Green Moon Principles: Serve and Receive
Serve and Receive. Rather than having everyone go on their turn and do any number of things that people can’t respond to, there’s a constant serve and receive going on, with people responding on their next action. Rather than piling up many conditional actions while time stands still, it’s more like a game of wizards playing badminton where, sure, someone might cast a spell to clone the feather ball thing midair or set the pitch on fire or summon a minion to hold the racket for them, but at the end of the day on your turn; you take your action and set something in motion. The ball doesn’t hit until their action when they have an opportunity to respond to it. If they choose to dodge they’ll compromise their ability to counter attack. The “ball” that is, the reaction-applicable action, is in motion between these turns and can be intercepted by anyone. If they fail to respond, it resolves just before the “servers” next action starts. It creates more options for how everyone goes about distributing their actions and forming counter plays.
In d20, you either take no damage because your armour was high, or you take damage, and whetheryou take damage or not it doesn’t change your options one iota since all you really need to do is keep hitting people until either you run out of hit points or they do. Sure your build can put a lot of spin on this and a good DM knows how to set up encounters and parties to create a lot of interesting situations. But I’m inventing my own thing over here that I want to be welcoming to people who’ve not played one of these games before. Having actual thought into how you respond to something means you’re paying attention to your attackers to, and potentially adds more counterplay to the act of being a tank and such.
It also allows for me to implement options such as Area of Effect spells requiring you to move out of their effect or find/make cover to even be allowed to make a Dodge check against them, or to use your spells defensively.
I am slightly worried of this creating defensive options as TOO enticing an offer. Maybe if I have a round where a player does nothing but defend I’ll decrease their Momentum or something. Still haven’t finalised on my Momentum system though, but the basic idea is for it to be a tracker of your tactical/strategic advantage in a fight.
This talk of action and reaction and especially of a momentum mechanic reminds me somewhat of third edition Exalted by Onyx Path, which is presently in a sort of unofficially released mostly-finished beta but should be coming out officially in a few months.
EX3 ties its momentum mechanics into the Initiative count, that is, while your Initiative will start out as whatever you roll at the beginning of the fight, it’ll continually wax and wane during a battle as combatants steal inish from each other using special Withering Attacks. At any time, should a player feel confident enough they can switch their attack for a turn from Withering to Decisive, expending their strategic advantage for a chance to target the opponent’s life points directly.
Less perfectly analogous, EX3 also allows each player several separate defensive values (based on parrying, dodging, etc) letting them choose how to defend against each given attack (though I’ll admit most characters are expected to rely on only one class of defense). Most supernaturally puissant characters (including almost all PCs) can boost both attacks and defenses using powerful effects called Charms, but these draw resources from the same pool, so spending too much on either without knowing what you’re doing can be dangerous.
What I’m saying is look into it. There’s probably something you can steal.
Or you can just ask me more things. I’m kind of excited about this game and have already memorized way too many parts.