Hi Marith!
Played (D&D5E): Librarians Errant.Renwick dashes off the new spell tome while his fleshy guests are wasting time in slumber, and sends them back to Waterdeep. As the squad traverses the 920 province of Dewey Decimal Country, they take a break in a mid-stacks coffeeshop, but although the rhino barista is chill, nothing in Bibliospace can ever be easy. An airship made of invisible forcefields full of black pudding and powered by fire elementals is a new one on them, though. Massive destruction, elementals of caustic flame (hydrogen fluoride?), and crazed biographies ensue. In the middle of that, Grim reads an origami octopus summoning them to a tri-library conclave, so that’s where they slink off to before anyone can make them pay for the coffeeshop. Like all meetings of senior librarians, the conclave is a boozefest, but somehow the next morning everyone remembers that Walter is indeed a threat to knowledge itself and is agreed that the Reshelving Squad should do something about it. Back to Waterdeep for real, but this time, as they cross the savanna of literature, they are set upon by a dragon made of all the text from the Island of Evil Books, as well as the physical structure of the island itself! Things look bad for a bit, but Thaïs uses lightning magic to break the island free of the flying books that drag it through the sky, and without that crashing down on everyone, the squad can concentrate on the word dragon. Victory! And onward to Waterdeep, where they will make a plan to use the hundreds of glyphs produced by Martin to assault Walter from multiple dimensions!
Read (manga): Cheerful Amnesia vol 4 (Tamamushi Oku): Horny airhead with amnesia and her girlfriend with a more serious affect continue to try to be actual girlfriends and somehow manage to become wives. Wait, is the airhead getting her memories back? CLIFFHANGER!
Written (game design): 676:
I should probably stop putting off the details of combat as “/* dumb –
fix later */” and think about them.
Since actions and movement are declared in Readiness order but
resolved in a pile at the end, players potentially have to remember
what they were doing for the entire round. This includes the GM,
who may have many characters to manage. So, important rule: no
takebacks! If you declare your action and then the next person
starts declaring theirs, that’s what you’re doing. If what you
declared is somehow not legal (though hopefully the rules aren’t
so fiddly that misplays are common), lose half your Harmony (or half
your Readiness if you don’t have any) and assume you did something
unwise with magic.
Zones are like 10m across, maybe less in cramped caves (but more
in open spaces) and characters can only move a zone or two per
round, so there aren’t many zones on a battlefield (and we don’t
need a battlemat with squares or hexes). It might still be handy
to have tokens to move around because there are more moving pieces
at once than activate-one-unit-at-a-time games.
In addition to being in a zone, a character might be engaged in melee
with one or more other characters in that zone. They might also be at a
specific point in that zone, like blocking a doorway, or near another
character to guard them, or whatever; that can be handled narratively.
Doorways and such seem like obvious places to divide zones, but then
which zone is someone standing there in? Maybe both, since they can be
engaged from both sides, take damage from explosions on both sides, etc.
That seems fine, we’re not on the chessboard.
Technically, I guess someone with Readiness 10 should be able to watch
characters with Readiness 5 and 8 both make their declarations before
deciding which one to react to. It would be easier if reactions had to
be declared immediately, though, and we could move tokens at the time of
declaration (or not move them if the reaction successfully blocks them).
I’m not sure how to handle blocking other characters from moving. In a
narrow space, Strength and Size will factor into it, but in an open
space it’s opposed Get Over There rolls, which I also don’t know how to
handle. And what about blocking movement by shooting them, or casting
any number of different spells on them? I’m pretty sure blocking
movement happens in the declaration phase, while any damage happens at
the end of the round, but if you’re hitting somebody to block them, you
have to roll attack vs Readiness to find out if you succeed, which would
naturally reduce their Readiness right then. Is there a fake attack roll that
doesn’t reduce Readiness or cause wounds, but just determines blocking?
Now I remember why I didn’t solve this problem already.
When attacks are applied at the end of the round, it would be nice
to be able to ignore timing by rolling all the attack dice together,
but then what do we do with any special effects of weapons? And
then we wouldn’t be able to use attack rolls to determine success
of blocking and maybe other actions earlier in the round, unless
they’re fake rolls as mentioned.
Do we use the tokens to show everyone’s intended final position
assuming no blocking or forced movement, and resolve a successful
block by rolling during the end of round and pushing the final
position back as far as the blocker wants/is able at that point? We
might need double tokens to keep track of original position, but that’s
not hard. We then have to keep track of everything somewhere, though,
since we can have situations where A moves to block B on their way to
engage C but D moves to block A from blocking B by pushing them over a
cliff. Argh!