HeroGrinder's page

We turn to you again to help us find answers to questions related to our work and passion, a new turn-based online multi-player arena game we work on, called HeroGrinder.

This time we would like to know how you would implement the field of vision (FOV) and how the hide skill would work in relation to it.

In the d20 system there's a 360 degree of FOV and you can hide only if the terrain allows it. That basically means that you can't sneak past a door or close on an unsuspecting character unless your DM specifically rules that it is unaware of you. This rule sums it up: Being Observed: If people are observing you using any of their senses (but typically sight), you can't use Stealth. Against most creatures, finding cover or concealment allows you to use Stealth.

In our case we introduced facing (which costs action points) and have a 180 degrees arc FOV before (including the line of the occupied tile) the character with the rest being unobserved area. We allow hide skill checkes outside the FOV. Some spec conditions or feats allow you make hide checks in the FOV (Hide in plain sight) or to have no checks made at all (invisibility). This way we can make sure that characters can be surprised, and this also creates more need for strategic movement.

Covers act only as FOV blockers, just like walls, but with 3 different height levels that block out different stances (small, medium, large cover vs. standing, kneeling, lying character statnces).

How would you sort this out in a d20 arena-shooter video game?

Thank you very much for your feedback,
The HeroGrinder Team

Dear Paizoians!

We turn to you to help us find answers to questions related to our work and passion, a new turn-based multi-player arena game we make, called HeroGrinder.

This time we would like to know how you would solve full-auto fire mode for guns in a d20 system. This will surely come up for StarFinder aswell and we can't wait to see how Paizo sorted this out. For now, we are asking you to share your thoughts on this topic.

We have studied many d20 rpgs (StarGate, Cthulhu, StarWars, etc) and came up with our own solution:

- Player decides how many rounds to fire in chunks of 10s (so 10, 20, 30, etc, upto the magazin size).

- Each bullet is rolled as a separate attack with a -2 penalty / 10 bullets fired.

- You can arc the fire in a line, or a 30, 60 or 90 degrees cone. In case of a cone, the bullets are traced for each line in the arc starting from the middle of the cone. So there might be more bullets on one line in case of a narrow arc and more bullets.

- You can have only one target per full-auto fire mode (whatever the size of the cone) and the rest of the bullets is fired as a "rogue bullet". Rogue bullets have a miss chance of 50% representing unintended (untargeted) firing of the weapon.

- The fumble chance grows to 1-2 in full-auto firing mode (instead of the default 1).

Other firing modes to compare to:

- The burst fire mode shoots 3 bullets at a single target with a -2 penalty to the attack.

- Only the single shot firing mode allows the player to add precision damage which consists of its Dex modifier, feats, sneak damage if any.

Our aim was to remove high damage from single bullets in full-auto and to give weight to single shots.

Please let us know if you like this or if you have a more balanced and better solution to this problem.

Thank you very much for your feedback,
The HeroGrinder Team