Please define 'swingy'

[Vegepygmy]

The thing that makes 3.x swingy is the damage attacks do compared to HP.

I don't think that's what most people mean by "swingy."

"Swingy" connotes a certain degree of randomness. Consistently dealing a lot of damage isn't "swingy," it's just deadly. Unpredictably dealing a lot of damage is more what people mean by "swingy," IME.

 

[Janx]

I don't think that's what most people mean by "swingy."

"Swingy" connotes a certain degree of randomness. Consistently dealing a lot of damage isn't "swingy," it's just deadly. Unpredictably dealing a lot of damage is more what people mean by "swingy," IME.

I'll buy into that concept.

Some of the posts in this thread point out spells that dramatically change the fight. That's what spells are for. If your spell is effectively the same as me chopping with my sword or shooting with my bow, then you don't have a better mousetrap.

So ignore the spells for a moment. Magic, by definition, short-circuits the universe to make fantastic things happen. Magic does add swinginess, but I think it is important to consider that swinginess can exist in the game's non-magical elements.

Consider the low-level non-caster party facing level appropriate humanoid monsters.

Arm the bad guys with swords like the party, and you have a fairly even fight.

Arm them with great-axes, and you have a swingy fight.

the bad guys could roll low for the whole fight (or at least, not any better than the PCs), or they could roll 11 and 12s for damage. Suddenly, those PCs are dead.

That's swingy. When the combatants have a fairly low HP count, but do a lot of damage. The outcome is mostly based on who rolled luckier

Give everyone more HP and/or lower the damage range, and you get a grindier game.

Grindy doesn't mean it is more tactical. In fact, it may mean the opposite. In a grindy fight, there's not much you can change as both sides trade blows and WHITTLE the other side down. By definition, nobody has any ability to dramatically change the fight, because everything's been watered down to grind.

In a swingy fight, some of that swinginess comes in when one side does something that can dramatically shift the situation. It could be rolling a 12 damage with the great-axe which is the luck component, it could be casting a sleep spell, taking out the enemy with 1 die roll.

I suspect an optimum design would be that some fights are swingy, some are grindy, with low level being a little more grindy than swingy, because the PCs have less resources to deal with a sudden shift (ie, 10 HP -12 damage=dead)

 

[Coldwyn]

@Janx:

I don´t really agree with your take on magic.
If you take only high damage and SoD spells into account, it´s more swing, build into the spells.
But the whole smattering of defensive spells that have been published in DnD so far exist only to counter swingy combat. Spells like false life, all the spells that raise AC, stone skin, and so on, exist solely to reduce the chance/effect of random effects.

 

[Janx]

@Janx:

I don´t really agree with your take on magic.
If you take only high damage and SoD spells into account, it´s more swing, build into the spells.
But the whole smattering of defensive spells that have been published in DnD so far exist only to counter swingy combat. Spells like false life, all the spells that raise AC, stone skin, and so on, exist solely to reduce the chance/effect of random effects.

My real point was to realize that swing happens in the mundane frame of combat. Folks were citing spells as if they were the sole cause of swing.

The reality is, some spells are grindy in that they level out the spikes of swing, increase combat duration, etc.

the swingy spells are the ones that do some pretty funky stuff, teleporting, stone2mud/mud2stone. The wierd stuff that when applied to combat, shifts victory to the caster's side.

in any event, it wasn't about the magic, it's about the core design of the combat engine itself. Before you apply a magic system, is it swingy, or grindy?

 

[Victim]

As noted above, my examples weren't save-or-die spells, but spells with effects that had a (big) effect no matter what. As a player I actually prefer using these spells, since they aren't nearly as random as save-or-die spells are.

The thing that makes 3.x swingy is the damage attacks do compared to HP. Fireball for instance has the same average damage as a rogue with 10 con has in 3.x. (Not I would want a play a character in 3.x with 10 con - you would be lucky to get to level 2).

Well, I'd say that's part of it. You can easily have non-damage related swing though: when our group used Tactical Teleport to move our team out of Force Cage and into perfect attack positions, that was a massive swing in our favor - first, for mostly canceling the Force Cage (a big swing in their favor), second, for getting around their melee defenders, and finally for the flanking full attacks against their caster that immediately followed it.

