The Iron Toa

We could keep track of XP for each skill. I'll try to come up with how much XP is gained from use of skills and how much it takes to gain levels. Just calling use of powers 'attacks' is easier, but not completely accurate, as there are also powers that can help and buff your allies. For Area, in some cases it would be the number of targets, in others, like forming a wall of an element, we'd need to keep track of how big the manifestation of it is. As for Ranged, I meant Range - it should cost more power to extend your supernatural reach 100 bio than 1 bio. Thanks for doing the physical combat equations. Speaking of physical combat, do you think we should have resistances for piercing, crushing, and slashing? Someone said just 'physical' would do, but I think we should keep different physical damage types if it's not too complicated.

I just read that Toa can pass out from stressful use of their elemental powers. The case I read of was when Vakama absorbed all the heat of an Elemental Fire entity. Maybe Toa can sometimes pull off feats they don't usually have the finesse for, but it drains their Endurance. I realized I'm not sure how skills should increase if we don't have levels. Should you get XP for each skill for using it? That sounds complicated... Anyway, let me review the equations from the old topic: Finesse = Will * Skill or Will + Skill In which Skill is your Power Control skill. I think Will * Skill would work, or maybe a fraction of it like your Will * Skill / 2. Accuracy Penalty = W * Power^2 / (X * Channel Time * Finesse) I've decided Channel Time will only come up for very powerful attacks - regular use of power will be instantaneous. I don't want to do away with it completely, because it should take several rounds to charge up for a Nova Blast, for example. W and X denote where we can set a constant. Basically, this is saying that the penalty to your Attack Roll increases exponentially when more Power (EE or Endurance) is put into the attack, and is inversely proportional to how much time you take to focus on the attack and your Finesse. If Accuracy Penalty > Finesse * Y, the power channeled will be released as an instantaneous AoE of random Area and Intensity. Instead of the above equation, let's say if an elemental or similar type of attack ends up with an attack roll of 1 or less, then the character will lose control of his gathered power and release it randomly. Maybe if you get a natural 1, too. Power = Intensity * Duration * Area * Ranged * Z All the things that contribute to power cost. I think this makes sense as it is. But let's type up the equations for physical combat now.

I was hoping someone with more experience as to how much is an average amount for numbers like hitpoints and damage and stuff would help us set the baseline. Otherwise, I'd say we should come up with something that's simple, but allows enough flexibility. I'll do a little thinking about it. I have OpenOffice, I should be able to figure out its spreadsheet program. First I'll try to figure out what the numbers should be in the first place. Did you take a look at the equations I posted on the old topic? Toa Alaka thought they made it too complicated, but I think if we used a chart to list common values it would help. But I might have changed my mind about some of them - I should take another look. I'm pretty sure there's some way out there to do artificial dice rolls, but we need to keep in mind the rules for using other websites. Hopefully that won't be a problem though. Ah, how about the degree to which an effect that only affects organic or mechanical parts harms or heals a being depends on how much of them are biological or mechanical? For example, a virus that eats organic tissue would be devastating against an Agori, useless against a robot, and moderately effective against a Matoran? As for the Mask of Healing, maybe it can only restore a biomechanical being's health to a certain extent, like up to half their full health or something.

I don't think I want to use the FATE system, sorry The Mask of Ice. Once we get the rules down, however, I would like it to be easy to make new settings for campaigns. I don't know about ability scores yet. I've been getting some good info from the d20srd online, but haven't read all of it. If you could explain it to me, that would be great. I like the idea of having a table for how much more EE/Endurance it costs to enhance your powers. Once we get an idea of what the numbers for these should be, I or someone else could get working on that. Anyone know spreadsheets? I took a class on it a couple years ago, but I got bored and ended up failing. I could give it a try again, though. Perhaps we ought to work on powers later, but charts and tables would come in handy for a lot of other things. I don't care that much what weight system we use, but either way we should come up with a good estimate of how much Matoran and Toa would weigh. My first guess is around 100 pounds for Matoran and 250 for Toa. I just had a couple other concerns. First, how will we do dice rolls on the internet? Is there some website we can use that allows both rolls others in your game can see and ones that are hidden? Secondly, and I'm loathe to make things more complicated but... we might need to distinguish between organic and mechanical damage. After all, there are powers that only affect one or the other (like the Mask of Healing). What would be the best way to solve that problem?

