Initiative and Timing

[pukunui]

Because of the segmented nature of the Initiative order, I feel it's hard to pull off action scenes involving carefully timed sequences and/or "forced movement" during combat encounters.

I'm running a Star Wars Saga Edition game, so I'll use a SW movie scene as an example: the climactic duel at the end of The Phantom Menace sees Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan chase Maul through a series of force fields that activate at regular intervals, cutting the combatants off from each other at inopportune times in order to heighten the drama.

I have no idea how to replicate that scene in my game. I could maybe pull it off outside of combat, but I don't know how I'd incorporate it into a turn-based combat encounter.

It seems like the way WotC handles it is to give these sorts of things their own Initiative count(s), but I'm not sure how well that would work in this instance. In order to pull off the sort of thing we see in the movie, I think you'd need to have the force fields acting independently of the Initiative order, perhaps even acting on the individual characters' turns.

Either that or you'd need to carefully engineer it so the corridor was just too long for someone to double-move all the way through and then you'd need to make sure your NPC starts his turn several squares ahead of the chasing PCs, so that even if you have both the NPC and the PCs act before the forcefield during the Initiative order, the PCs will still be end up far enough away from the NPC that the forcefield can activate in between them.


Another awkward one would be something like the conveyor belt scene in Attack of the Clones. I guess you could just have everyone move a certain number of squares along the conveyor belt at the beginning of each round - or, I suppose you could make it so that you can move at 2x your speed if going in the direction that the conveyor is going, but only half speed if you're going against it (that would be to show movement relative to anything/anyone not on the conveyor belt). But that's still kind of awkward.
EDIT: Interestingly enough, according to the SWSE supplement, Galaxy at War, this is exactly how you do it: moving with the belt is 2x speed, against it is half-speed. It also adds an Acrobatics check to avoid being flat-footed while on the belt.

I know this sort of thing is partly just a sacrifice you have to make when using turn-based combat, but it still rubs me the wrong way sometimes. Like when doing a chase scene. Instead of actually having one character moving simultaneously with another character, you have this sort of fits-and-starts thing where one character moves away, the other catches up, then the first one moves ahead again, then the other catches up again (and each time the first character tries to break away, the chasing character gets to make an AoO - whereas if they were both moving simultaneously, that might not happen). It's awkward but I don't know how else you'd do it.

I suppose maybe you could break up Initiative into a "movement round" and an "action round" but even that is unwieldy and awkward.


Thoughts?


Thanks,
Jonathan

 

[Rel]

So first let me say that I have run, and will in the future run, many a game that uses tactical movement on a battlemat. It is fairly straightforward and fair. But it does impose some limitations that go away if you use a looser format for tracking location on the battlefield.

A recent passion of mine is the game Old School Hack. It uses a system of "Arenas" for tracking location in combat. It sounds to me like it could answer a lot of the issues you're having.

(This is going to sound a little complex but once you understand it and use it, it really is very simple. Trust me.)

Basically an "Arena" is a portion of the battlefield that is discernibly different from other areas on the battlefield. Several such Arenas effectively make up your combat area. The way that these are connected indicates how the combat area is shaped. So in the Phantom Menace example, you might have the "Catwalk Arena" and the "Force Field Hall Arena" and the "Room With The Big Deep Shaft That You Just Know Somebody Is Going To Fall Down Arena" and you should probably make "The Big Deep Shaft That You Just Know Somebody Is Going To Fall Down" its own Arena.

These would be linked linearly, per the action scene in the movie. So if you want to get from the catwalk to the room with the shaft, you've got to make your way through the force field hall.

In Old School Hack it usually takes one Move action to move from one Arena to Another. But it might also require an attribute (or skill) check to do so. Thus in the Phantom Menace situation it may require some kind of Athletic or Acrobatics check to hurry and squeeze through that force field and make it to the room at the end. Or, if you want to make sure that the characters spend at least one round in the force field hallway, you can divide it into multiple Arenas.

For the conveyor belt situation you could have a particular conveyor belt be one Arena or divide it into multiple Arenas based on what happens there. In that scene from the movie there are obviously various hazards going on. Being in a certain part of the conveyor belt would result in trying to evade attacks or make skill checks specific to that Arena. Rather than require that a PC make a Move to get to another Arena then you could have them involuntarily moved to each successive Arena unless they take a Move to stay in the Arena they are in, thus simulating them running against the movement of the conveyor belt.

Representationally on the battlemat you can draw these Arenas in as much pictorial detail as you like, so long as they are recognizably distinct from one another. Then you simply draw lines from one to another to show which are connected. Once you get the hang of it then it is very easy to envision what areas are distinct Arenas and what properties those Arenas should have.

If this sounds like something that you're interested in then I am happy to try and provide more illustration. But I will note that the folks that played Old School Hack at GenCon immediately groked how the Arena system could be applied to other games and I know of several folks who did so immediately and with very few other rules changes required.

 

[Umbran]

So first let me say that I have run, and will in the future run, many a game that uses tactical movement on a battlemat. It is fairly straightforward and fair. But it does impose some limitations that go away if you use a looser format for tracking location on the battlefield.

