Author Topic: Stunts - Redefining Character Options  (Read 4338 times)

Offline Ziegander

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Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« on: December 11, 2011, 12:57:55 PM »
Okay, so I got to this train of thought as I considered mundane combat in "the real world," and I imagined that in most man-to-man scuffles people improvise their attacks and defenses on the fly and as the situation dictates. D&D doesn't handle that sort of realism very well and forces people to learn specific attacks or defenses and presume that they are always used and will always work. Then I thought, "well, what if martial initiators could use any number of maneuvers per encounter and used their maneuvers spontaneously?" And then I thought, "wait, what if for any given situation there were basic actions and lists of stunts, and everyone can always do the basic stuff and stunts are more class based and usable once per scene?" And thus we are now on the same page.

Now, I don't have a system written out for this, but what I'd hope to get out of one is a game in which a complete neophyte is given a situation and he tells his DM he wants to do something and the DM can say, "there's a stunt for that," and the newb is rewarded by not only having a mechanical representation of the cool thing he wanted to do, but by being mechanically relevant even though he's a newb. It also encourages the players to focus more on roleplay if they can be relatively assured that their actions will always be relevant. The game would explicitly encourage DMs and players to work out their own stunts for actions not covered by published stunts.

Stunts would be the game designers' attempts to mechanically cover as many imaginative uses of basic actions, or combinations thereof, as they possibly could. As such they would be applied universally across combat and non-combat situations. Player Characters would NOT learn stunts, but, ideally, the players controlling the characters would describe whatever actions they wanted to use in a turn and the DM would resolve them using stunts as they apply.

For example, PC 1 tells the DM he wants to leap from the overhang, swing from the chandelier while hanging by his feet, snatch the golden necklace from the Lady of the Court as he goes, and execute a rolling dismount into a sprint. The leaping part is certainly a basic action, but everything from there on should be resolved using published stunts.

Offline veekie

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #1 on: December 11, 2011, 04:14:07 PM »
What about building levels of basic actions into BAB so your ability to perform them goes up as you level? Sort of like the Quick Draw thing, except there should be more stuff like that.

EDIT: Clarification, stunts become basic actions as your BAB goes up. No longer spectacular tricks, they are routine.
« Last Edit: December 11, 2011, 04:17:35 PM by veekie »
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Offline Ziegander

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #2 on: December 11, 2011, 05:02:32 PM »
What about building levels of basic actions into BAB so your ability to perform them goes up as you level? Sort of like the Quick Draw thing, except there should be more stuff like that.

EDIT: Clarification, stunts become basic actions as your BAB goes up. No longer spectacular tricks, they are routine.

A possibility, sure, but I'm not sure this style of gameplay works that well for D&D anyway, and were I to attempt to hotwire it into D&D I'd still want Stunts to encompass more than in-combat martial maneuvers, I'd want there to be Stunts for just about any sort of action resolution and in all types of flavors (movement, social, magical, supernatural, miscellaneous utility, etc). What I'd like to accomplish is to change the paradigm from "there's a spell for that" to "there's a stunt for that," allowing non-casting characters to do interesting and spectacular things by coming up with a solution and rolling some dice for effect.

I do expect there to be some sort of "stunt level" involved so that some stunts are harder than others or outright impossible for characters of a given level and so that as characters gain levels they can use lower level stunts as basic actions and attempt higher levels of stunts.

Offline veekie

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #3 on: December 11, 2011, 06:12:29 PM »
Well, you just need different bars for each type of stunt, skill ranks would do as well as BAB for a metric.
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Offline SneeR

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #4 on: December 11, 2011, 07:30:28 PM »
I've been thinking of the same sort of thing. Perhaps we could collaborate to make these tactics more feasible!
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Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #5 on: December 12, 2011, 02:32:39 AM »
I think the best way to deal with this would be to base it off of skill ranks, like Veekie said.  You want to quickly dodge behind your enemy and attack him from an unexpected direction?  With X ranks in Tumble, you can take a 5-ft.-step to shift to any square next to a foe currently adjacent to you.  X, in this example, would depend on its size: while it's easy to quickly maneuver around a human, getting on the opposite side of the Tarrasque is going to take some parkour.

