Post by Yuko Sayre on Apr 22, 2016 6:44:14 GMT
The Digimon system, from what I’ve seen (at least on paper) lends itself rather well to small to mid-sized battles. However it doesn’t seem very suited for large scale battles or battles with multiple factions in it. This is important because I plan to have bot of these things in both of my campaigns so I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to do so.
This isn’t perfect, however what it is, is an attempt to make a fast, random, battle under these conditions. You could preroll all the rolls, but there are way to many variables in that approach and rolling out every turn is likely to bore the player, especially when they aren’t the focus. But first I think I should show what I’m going to be talking about. Click the spoiler to picture below.
First I should probably explain the picture you see before you.
Circled in Red are the players. Circled in Orange are the Digimon Soverigns. Circled in Blue, well lets call those the Forest Fairies. Finally, in Black is kinda an anti-hero who sometimes works with the players and sometimes doesn’t. Now, all in all in this battle theres an amazing 23 turns and only maybe 3 of them directly relate to the player! I think its safe to say if I played out the remaining 20 turns one at a time they players would be quite bored when it got back to their turn and they might even leave before the end of the battle. Thats why I wanted to come up with something for this kind of scenario.
The easiest way I’ve come up with this is to make them into groups and simplify the process as much as possible. First things first though. We need to establish a turn order. Like I said, we’re going to making some groups so each group will get one turn. What I mean is that both players will make their own rolls, but the GM will only make four different rolls for initiative. One for the anti-Hero, one for the Forest Fairies, and one for the Digimon Soverigns. Add the lowest speed of the group to the final (or fastest because it is GM choice) because after all, a team is only as good as its weakest link. These groups will be taking their turns all at once to simplify things. (You may want to hang onto these group rolls for later.)
I said four GM rolls, so you might be thinking wheres the fourth one? Its actually the Kumbhiramon closest to the player. We don’t want to skip out on that since it will be directly interacting with the player we want it to have its own fully fleshed out turn.
Now there can be other turns to highlight important things going on in the battle. Like say for instance the Digimon Sovereign nearest the Anti-Hero has the mystical dragon orb of light that can wish back to life your dead Digimon’s dog since it ran away and is likely dead and the anti-hero wants to steal it and you wanna show that struggle. Great! When you roll for turns roll for them as well. So in this case you’d be adding five more individual turns to the list, but for now lets just assume its another random faction, so now your turn order should look something like (I didn’t actually roll just picked these at random) this:
Player 1
Forest Fairies
Anti-Hero (probably listed by name, since theres just one, but even their turn will be simplified)
Kumbhiramon
Player 2
Digimon Sovereigns
Already that looks a lot less complicated than adding 23 turns to the list. Next we should move onto combat. I’m not going to touch the players or the Kumbhiramon because none of that has changed, however here is where the GM might want to do some prep work (or on the spot if you think you can do it) if you want to skew the scales a little bit. First I should talk about how combat will work. For this example I’ll use the Digimon Sovereigns, because there are, by far, fewer of them than of the Forest Faeries. Please view the picture below. (Sorry I don’t have a cleaner picture. I should’ve kept the original, but I didn’t think about it and the map kept crashing my roll 20 so I deleted it. Please bear with it.)
As you’ll notice the picture above had 5 numbers on it now. Assuming all of the Soverigns attack we’ll be taking that number and rolling twice as much. So 10 total. The first two will be assigned to Baihumon. The next two will be assigned to Huanglongmon and so on and so forth. However those first out of that two dice pool per Digimon each one represents an attack. That is to so for Baihumon the first die rolled would be one Simple Attack action and the second dice for Baihumon would be its second and final simple action for that turn. The same would be applied for the remaining four Digimon.
Now the normal hit rate is 5 or 5 on dice rolls, but you this is why I said the GM may want to work out some numbers ahead of time, like the Sovereigns are all very powerful beings while most of their opponents are only Ultimate stages so I might lower the margin to a 4-6 or maybe even 3-6 being a successful hit. Since each die is meant to represent an entire attack (both the attack and defense rolls) this should speed up the process quite a bit. Thats right. There is no defense roll for the opponent. Like I said this is meant to be as quick as possible so its meant to be as light as possible to focus the attention on the players.
Now that you have your success and failures (assuming you didn’t spend the whole turn moving) comes damage. This is something I don’t really have a lot of ideas on how to simplify. The two I’ve come up with so far is either take the straight damage of the attack vs the straight defense of the target. If you want to do it this way my best advice is have a nearby cheat sheet with the math on it already done. The other way I thought it so assign each success a set number of damage. As an example (these numbers aren’t set cause I don’t know the system well enough, but if someone wants to try to balance it please do.)
Fresh: 1
In Training: 2
Rookie : 3
Champion: 4
Ultimate: 6
etc.. Like I said. I don’t know if those numbers are close to fair its just to explain the idea.
But wait! Surely the players aren’t going to be fighting the same Kumbhiramon forever (hopefully!) So what happens when they get done with it? Well, this is why I told you to keep your initial speed rolls. The next closest enemy to the Players would be….I’m actually unsure, but for the demonstration lets assume its the Pajiramon which is a member of the Forest Fairies. If it moves close enough to the players or its the next closest thing (or you want to add several enemies at once) take that initial roll and add it to that Digimon’s Agility and put it where it would be in the turn order. OR you could add it at the beginning or end of the already existing list. This keeps you from having to reroll every time a new engagement with an enemy is started.
Okay, a few final things. Obviously, this is a minimal system so you I wouldn’t recommend lingering on Qualities in all the engagements (unless it involves the player). I think I got everything I wanted to talk about in this out of the way. Please, yell at me if I messed something up. Please feel free to suggest changes, but do try to keep in mind like I’ve said this is meant to be a very quick, random way to do large scale battles to get focus back on the players.
