Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Proposal: Horrors of War

Times out 1-6 and fails -SingularByte

Adminned at 24 Jun 2022 19:22:39 UTC

Divide all health values in the ruleset by 10, and likewise divide all current health values for Demiurges and Non-Player Characters by 10 (rounding down).

Append the following lines to the rule Living Beings:

Any Demiurge or Non-Player Character that has a health of 0 is said to be dead, otherwise they are living. A Demiurge or Non-Player Character reduced to a health of 0 is said to have been killed. Dead Demiurges cannot take dynastic actions unless otherwise stated.

Non-Player Characters have a Temperament which is a publicly tracked value and is one of Ally, Neutral, or Enemy; it defaults to Enemy. Non-Player characters with these values can be referred to as Allies, Neutrals or Enemies respectively.

Append the following to the first line of Fleshmancy: Phalanxes which have Demiurges as owners are Allies, otherwise they are Neutrals.

Append the following to the first paragraph of Wide, Empty World of the Damned: Any Demiurge or Non-Player Character with a Current Location of a given Location is said to be in that location.

Create a rule called The Flow of Battle:

Each location has a non-negative integer called Horrors Present, defaulting to 0. This value is publicly tracked for all locations.

When a Demiurge, Ally or Neutral Does Battle in a Location, and either the number of living Enemies or Horrors Present in that location is non-zero, the below steps are followed as an atomic action. For each step of this action, if the combatant (hereafter defined as the aforementioned Demiurge, Ally or Neutral in this rule) is dead at the end of that step then increase the number of Horrors Present by 1 in the location and skip all further steps.

- If the location has non-zero Horrors Present, the combatant must reduce their health by the Horrors Present (to a minimum of 0), and reduce the Horrors Present by the amount of lost health
- If there are more than 0 living Enemies in this location then follow the following process (henceforce known as Clashing Blades):
    * Select the enemy with the lowest health value in that location, choosing randomly in the event of there being multiple valid choices
    * Compare the health total of the combatant and the chosen enemy. The entity with the higher and lower health values are known as the winner and the loser respectively. If the two health values are the same, both entities are the loser
    * Reduce the winner’s health (if one exists) by half of the health of the loser to a minimum of 0
    * Set the health of the loser(s) to 0
- If there are any remaining living Enemies in this location, repeat the process of Clashing Blades as many times as required for either no enemies to be left, or for the combatant to be dead (whichever comes first)

The successful completion of this atomic action without the combatant being killed is referred to as Clearing that Location.

If a dynastic rule called Items exists, remove the effects of Raku Gem and Taru Gem.

(Flavour text note: The below has been added at approx 80 minutes in.)

Add a subrule to Locations called Dungeons:

The locations in this subrule are also considered Locations, but are classed as Instanced Locations and have the following additional rules:
-All Instanced Locations will have Unknown in their name. A given instance is referred to by replacing Unknown with any text; that text is flavour text.
-In addition to other prerequisites listed, all Instanced Locations have the prerequisite of “The Demiurge that Journeys to an instanced location must name a specific instance that they intend to reach, even if that instance does not exist yet.”
-All Instanced Locations have a Horror Count which is a lower and upper bound that the Instances can be created with - the number of Horrors Present in that instance when it is created are randomly determined between those two values.
-All Instanced Locations have Treasures. This is a list of Items, Provisions and health changes that the instance can be created with, in the distribution that the Instanced Location dictates (or evenly distributed if not stated). Often, only a subset of those Treasures will be in a given instance.
-Any instance can be removed by any Demiurge if it has no living Demiurges in it.
-An instance is created if it does not exist when a Demiurge fulfils all prerequisites of travelling to that instance.
-Upon entering an instance with Enemies or Horrors present, the Journeying Demiurge Does Battle.
-Scavenging for Supplies in an instance has the effect of granting one of the Treasures in that instance at random to the Demiurge. Any Treasures that would increase or decrease a variable outside of its legal limits when obtained will instead set it to said limit, and if that is not possible, the Treasure is lost.