However, fairly fragile combatants - even high level characters can often kill themselves in a round or 2 solo - increases the impact of what swings do happen. The pendulum doesn't have much time to swing back and forth when half the combatants went down on the first swing against them... Especially when you consider the action economy death spiral - it's harder to fight back after you lose someone since your side now has fewer actions and you lose the unique value and synergy provided by that character/monster. If the fighter dies, maybe the rogue then can't flank and get sneak attack.

My experience with 3.x was usually that reverses were hard; once things tipped in favor of one side, they generally had enough momentum to brutalize the opposition. This makes some sense to me - if the battle can be swingy, then you want to end it before things have a chance to turn around. Because of that, the game seemed to emphasize planning more than tactics. You load the gun in advance with items and buffs, shoot it at the start of the fight when you pick a trick to use or target to focus fire, and hope things go well. If they don't, maybe you prepped appropriate contingencies (like say the Tactical Teleport to escape the Force Cage, rings of evasion/long lasting resist spells/alternate means of travel or rest to avoid the many fireball ambush, etc).

 

[I'm A Banana]

I watched people pull out standard laundry lists of cautious behaviour .... that were too boring to enumerate on ... and tap them when the dm asks what they do next.

Which can be frustrating, but it certainly matches reality well. In reality, the first person to stick a sword in their enemies wins, pretty much right then and there. For certain styles of game (grim & gritty, for instance), this is entirely a feature. It's not for everyone, but it's not inherently a bad thing.

Would you say that Chess is a swingy game?

I'd peg it as a very binary game. One turn decides everything. That's not necessarily swingy (it's not random), but it shares the fault of extremely swingy systems in that it is boringly extreme.

Poker dodges the binary bullet, but can still be very swingy. The interesting design in Poker from this perspective is that people determine how swingy they want each hand to be via the mechanic of the bet. Swinginess plays a key role in the strategy: did that guy just go all in because he's got a killer hand, or did he go all in as a bluff? If you're making smaller bets, it's less swingy. This means that Poker has a pacing to it, and that pacing is set by players at the table. As the bets get higher, each decision becomes more important, because the swing gets steeper and steeper, becoming more and more extreme, until finally the hand is called and the tension is released.

I wonder what a game would look like if we took that element of "player-dictated swinginess" and added it to a fantasy PnP RPG like D&D? Say, your HP becomes your bank, and in each combat in a day(each hand), you can choose to wager a certain amount of HP. No one can make you loose HP you didn't put up. If you flee combat, you fold (you loose the HP you put up), but if you win combat, that HP comes back to you, and you ALSO gain rewards from the HP everyone else put up (perhaps that determines your XP and GP and treasure and the like). But, your enemies (the DM's party) can also fold, depriving you of those rewards. The key in such a system would be unpredictability; the players should never know exactly what powers they get to use, and they should never know exactly what powers the DM gets to use. If you were the stronger party, you would want to fake weakness so you'd get a better reward; if you were the weaker party, you might flee, or you might try to seem better than you really are. The combat would hinge on which party really is the stronger or the weaker (which could be slightly random, like a game of Texas Hold 'Em, or less so, like 5 Card Stud), but that's not something either party would know until all bets are placed.

Probably needs some work, and it probably isn't ideal for core D&D (which has a legacy of HP attrition to adhere to), but it's fun to think about appropriating these mechanical elements.

 

[Janx]

Which can be frustrating, but it certainly matches reality well. In reality, the first person to stick a sword in their enemies wins, pretty much right then and there. For certain styles of game (grim & gritty, for instance), this is entirely a feature. It's not for everyone, but it's not inherently a bad thing.



I'd peg it as a very binary game. One turn decides everything. That's not necessarily swingy (it's not random), but it shares the fault of extremely swingy systems in that it is boringly extreme.

