What system has the best rules for theater of the mind combat? I’m looking for something that sacrifices the least complexity while not requiring a battle map. I need to find something that can handle a area of effect or moving people from one place to another.
 |
 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
|
The point of theater of the mind is to make it less complex dumbass
Let me rephrase it. I want some option for handling position or area damage without a strict map.
>I want to buy a boat
>While I'm in a car dealership
This is you
Yes
Is this from HERO? I need to check out their combat rules as well
It's from Prowler and Paragons, it's like Hero but rules-lite
Oh, interesting. I’ll look into that.
PF2E has gridless combat? Huh
>I want some option for handling position or area damage without a strict map.
Use approximate map.
The point of theater of the mind is neither using minis nor maps. Nothing more nothing less.
Genesys and Equinox come to mind. Both use range bands and the combat is decently crunchy. Wouldn't call it tactical, but it's far enough from rules light for me. Both offer movement and AoE.
Also heard 13th Age uses range bands as well, but haven't read it.
I’ve heard of Genesys but I’ve never seen Equinox before. What’s the game about?
It's a sequel to shadowrun.
Men went to the stars, found magic again, demons overran the planet surfaces in the meantime and destroyed earth.
Use zonal maps, most games run just fine with those and you can draw them in seconds on plain paper.
How do zonal maps work? Just like designate each area of interest as a separate zone or something? How do you handle moving between zones that are far away?
Generally, you move one zone per turn, and size them appropriately to where that makes sense.
The main reason I ask is because i’m having to account for some people moving faster than others. I guess I could just let some characters move more zones than others.
If they don't move twice as fast, they move the same rate.
You just take a map and designate areas as zones. Moving anywhere within your own zone is a free action. Moving to a new zone costs you your move (fast creatures can move more than one zone and slow creatures must use a full round action to move to a new zone). The general size of the zones should be based on the encounter area. A tavern fight might have 3-5 different zones whilst a city under siege could have an entire city block represent 1 zone
>How do zonal maps work
It doesn't, that's the thing. It's regular ranges with few steps added to it, so it both fails as pure abstraction (since you have a clear-cut, yet purely abstract range of movement and weapon reach) and actual ranges (since you have "2 zones to enemy", which can both mean 2 meters and 200, depending on what the zone is at the moment).
If a game has zones in it, ignore them. If it doesn't, don't add them. All you are going to achieve is endless confusion of everyone at the table, and at worst, either a munchkin will exploit the shit out of them (since it adds "crunch" into abstract theatre of the mind combat) or, much more likely, people will start to argue what should be within the range of a zone, based on prior zones they've experienced, leaving everyone bitter and annoyed over how arbitrary and inconsistent this shit is.
Zones are just one of those things that people making "light" games decide to add to it in some insane logic that they will make it easier this way for people migrating from grid-based systems, missing the memo they create the worst outcome of the both options: an abstract grid
You sound like an idiot. You never mix real ranges with zones. Melee can occur between anyone in the same zone. Ranged combat between adjacent zones. AoE hits everyone in the same zone. Realistically, a scene should never have more than about six zones. You can move from one zone to another, or accomplish some movement action inside a zone (climb into a cupboard, etc) once per turn unless you are twice as fast as a normal human in which case do two moves.
Simples.
Nta, and the only game that I've played with zones was Achtung Cthulhu, but from the top of my head
>Village we end up in fight is divided into zones, four of them
>Your combat rifle with range of 2 zones can now reach half across the village
>Party reaches the village's church, divided into zones, also four of them
>Your exact same rifle can now reach half-across the church, everything else is out of reach
>Also, for reasons unknown, a guy with a longbow has longer reach than you, since bow has range of 3
>He was sniping targets from the other side of the village, but now can't hit the cultists on the other side of the church
This sort of random rollercoaster of inconsist bullshit was precisely why we only played the starter scenario and never returned to the game, going back to Pulp Cthulhu - and zones were one of the least problems we had with 2d20.
Also
>Realistically
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Realistic" in the sense that if you have more than six zones your environment is too complicated for zonal mapping and should be streamlined.
I also don't frick with weapons having different ranges in normal zones, and the limit is considered to be more to do with line of sight than maximum reach of projectiles.
