Pondering Inititiative

This post on Inititative got me thinking about how I handle Initiative in Skill20.

Right now, everyone declares actions, each side rolls a d12, and each combatant adds DEX bonus and if casting subtracts the level of the spell. This makes spell-casting a bit dicier and keeps things less predictable at the expense of rolling each round.

What the linked post proposes is that instead of rolling Initiative, use combat bonuses to determine order.

Since Skill20 doesn't use CB, I would have to use skills. In a way, it makes sense, as you would expect a highly skilled fighter to have the edge, and a more experienced spell-caster may well be likely to get his spell off quicker than a novice. The down side is that a halfway decent caster would be safe from lowbie monsters interrupting his spells before they went off.


I would need to keep the random element. Possibly have each side roll a d20 and individuals add their Skill/DEX asset to determine individuals scores (again, reduced by spell level for casters). That way Mr. Wizard wanting to fireball those pesky goblins would still be at risk if the dice were evil. The downside is that it might be too much swing.

A possibility is to make the opposition's Initiative static, effectively a DC to check against to see if you go first. So goblins with 2 ranks of Melee and a +2 DEX bonus would have an Initiative DC of 14 (10 + 2 + 2). If Mr. Wizard has 10 ranks of Magic, a DEX bonus of 1, and is casting Fireball (3rd level spell), he would add 8 to the Initiative die roll, meaning he would get his spell off on a 6 or better.

Hmm.

*Update*

I opened my combat rules document to type out new Initiative rules. My current rules for Initiative is one paragraph, two sentences. I decided to leave well enough alone.

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Skill20: Margin and Damage Spikes

I recently started a new sandbox campaign for my alpha testers and saw in practice how much damage can spike due to my Margin of Success rules. An opponent that has a 50% chance to hit can spike up to an extra 10 points of damage and average about 5 extra points of damage. This led to some ugliness when a handful of goblins with d4 damage weapons got a couple of lucky hits.

Characters with 14 or 16 hit points figured on being able to take a few d4 jabs over the course of the fight, none of us realizing the average damage going to be 7-8 and possibly as high as 14.


While I managed not to kill off any characters (though one player got to try out the dying rules), I realize I might need to mitigate damage a bit, even though the spikiness is, IMO, more realistic. And I need to do it in a way that won't overly complicate things.

Ideas:
Go On The Defense
My players had asked if there was a way to go all out defensive when they realized they were in trouble. Using a defensive maneuver that gives +4 Melee Defense reduces the odds of being hit and the margin. Assuming a 50% opponent, an opponent that hits now would have an average margin of 3 and a max of 6. I am debating halving the margin damage done to a character using this maneuver, though I may make that a feat.

Improve Armor
Right now, armor is pretty straightforward. It gives DR, ranging from 1 to 6 DR. While upping the DR would be easy, I don't want plate mail tanks clanking about the battlefield immune to harm. I'm considering adding a bonus to Melee Defense, as that would reduce the margins. But I don't want it to get too high... see aforementioned tanks.

Cap Margin Damage
Another idea would be to limit margin damage to the maximum of the weapon. That would cap a d4 weapon to +4 damage, and a d8 to +8. So far I like this idea the least.

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Skill20: Initiative

A post by Greywulf got me thinking about the old-school method of determining initiative every round and how I could integrate that into Skill20.

It meant that instead of Initiative being a resource, like focus and hit points, it would just be determined every round. I had to balance how that would impact spell casters, as before initiative was pretty predictable once the fight got under way. With initiative changing every round, casting spells, especially higher level ones, became dicier. I decided this is a good thing.

I debated old-fashioned weapon speeds for about 30 seconds, then dismissed the idea. Faster weapons almost always had less reach, and I decided the two balanced each other out enough for my purposes.

Different versions of D&D have used different dice for determining initiative. In my opinion, the d20 provided too much of a swing, while a d6 would seriously hamper spell casters and make any initiative bonus a major one. I split the difference and went with a d12. I'm still debating whether to add the Alertness bonus to initiative in addition to Dexterity or in place of it. (In Skill20 Alertness is an ability score, not a feat).

After the jump is my updated combat round breakdown and sections on declarations and initiative.


Combat Round (6 seconds)
1) Declarations
2) Roll Initiative
3) Start-of-round effects applied
4) Turns by Initiative order
5) End-of-round effects applied

Declarations
The players declare their actions and the GM decides on the opponents’ actions before initiative is rolled.
If an intended target is dropped, an attacker may attempt a DC 15 Skill/ALE check to switch targets. If successful, the attacker is at a -2 penalty vs. the new target, if not the action is wasted (but no focus is spent). The Skill is the one being used in the intended attack (Magic, Melee or Ranged). If a character has 10 or more ranks in the skill, a check is not required, but the penalty still applies.