Poker dodges the binary bullet, but can still be very swingy. The interesting design in Poker from this perspective is that people determine how swingy they want each hand to be via the mechanic of the bet. Swinginess plays a key role in the strategy: did that guy just go all in because he's got a killer hand, or did he go all in as a bluff? If you're making smaller bets, it's less swingy. This means that Poker has a pacing to it, and that pacing is set by players at the table. As the bets get higher, each decision becomes more important, because the swing gets steeper and steeper, becoming more and more extreme, until finally the hand is called and the tension is released.

I wonder what a game would look like if we took that element of "player-dictated swinginess" and added it to a fantasy PnP RPG like D&D? Say, your HP becomes your bank, and in each combat in a day(each hand), you can choose to wager a certain amount of HP. No one can make you loose HP you didn't put up. If you flee combat, you fold (you loose the HP you put up), but if you win combat, that HP comes back to you, and you ALSO gain rewards from the HP everyone else put up (perhaps that determines your XP and GP and treasure and the like). But, your enemies (the DM's party) can also fold, depriving you of those rewards. The key in such a system would be unpredictability; the players should never know exactly what powers they get to use, and they should never know exactly what powers the DM gets to use. If you were the stronger party, you would want to fake weakness so you'd get a better reward; if you were the weaker party, you might flee, or you might try to seem better than you really are. The combat would hinge on which party really is the stronger or the weaker (which could be slightly random, like a game of Texas Hold 'Em, or less so, like 5 Card Stud), but that's not something either party would know until all bets are placed.

Probably needs some work, and it probably isn't ideal for core D&D (which has a legacy of HP attrition to adhere to), but it's fun to think about appropriating these mechanical elements.

I was thinkin the same thing about poker as game mechanic in your second paragraph.

good idea. you need XP just for being original.

 

[Garthanos]

I wonder what a game would look like if we took that element of "player-dictated swinginess" and added it to a fantasy PnP RPG like D&D? Say, your HP becomes your bank, and in each combat in a day(each hand), you can choose to wager a certain amount of HP. No one can make you loose HP you didn't put up. If you flee combat, you fold (you loose the HP you put up), but if you win combat, that HP comes back to you, and you ALSO gain rewards from the HP everyone else put up (perhaps that determines your XP and GP and treasure and the like). But, your enemies (the DM's party) can also fold, depriving you of those rewards. The key in such a system would be unpredictability; the players should never know exactly what powers they get to use, and they should never know exactly what powers the DM gets to use. If you were the stronger party, you would want to fake weakness so you'd get a better reward; if you were the weaker party, you might flee, or you might try to seem better than you really are. The combat would hinge on which party really is the stronger or the weaker (which could be slightly random, like a game of Texas Hold 'Em, or less so, like 5 Card Stud), but that's not something either party would know until all bets are placed.

Mayhaps less extreme but more easily added to the games we already see. (without major rewrites)

Explicitly defining how risky you are chosing to be could be mechanically done by having a boost to to hit which penalized your defense. Or a boost to damage that increase enemies damage dealing if they hit you the same turn you are using it.

D&D 4e has a few moves that come in under this already, the fighters Brash Strike and the Wizards PP Bloodmage.

The gambits you mention are explicitly appearing mightier or weaker than you are were featured in Amber Diceless roleplaying... it was in mostly a hand waved form.

 

[pawsplay]

I don't think that's what most people mean by "swingy."

"Swingy" connotes a certain degree of randomness. Consistently dealing a lot of damage isn't "swingy," it's just deadly. Unpredictably dealing a lot of damage is more what people mean by "swingy," IME.

If damage is relatively large compared to hit points, the combat is more unpredictable.

 

[Hussar]

If damage is relatively large compared to hit points, the combat is more unpredictable.

I'd buy that actually. That was one of my pet peeves in 3e actually. A given creature of a CR equal to the PC could, granted with a low chance, take a PC from full to dead in a single round of full attacks. I played a fairly high hack game, so, it meant that PC's were dropping like flies.

One nice thing about AD&D is that the monster damage ranges were so piddly, after about 5th level, nothing other than dragons (and even then) could really threaten you in single numbers. The only thing I saw PC's dying from was save or die after about 5th, 6th level.

Makes controlling combat a bit easier since you up the damage with numbers of monsters, rather than relying on one monster, because adding a second just upped the difficulty too much.