My players (actually their PCs) are nearing the end of their quest and are about to enter the lair of the end boss. The end boss is from a different plane of existence, namely from a Realm of Madness and Nightmares in which the rules of physic are unknown and maddening to the inhabitants of the Prime Material plane.
The BBEG has manifested itself only partly yet on the characters level of existence. The lair will lead the characters through a series of look-a-like chambers. By visiting all chambers they will find themselves transported halfway between the Prime Material plane and the Realm of Madness and the BBEG will transport to them. While visiting these chambers they will have combat and they will suffer plot-exposure. In the last chamber they will finally meet the BBEG and its nightmarish physical form. Knowing my players they just want to dish-out damage.
However, as it is the Realm of Madness I want to time-reverse and time-forward the combat. (Stupid me.) So starting with a dead BBEG and let they PCs discover they are almost all out of hitpoints. Have some BBEG monologue-ing with opportunity for the PCs to ask questions while they are left under the impression its condition is declining toward death. Eventually they will loot or examine the body. When they remove a weapon from a wound of the BBEG its wound will heal. BBEG will attack (and hit) and remove a wound of a PC and restore hitpoints to this PC. Roll initiative and reverse-play a combat (going from zero HP to full). If they somehow gain more than their full hitpoints plus their wisdom score they will die of insanity (at the end of the adventure).
In general the BBEG will do melee damage (multiple attacks but with low strength), Touch of Idiocy and Confusion and Fear spells.
The fight might appear to look like for the players as: suddenly being half way hitpoints and attacking a wounded monster. Then examining a barely breathing monster. Then encountering a fleeing full health monster. Then talking with the monster when it has 1 hitpoint left.
So, I could cut this BBEG combat-sequence into different segments of a few rounds and let them fight this opponent in a randomly timed order of segments. So that when they have finished all chambers they have completed a single fight but with the combat rounds in a random temporal order. Unfortunately, my mind is very linear and I just cannot wrap my head around how to solve hitpoints loss and gain of PC and monster while time-hopping between combat rounds.
Any suggestions for hitpoints bookkeeping or alternative system to administrate the progress of the combat between party and monster?
Input would be appreciated!!
I understand that in your head (and probably a lot of other people's heads) this sounds really cool, and mystical. I also understand that you are trying to convey a certain sense of "messed up" physics to your players. All I can say is, I would never do that. The players of this game, at least all the players that I've encountered, have a rigid set of expectations for the way that their characters interact with the world (i.e. when I hit you with my weapon you lose hitpoints). You might reverse that, and make sure you describe it very clearly "instead of damaging the monster it seems you've actually made it stronger," etc. That is one thing, but to try and mess with the system in repeated disparate, and non-linear ways, so that the PCs don't ever know if they should, or should not hit a monster, will only cause trouble (at least in my opinion). Mess with the physics, fine. Mess with the time table, fine, but don't mess with both at the same time, and in changing ways. That's a bit too much, again, in my opinion.
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Heres how I would run it:
I would create 6 phases for BBEG, identifying a "beginning" and "ending" point for phase. Phase #1 might exist between 100% health and 80% health. Phase #6 might exist between 5% health and death, etc.
I would then convert those phases into 6 seperate BBEGs with the correct amount of HP. IE: if the BBEG has 100 hp(for simple math), then Phase 1 starts at 100 HP and ends at 80 HP, so the Phase #1 BBEG has 20HP.
Then I would roll a d6 each round of combat to determine which "Phase" the players are in, or which BBEG the players are fighting. If the players defeat a phase, then you re-roll the d6 to get a new phase. The players win when they defeat all 6 phases (I doesn't matter which order).
If you want to get more complicated, each phase can have different rules, tactics, or enviromental elements.
Phase #5 has +20 Str, Phase #2 has a room without gravity, etc. And then, for continuity, when Phase #4 "dies," the BBEG "rages," and when Phase #1 "dies," it casts revese gravity.
Seeing as how the party has no idea of how many hp the baddie has... my suggestion is just to assign a certain amount of hp to the baddie for each chamber before it "shifts" to the next. You can describe the baddies condition however you wish in each chamber. Whenever you decide the fight has gone on long enough you can describe a shift to a timeline in which the baddie is dead. Keep track of where your baddie is on the timeline... if you want to have spell effects travel over from prior chambers... or to be non-effective due to time passed.