You should link to this in your story topic.The chapters are short! I hope we get more soon. The writing's not bad, but I think it would be more interesting if more happened in each chapter.Just one detail didn't seem quite right to me - that Steltian was only able to hold down a Gorrellian Hound briefly. Comparing the size of Gladiator to your Hound model, I'd expect he'd have an easier time wrestling the Rahi.

Would it be too complicated for each combatant to keep track of the distance to his target? A relative positioning system? I also realized we'll need to keep track of weight, especially with Gravity-related powers. The only reference to weight I know of, however, is in The Many Deaths of Toa Tuyet when Devastator is referred to as 'a big boy, probably close to a ton of mechanical muscle'. Guardian I mean Devastator is pretty darn big, I'd expect an organic creature of his size to weigh at least a ton. Do you think we could measure weight in kilograms? Update: I did a little thinking and studying of Devastator's picture. For him to weigh only a ton, Matoran Universe beings can't be any heavier than an organic equivalent. So we can probably keep the original weight charts for size categories. We could change it to metric, though, or come up with our own Bionicle weight system.

Cool. So let's talk about combat. Distance and size of the target should affect chance to hit, so how will we include that? Edit: Okay, it looks like in D&D smaller sizes give a bonus to your attack and defense. We're not using AC, so instead of it providing a bonus to that, we could just add a penalty to an attacker's roll if he's attacking a smaller or a bonus if he's attacking a larger target. And how about for ranged attacks, there's a penalty proportional to the distance to the target?

Thanks, makuta_icarax. Let's continue this here.This topic can be locked now.

