What this is for

For the most part, I do intend to draw heavily from the D&D forth edition, which is why I'm setting that other thread up for reference. For example we can probably use most if not all of their "Skills" (second post in the other thread) while adding a few of our own for more modern things like Science, or Machinery etc.

The official rules have yet to be decided.

D&D is just where I'm going to start then add some more stuff together. Like we discussed the lion's share of D&D's Powers won't be applicable and we'll have to make our own. In addition there will be no real dungeon map so anything that refers to 'squares' or 'move actions' will need to be rewritten. But before we get into the nitty gritty of the rules, I think it'd be a good idea to establishment how the play by play will look/work. That way we can build from the ground up.

Though I did have an epiphany last night and come up with something that I think is a darling solution to one of the biggest obstacles. Experience.

As those of you who have been intimately following this whole ordeal, as I know all of you have , the methodology on how to allot experience points has been one of the most challenging things stopping us from getting a decent set of rules going. But now I believe I have the solution, and it's so simple it couldn't have been any simpler, well maybe it could have been but not without being significantly less fun.

The value of every dice roll a player character undertakes is added to their experience, ignoring modifiers.

So if you roll a D20 and you get a 20, you get 20 Experience points for that action. If you roll a D20 and get a 1 you get 1 Experience point for that action.

This is good because it rewards the more active players, as well as lucky ones who are simply getting higher dice rolls. It is also good because it means that a character, rather than gaining experience for successfully completing a quest or defeating a monster, can gain Experience in the process of doing that quest or fighting that monster. Which should allow for some rather 'dramatic' scenes when a character after failing an attack roll but scoring high enough to push them over to their next level unlocks heat vision and just nukes the monster into potato salad. Further more it's good because as you may have noticed, the Dice Rolling mechanism here calls out not only who rolled the die "User= blablabla" but what their score without modifiers is, so if someone hasn't been paying attention it'd be easy enough to simply go through a tread and tally up what their dice rolls have been, add it all together and that's their Experience value.

It's bad because it would reward any and every action with experience, and then a player character could unlock their next level by doing something mundane like reading books for weeks on end, as well as it leaves the potential for 'farming' where a character simply continually performs a single action off by themselves someplace and comes out a month later level 200. To eliminate this I suggest that rolls not involving two or more players provide half Experience. Robin training by himself only gains half the Experience he would if he had asked Cyborg or Beast Boy to join him. (Also his sparing partner would gain full Experience for their rolls as well so this method would vastly encourage 'training' scenes between characters.)

I'm awesome I know.

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While thinking about that I also came up with an idea for how characters would unlock powers and improve their abilities.

D&D 4th simply says, at this level you can choose from these abilities and pick however many your class says you can.

Since we don't really have classes or lists. I think we should say this.

The levels are 1-30. Every 2 levels a character gains access to 2 new Powers. A power would be anything from Robin's uncanny ability to jump long distances from a standing position, to Raven's ability to pick things up with her mind. At level 1 a character starts with 2 Powers, at level 3 they gain two more, at level 5 they gain two more. This should mean that a level 30 character would have 60 different powers at their disposal. This would make them obscenely powerful but considering that I would expect characters like Superman or Darkseid to be the only real ones in the level 30 range, it makes sense. (Batman maybe too but he'd have more Skill-Related powers)

And speaking of Skills. I do intend to use most if not all of the D&D 4th Skills, and I do intend to use all of the D&D 4th Ability Scores. I suspect we'll need to add a few skills to accommodate things like Science and Machines but I think the D&D 4th Skill list is a good start. Particularly since I intend to let characters start at level 1 with 4 'trained' skills. This means that they'd receive a +5 bonus to any roll relating to that skill, forever. It also means that since they won't have most of their powers until they start leveling up, low-level characters would be more reliant on their Skill, and thus it'd be more important that a low-level party have a good base of people with a wide range of skills. If everyone is trained in 'Acrobatics' than sure they can jump-flip from roof to roof together, but it means that they have the potential to be missing out on 1 +5 to a different skill per person. Which if it turns out they need that skill sometime down the line they'll be sorry.

In addition, since all Skills are linked directly to one of the Ability Scores, and I like that so I intend to keep it even for any Custom Skills (custom to my version of the dice game, not to characters, all characters will know all skills to some degree) and D&D 4th has it set up so that characters can add to their Ability Scores at various levels, I think this is a dandy idea and am going to steal it. So while every 2 levels a character would gain access to 2 new Powers, every 4 levels they can add 1 to two of their Ability Scores (you can't add to the same score twice in the same level.) This means that every 8 levels a character would have the potential to rise to the next Ability Modifier, which would increase their ability to perform All actions related to All skills attached to that Ability Score.

A more in depth description of how I plan on this to work will be posted with the actual rules once I have them ya'know, made. Provided that people *coughMercycough* believe this to be an acceptable method.

