Martial fighting styles

I have always felt that melee combat should be as diverse, interesting, and flavorful as magic, telekinesis or any other form of combat. It's a common complaint, especially for DnD 3.5e players that while the sorcerer/wizard/cleric uses all sorts of interesting abilities that are different from turn to turn, the fighter/barbarian does the same thing every single turn: charge, (power) attack, (power) attack, (power) attack). Sure, combat expertise and supplemental books may have tried to mix it up a bit but at the end of the day melee was still just charge and (power) attack.
Back on topic however, I'm not here to rag on 3.5e. Its a great system  and one that really helped make tabletop role-playing as popular as it is. If you have never played it then i suggest you give it a try.
My initial solution to this problem was to create a lot of different attacks with special abilities the player could unlock by investing experience to improve the attack. While many of these abilities could play off of each other, it still very much led to the same 3.5 charge, attack, attack, attack, style of martial combat. In addition, I had only a single unarmed attack when unarmed combat is one of the most diverse and interesting styles of combat.
So, I have created 5 unique martial fighting styles for unarmed combat and intend to create more as time goes on and my imagination warrants. These unarmed fighting styles are stance based. The stance itself provides a passive bonus and allows the use of abilities within that stance. Your stance may only be changed on your turn at the beginning of your turn before you take any actions. Each stance has about 8 supplemental abilities including a signature strike, an ultimate strike, a good number of passives, and optional attacks as well.

Boulder Stance- While in boulder stance multiply your strength modifiers bonus to unarmed damage by 1 plus 1 per rank in this skill.

While in boulder stance your movement speed is set at 15ft and cannot be raised or lowered by any means.

While in boulder stance effects that would knock you back are reduced by 5ft per rank.

While in boulder stance you gain a +2 bonus to strength checks when resisting a knockdown or knockback effect.

Boulder stance and its abilities are intended to be slow moving and hard hitting. When fully mastered, boulder stance will 2shot even the most defensive of opponents by dealing massive amounts of damage per blow.

Mountain stance- While in mountain stance you gain 1 damage reduction per rank in this skill.

While in mountain stance your movement speed is set to 5ft and cannot be raised or lowered by any other effect.

While in mountain stance, you can only be critically hit on a natural 20 or by an effect that forces a critical strike to occur.

While in mountain stance you cannot be moved, knocked back, or knocked down.

Mountain stance is extremely defensive and immobile. When fully mastered you are nearly indestructible and still maintain the ability to hit like a mack truck.

Water Stance-While in water stance you gain 1 damage reduction and a +1 bonus to unarmed damage per rank in this skill.

While in water stance, if you call an attack or defense while within melee range of an enemy you may move through their square to any of the 5ft squares around them regardless of whether or not the attack or defense was successful.

Water stance is intended to be balanced and flowing. Your defenses buff your offenses and your offenses buff your defenses. When fully mastered your combat prowess on the battlefield is without rival.

Wind Stance-While in wind stance your unarmed strikes deal 1 damage plus 1 damage for each rank in this skill.

While in wind stance you gain an additional speed action for each rank in this skill.

While in wind stance your movement speed is set at 45ft and cannot be lowered by any other effect. In addition, your movement speed is increased by 5ft for each movement you call during a round.

Wind stance is fast. REALLY fast. So fast in fact that I had to modify its abilities to condense attack rolls so that the wind striker wouldn't take an hour each time his turn came around. When fully mastered, the damage and speed of a windstriker is both beautiful and terrible to behold.

Reed Stance-While in reed stance you gain a +1 bonus to defense per rank and an additional defensive action per rank.

While in reed stance you may not call offensive maneuvers.

Reed stance is an interesting twist on something I have intended to do for awhile now: Defensive maneuvers that hurt. Reed stance is a trap for new players who would read it and think "well if i cant call offensive maneuvers, how am I ever going to kill my opponent" and then read no further. Reed stance brutally punishes opponents for attacking you and your allies with a speed that rivals wind stance. when fully mastered the enemy is left with no choice but to walk away.

The challenge here was to create something that was interesting but not overpowered by mixing a little bit of each with their opposites.

"How do I make these two get along?"

Too much balance makes a game extremely bland and boring, nothing really interesting about it. Not enough balance leads to an interesting game for Some players (the overpowered ones) but a boring experience for others. Too much balance and you're on the oatmeal side of things, too little balance and you're playing the book of nine swords. My solution is a kind of smoke-and-mirrors game: to give players abilities that make them feel overpowered and unstoppable when in reality these abilities are extremely limited and can easily be turned around.

In the future, expect to see more balance changes coming to the system as I have managed to get a campaign running (only took 2 years) as well as more role-play bonuses to existing abilities. I am also working on creating a comprehensive map of Nathera and populating it with interesting and useful things.

