Here is an idea for simplifying encounters; anything that can make the GM's job easier is always worth exploring IMO. It's influenced by Danger Patrol which, afaict, has a vastly simpler example of the same thing.

Each encounter is ascribed a Threat value. This assumes the encounter will feature antagonists of some kind and some kind of opposition or goal if only just to defeat the enemies. To beat the encounter and move forward, the players must reduce that value to zero. At this point they win: all remaining opposition is neutralised.

There are only three things a PC can do, using whatever appropriate skills/talents and abilities he has:
1. He can directly act to reduce the threat, doing so if his effort succeeds.
2. He can manouevre into some position to enable him to do this if not otherwise able.
3. Neither; ie his choice of activity will do none of the above.

For example: the PC's reach the villain stronghold where the bomb is going to be launched by the villain. The PC's have to deal with the villain and his henchmen as well as the bomb. The Threat value assigned to this is reduced by either: attacking the villain, his henchmen, or directly working on the bomb. In the meantime the antagonists will of course attack. Any action that affects those three things will reduce the Threat value. Once that value is reduced, regardless of all other factors, the players win. If they reduced it by solely fighting the villain then it is assumed that, with the enemies removed, they can easily defuse the bomb. Conversely, if they reduced the Threat by concentrating solely on the bomb, it is assumed that, with their weapon removed, neautralising the villain and his mooks was a foregone conclusion.

This way there's no need to keep track of individual NPC stat values except the bare essentials - their ability to influence or harm the players. No need to track their health points or such.

That shit sucks. I can't get into games that play my turn for me.

One of the fun parts of RPing for me is figuring out if I have time to focus on the villain, then defuse the bomb, or if I have to keep the bad guys off the bomb guy because the timer isn't going to leave enough time and we have to start working on it right now.

This system basically takes away one of the few things there are to think about in an RPG, and while RPGs aren't thinking games, they need a little of it or they suck.

The purpose of this is to reduce the encounter to its essentials so that the GM's head doesn't explode trying to process lots of stuff. Even a simple pick up and play game lik Feng Shui collapses in combat because of the amount of stuff. At least IME.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;466368There are only three things a PC can do, using whatever appropriate skills/talents and abilities he has:
1. He can directly act to reduce the threat, doing so if his effort succeeds.
2. He can manouevre into some position to enable him to do this if not otherwise able.
3. Neither; ie his choice of activity will do none of the above.

Congratulations, you've just derived 3:16 from first principles.

(Srsly, great RPG that does almost exactly what you're wanting.)

Yes, I can see this idea isn't going to work.

Unfortunately i do not care for 316 at all, having played it.

Do you ever actually play any RPGs or do you just construct theories of why they are not possible?

In Pathfinder, rounds are 6 seconds. If the bomb goes off in a minute thirty, that's 15 combat rounds. I can keep track of that by making a dash or turning  die every round. It isn't brain surgery.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;466407Yes, I can see this idea isn't going to work.

Unfortunately i do not care for 316 at all, having played it.

I love it, but I can see why people wouldn't. Anyway...

I think you're on to something, but it's tricky to abstract-out the nature of a threat and still keep a lot of G aspects. You could try building a sort of "group damage track", and seeing if that works; something akin to a FATE-esque Stress Track.

eg. Let's say we're playing an oWoD game, and the PC's corner the villain and his gang of lackeys - let's say six of them, plus the big villain. A Monologue Ensues, at which point the villain reveals his big plan will go off in five rounds (Dun dun dun!). A Fight Ensues.

Ordinarily you'd do this by giving everyone on the NPC side their own damage track, roll for initiative, and that's a lot of fun. But we're going to do things differently; to represent the mob, the boss hiding behind them, and the time pressure, we're going to combine them all into one gigantic damage track; let's give the mob five health boxes, and the boss ten, so the players have to chew through forty boxes total.

I've attached a rubbish diagram drawn in Excel.

Damage the players do all comes off the mob's total, but when they hit box #5, #10 (The red ones), etc. a lackey goes down (If their hit would do more damage than that, tough, sorry). All damage comes off it; even if they make a daring shot at the boss, he manages to get behind a lackey, or they're so brainwashed they take the hit, and damage comes off the track, whatever. If the players can do something to dishearten the mob (Perhaps by playing the tape recording the party got earlier, of the boss gloating how little he cared for his easily-brainwashed lackeys) then cross off the yellow boxes; it's free damage, basically. Finally, there are some barracks nearby; in a move totally not ripping off Call of Duty, the party can't progress past box #20 until the connecting door is destroyed (Cross off any damage on or past it at the end of each turn, add the appropriate amount of new lackeys - so there'll always be three at the start of a turn).

In the mob's turn, they act on initiative counts as usual, and get one attack for every mobster standing, and the boss; the boss could even get his own initiative count and his own action penalties. Box #35 indicates that the villain is wounded; treat it like a lackey's death (Damage from an individual attack doesn't overflow) but give the villain wound penalties from there. Hit box #40 quick enough for the win.

Adjust to suit, add more puzzle requirements or stages to suit. Maybe a scene could have multiple, maybe intersecting, tracks. Who knows?

Is it "cheating" with the physics of the game world? Well, yes, it is. But that's not to say that it wouldn't work and make for entertaining genre-style scenes.

Threat not only simplifies gameplay, it also rewards players equaly for their creativity and imagination.
 
