Hi All, I am curious about creating interesting and memorable combat that involves creatures that can (maybe very easily) manipulate or 'move' through time.Has anyone thought about (or wants to think about) rules concerning such creatures.
I wanted in my campaign creatures that could move through time (i guess they can augment the rate at which they moved through time or maybe time shift to a different temporal location outright, similar to telport). This brings with it worries concerning how combat against such creatures would go... I didnt want combat to devolve into the time creatures always winning because, well, they can move through time, a spellcaster with such 'innate' abilities would be fierce... What to do? Well somehow make temporal abilities interesting (i.e. not merely giving them a +X to AC due to their hasten state, etc.); dont get me wrong I love the haste spell) but not so powerful so as to essentially bar any interesting combat with such creatures...
I came up with the idea of splitting combat into different temporal sections (every round is individuated by a temporal index, T1... Tn, and combat can span different spatial regions, maybe represented by a map with 1 inch squares, etc., AND ALSO temporal regions... To make combat accessible one can say that the CURRENT round is at time T0 and that certtain creatures have effects that can happen on T0-1 or T0+1, so we stretch combat out two temporal sections to mka e it manageable and each creature is possibly AT each time location but some can have effects or can move about time sections in interesting ways, mayb they can disappear from T0 and goto T0+1 thereby giving them immunity to affects that ahppen at T0 (where t0 maybe spans a rounds amount of tie)... It is hard to desribe with words but I have ran combat lke this and it worked much better than I imagined it woud and that I can desribe here (i.e. combat where some creatures xcanm move about tie sections; when I implemented theses rules for the first and only time thmey sort of organically grew and worked smoother than imagined)...
Anyway hope that makes sense and any thoughts/questions?
I wanted in my campaign creatures that could move through time (i guess they can augment the rate at which they moved through time or maybe time shift to a different temporal location outright, similar to telport). This brings with it worries concerning how combat against such creatures would go... I didnt want combat to devolve into the time creatures always winning because, well, they can move through time, a spellcaster with such 'innate' abilities would be fierce... What to do? Well somehow make temporal abilities interesting (i.e. not merely giving them a +X to AC due to their hasten state, etc.); dont get me wrong I love the haste spell) but not so powerful so as to essentially bar any interesting combat with such creatures...
I came up with the idea of splitting combat into different temporal sections (every round is individuated by a temporal index, T1... Tn, and combat can span different spatial regions, maybe represented by a map with 1 inch squares, etc., AND ALSO temporal regions... To make combat accessible one can say that the CURRENT round is at time T0 and that certtain creatures have effects that can happen on T0-1 or T0+1, so we stretch combat out two temporal sections to mka e it manageable and each creature is possibly AT each time location but some can have effects or can move about time sections in interesting ways, mayb they can disappear from T0 and goto T0+1 thereby giving them immunity to affects that ahppen at T0 (where t0 maybe spans a rounds amount of tie)... It is hard to desribe with words but I have ran combat lke this and it worked much better than I imagined it woud and that I can desribe here (i.e. combat where some creatures xcanm move about tie sections; when I implemented theses rules for the first and only time thmey sort of organically grew and worked smoother than imagined)...
Anyway hope that makes sense and any thoughts/questions?