Ive been moving right along with the new formatting, and added artwork where its been made available, so ive updated the character creation file. I still need to go back and add in more roleplay abilities for each skill, but i'd almost like to do that through playtesting. Ive added in a couple of new skills too. Check out called shot in the offensive maneuvers. go check it out

Preview: New formatting

Thanks to +T. Coffman for the artwork he has been contributing to the project! With these new resources, I am formatting the document in a way that is more artwork friendly. So, here is a preview of that! I am interested to hear thoughts on these changes so please comment/email/g+ me.

Finalized character sheet

+Wyatt Havron and I got together and finalized the Theory character sheet. I have never been more happy with it.

Balance Changes and Clarification

I was able to run an Arena game with my friends last night and gleaned a lot of useful data from it. We ran through 9 rounds (a little under 30 turns) in about 45 minutes. This means that turns were taking about a minute and a half each with new players that were just introduced to the system. I feel that this lends well to the fast and tactical style of gameplay I was going for, but there is always room for improvement. The game was a 3 way free-for-all on crossfire: An arcane mage with devastation and brutality, a Frost mage focused on lance and frostburn, and a Telekinetic based on mindcrush. The arcane mage won the match. I don't feel that the arcane mage is overpowered, but that his competitors were under-powered.  No changes were made to arcane.

Magic

Frost saw the lance shape meta split into two skills: Lance and improved lance. The skill is still functionally the same, but the knockback effect has been split into the improved lance skill. We ended up with the feeling that lance alone, especially with its long range, was a little too powerful for a 100xp progression skill.
Lance and a few other shape metas saw a change made to their range, where the base range of the meta is now static, and increases by a much smaller increment per level of magicall access. Meaning that shape meta range now looks like this: "40ft+10ft per rank of magical access".
The Bolt meta was a new addition to the shape metas. It is a simple meta that fires the spell as a bolt of magical energy at 30ft+10ft per level for 100xp. Its low experience cost and long range makes it a strong low level shape meta.
With the changes to spell range, I have now also added the Sniper power meta. for 1 mana you can now increase the range of your spells by half for each time you use it.

Telekinetic 

Telekinetic characters get some love in this update as well. Playing a mindcrusher, I felt underpowered and nearly useless. My proc skills were never proccing and my damage was significantly lower than the rest of the field. All in all, telekinesis lost hard. So, in the interest of keeping telekinesis competitive, Telekinetic unlocks and Colonization have had their experience costs reduced dramatically. In addition, telekinetic characters gained an additional set of metakinetic skills called "Attunement" skills. These skills provided much needed base numbers to the class in terms of increased range, hit bonuses, and synergy between telekinetic unlocks.

Combat

Combat also saw a minor update. Nothing about combat has changed, I just added a section to clarify the way bleed damage works.

In the Works

I am still working on the new lore revision and will continue to try to put together arena games to test the balance and functionality of the system.

Turn Phases and then some

This time around I've added a small update to the Combat section: Turn phases. This didn't really change anything as far as how combat is run, as much as it is my attempt at clarification and declaration. Players now always have a reference to determine what to do and how to do it from any point in combat. As long as turn phase is followed, combat cannot get out of sync. So how did i break down turn phases?

It starts with the declaration phase. This is intended to be a formal time to say "im activating this ability or item that doesnt require an action" while at the same time, putting a control on such abilities and items so that they may only be declared once per turn. In addition, it adds stability to combat in that an ability cannot be activated and deactivation 7.62x10^3454735642376 times to deal unlimited damage or healing. The declaration phase is also where health and mana regeneration happen, as well as bleed damage. This gives additional stability to combat where before these points were moderately unclear.

Next is the action phase. This is where you say "Im attacking that guy!". You only get to declare one action here. At first read, you might think "what the fuck, im limited to one offensive action per turn?" absolutely not. The limitation of one action during the action phase keeps the game in line and keeps too much from happening at once. After everything is resolved, you have the option to return to this phase and declare another action.

Next comes the interrupt phase. This is where everyone else in combat gets to react to what you just did with up to a single action of their own.

Next is the resolution phase, This is where we take all those declared action and resolve them. At the end of this phase, the player has the option of moving to the end of turn phase, or going back to the action phase to declare another action.

Finally, the turn ends with the end of turn phase. This phase is more of a formality than anything else. Later abilities may take advantage of this phase, but for now its protection from "BUT WAIT MY TURN WASNT OVER!!!!" yes it was, you declared your end of turn phase.

In character creation Ive added a new power meta called "Illusory." This meta allows you to fire two spells, but only one is real. The catch is that you won't know which one until the resolution phase. This allows you to trick opponents into wasting defensive actions and leaving them wide open to you and your allies later.

In fire magic, the fire shield skill has been changed to "Searing presence." This ability still grants deals damage and grants damage reduction, but has the added benefit of ignoring damage reduction that does not specifically state that it reduces fire damage. The supporting skills have also been changed as well.

