1. How do you address posting order and initiative in freeform mass combat? Who goes first, and how often can they attack?
- The first hostile action starts it off, if that persons emote is going to effect more than one person, they would let the two people respond and counter before continuing. It makes for slow rounds, and in most of the events I have seen people tend to lock down 1vs1 even in mass fights as some sort of unspoken agreement. If someone was to fall which frees up a person, then they can jump onto someone else and the same thing happens where people adjust to let the third person emote. As to how often, generally speaking you do one attack per emote, but you can sometimes squeeze in two by stating what your character would follow up with should something go through - I did this a lot when I roleplayed as a mage in a past game, as I consider it good costum to emote for the act of charging up your spell/saying the spell out loud which counts as something your opponent can interrupt and cause the spell to fail. If a spell is very strong or complex, I would usually spend an entire turn on it (this usually has the side-effect of your character being completely open to bad stuff happening).
2. In situations where one group is outnumbered, does the other group allow them to have an edge in terms of how often they can attack and defend themselves for fairness' sake, or does the larger group press the weight of numbers?
- Not as for what I have seen. I think something that is a bit characteristic for freeform fights is that they're not really fair, and there's no emphasis on making them fair. If you are outnumbered, you have a disadvantage unless your characters strong side is dealing with more than one person. Remembering that people can end up leaving their characters open to dirty tricks and simple basic moves, as well as remembering your sorroundings can help turn the tide in a disadvantageous battle.Â
3. How do you handle disparities in character strength? The Powerlevel thread shows that some characters consider themselves strong enough to take on much larger groups. Do you take these disparities into account when trying to resolve a mass combat?
- Both yes and no. For planned events, I tend to allow my NPC's (I usually have them played by people) to ramp up their power if I can see the fight as being extremely out of balance to the end where they would not stay alive for long. Fights sometimes happen where you can't plan this out, and explanations of how powerful things are comes down to emotes and good ooc communication. OOC communication is very vital in these situations.Â
My Nailah was in a fight a couple of days ago, she's not at all strong or experienced and literally got caught in the middle of it with no other choice. So you could say she was much weaker than the rest, and that was reflected in her emotes - more uncertainty, slowness and bad judgementcalls. When her aether was as spent as she felt she could let it, she resorted to throwing rocks Pebbles at the assiliants which were notably clad in plate, she figured that she might as well try to distract them. Which in the end caused her to be distracted, she was snuck up on and stabbed in the leg and left the fight as the only "good-sided" person being carried off half-concious. Meanwhile I did keep people informed on any elaborations to questions I got about her attacks etc.Â
4. Do you assign individuals to specific targets to the best of your ability, or do you prefer a more chaotic melee in which it's possible for everyone to strike everyone else?
- I have never experienced anyone getting assigned outside of training fights. I vastly prefer chaos, and absolutely should people be able to strike everyone.Â
5. Friendly fire: It happens, and it's unfortunate, but how do you involve accidental strikes on someone friendly when there are very few accidents in freeform?
- Sometimes you can end up having it happen because you send something out just before someone else does, which puts them in the way of whatever you were doing. How that is handled is by the person I for example were trying to hit states that this person got in the way, and the person would then have to react to it - usually they get hit (there may be other ways of resolving this) I remember one notable encounter in a past game of mine where friendly fire caused an allies upper back to get covered by one big nasty burn wound.Â
6. Do you feel some of the difficulties in addressing the above have a cooling effect on this kind of combat RP? If so, how can they be corrected?Â
- I think that the difficulties in it makes freeform combat difficult to learn how to master, I know I was frustrated with my characters losing because I simply did not fully understand the extend of the freedom in the system back when I was a rookie. I'd make mistakes that I didn't think my characters would make, and there's just not really any way of getting around that I feel.Â
Some of them, especially with power and strength and that, can lead to a lot of ooc drama which is the #1 reason I hear people list when they do not use freeform, simply that it is too dramatic.Â
I make it a point to ensure that people in my own FC knows how to use the system, because we run all of our combat events with it - I find that by spending some time to ensure everyone knows and are confident with it, we do not have any drama related to fights using this system at all. However this is hard to achieve when you're thinking of an entire community.Â
*puts two gil in a hat* Also, disclaimer, I write from my experiences so take it as suggestions as to how things are done and not the one true way.Â
- The first hostile action starts it off, if that persons emote is going to effect more than one person, they would let the two people respond and counter before continuing. It makes for slow rounds, and in most of the events I have seen people tend to lock down 1vs1 even in mass fights as some sort of unspoken agreement. If someone was to fall which frees up a person, then they can jump onto someone else and the same thing happens where people adjust to let the third person emote. As to how often, generally speaking you do one attack per emote, but you can sometimes squeeze in two by stating what your character would follow up with should something go through - I did this a lot when I roleplayed as a mage in a past game, as I consider it good costum to emote for the act of charging up your spell/saying the spell out loud which counts as something your opponent can interrupt and cause the spell to fail. If a spell is very strong or complex, I would usually spend an entire turn on it (this usually has the side-effect of your character being completely open to bad stuff happening).