That all being said though, I have seen people attach set ranges to a zone (like Lounge 5m, Kitchen 3m) and any attack through them is considered to be at a range of the sum of all crossed zones. Not the way I do it, but makes more sense if you want to have rifles fighting longbows and the difference matters. Longbows outranging rifles is just moronic.
That's still not what that word means
And by adding measurable size to a zone, you might as well just use ranges. It's a bad system, period. Either ignore ranges entirely (you can see its eyes = you can shoot it) or go with actual, measurable ranges. Zones are miserable for ranged-heavy games, and when fighting melee, it doesn't matter one fricking bit what system is used.
Also, I'd love to see any game that just allows you to AoE everything in an arbitrary decided zone. So my burst from an SMG hit all 20 targets, including 3 other PCs? Brilliant!
That's how grenades work in my game. AoE is scary but rare.
The primary advantage to zones imo is that you can use index cards or rough outlines and don't draw anything (to scale or otherwise). I'm kind of moronic when it comes to drawing and my maps make things less clear, not more.
t. missing the point
>most games run just fine with those
Not OP, but who are you kidding here? Yourself? Zones are the dumbest idea that happened since Fate decided to double-down on useless features like banked Invocations. Either have actual ranges or keep it abstract. All zones are doing is cramming yet another obtuse feature into a game that can't interact with it in meaningful way and it also doesn't add anything to the experience, other than the tedium.
Zones are superior just for the fact that I don’t have to wait 10 minutes for ‘that butthole’ to find the perfect spot to place his fireball so he hits all enemies whilst barely missing all allies
prowlers and paragons
Sectors of 9. Treat square aoe as entire square, circle as a random selection of above 5, inline picks at random through the tiles it goes through and so on
Have you looked at 13th Age? It uses abstract rabges like engaged nearby and faraway
Well, the system that I am playing currently goes completely within the theater of mind (ToM, from now on). The things that you are asking for go as the following:
>AoE-effects:
In the ToM-engine, enemies get a set bonus to their rolls depending on their number. AoE-effects work in a way that reduces their "group-bonus" for a certain roll. (For example, a 'cleave'-type attack reduces the opponent's defensive roll if they have the group-benefit.)
>Movement
All player characters get a number of 'skill points' to be used in every combat. These points can be used for movement, for example. If a character decides to dodge, they can spend a number of their skill points to gain some temporary hit points against enemy damage this turn. They can also decide to 'go all in', increasing both the damage dealt and taken this turn, etc.
So, yea. Anything can really be done with the theater of mind. Some things just need to be abstracted to their basic elements.
Burning wheel has a pretty cool totm combat system with a sort of relative distances between combatants
Honor + Intrigue or WFRP 2e. WFRP assumes a mat by default but by no means requires it. Being able to move people around in it is actually quite plausible and effective, assuming you don't put your fights in blank white voids.
Interesting. Never heard of Honor + Intrigue before, I’ll have to check it out
I run only Theatre of the mind,
If I ever get into a situation where something like this needs to be resolved I scribble the location on a paper(no grid). Then I map out where all the characters are in my mind as a referee, let the players have some input, tweak, then I show on that doodle where it's moved.
Then I shred the paper and go back to Theatre.
A system not focused on combat. TOTM shits itself whenever positioning matters.
Pathfinder 2e honestly. I did it a couple of weeks ago during a late night outside session. Real simple to say “it takes one action to reach the enemy now you have two actions left” etc. It loses some of its deeper tactical nature but its a decent trade off if you dont want a basic b***h storygame system for totm. World of darkness/vtm appeals to me for totm but I haven’t got around to playing it so i can’t recommend. Its also probably not the complexity level you want. In the future I will probably just run an osr retroclone for theatre of the mind play.
Fate.
Not because it's a good system, or because it has good rules, but because it forces everyone at the table to either participate in the whole thing, or the game literally comes apart. It completely dismantles the "move + action" sort of behaviour from regular games, because you can just move freely and your actions aren't exactly resolved by some "Attack" skill (they work like that still in practice, but require figuring out how you are even doing that attack with your skills). Also, since it doesn't have HP for NPC, it never turns into a slog with bunch of targets with barely any HP left that now will take d6+1 turns to put down, as they won't just run away.
Said all that, Fate is a horrible system to play anything else and feels like a teaching aid for autistic children rather than anything else, due to how needlessly bloated all the rules are for a game of pure pretend.