The following are the Instanced Locations:
Name: The Unknown Dungeons
Description: In this nightmarish world, previously benign structures are now terrifying mazes of despair.
Horror Count: 1-10
Treasures: 1 Provision, 2 Health, 1 random Item, 1 random Item, 1 random Item
Prerequisites: You can only Journey here from Lost and Alone.
Rules Text: There is a 1 in 5 chance of an instance of this dungeon being created with an Enemy called “The Butcher of The Unknown Dungeons”, replacing Unknown Dungeons in that name with the instance name. This Enemy has 4 health, and has a Current Location field which lists this instance. If this location is Cleared while this enemy exists, the clearing Demiurge gains 3 Treasures.

Simple rules admittedly aren’t my strong point so someone might be able to give refinements to this, but this is hoped to be a decent abstraction of combat: you kill generic mooks and lose 1 health per mook. For bosses, you either one-shot them at the cost of their health if you’re stronger than them, or you soften them up first with wave after wave of disposable minions or friends then one-shot them.
As for the gems, I tried rewriting them to work with these rules without breaking the whole thing but the proposal is long enough as it is. Another proposal would be needed to let them mesh correctly.

Comments

lendunistus: he/him

22-06-2022 20:20:42 UTC

there’s nothing preventing your health from going below zero so you should either set the minimum to zero or make it so that going below zero also results in death. we should also outline a specific process for dying besides just “lol you can’t play the game now lmao”

also, imo we should figure out shops and currency first before doing battles, since there’s no point to it otherwise besides gaining access to a location. I like the idea of clearing out locations to gain access to services, but it’s not enough of a benefit to lose a ton of health over. this combat also feels a bit too simplistic and pre-determined, there’s no risk factor since you already know whether you’re dying or not.

i might have better insights after sleeping but for now, I don’t like this that much. i’ll wait for other people to give an opinion though

Josh: Observer he/they

22-06-2022 20:25:20 UTC

Tbh I’m obviously only one person but I’m going to keep voting against banal violence framings for this as they feel contrary to the overall aesthetic of the dynasty to me

SingularByte: he/him

22-06-2022 20:34:48 UTC

[lendun] For the specific death process, I’m imagining that’s one situation where turning into a demon would make sense. I’m also working on a proposal (which is still going to be a day or so off due to proposal limits) where you don’t necessarily know how many horrors certain locations have. You can push your luck, but it’s risky.
[Josh] Feel free. It is kinda the premise of the dynasty though, and the vibe my proposals are tending towards is a tough survivalist world where combat will occur. At least this way, combat won’t take days or weeks to finish.

lendunistus: he/him

22-06-2022 21:02:57 UTC

fair enough. I would still rather have more complicated combat with stuff like item drops.

also three other things: non-player characters as a whole don’t have locations yet, dividing health values by 10 seems harsh and this doesn’t really work with the guardian

also also i’d like to integrate phalanxes into this somehow but we haven’t really fleshed that out yet and t’d be complicated anyway

SingularByte: he/him

22-06-2022 21:14:10 UTC

Screw it, I might just add the Dungeons proposal to this one. It’ll make it exponentially more likely to fail since it’ll be a behemoth of a proposal and Dungeons are still an early draft, but if parts of it are usable then they can be salvaged into other proposals and it’ll really help show where I’m going with this combat system.

For Phalanxes, all we need is a system of sending them to a location and forcing them to do battle, and it should work.

As for the Guardian, I’m going to just worry about him later. Maybe he can get a new home in a location with updated stats.

SingularByte: he/him

22-06-2022 21:19:05 UTC

Dungeons added.

Lulu: she/her

23-06-2022 04:25:29 UTC

against per Josh.

Kevan: he/him

23-06-2022 08:32:50 UTC

I’m still not sure what the inspiration for this dynasty is meant to be, and the Amerigame style really isn’t grabbing me. I idle myself, quorum remains 7.

Josh: Observer he/they

23-06-2022 09:00:09 UTC

against

lendunistus: he/him

23-06-2022 18:51:31 UTC

against

voting against due to the issues I brought up before. i’ll work on a scavenging system somewhat similar to this

LinkVanyali:

24-06-2022 11:37:37 UTC

against per lendunistus

Trapdoorspyder: he/him

24-06-2022 13:56:09 UTC

against

Raven1207: he/they

24-06-2022 16:23:58 UTC

against