This isn’t perfect, however what it is, is an attempt to make a fast, random, battle under these conditions. You could preroll all the rolls, but there are way to many variables in that approach and rolling out every turn is likely to bore the player, especially when they aren’t the focus. But first I think I should show what I’m going to be talking about. Click the spoiler to picture below.
First I should probably explain the picture you see before you.
Circled in Red are the players. Circled in Orange are the Digimon Soverigns. Circled in Blue, well lets call those the Forest Fairies. Finally, in Black is kinda an anti-hero who sometimes works with the players and sometimes doesn’t. Now, all in all in this battle theres an amazing 23 turns and only maybe 3 of them directly relate to the player! I think its safe to say if I played out the remaining 20 turns one at a time they players would be quite bored when it got back to their turn and they might even leave before the end of the battle. Thats why I wanted to come up with something for this kind of scenario.
The easiest way I’ve come up with this is to make them into groups and simplify the process as much as possible. First things first though. We need to establish a turn order. Like I said, we’re going to making some groups so each group will get one turn. What I mean is that both players will make their own rolls, but the GM will only make four different rolls for initiative. One for the anti-Hero, one for the Forest Fairies, and one for the Digimon Soverigns. Add the lowest speed of the group to the final (or fastest because it is GM choice) because after all, a team is only as good as its weakest link. These groups will be taking their turns all at once to simplify things. (You may want to hang onto these group rolls for later.)
I said four GM rolls, so you might be thinking wheres the fourth one? Its actually the Kumbhiramon closest to the player. We don’t want to skip out on that since it will be directly interacting with the player we want it to have its own fully fleshed out turn.
Now there can be other turns to highlight important things going on in the battle. Like say for instance the Digimon Sovereign nearest the Anti-Hero has the mystical dragon orb of light that can wish back to life your dead Digimon’s dog since it ran away and is likely dead and the anti-hero wants to steal it and you wanna show that struggle. Great! When you roll for turns roll for them as well. So in this case you’d be adding five more individual turns to the list, but for now lets just assume its another random faction, so now your turn order should look something like (I didn’t actually roll just picked these at random) this:
Player 1
Forest Fairies
Anti-Hero (probably listed by name, since theres just one, but even their turn will be simplified)
Kumbhiramon
Player 2
Digimon Sovereigns
Already that looks a lot less complicated than adding 23 turns to the list. Next we should move onto combat. I’m not going to touch the players or the Kumbhiramon because none of that has changed, however here is where the GM might want to do some prep work (or on the spot if you think you can do it) if you want to skew the scales a little bit. First I should talk about how combat will work. For this example I’ll use the Digimon Sovereigns, because there are, by far, fewer of them than of the Forest Faeries. Please view the picture below. (Sorry I don’t have a cleaner picture. I should’ve kept the original, but I didn’t think about it and the map kept crashing my roll 20 so I deleted it. Please bear with it.)
As you’ll notice the picture above had 5 numbers on it now. Assuming all of the Soverigns attack we’ll be taking that number and rolling twice as much. So 10 total. The first two will be assigned to Baihumon. The next two will be assigned to Huanglongmon and so on and so forth. However those first out of that two dice pool per Digimon each one represents an attack. That is to so for Baihumon the first die rolled would be one Simple Attack action and the second dice for Baihumon would be its second and final simple action for that turn. The same would be applied for the remaining four Digimon.
Now the normal hit rate is 5 or 5 on dice rolls, but you this is why I said the GM may want to work out some numbers ahead of time, like the Sovereigns are all very powerful beings while most of their opponents are only Ultimate stages so I might lower the margin to a 4-6 or maybe even 3-6 being a successful hit. Since each die is meant to represent an entire attack (both the attack and defense rolls) this should speed up the process quite a bit. Thats right. There is no defense roll for the opponent. Like I said this is meant to be as quick as possible so its meant to be as light as possible to focus the attention on the players.
Now that you have your success and failures (assuming you didn’t spend the whole turn moving) comes damage. This is something I don’t really have a lot of ideas on how to simplify. The two I’ve come up with so far is either take the straight damage of the attack vs the straight defense of the target. If you want to do it this way my best advice is have a nearby cheat sheet with the math on it already done. The other way I thought it so assign each success a set number of damage. As an example (these numbers aren’t set cause I don’t know the system well enough, but if someone wants to try to balance it please do.)
Fresh: 1
In Training: 2
Rookie : 3
Champion: 4
Ultimate: 6
etc.. Like I said. I don’t know if those numbers are close to fair its just to explain the idea.
But wait! Surely the players aren’t going to be fighting the same Kumbhiramon forever (hopefully!) So what happens when they get done with it? Well, this is why I told you to keep your initial speed rolls. The next closest enemy to the Players would be….I’m actually unsure, but for the demonstration lets assume its the Pajiramon which is a member of the Forest Fairies. If it moves close enough to the players or its the next closest thing (or you want to add several enemies at once) take that initial roll and add it to that Digimon’s Agility and put it where it would be in the turn order. OR you could add it at the beginning or end of the already existing list. This keeps you from having to reroll every time a new engagement with an enemy is started.
Okay, a few final things. Obviously, this is a minimal system so you I wouldn’t recommend lingering on Qualities in all the engagements (unless it involves the player). I think I got everything I wanted to talk about in this out of the way. Please, yell at me if I messed something up. Please feel free to suggest changes, but do try to keep in mind like I’ve said this is meant to be a very quick, random way to do large scale battles to get focus back on the players.