While the lore update is still not ready, I have made a lot of progress toward the revision thanks to +Wyatt Havron. While what we have been working on is extremely solid and much more interesting than what we had before, we just need MORE of it. Currently the entire timeline is ~5 pages long. So expect to see this and more character sheets in the relatively near future. 

Shields and Defensive playstyles

Shields and defensive play are a big part of any good RPG. Their execution however, is critical. When we allow a defensive player too much defense, he becomes unkillable and the game is forfeit from the start. When we allow too little defense, he becomes non-viable and the abilities are scoffed at and ignored. There is a third, and even worse, situation in which the defensive player has too much defense and becomes unkillable, but has too little offense as well: creating a stalemate. Then finally, the worst scenario, is one in which the defensive style character is unkillable, and his defensive abilities are so strong that he absolutely murders the entire field, surpassing even damage-dealing characters. All four scenarios are examples of poor game design, development, and testing. So, this time around we take a look at how we thread that delicate needle of defensive characters, and balance them with others.

One trademark of the standard defensive character is the shield. In Theory, shields have three stats: Damage, Damage Reduction, and Speed penalty. Shields should do a low amount of damage when used to attack, they should reduce damage when blocking, and are cumbersome, thus reducing the speed of the user. But, from a balance perspective this can make shields look REALLY bad. Reducing your speed (the stat you need to defend multiple incoming attacks with), to defend against incoming attacks seems counterproductive.  Actually though, its a balancing factor. The shield based build is centered around only two abilities really, Block and Shield bash. Neither of these abilities has an experience cost and the cheap meta-martial unlocks make them easily upgradable.  This leads the Shield user down three paths: One is to invest experience in the speed stat and plug the hole, gaining enough speed actions to successfully defend against enough attacks to make the shield an extremely strong defensive tool. But this takes away from offensive power, experience spent on speed just to plug a hole made by your shield is not experience spent on offensive abilities. So, our second choice is to spend that experience on offensive abilities instead and have very few actions in combat. We can do both, offensive and defensive skills, but not very many. However, both are really effective. The third path. is to get a really expensive shield: an energy shield. Energy shields are statted to be big upgrades for characters to look forward to, never to start with. They represent the midpoint between these two paths, with no speed penalty, and very little damage, but heavy defensive ability. Allowing the player to invest in offensive abilities instead of plug a speed-hole in their experience. But doesn't that create the fourth-kind of defense character? the kind that cannot be killed and wrecks the field? While an argument could be made, and testing could show that, I anticipate that it wont. Because there is a resource we haven't talked about thus far: Handedness. A shield actively takes up a hand, reducing the wielder to one handed weapons, the highest of which is 6 damage. Which I might add is a pistol and therefore does not benefit from strength. So what about a defensive fighter that doesn't use a shield at all? What if a defensive fighter was dual-wielding wouldn't THAT create the fourth-kind of fighter?

The parry fighter gains big defensive bonuses from wielding more weapons. He can attack with more weapons and deal more damage, has access to more offensive ability, and at first look seems unstoppable. A parry fighter is an extremely strong build if we look at it in those terms, but they have a critically overlooked weakness, and they rely on it to turn the tables on you. A parry fighter is either on the offensive or on the defensive: Never both. He relies on being faster than you (and probably is), so that he has enough actions to parry anything you could throw at him (which he can't actually do until the lower mid-levels). While he is doing this, he isn't spending actions to deal damage. He is spending actions to stop you from dealing damage to him, and prolong the fight. He is disarming you to make you waste actions running to your weapon to pick it up, so he can shift the balance from defensive to offensive. And the whole time he's doing that, there is one thing he's not doing: Damage. A parry fighter will deal lots and lots and lots of little damage, but never very much at a time, and never very often. Making any character with a small-to-moderate amount of healing stop the parry fighter in his tracks. Not to mention magic, without a Thrumming weapon a parry fighter is helpless against magic. And that's assuming that even if they do have a thrumming weapon that magic-users don't have a way around it (they do). So if the parry fighter is so weak to magic, why not pick up the ability to counter-spell? with arcane magic you can counter any spell. This is, again, using experience to plug the hole in a strategy. While it does allow you to throw dice at the problem, the modifiers for a parry fighter on a counter-spell roll are going to be massively out of his favor. But lets say he uses his experience to plug that hole too, he gets enough skill to counter-spell with the best arcane mage. At this point, he has had to sacrifice so much offensive ability that he is entirely defensive (albeit a beast of a defensive character). So then, this creates the first-kind of defensive fighter.... right? Not necessarily, While he has spent so much experience plugging holes, other characters are getting faster, and their abilities are hitting harder. Even a slight misstep for the parry-counter-fighter will mean death.

Defensive characters are a special and unique balance of abilities, numbers, situations, hands, feet, heads, shoulders, knees, and toes. So check out shields on page 63, and the new offensive and defensive abilities to go with them.

Up and coming is still the Lore overhaul and more arena content.