That's more than you can say for alot of RPGs. For example, consider the infamous Tomb of Horrors. Now there's a dungeon with alot of arbitrary "wrong" choices. It only rewards players who have a very specific kind of trap finding skills, and a neurotic attention to details. Sure, that teeny tiny niche enjoys it, but what about all the people who want to play their own way? Judged in that criteria Tomb of Horrors FAILS where a game with threat style game succeeds.
 

Caption: Just try to imagine of how many choices you can make with this thing. Now realize that all but one of those choices is arbitraraly wrong. Basicaly, it's like someone gave the GM a MADLIB and he filled in all but one of the blanks with one word 'PUNISH THEM WITH DEATH!'*
 
Additionaly, the Tomb of Horrors style is poor game design because the rules for it are too specific to the environment they describe. There's no way to re-use the Tomb of Horrors as part of a different adventure without rewritting it from the ground up. (Wheras more practical adventures can be reused. In a pinch you could re-use a Gnome tavern as a Dwarven tavern and no one would be the wiser.)
 
Fortunately, there's a new game from Hasbro that has none of the aformentioned problems.
 
It's easy to GM, easy for players who want to let their freak-flags fly, and it's infinitely reusable. One adventure you might be helping an endangered puma find it's mother. The next time you might be helping a lost whale shark find it's mother, or even teaching a lost bee how to find it's mother by learning to count in spanish. Any story, any adventure, can be run in the same way because the game mechanics are dissasociated from the fictional world's cause and effect.
 

 
*cuerto

Jesus Christ.

Quote from: Cole;466408Do you ever actually play any RPGs or do you just construct theories of why they are not possible?

what?

Quote from: Cranewings;466410In Pathfinder, rounds are 6 seconds. If the bomb goes off in a minute thirty, that's 15 combat rounds. I can keep track of that by making a dash or turning  die every round. It isn't brain surgery.

horses for courses. I get overwhelmed by increasing amounts of information and so i like to find as simple a means to an end as possible as a gm.

Ok, so the problem so far seems to be that, if the threat includes elements separate from the npc antagonists, they might as well not be there as there's no mechanical advantage to attacking them as it all does damage to the Therat to beat the encounter.

However that isn't always meant to be the case. Threat is intended to represent only those elements germaine to the encounter that have a chance of defeating the players. EG: if the bomb goes off, the players lose, but if the players defeat the villain that planted the bomb it won't stop the bomb - though it might make doing so easier. That is the problem part.

So surely the solution is to have a rule that confers an advantage to the player if an action to attack the villain/pertinent NPC in some fashion (maybe social combat browbeats him into giving up the passcode, not just socking him one) succeeds, the player gets a bonus to his next action that target's the Threat specifically. Something like that. It's abstract and simple,

As I said players do either of three things (i don't see what else they would choose):

1. Something that targets the Threat score, to reduce it further.
2. Something that gains them better advantage to do so (which may, as just described, mean targetting an NPC).
3. Something that does neither (perhaps healing a fellow pc).

Advantage should be thus fairly simple to define in rules: a bonus to a subsequent roll. How it plays out in terms of narrative and roleplaying is that which is beyond the rules - it's down to how entertaining the players and the GM can make it. If you want to allow people increased bonus for cool roleplaying then fine.

Quote from: Ladybird;466414I love it, but I can see why people wouldn't. Anyway...

I think you're on to something, but it's tricky to abstract-out the nature of a threat and still keep a lot of G aspects. You could try building a sort of "group damage track", and seeing if that works; something akin to a FATE-esque Stress Track.

Yes, it's a good idea and thanks for contributing it. However it does seem like it's going to be no less complex than what I'm trying to simplify. If you're defining separate areas within a group track then you still have the same issue I'm dealing with.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;466438Yes, it's a good idea and thanks for contributing it. However it does seem like it's going to be no less complex than what I'm trying to simplify. If you're defining separate areas within a group track then you still have the same issue I'm dealing with.

The next place I can think of for mechanical inspiration is MMO raids, with "adds" and the main "boss". You could use your system's extended challenge mechanics to deal with the problem, if it has them.

I'll use WoD-esque mechanics to explain: the main threat (The bomb) starts off as a difficulty 13 extended challenge, requiring ten net successes, and will go off in five turns. Other, lesser, threats are the lackeys (Start off at one per PC, and another one arrives each turn, use mook rules, they go at the end of the turn) and the villain (Use full character rules for him).

Each turn, the players have a number of options:

* Attack the mob, or the villain. This is giving them an advantage, in that it's potentially reducing the numbers attacking them, meaning more of them can work on the main skill challenge without danger. Maybe they wipe out the mob and the boss, which is great, but that still doesn't solve the bomb issue.
* "Attack" the bomb, using a skill check: if they pass, great, they've got some successes. If they fail, lower the difficulty of the "bomb" challenge by one (Cumulatively). If they botch, difficulty goes back to 13.
* Finesse the situation, using social-fu on the boss or the mob, or whatever else seems like fun (Weight the appropriate resistance dice pools depending on what you want the trick to be). If this works, lower the difficulty of the "bomb" by one (As if it was a "defuse bomb" success"). On a botch, raise the difficulty of the bomb by one.
* Anything unrelated to the situation. Faffing about won't solve anything.

The villain can use proper initiative rules, the mob all goes at once, at the end of the turn; each member of the mob attacks a PC, prioritising anyone who "attacked" the bomb if there are any attacks left over. At the end of turn five, if the bomb isn't disarmed, it goes off, obv.

It's still a bit more complex than you seem to be wanting, but are we at least getting closer?