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The one thing I'm still wrestling with and probably will be for a while even if you guys think this is as dandy an idea as I do, is the number values required to reach each level... I'm tempted to set level 2 at 1000 Experience, because that would be a minimum of 50 rolls. (assuming a character was lucky enough to roll 20 50 times in a row) I know it seems high, but I don't like the idea of 'giving levels away' and since characters would always be advancing regardless of what they were doing, as long as it involved rolling Dice, I have the creeping suspicion that it won't take half as long as it sounds like it would.

Will that be the only way you will allot Experience? If so, you may have a problem in that you will only be rewarding people that roll, and not the people that rollplay. A player can easily come up with ways to get around encounters or challenges without ever needing to roll a die, how would people that do this get rewarded?

I would say, let the GM reward experience as he see's fit for actions.

Also, if you're setting 1000 XP for level two, does that mean you'll be using 3.5ed EXP levels? Where to level up you need EXP equal to all previous levels added together and multiplied by 1000 to level up? (So to reach level 7 you would need 21,000EXP [6+5+4+3+2+1 all multiplied by 1000])

If so, then you're going to reach a problem as reaching level 30 will take 435,000 EXP which is over 21,000 perfect d20 rolls.

I haven't decided on the values for cumulative levels. For that exact reason.

And I don't know about people who rollplay. I'd hope that for the most part, avoiding situations would include rolling dice for some of the more obscure skills like Bluff Diplomacy or Stealth, but I'm really trying to avoid having a set GM here, since being a GM for a dozen people posting like rabbits every day would be a lot of work.

TheDeceiverGod wrote:I haven't decided on the values for cumulative levels. For that exact reason.

And I don't know about people who rollplay. I'd hope that for the most part, avoiding situations would include rolling dice for some of the more obscure skills like Bluff Diplomacy or Stealth, but I'm really trying to avoid having a set GM here, since being a GM for a dozen people posting like rabbits every day would be a lot of work.

Yeah, DMing for too many people SUCKS. Take it from me, the idiot that tried to host a game for 10 people (Five of which had never played the game before) once. It is NOT fun.

I know what you're trying to say about avoiding situations using skills like Bluff and Diplomacy and Stealth. The problem I see arising is that one good Bluff check or Stealth check can easily allow a person to avoid a combat situation, in which multiple more D20s will be rolled instead of just the one needed to get away from the situation.

So doing it your way would unfortunately reward people that dive into fights over those that talk their way out of it. Maybe that's what you're going for, I don't know. I'm just pointing out things, just in case you didn't consider them and can now hammer them out to improve whatever you're doing.

No it's good that you point this out. It's something I hadn't considered, and you're right. This is why I post ideas here before committing them to the final rules

The easiest answer is to increase the exp value for those skills, but then I'd be worried about people trying to favour those skills because they see it as easier Exp with less risk.

I don't know maybe it's good with more exp for battle than for guile since characters would be risking their lives, and I do intend to have unintentional character death included, I'm thinking -50% rather than -10 since we have so many people new to the dice game scene.

TheDeceiverGod wrote:No it's good that you point this out. It's something I hadn't considered, and you're right. This is why I post ideas here before committing them to the final rules

The easiest answer is to increase the exp value for those skills, but then I'd be worried about people trying to favour those skills because they see it as easier Exp with less risk.

I don't know maybe it's good with more exp for battle than for guile since characters would be risking their lives, and I do intend to have unintentional character death included, I'm thinking -50% rather than -10 since we have so many people new to the dice game scene.

4ed death is at -bloody anyways so no changes there. That's going to be the real interesting bit with your system, and I'm going to keep an ear out when people start playing. In a PvP scenario like it seems you're going to have, there's an increased chance of people's characters being killed. I'd be sure to remind your players that while it's fine and dandy to really enjoy your character, it's possible they will die and they shouldn't get mad at whoever does the killing.

Yeah, I hope people have been listening to my rant about detaching yourself from your characters for like the past forever in the educational thread.

And to be fair I'm still on the edge about the whole Original Character question anyway, since I'm not sure how well it would work for the whole Powers thing, D&D give you the list, but 60 seems like a manageable number to me and with a little work I have no doubt I could build up 60 Powers for any cannon DC character.

The problem is that while I really want to believe that other people are equally as capable as me, experience has taught me otherwise... And I really don't feel like having to wade through 60 powers, moving adjusting and outright eliminating them for every OC that steps through the door.

Having a list of 60-80 powers for a cannon character is great because everyone would have different choices, but a character from level 1-30 only goes through a total of 25 or so different powers. The reason there's a list of choices is because it adds strategy/personal preference, but as I'm fairly certain an OC wouldn't be played by anyone other than its creator; they would only have to design the list to their own wishes.

Which is still pretty sloppy, but it would be easier than a list over twice as large.

It's less the quantity of the powers that concerns me, and more the quality.