Another idea...
the combat "timer" resets every (random number ) rounds, D6 would be my suggestion.
so the party hacks away at the bad guy and then randomly the game "resets" with everyone back to full health, spell resources, etc
and it starts all over again.
they either have to kill him before the timer resets or you could keep track of his HP over the various reset periods and when he has been killed the timing resets stop.
though I am sooooo stealing NAEDRE idea :)
This looks like it would lead the combat quickly into frustration for the players and also add way too much book-keeping to the encounter. Players rarely like to feel impotent.
While I take my hat off to you for wanting to provide a truly unique experience for your players and really change things up I’m afraid that this particular method will be ultimately futile. Here are a few problems with your current scenario.
1) We exist and experience time in a linear fashion and, not surprisingly, trying to imagine anything else is very difficult and any attempt to get around this is likely to come across as very clunky.
2) Starting at the end with the BBEG dead is sort of anticlimactic. Yes Suddenly he is alive and you have to fight him but honestly if you already know you kill him then it’s just crunching numbers till you are back were you started.
3) Since you don’t know how things will go it’s impossible to accurately describe the beginning of the fight, were characters health are etc.
And these are merely a couple of my initial thoughts, I’m sure I could come up with more problems, in fact I have already but I won’t bother adding them at this time. If you are absolutely intent on doing I think Naedre's idea is probably the best I've heard to do something like that, though it would only be effecting the BBEG and not the players and I think it would still feel a little clunky.
Now if you are not adverse to a different approach I have played a bit with the realm of madness and here are a few ideas I like using.
Create a list of changes to physics/magic and roll a die at regular intervals to see what changes. For example, gravity could change to a random direction. One or more characters or perhaps an entire area could be rewound in time undoing anything that was just done to them or it. Energy types on spells and even normal effects could change so you could have fire generate cold instead of heat. Some effects can even be harmless, like fire light suddenly turning green. Let the players minds run as to what implications that may have.
Some effects may have durations and others may last until the end of the battle, or at least until you roll that it changes again. Meanwhile being from the realm of madness I’d give the BBEG one extra ability, let him know what has changed so he can act accordingly to best make use of it. After all you’d expect creatures that live in that kind of a chaotic environment to adapt to survive or even thrive in it. So if all fire was suddenly more intense he might cast a fireball, etc.
In any case I hope these ideas are useful to you, good luck with whatever you decide to go with.
By changing the progression of the battle you are already taking some control out of the hands of the players. Adding a descriptive change to how the combat appears to flow could be quite fun and unique. However, you do not need to change the rules of the game to have that randomness. Simply assigning a specific amount of the bosses hp to each "chamber" during the combat should suffice to split the combat up. Once all the bosses hp is used up the combat is over. The order in which state the boss appears to be need be descriptive only. Having the combat end with the boss appearing only at half health and then vanishing once the set hp is used up adds a weirdness. The bosses corpse could then be found in another chamber... or not at all as you will it.
On a side note...
I had a combat in the 3.0/3.5 days in which I wanted a single baddie that could last against a powerful damage dealing party for a certain amount of time. The way I did this was to create a kobold fighter/barbarian/frenzied berserker that was of high enough level that is had deathless frenzy. The combat continued until the kobold's rage ran out then the kobold dropped dead. The party was easily able to deal 3 or 4 times the kobold's total hp during this time, but it allowed the kobold to stick around enough to rough up the pc's and made for a very memorable combat.
Heres how I would run it:
I would create 6 phases for BBEG, identifying a "beginning" and "ending" point for phase. Phase #1 might exist between 100% health and 80% health. Phase #6 might exist between 5% health and death, etc.
I would then convert those phases into 6 seperate BBEGs with the correct amount of HP. IE: if the BBEG has 100 hp(for simple math), then Phase 1 starts at 100 HP and ends at 80 HP, so the Phase #1 BBEG has 20HP.