That's just a random example, conjured at 2:30 in the morning.  Pay it no mind if it's laughable.
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Offline Ziegander

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #6 on: December 12, 2011, 03:54:04 PM »
I think the best way to deal with this would be to base it off of skill ranks, like Veekie said.  You want to quickly dodge behind your enemy and attack him from an unexpected direction?  With X ranks in Tumble, you can take a 5-ft.-step to shift to any square next to a foe currently adjacent to you.  X, in this example, would depend on its size: while it's easy to quickly maneuver around a human, getting on the opposite side of the Tarrasque is going to take some parkour.

That's just a random example, conjured at 2:30 in the morning.  Pay it no mind if it's laughable.

Well, yes, I think the skill ranks idea works well for D&D 3.5, and I could use BAB for martial stunts, and caster level for spell stunts, etc. It would possible to use this idea in D&D, but it would be messy. It would be much nicer to base it simply on character level. Actually, thinking about it, that wouldn't be impossible to swing in D&D either, since the mechanics for stunts don't exist yet. Performing stunts could require skill checks, caster level checks, or attack rolls, and most everything would be gravy.

Hmm... replace just about all powers in D&D with stunts. Even your average level spellcasting. Make a lot of the uber powerful spells into magic rituals that anyone with the Ritual Caster feat and the appropriate knowledge skills can do. Remove other uber powerful spells from the game that just don't make sense as stunts or rituals. The design goal here would be that no character actually "knows" anything other than "how to fight," "how to move," or magic, and that everyone uses stunts on the fly to produce flashy level-appropriate effects. Feats would further specialize characters so that they would be better with certain stunts than other characters.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2011, 03:58:37 PM by Ziegander »

Offline veekie

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #7 on: December 12, 2011, 04:11:37 PM »
You probably wouldn't need magic stunts. KNOWLEDGE stunts on the other hand, could provide magic of some form.
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Offline Prime32

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #8 on: December 13, 2011, 10:26:35 AM »
You probably wouldn't need magic stunts. KNOWLEDGE stunts on the other hand, could provide magic of some form.
If it's possible to stunt with magic, keep those stunts in the martial classes so that you need to be a multiclass character for Full Contact Magic (or give them to warmage). Magic is supposed to be less flexible than mundane combat.

What about allowing characters to create stunts on the fly with as many effects as they want, but limited by the difference in BAB between them and their opponent? (assuming rules which reduce monsters' effective BAB for this purpose) An extension of Tome's combat rules.

Make some of these stunts "ignore concealment", "ignore damage reduction", "destroy a spell effect" and so on.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2011, 10:32:14 AM by Prime32 »

Offline Ziegander

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #9 on: December 13, 2011, 05:52:59 PM »
You probably wouldn't need magic stunts. KNOWLEDGE stunts on the other hand, could provide magic of some form.
If it's possible to stunt with magic, keep those stunts in the martial classes so that you need to be a multiclass character for Full Contact Magic (or give them to warmage). Magic is supposed to be less flexible than mundane combat.

Vancian magic is supposed to be less flexible, but in almost every non-D&D setting I've ever read or played, magic is much more flexible, and characters experiment and even play with it constantly. An example magic stunt would be "freeze something with ice, then rapidly heat it with fire," or "cast lightning into the sea from your ship as the leviathan attacks."

Offline veekie

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Re: Stunts - Redefining Character Options
« Reply #10 on: December 13, 2011, 10:30:49 PM »
Yeah but you do need a non-vancian magic system first. Vancian spells are more like computer programs, they do exactly what they're programmed to(which is a hell of a lot to begin with), while their limitations and principles are obfuscated.

I'd actually count the ice/fire or conductive shock combination stuff as Knowledge stunts personally.
Everything is edible. Just that there are things only edible once per lifetime.
It's a god-eat-god world.

Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves; The vast concerns of an eternal scene.