I mean for those of us who've played a dice game before, or people like myself who have attempted to build one from the ground up before (before I even had 4th edition to do a lot of the work for me) it's almost second nature to identify, oh this is a 3rd level power, or this is a 12th level power or this is too powerful a power for a character to even have at 30th level. (Omega Beams jump to mind but that's neither here nor there)

For the, shall we say, lay person, it might not be so easy, and I for a fact would rather not spend my time looking over potential character applications fine tuning the nitty gritty of character powers.

My point was that if people had to write out a smaller list, it might come out better. Basically, I think that in this situation, if you decrease quantity, then quality would rise as a result because not everyone is familiar with this level of character development.

Maybe.

Alright so, time for a new question.

How am I going to deal with time?

Mercy brought up this question the other day, and I've been mulling it over ever since. I can't seem to think up a good way to deal with time in the rp. I mean normally it would be controlled by the GM, whenever the characters take a rest, or they do something that has a minimum time limit on it the GM would be the one keeping track of how that effected the world and how the npcs moved during that time, but as I've stated I'm trying not to have a GM here because it would be vastly too difficult for one person to keep track of everyone else.

While at the same time in past role plays, the element of time has been rather neglected. I wanted to make the levels 1-30 represent a character's experience in more ways than just in points. I wanted a level 1 character to be some guy fresh off the street, and a level 30 character a legend who's deeds would go down in history forever. But again Mercy went and burst my bubble by pointing out that characters like Robin would only advance from level 1 to level 30 over Years, and while it's entirely possible that Robin might accumulate enough experience to get to level 30 in our RP, it's unlike that that would involve as much time as it would take to make it realistic. And if I tried to require such a vast amount of experience as to try and make it realistic it would decrease the chance of ever having a max-level character in the RP.

Honestly, I'm pretty okay with the latter choice. I mean in D&D once you max out a character, you're done, that is it, there's really nothing left for you to do but quest for times, and even then you're so obscenely powerful that you're going to have to fight gods to get any real challenge. That's why 4th ed had 'epic destinies' so once you were done maxing out a character, you could have them go off and meet their destiny and still include them as character in later rps, just not player-characters.

But even if I do use the 'level 30=god mode' excuse, than there's still the problem of dealing with the overall passage of time, and again D&D doesn't have a proper answer for me to draw from. They're answer is to say, 'DM controls time outside combat, inside combat one circle of everyone's turn=6 seconds'

6 seconds seems a little low to me. But at the same time I don't know what a good amount of time would be for say, one post. That'd be the easiest answer, say that ever player's post occupies X amount of time minimum and if it occupies more than that then they have to expressly say so. "For two hours she sat there beside Cyborg's sleeping slab," etc.

Also sleep. I've noticed a lot of people seem to neglect the basic necessities of life when role playing characters, and while I'm okay with not hearing about the latter end of the digestive system, for characters like a Flash who's major weakness is their need to eat I think it's important to include food drink and sleep. My current idea is to just come up with a list of some basic items that do basic things Fruit: works like a health potion for example. Herbal Tea restores mana/energy/stamina whatever etcetera.

The more pressing problem and the one more deeply tied into the control of Time, is sleep. In D&D characters are required to take short or long rests to restore certain abilities after use, or to heal from effects etcetera etcetera. But the truth of the matter is that sleeping is boring, at least from an outside prospective. But having a character be asleep can be important to the story, the Puppet could wait until all the Titans are asleep to break into the tower. Mad Mod could use knock out gas on them to kidnap them to his reform school-submarine. Sleep can be a character in and of itself, and the rp would be weaker for not having it.

Not to mention it offers a couple of possibilities for low-level super powers. D&D says six hours is a decent sized nap, but maybe one of say Robin's 3rd or 4th level powers could be Light Sleeper: "Requires only 4 hours for a long rest gains a +2 bonus to Passive Perception checks while asleep " or Raven's Meditation could act as an accelerated sleep state while decreasing her awareness of the outside world.

Huh, I feel like a bad guy because the beginning. Anyway, have we been stopped because we can't figure out how to distribute time?

Pretty much, and again, no one should feel bad for poking holes in my labors, the more holes you poke now, the less there will be later when people are actually playing.

Like I said, I think the easiest way would be to say that... all posts take at least: some completely arbitrary number like three minutes. That would work out fine because people could just keep track of how many posts there have been, an easy enough endeavor and a nice number like 3 minutes means that every twenty posts would equal an hour, and every 480 posts would be a day. Easy enough since the forum keeps track of how many replies there are to a given thread we just start the game at... again some completely arbitrary date, January 1st 0:00

The problem with that would be combat. Three minutes is a long time for Robin to take to throw a punch, and making any exceptions would screw over using the built in forum post counter to keep track.

Hmm.. What if at the start of every post each member posts the time. And at the bottom post how much time had passed.

That way a post could last up to 2 hours or 6 seconds. Though I'm not sure how many people will put up with that.

That could work. Particularly since I'm requiring them to post their roll modifiers health and energy/mana/whatever. It would just mean that there'd be two parts to every post, the actual post, and the data declaration for it.