I am happy to announce I am now using a blog as the home of the Bionicle RPG system I and several others are working on. Here's a list of people that have contributed: BenLuke-116, Katuko, makuta_icarax, Portalfig, The Iron Toa, The Mask of Ice, Toa Alaka, Toa Kaithas Update as of 10/10/2012: And here is a list of people that still seem to be actively contributing: makuta_icarax, The Iron Toa, The Mask of Ice Come on back, guys! We're actually starting to get somewhere now. And we have another joyous announcement. It is time to start to split this project into its aspects, which will be worked on over multiple blog updates. First, we have the Races and Subtypes. I have made a detailed post that will get much bigger over time, but I can't do it alone -- read it, and give me your comments and suggestions! Soon, we will have separate posts about the combat system, powers, items, societies -- every part of this project we can think of. ----- It will be a mostly D&D derived system, but there are some important differences. Here is what we have so far: Attributes: Strength: Used to determine melee damage, blocking, and how much a character can lift/carry, certain athletic feats like climbing Dexterity: Determines dodge/evade (we should pick one term to use), hit chance, ranged damage, certain athletic feats like climbing and acrobatics Toughness: Determines/contributes to values of Vitality (HP) and Endurance, and resistance to physical effects. Charisma: Determines how well characters can get along with and persuade others. Used for lying, persuasion, and intimidation, but also important for friendship and getting you and your allies to work together. Intelligence: Used to determine how quickly/how much you can increase your skills, learn new languages, and how easily your character can figure things out. Will: Determines damage of Powers, aim of Powers, and control over Powers, resistance to mental effects, and how quickly Endurance is lost. That is, a character with higher Will would take less Endurance damage from suffering pain or using powers. Resistances: Heat, Cold, Electricity, Sonic, Mental, Light, Shadow, Poison, Acid, Energy (generic powers), Elemental (direct damage from Elemental Energy-based powers), and either Crushing/Piercing/Slashing or just Physical. Moral Light - characters that are evil enough can, with the proper training, tap into their inner shadow. There is a very rare ability to see the Moral Light and Shadow in a being to determine if he is good, neutral, or evil. Destiny: a GM can come up with a Destiny for a character, and is encouraged to bend the rules a little to make characters fulfill their Destinies. A player can tell the GM what he has in mind for his character, but the GM makes the decision, and should keep it a secret in most cases. Toa Energy: The normal value for this will be -1. There is a small random chance for a Matoran to have 0, which means he has the potential to become a Toa. The player of a Matoran won't necessarily know if this value is -1 or 0. If a Matoran does become a Toa, his Toa Energy is set to 60. This energy can be used to heal others or to transform destined Matoran into Toa. Transforming other Matoran costs 10 Toa energy, so a Toa can transform up to 6 Matoran. When a Toa's value reaches 0 and he has completed his Destiny as a Toa, he becomes a Turaga. If he hasn't completed his Toa Destiny yet, he remains a Toa until he does. Size categories: Fine: Less than 1/8 bio Diminutive: 1/8 - 1/4 bio Tiny: 1/4 - 1/2 bio Small 1/2 - 1 bio Medium 1-2 bio Large 2-4 bio Huge 4-8 bio Gargantuan 8-16 bio Colossal Greater than 16 bio Skills: I think the D&D skill list suits our purposes. Except instead of Spellcraft... I don't know what to call it, but it will be control over innate powers. Use Magic Device would be Use... Powered... Device? We need a better name for that too, but that would be the skill for using Kanohi and other things that aren't part of a character but are mentally activated. Also, we'll want to have some different subcategories of the Craft and Knowledge skills. I'm starting to understand the D&D combat system but I think I could use some practice. Here's what I understand of how it will work for us: Characters that win an initiate roll or ambush their opponents go first. Attacking characters make a roll (or multiple) to determine their chance to hit and again for damage. All physical attacks need to roll for both, some powers automatically hit but can be resisted, and for some powers instead of rolling for damage you roll for Intensity and Duration. Defending characters, if they can move and it's not an auto-hit attack, can attempt to Dodge or Block it. If they are hit, the damage or chance of affecting them is mitigated by their Resistances. An attack that does Vitality damage or a physical debuff is resisted by a roll based on Toughness and the appropriate resistance type. Endurance damage and mental effects are resisted by Will and the appropriate resistance type. For simplicity, I suggest a certain amount of Vitality damage always does a certain amount of Endurance damage, and how much is based on a character's will. Otherwise, the defender would need to roll twice - once for how much damage it did and again for how much it hurt. Still, this is pretty complicated -- we still need to include how distance affects ranged hit chance. I still need help with this. I'm sure there's more I missed, so here's the link to the old topic for reference. We should post everything we came up with onto here.

