Nire Bryce

Waks doesn't miss

tangential to all this but I was thinking about it when alternative systems were brought up -- the one thing that baldurs gate does wrong is stick to D&D canonicity in terms of how the abilities are allocated, but lose out on a lot of the ancillary actions.

An action is an attack or a jump or a run faster or a become immune to opportunity attacks, but your bonus actions are like, buffs and that's about it, with no feats that really let you attack and move in interesting ways, nothing good for repositioning if you don't have spell slots to expend, etc

Monsters will break most cover and shoot you through it, you can't do the same, etc. As the enemies get more INT as the game goes on, their AI gets better at exploiting the tiniest pixel of cover.

but there's nothing you can do about that -- no prepared actions/overwatch you can assign to rangers (Unless it's later in the game), no being able to let your spellcaster hit someone as they come around the corner, nothing. No bonus actions that let you attack unless you've got an offhand weapon, outside of ones that require a short rest. It's a game that sticks to D&D canonicity and scarcity so hard that it hurts itself, badly. There's so much room for it to be a good game! You can see glimmers of it with barbarian and thief rogue. But hostiles are often very strong for your actual level because they seem to level up with you, meaning the longer you spend in the first act, the harder the game is going forward.

and there's just so much in this game where I'm like, man I wish they didn't do the action system, or if they did they'd copy Shadowrun: Returns or the X-Com reboot.

Because the world interaction is great, I just wish I could do it more than once between long rests early and mid game. The world has so much urgency, and yet I need to sleep every fight because my wizard is too tired if I play him like anything but a finisher that casts cantrips instead, because there will always be more fights in the area.

Pillars of Eternity had this same problem, the gameplay was completely detached from the actual game, and within the gameplay, there was so little you could do because it was Trying to Be D&D So Hard It Couldn't Make Affordances.

halp give me readmore for comments sorry for taking up an entire screen at 4k.

Thank you for sharing this! It's fascinating to have a game adopt from alternative systems besides "hit for damage or miss for no impact".

There's that classic comic that I'm having trouble finding now about the two armies who have their wizards duel to determine the fate of the war, and they just keep casting incredibly powerful spells and then the other one goes "I saved" and they don't move and nothing happens. Eventually one of them runs out of spell slots or something, idk.

Anyway, I've heard some systems (maybe FIST?) have tried approaching Into the Breach style combat mechanics, which feels much more in this space of "can you set up some cool turns if we give you the tools and tell you to ignore rolling to hit or deal damage." With that in mind, I'd be really curious to see what other combat systems are like when represented as a TTRPG.

In particular, I think Sekiro has a fascinating combat system that could potentially be adapted to a more combat-heavy TTRPG. Do you know of anything like that out there today? The push and pull of parry into kill maneuver feels much more in line with clocks to me, which inherently pulls it out of the DnD zone. But with an emphasis on footing, parrying, blocking, etc, I think there's interesting combat positioning that could come out as well.

y'know it's insane but something i'd really enjoy would be an attempt to port some of the systems that make, like, Slay the Spire fun to ttrpgs. would it be that hard to make "skill decks" that you expand or contract and draw from, deterministic damage mitigated only by block, etc... does this already exist?