And honestly I expect this game to take a lot more work than the regular one. Though it will make posting easier in the long run when it's easier to interact with the environment.

I was thinking of having players be able to use 'Nature' checks to influence the weather. Not like Weather Wizard's power, but like if Beast Boy wants to look outside and say "looks like rain today" then if he rolls high enough he's right and it'll rain.

Would also mean that low-level naturmancer powers could make that easier for them to do.

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Edit:
But again that could get really cumbersome for battles. I mean, who, aside from the Clock King, knows exactly how quickly Batman throws a punch, or how quickly a Starbolt travels...

Maybe we'll just have to restrict it to minutes, say no one cares about the second to second, and just say something like. If the time hasn't changed in 12 posts, on the thirteenth post it's automatically one minute later.

Since I think we've covered just about everything that needs to be covered in the post-to-post process of the Dice Game, I thought I'd mock up a beta-post, just so everyone gets an idea of what stuff'll look like once things get underway. Now mind you it'll be the Character Sheets that'll be the real ordeal, but I hope to find time to personally make those for at least the first five Titans (Robin, Raven, Starfire, Cyborg & Beast Boy) in the next couple of weeks.

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Beta Post wrote:
January 1st 00:00-00:05
Health: 100/100 Mana: 100/100

He looked down on the festive streets from high above them. Far above the chaotic revelry of the city citizens celebrating the passing of one year into the next. Such a scowl so firmly affixed to his face that his mentor would be proud. Robin crossed his arms over his chest and set one foot against the back of a looming gargoyle, keeping careful eye on the festivities bellow, ever vigilant for the slightest disturbance, the slightest break from pattern. It had been another year. Another year since the Brotherhood fell, another year since the greatest challenge they'd faced had crumbled away. There were always criminals to catch, there would always be criminals to catch, but since the fall of the Brotherhood of Evil the Titans had, well, more free time. Robin had even begun returning to Gotham on occasion, not that he was considering going back to work with, him, but Jump was quiet these days, five heroes was almost too many to keep rounding up the stray villains that would wander through, and Gotham always needed help, it probably always would.

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Perception Check: (1D20) + 3 (Wisdom Modifier)

Just to keep things clear the {hr} after the body of the post and the "Perception Check:" would only be necessary if the character is actually using a skill or making a check of some kind. In this preview Robin is using his Perception Check in an attempt to spot any crime or "The slightest disturbance, the slightest break from pattern."

If someone was playing a character who was in the crowd and didn't want to be seen they'd roll a "Stealth Check" and if it came up higher than Robin's Perception Check, Robin can't notice them. Or if they don't want to hide they're considered to just take 10 for the roll, and I say we just ignore modifiers for characters taking 10, in which case Robin can only notice them if his Perception Check totals higher than 10.

And this post would of course be followed by an automated one by 'Odin' or whatever he's calling himself these days, staying that the user who's playing Robin has performed the action of rolling a one 'D20' and the result of said roll. Which would have three added to it to result in the total value of the character Robin's Perception Check.

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So, is this good, think that the average role playing person could manage to mock up something like this every time they post? The basic format not the quantity/quality.

Also I'm not forgetting anything am I guys? Sponge Feather Mercy?

So I have questions and they're not being answered by the gremlins who live in my head so I guess you folk on the internet will have to do.

Now this is in no particular order, but the question of how to handle Combat is most pressing.

• Combat: How are we going to handle combat? I mean it's going to be probably almost exclusively player verses player, though I have toyed with the idea of making up a few small 'creature sheets' for a couple levels of thugs henchmen and rudimentary criminals [sarcasm]vast amounts of free time.[/sarcasm] This is the most pressing question because most if not all of our heroes' powers are going to be at least partially combat based, and simply put most combat powers are just ways to bend the rules of combat. Thus having established rock solid rules of engagement would be nice. A few things I know need to be dealt with for combat are
  
  
  
  1. Actions: D&D labels virtually everything as one of four kinds of actions. Standard which means just about anything that takes a good deal of focus, Move, which means anything that involves moving slipping pushing or otherwise getting from point A to point B, minor which is basically anything that's not a Standard or a Move Action, and Free, which is something you can do in your sleep, or virtually so like dropping something.
     
     Now D&D lets each player perform only a certain number of these actions per turn, but in their game world one turn of combat is about six seconds, and that's too little time for us to concern ourselves with, but I do think that some manner of restricting the number of actions a player can take per amount of time is a good idea, if only so we can let players circumvent that rule with special powers, like Robin gets a power that lets him perform two Melee attacks in the amount of time it would take someone to normally perform one Melee attack. Plus it would prevent players from initiating more things than they can keep track of. I'd hate to see someone start like six attacks in one post and not be able to remember who they're targeting with which one. (I can totally see this happening if the Titans gang up on a "Deathstroke" type character, like Deathstroke for example.)
     
