INITIATIVE
This will be all the advanced topics relating to initiative, sequencing and turn structure.
Stamina use
Fighting is inherently stressful. ‘Fight or flight’ reflex has kicked in, adrenaline is pumping, and you are running, punching, swinging weapons and dodging or blocking attacks. This can wear you out very quickly. This is probably the single most important advanced topic for combat, and one that is usually ignored in most game systems.
At the end of each turn of a combat, all those in the combat burn some Stamina. If you are out of Stamina, then you take one-third of the excess (round nearest) as non-lethal hits. Toughness does not apply, since it is ‘fatigue’ rather than ‘damage’. The gamemaster can adjust this 1:3 ratio for a particular gameworld or genre. Add up everything that could cost you stamina:
action amount
activate/use a power its drain
running +1
sprinting or maximum physical effort +3
in combat +1
in melee combat +2
turn mod used +amount used
sustained use of power +time level
Add this up and divide the total by 5, rounding nearest. This is the stamina you use up at the end of the turn.
If you were in melee(+2) and used +6 turn mod during the turn, this adds up to +8. Divide that by 5 (round nearest) and you use 2 Stamina on that turn. An average person only has 6 or 7 Stamina, so you can use it up very fast.
activate/use a power: If you turned on a
power and it has a drain on your stamina, it counts once on any turn which the cost
applies. If a power has special modifiers on its stamina cost, that would be reflected here. The more you want to get out of a game system,
the more you have to put into it. But not everyone wants minutia and obscure details. Putting all of those in the basic combat rules would bog it down and turn off many gamemasters or players. So, the core of combat and conflict resolution is the basic rules, and everything else is optional, and you can gradually work your way into it.
INTRODUCTION
The combat and damage system in
EABA is designed around a simple
principle: One medium-caliber pistol
shot or a well-placed sword blow should be able to kill a normal person, or at least render them unconscious and bleeding. And years of adventuring experience do not matter. You do not magically gain the ability to absorb more damage. At best, you become healthier and stronger, and more likely to survive that bullet or sword, but it is never guaranteed.
The EABA advanced combat rules are merely embellishments of this principle, side cases of damage for specific weapons, or bits of realism and detail that you may or may not want or need. Consider everything in this chapter as an ‘advanced topic’. Things in blue would be ‘really advanced topics’. The length of the chapter is irrelevant. Take what works for you, and leave the rest.
There are two ways to reduce stamina use. The first is to exit the combat. If you leave the scene and do not come back, you are no longer in the fight and are no longer burning stamina at that rate. The other way is to reduce your level of participation in the fight. The biggest factors in stamina use are turn mod and any stamina-using powers that you are sustaining. If you slack off and avoid the most intense part of the fighting (by using less of your turn mod), you use less stamina. And of course if the turn is long enough, you can just spend part of it resting (see page 5.24) so you can get your stamina back!
Debilitating losses of stamina are what really end a lot of fights. One side or the other is simply too exhausted to continue!
Complex situations
In basic combat, a person does everything they want to do when it becomes their Initiative to act, or everyone does one major and/or minor action, then people repeat this sequence until everyone is done.
If you want to subdivide a turn, say that each independent major or minor action someone wants to initiate has to be separated by 3 points of initiative, and the turn ends when everyone has finished for the turn (initiatives can go into negative numbers). Minor actions that are responses to other people (like blocks) do not count.
If you declare ‘4’ for initiative in a round and want to draw and fire a gun, then your draw happens on an initiative of 4, and the shooting on an initiative of 1. In between these two things, people with Initiatives of 3 or 2 get to act, and might do things that affect your shot. In game terms, what you do on Initiative 4 happens on Initiative 4, but in practical terms, it is a series of actions that begins on initiative 4 and
continues down the initiative numbers until you get your next action. This would be a case where a Neat Trickof ‘draw and fire’ would let you do
both actions on initiative 4.
running: If your movement rate for the turn is
more than your walk distance level but not more than your run distance level, add +1.
If you applied a turn mod of +3 to movement and your walk, run and sprint rates were +5, +7 and +9, then a movement distance for the turn of up to +8 (walk+3) would count as a walk, a distance of up to +10 would count as a run (run+3) and a distance of +12 would count as a sprint (sprint+3).
sprinting: If your movement rate for the turn
is more than your run distance level, add +3.
in combat: Simply being in a fight is stressful,
so this is worth +1. If you are in melee
combat, this is worth +2 instead. If do you not make any attacks or defenses, do not apply either. If you want to give people more combat endurance, leave this factor out. If you are just dodging, count it as +1.
turn mod used: The turn mod you use is just
the fraction of the turn you are doing things that can wear you out. The gamemaster can reduce this for long but non-tiring actions.
sustained power use: If a power has a drain
to use and is kept in play for a long duration, the time level you keep the power active adds to the total. If the power is used in pulses (like a firebolt), the amount you are using it is already reflected in the amount of turn mod you use.