A recent passion of mine is the game Old School Hack. It uses a system of "Arenas" for tracking location in combat. It sounds to me like it could answer a lot of the issues you're having.

In old (FASERIP) Marvel Super Heroes, movement was done in "areas", where an area was roughly the size of space covered in a typical comic book panel. You could move some number of areas per round, your attacks would have a range and area of effect in areas. The details of what went on inside a particular area were freeform, it was only longer-distances that had the bookkeeping.

3e and 4e D&D have more effects that depend on fairly precise positioning - using such a system with those games calls for some solid trust between players and GM, that the opportunities to use those powers and abilities will be present, even though the battlemat isn't.

 

[Rel]

3e and 4e D&D have more effects that depend on fairly precise positioning - using such a system with those games calls for some solid trust between players and GM, that the opportunities to use those powers and abilities will be present, even though the battlemat isn't.

Yeah it's tricky if precise positioning is important. I haven't played much SWSE but I get the impression that it is less position dependent than 3e and 4e.

 

[pukunui]

Thanks for the responses. SWSE is still fairly position-dependent, but mostly only as far as attacks of opportunity and line of sight/effect are concerned. And range.

I wanted to ditch the battlemat altogether before, but my players like minis and were concerned that fights would boil down to arguments about positioning. Plus, I have a large collection of minis myself, so I figured I might as well use them ...

I think in terms of the force fields thing, I can just have them act independently of initiative. I could see Maul and Qui-Gon being only one square apart in that scene, so the force field could just activate on the line between their squares. And even if I were to do something similar in my own game and the chasing PC came alongside the fleeing NPC, it could still potentially make for an interesting scene whereby the two characters fight each other while everyone else is forced to watch through the force fields. After all, I'm not trying to recreate the movie scene exactly. Just trying to figure out how to do something similar.

 

[LostSoul]

I am using an initiative system that has all characters acting "at the same time". I needed to change a number of things to make it happen, so it might not be of any interest to you.

When Qui-Gon is chasing Darth Maul, it would work something like this:

Qui-Gon: I chase him down and chop at him with my lightsaber.
Darth Maul: I move down the hall between force fields, timing my move so that when they activate there's a force field between us.
<both roll, Darth Maul wins>
DM: Qui-Gon, you run down the hall after Darth Maul, but the force fields snap into place before you can get to him.

 

[pukunui]

Is it like opposed Initiative rolls or something? I like the idea but I worry that it would descend into chaos.

 

[LostSoul]

It's a different way of doing things, but when you get used to it, it makes a lot of sense. It breaks down into a number of steps:

1. Describe your action (everyone does this at once, in the open, and you can change your action in response to other people's)
2. Figure out the modifiers and DCs
3. Everyone rolls (and writes down the number)
4. Resolve the actions

In the above example, Darth Maul wanted to put those force-fields between himself and Qui-Gon; he succeeded at his roll, so he did. (What I need to figure out is if Qui-Gon should have got his hit in - assuming he succeeded at his roll, beating Darth Maul's AC - or if Darth Maul's success invalidates Qui-Gon's action completely. Oh well, I play tomorrow night!)

 

[Coldwyn]

I think there are ways around the turn-based problem, they´re just a lot of work.
Take the conveyor belt, for example: asign it a speed of x squares per y initiative segments. For example, assign it the highest Ini of all participants, the move it one sqaure every 3 inis down from that.

For the force-fields, generate initiative counts for them, have them ready action to activate when approached. This lets players interact with them and also outsmart them when they figure out how it works.

 

[Dausuul]

It's a different way of doing things, but when you get used to it, it makes a lot of sense. It breaks down into a number of steps:

1. Describe your action (everyone does this at once, in the open, and you can change your action in response to other people's)
2. Figure out the modifiers and DCs
3. Everyone rolls (and writes down the number)
4. Resolve the actions

Interesting note, this is somewhat like how D&D worked before the release of 3E. First everyone declares what they're doing; then you roll initiative and resolve the declared actions in initiative order. Sometimes your action gets invalidated by another combatant's action, and you don't get to do anything that turn.

It makes combat more chaotic and exciting, and it stops people from "finessing" the initiative order (e.g., "Okay, Bob goes after me but before the monsters, so if I go here and ready an attack, he can go there and attack with flanking, then I take my readied action, and then..."). However, it's harder to keep track of, and it doesn't lend itself to complex tactical maneuvering. That may be a plus or a minus depending on where you stand*.

As for the force field scenario: Regardless of what initiative system I was using, I'd give the force fields their own initiative. (In 3E-style "sequential" initiative, I'd roll for it each round to keep it from getting predictable.) Then the outcome of any given round depends on how the initiative order falls out.

[size=-2]*It also made spellcasting a tense experience. You really, really hoped for a good initiative roll as a caster, because if the bad guys scored a hit on you before you got to act, poof--concentration disrupted, bye-bye spell. And AD&D gaming culture being what it was, there was a good chance the DM had cobbled together some kind of vicious homebrew "spell failure" chart and was just itching to roll on it...[/size]