D&D 4E 4e-like game (title TBD)

Composer99 · Dec 30, 2023

Now I come to think of it, I mentioned more about being at 0 hit points in the berserker post, and then forgot to bring it up! So here it is.

In classic 4e, when you hit 0 hit points, you are out of the action, unconscious, making saving throws until you either die, roll a natural 20 on a save, or receive healing and/or stabilisation.

The downside of this approach is that you're... well, just lying there, doing nothing! It might be verisimilitudinous, but it sure ain't heroic.

An idea I'm considering adapting from Darkest Dungeon (which I am sure is not original to that game) is being "at death's door" at 0 hit points. The long and short of it is that when you reach 0 hit points, you can still take your turns as normal. But, while you're at 0 hit points, each and every time you take damage, you roll a saving throw. On a failed save? You die.

When you reach 0 hit points, most characters die - player characters are the ones who end up at death's door. I'm debating whether this will cost a healing-surge equivalent so I don't have to actually have different rules for dying for different kinds of creatures. (I'm expecting NPCs and monsters won't have healing-surge-equivalents unless they're elite somehow.) You don't roll a saving throw upon hitting 0 hit points - either you spend the surge and go on at death's door, or you're kaput.

Unless things go terribly wrong, player characters will be able to use their own turns to get themselves back up from 0 hit points.

MuhVerisimilitude · Jan 2, 2024

Composer99 said:
Now I come to think of it, I mentioned more about being at 0 hit points in the berserker post, and then forgot to bring it up! So here it is.

In classic 4e, when you hit 0 hit points, you are out of the action, unconscious, making saving throws until you either die, roll a natural 20 on a save, or receive healing and/or stabilisation.

The downside of this approach is that you're... well, just lying there, doing nothing! It might be verisimilitudinous, but it sure ain't heroic.

An idea I'm considering adapting from Darkest Dungeon (which I am sure is not original to that game) is being "at death's door" at 0 hit points. The long and short of it is that when you reach 0 hit points, you can still take your turns as normal. But, while you're at 0 hit points, each and every time you take damage, you roll a saving throw. On a failed save? You die.

When you reach 0 hit points, most characters die - player characters are the ones who end up at death's door. I'm debating whether this will cost a healing-surge equivalent so I don't have to actually have different rules for dying for different kinds of creatures. (I'm expecting NPCs and monsters won't have healing-surge-equivalents unless they're elite somehow.) You don't roll a saving throw upon hitting 0 hit points - either you spend the surge and go on at death's door, or you're kaput.

Unless things go terribly wrong, player characters will be able to use their own turns to get themselves back up from 0 hit points.

This is pretty cool tbqh. Paradoxically it might actually end up increasing lethality, though.

In any system where you get knocked unconscious at 0 HP it makes sense for monsters to ignore you, since you are no threat... But if characters can still act even at 0 HP then that changes things considerably.

Note that I think this might actually be a good thing, I just wanted to point it out in case you hadn't thought of it.

Composer99 · Jan 2, 2024

MuhVerisimilitude said:
This is pretty cool tbqh. Paradoxically it might actually end up increasing lethality, though.

In any system where you get knocked unconscious at 0 HP it makes sense for monsters to ignore you, since you are no threat... But if characters can still act even at 0 HP then that changes things considerably.

Note that I think this might actually be a good thing, I just wanted to point it out in case you hadn't thought of it.

Oh, certainly! Part of the fun of Darkest Dungeon is having a character at death's door, and feeling that rush when they pass their save.

Of course, unlike Darkest Dungeon games, each player probably only has one character that they're a bit more attached to, so I imagine it's best to be rather more forgiving when someone does get down to death's door. I'm imagining this works by way of martial classes and tanky classes from other power sources having some way to easily get off of death's door the first time it happens in an encounter (i.e. an encounter power), and maybe also ways to reroll or gain bonuses to saving throws to avoid dying, again, likely once per encounter.

Squishy classes, like the wizard (or the occultist as I think it's going to be renamed in core), might only have one of these buffs, further emphasising that, they're, y'know, squishy.

Ideally, the net effect will be pretty close to 4e, in that it's not hard for characters to feel threatened, but it takes a lot of things going wrong for a player character to actually die. Just, hopefully, with less of players sitting around with nothing to do.

