Proposal: Marauder Refactor
Times out 8-0 -Darth
Adminned at 04 Oct 2009 16:37:12 UTC
Repeal all subrules to rule 2.5 “Marauders”, and amend the text of that rule to read as follows:
A Marauder is an entity that can be created by the Leader, and which has the following stats:
- HP, which is an integer (1 if not stated); negative HPs are legal but have the same effect as 0 HP does
- 1 or more Jobs.
As a daily action, a non-Fallen Survivor may Fight one Marauder. By default, this causes the Marauder to lose 1 HP; but this may be modified by the Marauder’s Jobs. If a Marauder ever has 0 or fewer HP, it ceases to exist.
An active Marauding exists while at least one Marauder exists. The Leader can create a Marauder at any time; this creates a new active Marauding if there is not currently an active one, or adds Marauders to an existing active Marauding. When creating a Marauding, the Leader must detail the Marauders in it in a Story Post with [MARAUDERS] in its title; new Marauders added to an existing Marauding must be detailed in comments to its associated Story Post, and the comments to that post should also be used by Survivors to track the current HP and existence of Maruaders. If all Marauders in a Marauding cease to exist, it becomes inactive and no longer has an effect on the game.
Add a subrule to that rule, “Marauder Jobs”:
The following Jobs exist:
- Thief
- Each day when a Marauding is active, the Leader shall decrease the Food and Water by 2 times the number of Marauders with this Job.
- Drainer
- Each day when a Marauding is active, the Leader shall decrease the Stamina of each Survivor by the number of Marauders with this Job.
- Fighter
- Whenever a Survivor Fights a Marauder with this Job, that Survivor must take a Fitness Test. If it fails, the Survivor suffers damage.
- Ghoul
- Whenever a Survivor Fights a Marauder with this Job, that Survivor may not take daily or weekly actions defined in dynastic rules for 48 hours afterwards, no matter what else happens in the Fight.
- Medic
- Whenever a Marauder with this Job loses HP as a result of a Fight, the Survivor who Fought it gains 1 Stamina. Each day, each Marauder with this Job gains 1 HP, unless this would give it more HP than it had when it was created.
- Boss
- Whenever a Survivor Fights a Marauder with this Job, that Survivor must make a Fitness Test (a separate and independent one from the test for Fighting a Fighter). If it fails, the Boss loses 1 HP less than it otherwise would from that particular Fight (this may reduce the HP loss to 0; but even in that case, any other effects of the Fight still happen).
Change every Boss that existed before this proposal passed into a Fighter Thief Boss with the same amount of HP remaining. All other Marauders have their HP set to 1.
The slot limit encourages me to do a lot in one proposal. I think the Marauding rule needs a refactoring to be clearer, and this also fixes an exploit (deliberately leaving one Fighter around to prevent any more Maraudings being created), as well as encouraging the Leader to start them small as he can always add more later. In addition, this gives more flexibility to the Leader in creating Maraudings, by generalising the framework and adding some new Marauder types. The Drainer is basically designed to favour all three factions; it helps non-cultists to eliminate cultists, and vice versa, and more dead bodies is always going to be good for the zombies/Infected. Therefore, the ability to add them will tend to improve the ability to control pace of the dynasty; if it’s dragging on, we can always add more to speed up the end of the dynasty. Medics are there to encourage players ganging up; in addition, it gives us a flavourful method of obtaining medicines and bandages. Ghouls, as every roleplaying game addict knows, can paralyze people; I’m adding them because I think they might be interesting, not for any particularly good gameplay quality reason (and they don’t have to be used, of course). Fighters, Medics, Thieves and Bosses work fine for either human or undead enemies, the other jobs seem more undead-specific.
Incidentally, the reason why HPs are allowed to ineffectively go negative is to get around the “no action may be taken which would require setting a gamestate variable to an illegal value” problem; if in the future some item is created allowing extra damage to be dealt to Marauders, it shouldn’t cause Marauders with only 1 HP left to be unattackable.
Abstaining. Humongous proposal of doom. I will not read it.
Josh: Observer he/they