2. In situations where one group is outnumbered, does the other group allow them to have an edge in terms of how often they can attack and defend themselves for fairness' sake, or does the larger group press the weight of numbers?
- Not as for what I have seen. I think something that is a bit characteristic for freeform fights is that they're not really fair, and there's no emphasis on making them fair. If you are outnumbered, you have a disadvantage unless your characters strong side is dealing with more than one person. Remembering that people can end up leaving their characters open to dirty tricks and simple basic moves, as well as remembering your sorroundings can help turn the tide in a disadvantageous battle.Â
3. How do you handle disparities in character strength? The Powerlevel thread shows that some characters consider themselves strong enough to take on much larger groups. Do you take these disparities into account when trying to resolve a mass combat?
- Both yes and no. For planned events, I tend to allow my NPC's (I usually have them played by people) to ramp up their power if I can see the fight as being extremely out of balance to the end where they would not stay alive for long. Fights sometimes happen where you can't plan this out, and explanations of how powerful things are comes down to emotes and good ooc communication. OOC communication is very vital in these situations.Â
My Nailah was in a fight a couple of days ago, she's not at all strong or experienced and literally got caught in the middle of it with no other choice. So you could say she was much weaker than the rest, and that was reflected in her emotes - more uncertainty, slowness and bad judgementcalls. When her aether was as spent as she felt she could let it, she resorted to throwing rocks Pebbles at the assiliants which were notably clad in plate, she figured that she might as well try to distract them. Which in the end caused her to be distracted, she was snuck up on and stabbed in the leg and left the fight as the only "good-sided" person being carried off half-concious. Meanwhile I did keep people informed on any elaborations to questions I got about her attacks etc.Â
4. Do you assign individuals to specific targets to the best of your ability, or do you prefer a more chaotic melee in which it's possible for everyone to strike everyone else?
- I have never experienced anyone getting assigned outside of training fights. I vastly prefer chaos, and absolutely should people be able to strike everyone.Â
5. Friendly fire: It happens, and it's unfortunate, but how do you involve accidental strikes on someone friendly when there are very few accidents in freeform?
- Sometimes you can end up having it happen because you send something out just before someone else does, which puts them in the way of whatever you were doing. How that is handled is by the person I for example were trying to hit states that this person got in the way, and the person would then have to react to it - usually they get hit (there may be other ways of resolving this) I remember one notable encounter in a past game of mine where friendly fire caused an allies upper back to get covered by one big nasty burn wound.Â
6. Do you feel some of the difficulties in addressing the above have a cooling effect on this kind of combat RP? If so, how can they be corrected?Â
- I think that the difficulties in it makes freeform combat difficult to learn how to master, I know I was frustrated with my characters losing because I simply did not fully understand the extend of the freedom in the system back when I was a rookie. I'd make mistakes that I didn't think my characters would make, and there's just not really any way of getting around that I feel.Â
Some of them, especially with power and strength and that, can lead to a lot of ooc drama which is the #1 reason I hear people list when they do not use freeform, simply that it is too dramatic.Â
I make it a point to ensure that people in my own FC knows how to use the system, because we run all of our combat events with it - I find that by spending some time to ensure everyone knows and are confident with it, we do not have any drama related to fights using this system at all. However this is hard to achieve when you're thinking of an entire community.Â
*puts two gil in a hat* Also, disclaimer, I write from my experiences so take it as suggestions as to how things are done and not the one true way.Â