     So we need some means of saying a player can only perform so much in so little time. But I don't know what would be an acceptable amount of time for each something. D&D characters can perform a basic attack every six seconds, but that would mean that our characters could perform up to 10 attacks in the lowest increment of time increase we're measuring. Granted the rule that says every 12 posts (arbitrary Number) the time automatically goes up by 1 minute would mean that theoretically 12 different attacks could occur in that same one minute, but I just don't know what would be best here.
     
     
  2. Triggered Actions: D&D has something that basically says certain actions can prompt certain responses. For example if you try to move from point A to point B and there's a monster between you and point B it gets to perform an attack on you before you get to point B even if it's your turn. This would be utterly impossible to do in our setting because A: we can't keep track of location that well, and B: we can't do anything without posting which is effectively taking our turn. I say we scrap these all together and more or less regardless of what anyone says that's probably going to be what happens, but I felt it was worth mentioning.
     
     
  3. Attack Range: Basically this means that you can't attack someone if they're too far away, for the most part I think we shouldn't have too much trouble with this since we're not keeping track of location that specifically. If BB wants to he can just rush Cinderblock as a rhino and we'll call it a Melee Attack, but there are certain circumstances where I can see this coming into play and we'll need rules to address it. Say if Robin was on Rooftop A and Slade was on Rooftop B and they're across the street from one another, can Robin's Bird-a-rang's reach that far? Or can Slade's gun? Should either of them receive a penalty to chance to hit (Attack Roll) for being so far away from one another? What if it's raining?
     
     
  4. Area Attacks & Area of Effect: Again something that's been bothering me based around the fact that we can't keep track of locations that well, though I'm beginning to think the answer to all my woes might be to just not try and keep track of distance that well. Initially I was thinking that if we had something that had and area of effect, say; Batman's exploding Batarang, we would tag the item with an 'explodes on hit' ability and then specify some damage and some distance for the area of effect of the explosion, same thing if say Gizmo launched a missile at Cyborg, or Robin used an exploding disk on Mammoth, but now I'm starting to think that maybe if we just make a few classifications of distances (Close Explosion, Far Explosion, Very Far Explosion) than maybe we can all just play along and say that anyone who you would say was 'close' to Mammoth takes the explosion damage from Robin's disk. (But not the 'hit' damage, there's a difference.)
     
  
  
• Line of Sight: How far can a character see and under what circumstances? This is a really basic question that really needs to get answered and I'm ashamed I forgot about it until now. It's basically one of the character's attributes, albeit one of the more flexible ones. How far away does Robin's rooftop have to be before he needs to break out his bird-binoculars to make out that shadowed figure across the way? How high can Starfire fly before she can't make out the T-car anymore? Not to mention all those super powers that shoot beams from your eyes, those would basically have your line of sight as their range, maybe more if your actually vision is compromised by; fog, dark, sand, slime, shadows, dim lighting, extremely bright lighting, etcetera.
  
  So how should Line of Sight play into the game, and how should it be decided and measured? I was thinking again just say that people can see __ feet under normal conditions and come up with some abnormal conditions that subtract from that, but again, we can't keep track of distance that well so now I'm thinking we just establish 3 (arbitrary number) states of distance; near sight, plain sight, far sight, and say that if Beast Boy is crouched in front of Slade and he's considered to be between ___ and ___ feet from Slade, he's in plain sight, if he's closer he's in near sight, and if he's between ___ and ___ he's in far sight, and if he's beyond far sight then Slade can't see him and he can't see Slade without one of them needing goggles/binoculars.
  
  
• Weather: My original idea was to just make use of the D&D 'Nature' Skill and say that players can roll for a Nature Check and if they get higher than 15 (arbitrary number) they get to say what kind of weather is going on. That idea worked in my head but I'm beginning to think that it won't work in practice. It relies too much on "Goldy Locks" conditions of people using it just the right amount. If people use it too much then the weather will be unnaturally swinging back and forth between this and that, if people use it too little the weather will be forgotten and left behind.
  
  Lucky I decided on the simplest rout being the best rout on this and just decided to spend my afternoon making a calendar that once we have actual weather effects decided upon, will show the weather for Morning Noon and Night of every day for one year of game time.
  
  The problem is that I seem to have used up all my creative juices for the day doing that so I need some help figuring out what sort of weather should occur when and what it should do. Anything will be helpful ideally things like "I think the second week of august it should snow! Making all the players have to perform Endurance Checks or take 2 Cold Damage every hour they're outside." Really this is kinda the whole purpose of the Endurance Skill even in D&D, so ideas will be appreciated. I'd like to point out that Martian Skin boils at something like 108 degrees Fahrenheit, so if Miss Martian or the Martian Manhunter come into play in the middle of summer they would suffer significantly (incidentally this is also why they don't like fire).
  
