A Roll-to-Move Monster Hunting Engine
Yesterday, Toucant Sam shared a very funky post called Roll to Move HP where they made a convincing argument:
...if 5e’s HP system was turned into a stand alone racing game, every space on the track would be blank
In this post, they meditated on converting a very popular roll-to-move game into a first-person shooter RPG - you should already be reading their post instead of mine, but when you're ready to report back we can get to my point.
I want to posit a hypothetical more "traditional" approach to roll-to-move HP that could be fun to explore in fantasy monster fighting pen and paper games, and we can discuss the knock-on effects of the design concept afterward.
First, picture a Deinonychus, a classic theropod dinosaur. It has nasty jaws, a whipping tail, and brutal claws.
By Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com) - Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19462787
Now, picture 3 adventurers trying to hunt it: Alice, Bob, and Carl. Alice has a great sword, Bob has a sword and shield, and Carl has a shortbow.
Let's say our Deinonychus has 10 HP, which we represent as a 10-segment track:
When our adventurers engage the beast, they have some knowledge of its behavior. Their representative tokens all start on the "No Harm" tile:
Carl strikes first with his shortbow, taking the beast unawares. This deals 2 damage, which moves Carl's token up the harm track:
Bob strikes next, wading into the fray with his sword and shield. He deals 2 damage, so starting from Carl's position he has riled up his quarry and triggered a retaliatory tail swipe, which sunders his shield but leaves him unharmed.
Alice swings wildly with her heavy blade and does not get a strike in on her foe, so Carl takes the chance to nock another arrow and fire into the melee, dealing 1 damage. This moves his token into place to trigger a bystander attack. Since Alice has not yet damaged the beast, it furiously bites at her and delivers a gruesome wound.
Bob braces himself and allows Alice to make another attack, this time scoring a grievous blow for 3 damage. This severs the monster's tail and places Alice on a space triggering a furious slashing of claws at Bob and Carl. Bob's defensive posture allows him to parry the attacks, but Carl is badly hurt and takes a turn to nurse his wound.
Bob takes his chance and makes a decisive swing of his blade to deal 2 damage and defeat his quarry.
The key principles that I think are interesting to explore here are:
- The farthest-along token represents the current harm dealt to the creature and thus the last person to inflict harm
- The relative position of tokens give a monster designer flexibility to vary the targets of retaliatory strikes
- You could obviously move to differently-shaped harm tracks to use different directional strikes, or you could color-code different positions on the track to allow strikes to behave differently
- This completely abstracts the fictional position of a fight and replaces it with more of a temporal or relative harm position that can still be engaged tactically in a combat engine like Fabula Ultima
I typically don't write more fighty games but this feels like a fun way to shift the tactical decision-making in a game! Let me know if this is weak beer or how you'd fiddle with it!