Then I would roll a d6 each round of combat to determine which "Phase" the players are in, or which BBEG the players are fighting. If the players defeat a phase, then you re-roll the d6 to get a new phase. The players win when they defeat all 6 phases (I doesn't matter which order).
If you want to get more complicated, each phase can have different rules, tactics, or enviromental elements.
Phase #5 has +20 Str, Phase #2 has a room without gravity, etc. And then, for continuity, when Phase #4 "dies," the BBEG "rages," and when Phase #1 "dies," it casts revese gravity.
You could extend this to each of the PC's as well. It'd work interestingly with spontaneous casters by limiting them to 1/6th of their spell slots in each time segment but I'm not sure how you'd do the same for other casters.
Something to think about is how excess damage would be used. If you have it disappear then everything will appear to have extra hit points (with 20 HP in time segment if you take damage in 50 point chunks only 20 of it would matter). I suggest having extra damage being applied to the later time slices till they are full.
I presume a character is unable to act in time segments where they have 0HP.
For simplicity, I would only apply it to the boss, since the bookkeeping would be a nightmare and you can get the same effect with just the boss being displaced in time.
To play up the time-shifts, I would make sure to describe physical changes in the room around the players and the BBEG. For example, a broken statue in phases 5 and 6 would be intact in 1 and 2. And at some point in 3 or 4, the BBEG would let out a shattering scream and break it.
If I rolled a phase where the boss was already dead, I would re-roll until I got one he wasnt.
For the players, time would advance normally.
I'd hope that the players would do their own book keeping for there different time streams. At least that is the only way it would feasibly work.
To me, the mystery of whats going on would be part of the encounter. I wouldn't explain the mechanics to my players. The d6 would be behind the GM screen, and the players would experience time linearly.
I would work some hints into the preceeding dungeon. Knowledge: The Plains would also give them big hints, but still not spell it out for them. Knowledge: Arcane, History, or Religion might also give some minor hints.
I would also give them a way to run.
Some groups might run when faced with an enemy that doesn't make sense, in which case I would send them on side-quests to get more and more info until they realized what was going on. Some groups would stop to try to figure out what is going on around them, which could waste actions in the middle of a BBEG fight. Other groups would just brute force it with as much damage as they can, ignoring the madness going on around them. The brute force method would be the correct one, which is opposite to my instincts of rewarding clever players.
If you want a BBEG representing madness, this seems thematically appropriate.
Dear all, thanks for all the to the point responses!
I will take the following into account:
- Do not change the actual game mechanics. This means not to mess with the hitpoints system as it is, during combat you lose them when being hit.
- Keep time linear from the point of view of the players
- Do not cancel actions done by characters via time reversal (prevent player impotence)
- Do not start with the death of the BBEG as this reveals the PCs are guaranteed to win.
- Divide the BBEG hitpoints into as many (equal) portions as there are combat segment, I think four is enough to prevent repetition and thus boredom.
- Make it appear to the players as if the combat segments are selected randomly, but think about what a nice order of combat, investigation and dialoguing is.
- Include some objects in the environment which become damaged and reveal the non-linearity
- Change the “flavour”, for example direction of gravity or exchange fire with cold
To give some control back to the players I will make their characters pass-out and “everything turns black” when they loose ¼th of their hitpoints in a combat segment. Then let them either re-spawn in the current combat if they want to (player’s choice) or leave them waiting unconscious until they move as a group to the next chamber when the current combat segment is finished. As a consequence they cannot die during their visit in the realm of madness. Which takes away all the fun and thrill of combat. Therefore I will give the PC who passed out or re-spawned one Madness point. At the end of the adventure when they leave the BBEG lair at the doorstep of the Realm of Madness each PC will receive (for example) xd8 hitpoint damage Will saves vs half, with x being the number of received Madness points. Reaching negative hitpoints will mean being Cursed with total insanity or death (player’s choice). This will be an additional game mechanic for which I will clearly warn them in advance.
On a side note:
This penalty for not defeating the BBEG during a combat segment I can also use if they do not solve other obstacles and encounters in the same lair as there will be a few more NPCs in the lair. This also means they do not have to solve or win every fight as one lost fight will only increase their risk of insanity just one small step at a time. So they can continue with the story and skip a fight or obstacle if they want.