, but now I will have to wait for 4 players to state their actions before I can move the turn forward, which means a turn can take half a week? And how would I even know when every player has said his piece? In a real-time situation I know that if someone doesn’t speak, they’re doing nothing, but on Discord I will have to wait for people to actually say “I do nothing” with every line of NPC dialogue? Otherwise how will I know if they just haven’t happened to log into Discord to say their line and make their move? Compounding the issue is that, unlike Skeleton King which was entirely theater of the mind, Black Fang and all normal scenarios have maps. So I will have to share a new map with every player move? That’s 4 maps per turn? It sounds extremely cumbersome, maybe even unplayable.

So one quick solution that solves everything that I thought up is to simply require that all 4 characters... belong to a single player. Problem instantly solved, and all scenarios should move as fast and excitingly as SriK’s inaugural one. Now you might say this isn’t as cool as 4 players cooperating, interacting, roleplaying, etc., but keep in mind that the flipside of this increased interactivity is... increased effort which means all players must be simultaneously present and a Saturday sacrificed for a mini-adventure instead of being used for a full-scale roleplaying campaign that’s 100x better. Is this price worth paying to run the scenarios as immersively as possible? And the answer is no. I would rather not run the scenarios at all in that case. And remember that the entire point of Master of Combat is to serve as SRPG layer to the Battlegrounds. And SRPGs are... singleplayer. So it’s cool for one player to control all characters. There’s not a lot of roleplaying in these scenarios anyway, they’re meant to be run in conventions as a ranked competition between strangers. So we aren’t straying far from their intended purpose when we run them this way. That’s why the game/layer is called Mater of Combat instead of “Master of Roleplaying”: because it’s mostly combat. Remember, finally, that Pathfinder has hundreds of these scenarios, and Greyhawk (which started this tradition) has a freakin’ thousand of them, and the Forgotten Realms hundreds more, and even Starfinder has at least a hundred of them I think, and at least a couple more are released every month. No one else has even conceived of running ALL of them, let alone in the same world with ALL the regular campaigns and adventures (let alone a 4X MMO ON TOP of all that), so if any sacrifices to fidelity or detail must be made to make this monster design achievable, they should be made. But we aren’t really making much of a sacrifice of anything here, and we’re setting ourselves up for being able to complete several of these scenarios PER WEEK. If it’s just me and one player for every scenario, we could finish some of them in an evening if both the player and I happen to be online, as happened with SriK. Imagine how exciting it will be to watch all these story developments and battles take place across our overworld every freakin’ week! And adding the singleplayer stipulation is the rule that will allow this to happen.

Does that mean that players will never join forces in the SRPG layer?

No, because we also have season-concluding 12-character scenarios, which can be multiplayer, and for which we shall, of course, devote a Saturday to play them out fully in Cult Engine 1 (and the newer ones in Cult Engine 2 because Paizo is now releasing them there with music, lighting, etc.) Moreover there can be circumstances on the overworld where a player just doesn’t have enough heroes near a scenario that must be dealt with urgently, so in that case they can join forces with others. But maybe I will decree that one player LENDS his heroes to the other one to play them, so that they share the rewards, while only one player gets to actually play and the other has to watch (but may be able to advise in the general chat channel where we discuss the rules; though I think I’ve already said that spectators can also advise, to make it more fun and engaging for everyone, unlike the roleplaying layer which is more strict).

In short, Black Fang is now SriK’s scenario because he started the thread, and since he’s subbed at the $100 tier or above he gets a new hero free every two months, so I think he has 3-4 now, plus of course his bonus hero from Skeleton King. So all that remains is for me to roll the new heroes and give them to SriK, which I’ll be doing soon.

And bear in mind that once Black Fang is finished, no matter the result, multiple new scenarios are unlocked all over the map, so players looking to jump in will have ample opportunities. Just be quick to start a thread when you see a scenario pop up that you like the look of, because multiple players will be competing for them (and of course you’ll have to move your characters there manually in the 4X layer, unlike with how Paizo and co. run their scenarios by magically teleporting 1st-level characters across the map). But there is no shortage of scenarios across multiple worlds and dimensions, so every player will get his fill of the ultimate SRPG, no problem.

Or maybe fast thread-starting won’t be a mechanic at all and you’ll just have to rush with your characters in the 4X layer to reach your desired scenarios faster than the other players... Need to test this to see how it works. I’ll have more concrete rules on this after Black Fang.

Any questions, suggestions or objections about any of the above, post them here.