Say it is turn 10 of a fight (8 minutes long, +18 turn mod). You have a flight power and a force field, both of which have drain of +1 to activate, and you use both of them the whole turn, in addition to using +18 of turn mod on skills. Your total for the turn is +56 (+2 for powers, +18 for turn mod, +36 for two sustained powers), so you burn 11 Stamina that turn. Anyone with long duration powers needs to have a good Stamina.
If reinforcements are notified of a problem on turn 3, insert them into the combat timeline at turn 3. Their movement towards the combat (and Stamina use) will have the same turn mod as everyone else in the fight, and when they arrive, plug them seamlessly in.
However, if the combats are separate entities that started at different times, the best thing to do is at the start of the next turn, you reset back to turn 1. The situation that separated combatants leads to new opportunities and new chaos, so the time scale starts short and lengthens again as the situation restabilizes. This is one of the few ways in which a combat can last more than ten turns, when a situation changes dramatically enough that it is like starting a new combat!
If someone becomes a participant in ongoing combat by surprise, on their first round in the combat they will get no turn mod and count as ambushed. So, if you are fleeing pursuit, turn a corner and there is a guard napping on a chair, he gets inserted into the combat, but the guard’s first turn in the combat starts on Initiative 0 of that turn.
Tweaked turn scale
The normal combat system has turn length increased as described elsewhere. If you are not comfortable with this, or it does not seem right for you for a particular encounter or genre, you can always go to fixed turn length and run combats as many turns as you want, or adjust the turn scale to match what you want the players to be able to do in a turn. You would just find the appropriate turn mod for that turn length and apply it to each turn.
If you were running a fantasy gameworld and felt that a turn length of 6 seconds was about right, then you could just arbitrarily declare that turns were 6 seconds long and every turn had a +5 turn mod for players to apply as they wished between skills, attributes and movement. Or, you could see that things were bogging down and just say “Okay, next round is going to be a minute long and have a +12 turn mod.”
Remember that each action you take normally suffers a penalty of your initiative, plus any penalties for doing more than one major action. If you do complex sequencing, the maximum turn bonus you can apply to one action is based on the action. Ranged weapons will be limited to a quantity mod of their
remaining supply of ammunition. Movement, melee and unarmed attacks can use any
portion of the turn mod they wish. For purpose of combat modifiers, you are counted as using the maximum movement that you did at that or any previous point in the turn.
You declare ‘4’ for initiative. Let’s say the turn mod you have available is +4 and your run distance is normally +8. If you apply your +4 turn mod to movement, your movement level becomes +12, or 23 meters. If someone shoots at you, the modifier for your movement is +6 (half the level for your movement plus their movement). Even if this was a turn where you took three actions, and you did not change position on your last action, you are counted as moving the maximum rate you had during the turn. The reason for this is to keep you from running really fast, then stopping and taking no penalty on your action.
Multiple combats
The ever-lengthening turn scale works very well for combats where everyone is at the same location. But what if a situation divides the combatants into separate groups? This could be a problem if a group with a turn length of 2 seconds runs into a group having a turn length of 2 minutes!
First, you have to make sure this is actually the case. If a turn is long enough that people in one part of the combat can move to or launch attacks against where the other one is going on, then it is still all one combat and one location. It is just one large combat and one large location. If the gamemaster expects that separate groups are going to run into each other, the best thing to do is synchronize them from the start.
In conditions of poor visibility, the difficulty for spotting things will be increased, and it could be that nothing is obvious and that actions are required to spot anything.
vision arc awareness roll
front +0 penalty
side -3 penalty
rear -6 penalty
indirect -varies
vision condition difficulty
default vision +range level/2(d)
well lit & open +0
poor lighting +2
dusk +4
moonlight +6
starlight +8
no light vision n/a
light obscurement, 50% cover +2 medium obscurement, 75% cover +4 heavy obscurement, 90% cover +6 total obscurement vision n/a
item motion -move level/2(d)
item size ±size level
hearing condition difficulty
default hearing +range level
no background noise +0
background conversation +2 traffic noise or light machinery +4 background melee combat +6
background gun combat +8
to hear gunshots -level of damage to hear obvious powers -level of effect to hear silenced gunshots -dice of damage to hear subtle powers -dice of effect
to hear your name -4
sound related to a ≥4d skill -2
You are looking in your front arc and something person-sized moves a few meters, out at 200 meters (distance level of +18). Noticing it is half the range level (+9), minus half its movement level (say this gives a -2), for a final difficulty of 7. Odds are pretty good you will spot it.