  
• Skills!: D&D's list is good, but we need to add a few more and probably drop a couple too. "Dungeoneering" is on my personal chopping block, but I'm not sure how often "Heal" "History" or "Religion" would really get used either. I mean, I can see uses for them. Trigon is worshiped by some people so that would technically make knowledge about him "Religion" knowledge, and being able to "Heal" one anther or at very least set wounds and treat diseases like Raven does is also something that should be included, but that would mean that we'd have to include wounds and diseases, which could just be thrown in as status effects which D&D handle's pretty nicely but it would mean just one more thing that players would have to pay attention to.
  
  As for adding skills I foresee the induction of a "Science" skill covering Gizmo, Cyborg, and Ray Palmer's specialties, but at the same time I kinda want to break up the sciences, so Gizmo and Cyborg could be tech heads, while The Atom, Lex Luthor, and others get either specific sciences or general science just as differentiated from 'Super Science.'
  
  
• Resting: The main way D&D heroes heal up in between battles is resting, and this is just what it sounds like, sleep. Which would be rather boring and pointless for those who's characters are resting, and could really disable some characters for a long while if people didn't do it all at once. D&D doesn't actually have an answer for this one, this right here is the core reason why D&D games normally only follow one part of adventurers at a time. Yet at the same time I do want to maintain as much realism as possible and that means making the player-characters sleep at some point in time. Maybe Robin/Batman can pick up some low level Powers that let them take half the time to rest up full as others, or Raven's meditation lets her squeeze a full rest into a third of the time but has some draw back, like if she's interrupted she takes a penalty to her mental defenses (Will Defense) until she gets a full rest or a full meditation, and then there's people like Dr. Destiny who's powers revolve around sleep and dreams. Plus with the movie Inception having just come out I think we could get some really inspired story lines going involving dreams... but there's still that looming problem of what to do if X characters are awake and Y characters are asleep, D&D says for a full rest you need 6 hours, just doing that could work, but I'd be afraid of doing that for the same reason I changed my mind about weather. If a fight breaks out while someone is asleep 6 hours is a minimum of 4320 posts, going 12 to a minute. Even if you cut that in half it's still a long time for a character to be out of play.
  
  
• 'Powers' vs Gadgets: A lot of DC heroes don't have many 'powers' and just supplement themselves with machines, Robin is a basic human, trained to perfection, but basic. So is Batman for all his toys. My problem with this is that if you gain Powers when you level up should that be akin to Robin getting a new Gadget? or should he have had access to all his gadgets from level one? (I'm against this option) or should the Gadgets require certain levels to be utilized? (This is what D&D does) or should certain gadgets just require that you have a certain value in a certain (skill/Ability/potato salad) to use them?
  
  In addition what about those really versatile gadgets? *coughLaternRingcough* My idea was to give them their own Power trees, and just say the player who utilizes them has to be level X to use a level X Power on the ring, but then I think it'd feel like players are leveling up their rings and not their characters. You see it all the time with the Lanterns, their ring runs out, or is stolen or broken or something, and they still manage to save the day. What should I do about that? Those heroic bastards
  
  
• Weapons: Just generally how are we going to handle these? My plan was to rip off as much of the D&D book as I could, and then fake the rest, but that sounds really tiring at this point, and I don't even know how to approach firearms, well that's not true I do know how to approach them, with caution, and want to give them a ridiculously high variance of damage. Like a simple hand gun hits for 5d20 where its minimum damage is 5 and it's maximum damage is 100, but at the same time I want people like Robin to have to actually go back to the tower to restock their ammunition every once in a while, sure he can carry like 50 bird-a-rangs another 50 explosive disks 20 gas disks and 20 electrical disks on his belt, but I refuse to let players have infinite ammo with them. Not to mention making Red Hood pause to reload his gun every two turns would just be realistic. (That relates back to the "Actions" question of combat, because we'd probably say that loading his gun is the same action type as firing it, which means that if he can only perform _# of those actions in one turn, then he'd have to pause at least once to reload.)
  
  Not to mention 'improvised weapons' if Mammoth picked up a brick and hit Raven over the head with it, how busted open would her skull be vs if he used a Honda Civic?
  
  
• Armor: Batman has his suit, Deathstroke has his vest, Wonder Woman has her magic bracers, more heroes than you'd think are wearing some kind of armor and something needs to be done about that. The simplest answer is of course to just use D&D's old standard of making it add to you AC, but then we're taking about at very least making up items for characters to carry around, and probably finding some way to say that Cassandra Sandmark can't ware Wonder Woman's girdle for reasons beyond the difference in cup size. D&D just adds levels to armor too, but it does mean that's just one more thing that will need to be attended to during Character creation.
  
