Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 8400196" data-attributes="member: 2629">You can abstract away from what happens on the battlemap to tell the story you want to tell.  You can also frame your tory around what plays out on the battlemap.  Both can be combined to tell a good story and hold the mechanical aspects as controlling of the game, but allowing the game to tweak around the edges to tell a good story.  Examples from Critical Role are the countless "How do you want to do this?" moments.  The PCs describe a kill in a way that has nothing to do with the mechanics of the fight.  For a specific example (taken from my game where someone was a Black Widow fan): A PC may roll a hit, deal 8 damage and finish off the warlord ... but they describe it as leaping up and wrapping their legs around the neck of the enemy, using their body weight to flip the enemy and dropping them onto the dagger they pulled out as they flipped, driving the dagger deep into the fallen enemy skull.  As a DM, I say, "Cool!  You end up prone after the maneuver - do you want to stand up?"ALTERNATIVELY: If you really need the mechanics to tell a more dynamic (and less turn based) story, you need to eliminate the 6 second round.  That is too much time for players and monsters to act without interacting.  If you watch a good fight scene in a movie, you'll find that 3 seconds is about right for the back and forth of combat.  Each combatant takes about a second and a half to engage their attack, while their enemy responds in about a second and a half.  This is not universally true, but it is is what I noticed in the combats I've seen.  This takes some pretty significant revamping of the rules to do well, but I've had systems for it in prior editions (unless you go with the simplest version - rounds are 3 seconds and movement is cut in half, but everything else remains the same).  You can also go with a truly dynamic segmented system where time is not broken up into rounds at all, but we instead have actions take time and just move from action to action.</blockquote>

Verification