Composer99 · Jan 2, 2024

The Rogue
This rogue will not stray too far from the ideas of the 4e rogue - a martial striker/damage-dealer with some light control elements.

Core Ideas
The core ideas of the class are:

Striking the Vulnerable
Set Up and Take Down
Sneaky Lurker

Striking the Vulnerable
The rogue doesn't want to get into a stand-up fight against enemies - they want to strike the vulnerable. As you might imagine, this is usually modeled in the game by sneak attack.

Set Up and Take Down
Instead of having a resource, as such, that the rogue tracks, they have "Combo" (an idea inspired both by World of Warcraft and Darkest Dungeon 2). This is a trait that rogue imposes on other creatures by some of their at will attacks, or possibly by some utility powers (for instance, an ability to impose Combo on creatures that have been marked by a defender.)

The rogue's encounter powers, such as they are, will have improved effects when attacking a target with Combo, while also removing Combo.

I don't expect to make Combo work on an individual basis, meaning rogues can team up: one sets up a foe by applying Combo, and the other takes them down with an attack that keys off of having Combo.

Sneaky Lurker
The rogue likes to be hidden and sneak around. They'll find it easier to sneak around than characters from other classes will. In 4e, the Hide action is a minor action, but I think I'll make it a standard action in this game - except for the rogue, who can still hide as a "quick" action.

Mustrum_Ridcully · Jan 3, 2024

I remember an idea I saw in Star Trek Online: Weapons had firing modes that either "exposed" or "exploited": If a target was exposed, you could exploit and bad things happened to the target. This idea stuck in my head and I always wanted to use it for a system. It is similar to combat advantage or "combo". My idea however was more along the lines of there being different "exposed"/"exploit" combos, possibly encouraging teamwork - your ally might "shaken" an enemy, and now you can do your "shaken exploit" to do something nasty. Of course, you can also do it within a character - shaken expose round 1, shaken exploit round 2, but you get can get a faster turnaround if you do it in a team.

Composer99 · Jan 5, 2024

Mustrum_Ridcully said:
I remember an idea I saw in Star Trek Online: Weapons had firing modes that either "exposed" or "exploited": If a target was exposed, you could exploit and bad things happened to the target. This idea stuck in my head and I always wanted to use it for a system. It is similar to combat advantage or "combo". My idea however was more along the lines of there being different "exposed"/"exploit" combos, possibly encouraging teamwork - your ally might "shaken" an enemy, and now you can do your "shaken exploit" to do something nasty. Of course, you can also do it within a character - shaken expose round 1, shaken exploit round 2, but you get can get a faster turnaround if you do it in a team.

I hope to have a few of that for each class - e.g. maybe most martial classes get a special attack that procs additional effects if the target is frightened, so that sets up a synergy that player character parties might choose to exploit if enough characters in the party pick up things that let you frighten enemies.

Composer99 · Apr 26, 2024

So this project has hit a snag: in early-mid March, I managed to spill tea all over my laptop, with the predictable results. My laptop is what I use for work and for non-video-game leisure activities such as this project.

While I have a new laptop, an attempt to transfer data from the old one to this one failed. I have to contemplate whether it's worth spending the money on data recovery. I may decide it's not worth it, on account of not having lost any other super-important personal files that aren't already stored on a portable hard drive.

In the meantime, though, that does mean everything I've done for this project is currently kaput! So at least for now I'm going to have to start from scratch.

Joshua Randall · Apr 26, 2024

That stinks and I'm sorry it happened.

A long time ago I read somewhere, in relation to software design & development, that if you had a good handle on what you were doing you could re-create it from scratch after a drive failure. That always seemed reductive and insulting to me -- like all the hard work you did thinking things through and optimizing your code was trivially easy -- which of course, it's not.

I believe the same applies to game development.

So you have my sympathies.

Dannyalcatraz · Apr 29, 2024

I’ve been there. It absolutely sucks to lose your data.

The Myopic Sniper · Apr 29, 2024

That is awful. I am so sorry. I hadn't heard of your project until just now and was intrigued with what you had done so far. Good luck going forward however you decide to handle it.

D&D 4E 4e-like game (title TBD)

Composer99

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MuhVerisimilitude

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Composer99

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Composer99

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Mustrum_Ridcully

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Composer99

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Joshua Randall

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