  
• Recovery Items/Food: I want to make food a basic recovery item, but the only way I can see to do this really right is to make up a giant list of all known foods in the world and assign effects to them and that's not something any of us want to see. We could go general with it but going general with it generally means getting more specific to characters, if we want to keep some variance. Say like adding a nationality field, and saying that if you eat food of your nationality you gain full effect, but if you eat food of a different nationality you gain 2/3s effect, or something I don't know. I just don't want Starfire's alien cooking to have the same effect as a pizza fresh from the oven, Mmm... Pizza sounds really good right now and besides for 'Flash' characters who's main weakness is that they need to eat like all the time, including food in the game for everyone is the only way I can see us pulling that off right. (I'm picturing something like "If hasn't eaten in the past 6 hours begins to suffer from starvation -1 to health every 1 minutes game time. Endurance Check Saves" Vs "If hasn't eaten in the past 5 days begins to suffer from starvation -1 to health every 10 minutes game time. Endurance Check Saves")
  

So... I think that's it. Once we have all of these questions answered, and I have reformatted a few things into a sexy fine new thread (I plan on giving it a hyperlink enabled table of contents ) we can get the game started.

*ahem*

First, of course the brain gremlins aren't helping; gremlins make mischief, not help!


Anyways.

My idea for attack range: Build a series of charts; one for each category of weapon. Create a list of modifiers, like, for thrown weapons: -X to attack roll if it's raining, due to impaired vision, -Y to attack roll for fog, -Z if thrower and target have a number of feet between A and B, then +C for being at point blank range, etc. Create a bunch of guidelines built around broad terms instead of specifics.

Area of Effect, I liked your answer to it.

Weather Effects. Not sure what you need here. Something like this maybe:

Heavy Thunderstorm
Impaired Vision (Penalty to attack rolls)
Lightning (Every X turns, roll a d1000, if you roll a 1000, you are struck by lightning, fall unconscious and take X damage)

Heavy Snowstorm
Impaired Vision
Rough Terrain (-1 speed)
Cold Damage (Every [time unit] make an endurance check, if failed, take X damage)

Sleep...I find this hard. On one hand, it would really hurt the mechanics if everyone was awake 24/7, but on the other hand, I don't see it working. Even with a character having to sleep 3, or even 2 hours, that's still a freakishly long time if, like you said, a fight broke out. I think that the best option here is, sadly, to keep sleep out of the equation, period, or have some kind of...I dunno 'nap time' maybe, where you get everyone to sleep at the same time in order to skip ahead a number of hours. Either way's lacking the realistic feel of life though.

Gadgets and Powers. Simple. Learning a new power is virtually the same as picking up a new gadget/learning a new feature of said gadget. As for the 'lantern ring' bit, well, stats increase with levels right? As so do skills. So therefor not only the gadgets are leveling. Or you could make not all the powers lantern ring based (To stick with the theme). Kinda like Shamans in D&D, some of their powers rely on their spirit companion, but not all of them. Build extremely watered down powers to give them a very slight edge, but big enough to do something with.

Weapons & Armor. Ripoffs and charts. Tiring but efficient.

Food. Bah. Building effects for every single type of food on the freakin' planet won't work, obviously, so I say broad terms and a hunger chart.

Looking at gadgets it would be better if Robin came prepared with everything in his arsenal but all of his items are at low levels and he would implement them in better ways as he advances in levels. Cyborg the same way since he is heavy on gadgets too. He has all his weapons and gizmos from day one but as he advances the level of the item increases and he finds more uses for them that are stronge and more powerful.

Okay so I've started work on the official rules, thus far there's nothing concrete yet (hence the 'beta draft') but I have started editing together the Skills list for the actual game. Removed Dungeoneering added Science and Xenology (study of aliens).

New Thing I need people's help with. Since we won't actually have a Dungeong Master, anything that says "The DM decides" needs to be decided now. Review what I've got here and give me your ideas, also you'll be able to see the calendar I stitched together for the weather effects, might give you a better idea of how those'll work.

What I'm really looking for for those isn't just effects, but when those effects should take place to make the weather feel 'realistic' sure is a naturally random event, but just because it's not random to us, doesn't mean it can't be random to the characters.

PS: Oh also people should start making there desires known as to which DC character's I should make sheets and power lists for, the basic five Titans are already on my list, as well as a few of the Fearsome Five, but if you want someone like Miss Martian, Super Boy, or Kid Flash call out now and I'll put them on my list so I get around to them. I figure the more characters I make the quicker things get going, plus once I actually have the rules made and done with I'm going to have a sudden surge of free time.

I feel as though I should perhaps voice something that has occurred to me recently. Many of you seem put off by the raw complexity of the Dice Game, and I get the feeling that some of you may be afraid that should you attempt to participate and make a mistake that I would become irate with you.

I would like to offer you my assurances that this would not be the case.

While it is well known that I have little tolerance for stupidity, I would like to mention that I differentiate between stupidity and making a mistake. If you don't read the rules and attempt to participate, that's stupid, you're not even attempting to involve yourself in the laws of the thing you're attempting to involve yourself in.

However, if you read the rules, attempt to participate, and make a mistake, that is no fault of your own, and in fact, if you honestly attempted to understand the rules to the best of your abilities, and still make mistakes, than it's not your fault at all. It's mine.