Different attributes will affect rolls, like Charisma would affect Bluff. But for combat, excluding special cases, I agree we should use Strength, Dexterity, Will, and Toughness.Let's wrap this up and sum up what we have so far so I can list it on a blog post. Once it's up, we can continue there. So... we have:Attributes:Strength: Used to determine melee damage, blocking, and how much a character can lift/carry, certain athletic feats like climbingDexterity: Determines dodge/evade (we should pick one term to use), hit chance, ranged damage, certain athletic feats like climbing and acrobaticsToughness: Determines/contributes to values of Vitality (HP) and Endurance, and resistance to physical effects.Charisma: Determines how well characters can get along with and persuade others. Used for lying, persuasion, and intimidation, but also important for friendship and getting you and your allies to work together.Intelligence: Used to determine how quickly/how much you can increase your skills, learn new languages, and how easily your character can figure things out.Will: Determines damage of Powers, aim of Powers, and control over Powers, resistance to mental effects, and how quickly Endurance is lost. That is, a character with higher Will would take less Endurance damage from suffering pain or using powers.Resistances: Heat/Fire, Cold/Ice, Electricity/Lightning (the former terms are more accurate but the later sound cooler to me), Sonic, Mental/Psychic/Psionic (need to decide on a term for that), Light, Shadow, Poison, Acid, Energy (I'd like a better term for this, but it means generic non-elemental attacks), Elemental (resistance against any attacks that are directly Elemental in nature. For example, it would resist fire a Toa of Fire hurls at you, but not a fire sustained by natural means, whether he started it or not), and either Crushing/Piercing/Slashing or just Physical.Size categories:Fine: Less than 1/8 bioDiminutive: 1/8 - 1/4 bioTiny: 1/4 - 1/2 bioSmall 1/2 - 1 bioMedium 1-2 bioLarge 2-4 bioHuge 4-8 bioGargantuan 8-16 bioColossal Greater than 16 bioMoral Light - instead of an alignment system, all we really need to keep track of in terms of game mechanics is if a character is evil enough to draw about his/her Moral Shadow (and maybe how much), and if beings like Keetongu who can see a being's inner Light/Shadow would see the character as good or evil. The latter might not even come up, I imagine that ability is rare.Toa Energy. I haven't come up with a system for this yet, but let's see. Let's say anyone who's not destined to be a Toa has -1. Matoran who are destined have 0 (but the players of Matoran shouldn't know what this value is). Upon transforming into a Toa, that value changes to... let's say 60. That Toa can use that power to heal others or to transform destined Matoran into Toa. Transforming other Matoran costs 10 Toa energy, so a Toa can transform up to 6 Matoran. When his value reaches 0 and he has completed his Destiny (set by the GM, possibly with some input from the player), he becomes a Turaga. If he hasn't completed his Destiny yet, he remains a Toa until he does. We'll come up with the chances of a Matoran having the potential to become a Toa, and also how much healing can be done for each point of Toa Energy.Skills: I think the D&D skill list suits our purposes. Except instead of Spellcraft... I don't know what to call it, but it will be control over innate powers. Use Magic Device would be Use... Powered... Device? We need a better name for that too, but that would be the skill for using Kanohi and other things that aren't part of a character but are mentally activated. Also, we'll want to have some different subcategories of the Craft and Knowledge skills.I'm starting to understand the D&D combat system but I think I could use some practice. Here's what I understand of how it will work for us:Characters that win an initiate roll or ambush their opponents go first. Attacking characters make a roll (or multiple) to determine their chance to hit and again for damage. All physical attacks need to roll for both, some powers automatically hit but can be resisted, and for some powers instead of rolling for damage you roll for Intensity and Duration. Defending characters, if they can move and it's not an auto-hit attack, can attempt to Dodge or Block it. If they are hit, the damage or chance of affecting them is mitigated by their Resistances. An attack that does Vitality damage or a physical debuff is resisted by a roll based on Toughness and the appropriate resistance type. Endurance damage and mental effects are resisted by Will and the appropriate resistance type. For simplicity, I suggest a certain amount of Vitality damage always does a certain amount of Endurance damage, and how much is based on a character's will. Otherwise, the defender would need to roll twice - once for how much damage it did and again for how much it hurt. Still, this is pretty complicated -- we still need to include how distance affects ranged hit chance. I still need help with this.I know there's more, I'll keep listing it, but I want to post what I have so far.

Well just because they're conscious doesn't mean they're not incapacitated. And I actually think every attack that does physical damage should do at least a little bit of lethal damage (you might try to knock someone out with a punch, for example, but you'll still injure them to some degree). But right, you can aim to incapacitate instead of kill. Maybe instead of 0 Endurance being unconscious, -10 should be unconscious. Then -1 could be can't move (can only lie down/kneel/sit) and 0 can be can't attack or can't use powers.A Feat that lets one substitute your Will for your Toughness in a roll against certain effects would work. But for default, we'll say if it affects your body, your roll against it will be based in Toughness and Resistance, and mind-affecting effects are defended against by Will and Resistance. I had better go to bed now, but go ahead and post more whenever you want. Hopefully tomorrow my Premier membership will be activated and I can make a blog.