Initiative
At the beginning of a round each side rolls 1d12, and then each character and monsters adds their Initiative Bonus and any penalties. This is their initiative score for the round.
Any initiative below zero counts as zero. A combatant with a zero initiative may only fight defensive, gain initiative, or second wind.

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Skill20: Margin of Success

Skill20 design is a constant battle between simplification and detail. Sometimes my brain will pop out some arcane design idea, only for me to chew it over a day or so and dismissing it as needlessly complicated.

A recent idea I had was to eliminate damage bonuses. As it stands, characters get a damage bonus with weapons equal half their skill rank, plus the appropriate stat bonus. Whether you hit dead even or by 10, the damage is the same. Then it occurred to me that in some other systems I use, the more you hit by, the more damage you do and I pondered how to incorporate that into Skill20.


Effectively a bonus to hit would be a bonus to damage. Likewise, even if a defensive action didn't keep you from getting hit, it would reduce the damage. Separate critical rules wouldn't be needed, as the damage of such an accurate hit would be reflected in the margin damage.

This would mean that fights against evenly matched opponents could take longer, as the margin on both sides would likely be small, while fights against goons (cannon fodder opponents) would probably be skewed more in favor of the PCs. The danger would be big-bads, like dragons and giants, I'll have to monitor their damage output carefully in playtest.

I'll also have to tweak some damage dealing spells. Instead of scaling dice of damage, I'm thinking a flat die amount for the spell plus margin. So instead of a fireball doing 1d6 per rank, up to 10d6, it would do 5d6 plus margin. Each +3.5 of margin is equivalent to a d6. Some more crunch to chew on during playtesting. It might slightly nerf magic damage output, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but a wizard-type could still clear a room of 15 hp goblins.

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Skill20 101

In most incarnations of MicroLite, three stats (attributes) are used - Strength, Dexterity, and Mind. The trouble I ran into using the three stat system was that it put too much on Mind. While specifics were driven by skills, it still put everything from Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma into one stat.

My solution was to add Alertness. It was the one area that wasn't well defined by a skill and that I was struggling with in game play. So my simple 3x9 skill chart had to expand to 4x9.

That's right, 9 skills. At least for Fantasy Skill20. Different settings could require different skills around subjects such as magic and technology.

Skills replace numbers such as Base Attack Bonus (use Melee or Ranged skill) as well as defenses. Without numbers derived from levels, there's no need for levels. Advancement is handled through advancing skills and stats. Advancing skills is fairly easy, growing more difficult with higher skill ranks, while advancing attributes are expensive and require a lot of work (xp).

The third part of the character building blocks is the selection of feats. Class abilities from other d20 incarnations are part of feats, as well as some familiar feats. The initial number of feats hinge on stat scores and are gained by improving stats and getting skills to certain break points (11 ranks of a given skill). Feat gain is fairly slow, though the initial helping may look generous. However, given that the player uses feats to emulate class abilities, they can get used up quickly.

The player can decide whether to focus their character and make it more versatile based on feat selection with the obvious trade off. The same holds true for skills. If a player dumps all xp into advancing their melee skill and load up on combat feats they will shine in toe-to-toe fights. The counter to this min-maxing is to have a well-rounded campaign with plenty of skill checks and challenges other than combat.

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Game Name Game

Back when 4E was looming on the horizon, I started working on what I called Project 39, my attempt to combine the best of what I had seen in the 4E mechanics with what I wanted to keep from 3.5.

4E hit, I blew up my campaign world to accommodate the huge shift it represented, and we converted our ongoing campaign to 4E. That last a few sessions until I hit on a way to do more granular advancement (something I frequently tinkered with in d20) and hit on the idea of 4lacarte, an a la carte advancement system where players bought powers, feats, skills and what not piecemeal, rather than a surge of power once in a while when they leveled.

Cruising the InterBlogs, I stumbled across Robin Stacey's Microlite system. The idea behind Microlite was to boil down D&D to its barest bones, with the basic rules taking up a couple pages. A small community developed around the idea, all doing their own takes on it. I realized it would be easy for me to distill down what I was doing into a simplified system, basically just expanding slightly on the Microlite idea but keeping my idea of advancement divorced from level. I called it MicroZ.

Microlite was bought by Seth Drebitko of Kobold Enterprise. Microlite20 or M20 continues to have its community and Mr. Drebitko is continuing to develop the system. However as thing progressed I could see his path and my development path were diverging enough that I felt that my system was not quite Micro and many of the mechanic introduced to M20 were not ones that met my needs.

I flirted with the name z20, a play off d20 and the z in Oz. But it isn't very descriptive, then I hit on an idea for a name that sums up the core of my iteration of d20. Skill20.

Advancement in Skill20 mostly hinges on Skills. While there is Stat (Ability or Attribute such as Strength) advancement, Stats don't change much over time. Skills are the driving force in this game. Hence the name.

I'll go into more details on Skill20 in a future post.

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