The major reason why I've been jumping on people to give me feedback about the rules I've set in place, is because I want to make sure they can understand them. Because if anyone here can't understand the rules, and wants to, than not only will they be unable to participate, which is just horrible, but than it's my fault they can't participate because I was unable to express the rules in a manner which they could understand.

As the person writing the rules and building the system I take on the responsibility of insuring that people can actually use it. If one single person can't play in the Dice Game because they don't understand how the system works that's my failure. I could make the most wonderful complex exciting system in the universe capable of doing anything, but if I'm the only one who can use it, than it's pointless, because the whole point of me building the system in the first place, is so that you guys and girls can use it.

I'm not putting all this work into building this forum based dice system so that I can use it. Honestly, I'm not sure I'll even play in the first couple of games. I'm thinking of taking more of Game Master-ish position so that I can watch the system in work, and adjust it as needs arise. I've never done something like this before, it works out all in my head, but I've learned from hard experience that my head and the real world are very different places. I just want to make sure that you all know that if you don't understand something, I'm not going to blame you. It's not your fault, if you don't understand something I'm attempting to explain to you, than it's my fault.

Building the system is only half my job, making it workable is the other half. Making sure that there aren't any holes in the system, making sure that I never have to answer the question "What would I do to do this?" with "I don't know." Or worse with an answer that sounds so complicated and convoluted that the person who asked won't even try to understand it. The one thing I really want to make sure that doesn't happen, is that people who agree to play the Dice Game, decide against making their characters do something they want to because it seems like it would be too complicated to do, or because they don't know what the process for doing that would be.

But I need your help in this. I need you to ask me questions, I need to know what it is you'll be interested in doing so I can insure that I'm giving that area the attention it needs. I'm not asking you to understand my answers right now. I'm just asking you to ask me questions. Ask me things like "If I wanted to have a scene where this happens... What would be the process, or what would I do?"

I'm busy building the system, I don't have time to think of every little situation the character's might encounter, so I need you to do that for me, I need you to think of things for the characters to do, so that I can make sure that they can do it. I don't need people to tell me how to make it so character's can do something, figuring that out is my job, I need people to tell what it is the characters need to be able to do.

If Raven wants to bump into Terra and catch a glimpse of the future, there needs to be a way for her to be able to do that.

If Robin want's to be able to drive his motorcycle on the bridge's cables, there needs to be a way for him to do that.

Because if there isn't a way, because if it turns out there's a situation that I didn't think of, because if it turns out that there's something that I didn't address, than one of two things will happen, either the players will just do it and they won't need a roll for anything in which case why would we even bother with the rolls in the first place, or they won't do it because they don't think they can within the confines of the Dice Game, in which case I've messed up.

Because the Dice Game isn't supposed to be restricting. It's a Role Playing game at it's core, and as soon as you start restricting the creativity of the players in a role playing game you start killing the essence of what they're supposed to be.

Ignore the Dice Game, ignore it's Rules. What do you want to be able to do? You come up with the situation, You come up with the action, You come up with everything. I make sure you can do it in the Dice Game.

Knowing another character and what they'll do would be a simple Insight Check. You roll 1d20 + half your level + your ability modifier, and if the total is greater than the opposing number you get to know what Powers that character has. Which includes Attack powers like 'Double Butterfly Kick' or 'Bird-a-Rang Smash' or whatever.

It's a Skill, all characters have it. All character's have all Skills. I don't have them written up just yet, only imported from D&D 4.0 that's why I wanted stuff like this to be asked so that I can know what sort of stuff I need to write up. Like now I know I need to write up a way for characters to perform an Insight Check against another character, to see information about them.

It'd probably be fairly difficult, probably have to beat either their Will Defense (a set number) or a Bluff Roll (a variable number generated by rolling 1d20 + 1/2 level + ability Modifier) to be successful. You'd only know what Powers the other character has upon a successful roll, and there might be other requirements such as having already performed a successful Insight Check to acquire relevant information about that Character.

As for Slade's dodging it could be done a couple of ways, both of which would be a Power for Slade.

The first would be that Slade has a power which provides him a bonus Defense against attacks he knows.

So say Slade has performed an Insight Check on Robin in the past, and knows all the Powers Robin has up to level 5. Robin is level 7 now. Slade would gain the bonus to his defense anytime Robin targeted him with a level 1 3 or 5 Power (you gain powers every 2 levels) but any Level 7 Power Robin has, Slade would have to perform a new Insight Check and be successful in order to 'know' that Power, and gain his bonus.

Alternatively, since Slade and Robin have similar builds, they may share a good number of their Powers. Slade & Robin both know the Power 'Double Butterfly Kick' for example. Slade may have an addition power, one that Robin does not, which provides him with a bonus to defense against any power he possesses. So anytime Robin targets Slade with 'Double Butterfly Kick' Slade gains a bonus because he knows how to use 'Double Butterfly Kick'

Ahhh...I basically get it, about the character's could you do maybe Ravanger(Rose Willson) and how many characters are one limited too?