| From The Ashes- System: Make Me A Challenge Combat: Combat begins when someone, PC or NPC decides to begin it. Combat is an altered state of gameplay where time is easier to deal with and things happen in a set order. Time in combat passes very slowly- a round of combat is under 15 seconds. The exact time is unspecified, but it's damn short. At the beginning of combat, there may be a surprise round. Only the people initiating combat get to go in the surprise round, unless there are skills which negate it. After that, every round runs in order of initiative. Everyone goes once, unless there are skills which allow extra turns. See the relevant skill for more info if you have it. Each round, you will have one offensive action, which you use when your turn comes up. In addition, you can use a defensive skill once for free. Each time you use a defensive skill again during the round, spend an additional speed. So if you're attacked three times, it costs 0 then 1 then 2 speed to defend all of these. You don't have to defend; some people don't have to. These people often use power armor, force shields, or other passive defenses. Also you can't spend more speed this way than your burst value. Alternatively, you can take a defensive stance. You lose your offensive action and instead your next 3 defensive actions this round are free. Finally there are free actions. These can be used whenever for whatever as much as makes sense in a roleplaying sense. Please don't abuse these. Offensive actions can be almost all skills. You can't do more than one thing at once that's an offensive unless you have a skill which allows you to. So no spellcasting while also swinging lightsaber. You have to pause and gesture, like Darth Maul. You can do an offensive action without the skill, but generally you'll be swinging a -3 challenge or something like that, versus enemies' positive defense numbers. It doesn't work very often. Finally, some weapons require multiple rounds' worth of offensive actions to use. For example, bowcasters. Defensive Actions are a much smaller subset. You may increase passive defense (click on your shields for instance), dodge, parry, etc. Telekinesis is not a defensive skill, unless you buy a specifically defensive version of it. In addition, you can always try to dodge, but it will not be terrifically effective without your dodge skill. To dodge, spend speed up to your burst, but you only get +1 to your defense for every three speed thus spent. Rounded down. Dodging effectively is not easy without practice. Free Actions are things that you just do. Talking is a free action but don't do too much each round, 'cause rounds are really short. Drawing easily accessible weapons, igniting lightsabers (if you're not igniting them into someone that is, which is an attack action) if you're holding them, are free actions. Pumping up some powers (such as anticipation) is a free action (it'll say on the power). You can also move a meter per round for free. Or you can spend 1 speed per meter up to your burst to move that up to a lot faster. And you can sacrefice your offensive action for a second movement phase. Movement can happen before or after your action. Holding Your Action: If your initiative is higher than someone else's, you can hold your action to be right after theirs. You must say whos at the time you do so though, so you can't just wait until an emergency and then suddenly wade in. Cooperative Actions: Some actions require to people acting at the same time. We work this by having one person start the action and the others complete it. Any challenges associated with it happen when the last person involved completes the action. Cooperative actions can't be more than a turn apart. And finally.... Challenges. Everything in this system revolves around challenges. A challenge happens whenever a skills says "Make a challenge". When someone uses a skill on you, you will be asked to defend with one of (1) Your resist body, (2) your resist mind (3) nothing. In addition, you'll be able to use whatever defensive skills are relevant (the skills will say). All the defenses applied and all of the attacking skills applied are totalled up. Then the digital equivalent of five coins are flipped. Attacker gets heads, defender tails. For each point of advantage, the character with the advantage gets to reflip one coin that landed in the opponent's favor. You don't have to worry about this too much; the computer takes care of this all instantly and I tell you who wins the challenge. If attacker wins, the skill does its job. If defender