When it came to figuring out combat, I was really, really done with strategic positioning as a concept. I’ve played Pathfinder and normal DnD a lot, and it was always the strategic positioning that caught me out. Especially when it came to hurting your allies on accident. Like it always felt awful when I was trying to figure out what to do, and think that I figured it out, only to get told that I’m about to roast a teammate.
So one of the major things that my players and I decided on was that friendly fire for the players was going to basically be turned off. Unless something went particularly wrong, your allies won’t get hurt by various attacks.
But the other core element was to switch to Zone Based Combat, a style of running combat that I saw in games like Fate Core, as well as talked about in various articles about running RPGs. I thought it would be something that I could much more easily wrap my head around, and would allow me to more easily create some truly wild encounters that I could keep track of. It makes for very flexible story telling in these combat encounters, letting your players and yourself describe some truly fantastic actions in combat without having to worry as much about the technical narrative.
As I play around with it more and flesh out the mechanics of these various monsters, combat encounters, and traps I’m building new mechanics that play around with those zones.
Such as the Ancient Mage Constructs, whose magic can literally transform zones to make them into difficult terrain, dangerous traps, or even outright hazards on the battlefield.
Or a dangerous chase with a humongous birds chasing after the players, diving through water to deliver deadly pounce attacks that can pin a player down.
Or even a giant stone creature that can attack and grab enemies the moment they get too close by stepping into a nearby zone.
Unfortunately a lot of this is a lot more rough and not really well written down right now, I’m still trying to flesh this one out, and at this point it’s more about writing down what I’ve been using so I can really start to flesh it out.