Spotting things
It was not mentioned in basic combat, but it should be pretty obvious: You cannot attack something you cannot see. Sure, you can lob a grenade blindly into a room, but you are at least assuming the presence of a target. But movies, stories and even real life are full of situations where someone gets the drop on someone else because of distraction or cover or good planning. The easiest way to handle spotting in combat is to assume that anything happening that is obvious is...well...obvious. No roll is needed. Do not make life more complicated than it has to be. If you have to determine what ‘obvious’ is, it would be a difficulty you can ‘take 2’s’ to meet with an appropriate Awareness roll.
If you an Awareness for seeing things of 3d+1, then anything of difficulty 7 or less is ‘obvious’. Anyone who leaves your sight or other senses during combat has to be reacquired if they reappear stealthily or from an unexpected direction. This is an Awareness roll against half the difficulty for range (round down) for visual spotting, or the normal difficulty for range for things you try to spot through hearing. Any penalties for weapon arcswill apply to your Awareness for visual spotting (it is harder to see something sneaking up from behind). If there are multiple ways to spot something, you use whichever one you want or think gives you the best chance, but you do not use all of them.
Spotting rolls for something that is happening in the midst of other actions does not count as an action, you are merely noticing changes in an evolving situation, and such free Awareness rolls may not apply any turn mod. However, making a deliberate spotting or listening roll is a minor action. In the case where you are spending time on the action, you may apply any part of your turn mod towards the roll. If you spend time looking, you have a better chance of seeing something.
Movement
There are not many special rules for move- ment that you will need on a regular basis. The ones that do exist are here just because you may occasionally need to look one up.
acceleration: In the basic rules, you walk as
a minor action, run as a major action and sprint as a major action that counts as two, noting that your total movement level for a turn is your appropriate movement rate plus turn bonus. So, you may not take three major actions and run for each of them to cover more ground. Instead, you choose your movement level and then apply turn mod to represent how much of the turn is spent moving. In the real world, you cannot get up to full speed instantly. In order to sprint, you have to have been running on the previous turn, or use +2 of your turn mod to go from stationary or a walk to a sprint, which effectively means you cannot sprint on the first turn of a combat, since the turn mod is +0.
You have a walk, run and sprint movement level of 4, 6 and 8. It is turn 3 of a combat, so the turn mod is +4. If you had been running on the previous turn, you could sprint on this turn and move a total distance during the turn of +12 (movement of +8 with a +4 turn mod). If
however, you were going from a walk or standing start and wanted to sprint this turn, it would cost you +2 of your turn mod, so you could move a maximum distance level of +10. You would use all of your turn mod to do this (+2 to accelerate, and +2 on your sprinting movement level).
jumping: Unless you have an enhanced skill
to affect it, your standing jump distance level is half of Strength or Health (round nearest), whichever you are basing the jump off of. Your vertical jump distance is a quarter your Strength or Health (round nearest). A ‘vertical jump’ is what you can get your whole body over. If you are moving, you can add half (round nearest) your movement distance level to your attribute.
indirect: This modifier is worth noting as a
special case. It means you are seeing things through some other device, like a surveillance camera or a periscope, which limits the range and quality of what you can see.
Bear in mind you can have gear which alters these modifiers, from a flashlight that changes lighting for everyone, to night vision goggles that affect the apparent lighting for just the wearer. Similarly, the level of obscurement can be changed in an instant. Going prone in waist-high grass takes you from 50% cover to nearly 100% cover (they can’t see you, but they can see if the grass moves). And also bear in mind that obscurement is not always the same as armor. The tall grass might hide you, but it does not stop machinegun bullets...
The ‘your name’ difficulty adjustment for hearing is what is known as the ‘cocktail party effect’. Having become used to hearing it all our lives, we are very good at pulling our name out of the clutter of background noise. So, you might not hear what someone is saying about you, but you
would be likely to catch that someone was talking about you. A low-tech society’s non-scientific
awareness of this might be what is behind the superstitions of not speaking certain names (like devils or fey), lest the being in question hear you and show up to see what is being said about them. Similarly, the skill-related adjustment reflects that you are attuned to the sounds of your profession and are more likely to hear them. For instance, as a gamer, odds are that you would pick up the rolling of dice over background noise easier than most people.
If you look at them, all of these visibility and hearing modifiers are really just interpretations of values on the Universal Chart. For instance, the modifier for object under 50% cover is the same as the modifier for a torso-sized target (about 50% of a person). So, once you remember that sight rolls are half the difficulty for range and hearing is the full difficulty for range, you should be able to wing most of the rest.