wins, it doesn't, and there might be some kind of counter-challenge for some defensive talents (such as directed lightsaber parry). Many challenges are just against a generic DC (difficulty class) which represents how hard something is to do. Finally, if all the coins end up on the same side, that's a critical. If it's a success, GM-specified good things happen for the attacker. If it's a failure, GM-specified bad things happen to the attacker. Some examples: * Ben Kenobi decides he's going to make the stormtrooper accept his word unquestioningly. It's not a combat situation, so he just makes the challenge during roleplaying. Ben Kenobi asks the stormtrooper to defend against a mind challenge. The stormtrooper defends, using his resist mind, which is zero, because stormtroopers are weakminded goons. Obi-wan has a plus five. The computer flips 10 coins (5+5), and five come up in Obi-Wan's favor. The challenge succeeds and they aren't the droids we're looking for. * Han Solo sees Darth Vader in cloud city and decides to shoot him. It's the surprise round, and Han, 'cause he has a really sweet gun, gets two shots off in the surprise round at a challenge rating of 5. Darth Vader spends 1 speed to defend twice using his absorb-power skill. Vader's body defense is already 4, leaving Solo with +1. Solo hits twice, but Vader absorbs the damage as Force instead. The next round, Solo goes first with his superior initiative of 4. He shoots twice more, and hits once, which Vader again absorbs. Vader then uses the 9 damage he just absorbed to power some telekinesis. He uses 4 points of force for Basic TK and another 5 points of personal TK, two skills which stack. He attempts to yank the gun out of Solo's hand at a challenge rating of 9. The difficulty of getting a TK grip on the gun is 1, breaking Solo's grip another 1, and Solo's resist body is 3, for a total DC of 5. Vader wins, disarming our hapless muggle hero who thought the Force was a crazy religion. Poor guy, sucks to be him. Solo gives up, and Vader starts roleplaying, so combat ends. Some Final Wrinkles: Most talents have you spending points of Force or physical stats. In addition, many Force powers are "Pumpable". This means that you can spend more Force points in a very inefficient way to power the skill further if you're a total magic goon. Each additional level of challenge doubles the cost, unless some skill intervenes. For example: if you have a basic TK of 3, you can spend 3 points to get your challenge to 3, 6 points for 4, 12 for 5, 24 for 6 etc. capped at your burst level. This is why auxiliary skills are good; if you also have personal TK of 3, you can get your challenge up to 6 for only 6, a quarter of the cost. Good stuff. You get 10% of depleted stats per 15 minutes. You get everything back in a day. You get 1 HP back a day unless someone uses medical intervention of some sort. You're unconscious at 0 HP, if a phys. stat goes to zero, or you're stunned for some reason. You're dead at -1 or lower HP. Don't die. It would make me so sad. I want combats to run quickly. After the first combat, which is supposed to be a learning experience, if you do not give responses to actions in a relatively timely fashion, I will assume you're paralyzed by indecision and you'll take no action. Sucks to be you when that happens. Consider yourself warned. This is partially to keep the game moving and partially for cinematic feel. Probabilities of Success Bonus %Chance of success <-6 0 -6 3.3 (67/2048) -5 5.4 (56/1024) -4 9.0 (46/512) -3 14.5 (37/256) -2 22.7 (29/128) -1 34.3 (22/64) 0 50 (16/32) +1 65.6 (42/64) +2 77.3 (99/128) +3 85.5 (219/256) +4 91.0 (466/512) +5 94.5 (968/1024) +6 96.7 (1981/2048) +6 1 Critical Successes & failures: After the initial challenge, 2 more coins are flipped. If all coins are still tails, that's a critical success for the side that didn't have an advantage. If 7 or more coins are heads, that's a critical success for the side that did. Thus there's a 1/128 chance of critical failure or success on a +0 challenge. Critical success probabilities go up with advantage, and failures go down with advantage. Effects of criticals are mostly GM determined in a way that makes sense for the moment. Hitpoints, Death: If you lose half your hitpoints in a round to damage of any kind (subdual or otherwise) you lose your offensive action for that round as you reel from the damage, unless you have a skill that negates that effect. 0 HP is unconscious, bleeding out within 5 minutes. < 0 HP is dead. |
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