Battle standard on a wagon

[Dr_Ruminahui]

You didn't indicate to whom you were responding, so I'm going to pretend it was to me.

Yeah - it was to you and Wormwood - you both posted right before me and seem to be in agreement.

More accurately: if you loose it, you lose it.

Okay - we seem to be in agreement then - my concern was that you hadn't accounted for situations where the flag might move which weren't an abuse of the item. So, this:

Your interpretation would cause the flags to fail in any non-Terracentric cosmology. That can't be right.

was actually the concern I had with the way your interpretation had previously been phrased.

That said, I seem to be in the relative minority that I might allow it to be mounted on something that is moveable by the players relative to the battlefield - I would just need to come up with some balancing mechanism that gave a penalty to the player moving it that ballanced out the added value mobility gives the standard.

 

[Nifft]

That said, I seem to be in the relative minority that I might allow it to be mounted on something that is moveable by the players relative to the battlefield - I would just need to come up with some balancing mechanism that gave a penalty to the player moving it that ballanced out the added value mobility gives the standard.

I don't really trust myself to foresee all the consequences of that ruling, so I'd be wary of allowing the players to violate a fundamental, general design constraint (limited mobility of Zone effects) for concrete mechanical benefits. It's also a bad precedent, since there are plenty of other, more awesome Zone effects for which the main usual remedy is moving away from ... but with your ruling, the Zone can follow.

Finally, it's rewarding a poor kind of "creativity": the kind that attempts to subvert the spirit of the rules by chipping away at their letter. It's the kind of thinking that got us the previous edition's "bag-of-rats" exploit. IMHO, Battle Standards are cool because they claim territory: they do so via flavor (the historical use of standards), and they support that flavor mechanically (the Zone that helps the PCs defend that territory). It's a simple concept, but they're cool because they execute it reasonably well.

Allowing them to move around subverts their flavor, gives a precedent which could be abused by more powerful Zones, and doesn't add anything to the game (IMHO)... so yeah, I'm not seeing it showing up in my games.

There are already Zone effects which follow you around. If you want one of those, or something like one of those, they're not impossible to design. They're just a different kind of design from Battle Standards.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Storminator]

I think the idea is cool enough to come up with an equivalent to a battle standard - call it a war banner for now - that gives some cool bonus but REQUIRES that the standard move every round.

Something like:

War Banner of Mobility Level ??
Those following this black and gold banner flow over the battlefield.

Wondrous Item ?? gp
Power (Encounter ✦ Zone): Standard Action. When you activate the war banner on your mount of vehicle, it creates a zone in a close burst 5. You and any ally that ends its turn in the zone gains the ability to shift its speed as a move action. This ability lasts until the end of your next turn.*

This zone lasts until the end of the encounter or until the war banner is stationary for one round.

*The implementation is a little wonky, but I think it works. Since the banner moves, just having the bonus while in the zone doesn't work, but if you gain a delayed benefit for ending your turn in the zone, you can use the benefit next turn, then move back into the zone to get it again. You then have the incentive to follow the banner around, which matches the flavor goals.

PS