Not just Norik. You reminded me of how great the Toa Hagah/Rahaga were. First off, they must have had pretty impressive careers to be chosen to be Teridax's personal guardians. But those aren't the great deeds I mean. They served the Brotherhood for years, they saw the might of its members, its minions, and its fortresses firsthand. But when they found out what the Makuta had done, they didn't hesitate to turn on their masters, nor did they flee even when they knew what they were up against. They went and took the Mask of Light back. When they were mutated, they continued to act as Toa as well as they could, despite the loss of their might and being forced into hiding. They helped the Toa Metru come to terms with their Hordika sides, and helped get them cured - and as far as we know, that's the only time Hordika mutations have ever been cured. Years later, when the Kanohi Dragon and Tahtorak were fighting on Xia, the Rahaga didn't let what Roodaka did to them stop them from helping her people. So I can't say who the best hero is, but I think all six of Teridax's Toa Hagah are pretty high on the list.

And in certain situations he could do both, but maybe he'd need a feat for that or a certain degree of skill, to be able to dodge with your shield or weapon raised.Should we stay with the idea that 0 Vitality is Disabled, -1 is Dying, and -10 is Dead? And I guess we're using Endurance instead of nonlethal damage, though lethal damage will also do Endurance damage. But I think in D&D a Dying character is automatically unconscious, for our system a character should only be unconscious if his Endurance is at 0. So a character that's dying of a wound would be conscious if the pain of the wound didn't knock him out.I read how you can take five-foot steps as part of your turn, one bio is 4.5 feet, just a little less, so do you think we could just make that a 1-bio step? Or increase it to two bio (nine feet)? We already converted the size categories to bio measurements.On another note, I saw D&D already has a thing for Concentration checks. Now, I was thinking certain powers, instead of fizzling, should release an unfocused AoE that can damage the caster. But let's stay in the subject of movement and physical combat for now. Except for this one thing which relates to Powers and defenses against them: should Will only help defend against mind-affecting attacks, or do you think you should be able to resist effects such as paralysis with a mental effort?

I think the names of Kanohi are actually the Matoran words for what we call them in English. For example if you call the Kanohi Hau just 'the Hau' you're calling it 'the Shielding'. If that's the case, the full word for Light would be Avohkii, which means Av- and the other prefixes would be abbreviations.Didn't we used to have an Official Languages topic?

Let's see... assuming you know the attack is coming and you can move, you can attempt to dodge it, or block it if you're holding something you could use for that. The attacker's roll(s) would have to beat the defender's roll as well as a penalty to hit depending on range and size of the target. And we should have something like Will and Fortitude saving throws for if you do get hurt. Those could be tied to your resistances, your Will, and your Toughness. I mean, I want a little bit of randomness to the effectiveness of resistances (not counting complete immunities). We'll need to work out how much is rolled for each (1d20, 2d6, 4d4, etc), but does that sound good so far?

Well, I don't think I want to have classes, and I'm not clear on when a Defense Roll is used and when a Saving Throw is used. But other than that, it seems pretty good and straightforward.I will start a blog on this when I can, once it's made I think we can continue there.Edit:Just did a little thinking of the methods of defense we have/could have. There's Block, which could be mainly strength, maybe some dexterity, which is when you use a weapon or shield to block an attack. Then there's dex-based Dodge/Evade. And finally you have your Resistances, which reduce/negate the damage you would otherwise take. Would something like that work?

Right, and let's build the basic system first. We can come up with racial traits, mask powers, and other abilities once we have a foundation for them.

How about combat and movement? I know it's based on rounds, and certain types of actions like free actions, standard actions, and full-round actions. But I don't know much else.

Oh. Well, maybe we could use that, but I don't think it should be central to the system, sorry.

I understand how you can use fate points to give yourself a bonus, but not how it makes sense to use them to harm enemies. To set an enemy on fire, wouldn't you need some source of flame?

Very nice! I took a look at the original, that was good too. It had neat weapons, which this one lacks - will you give this one some weapons? The hands of this one are good, though.I have a couple other suggestions: try to add some armor to his back, and thicken his upper legs, or at least try to make the transition from leg to hip smoother.

Well, Destiny is central to Bionicle, so I'd like some sort of Fate/Destiny system. Could you explain the points to me again?I was thinking the GM should have an idea of the destiny of certain characters, even if the players behind those characters don't know. I can spare the money. I was just thinking of a few advantages:- We wouldn't have worry about this thread dying or getting buried. I mean, hopefully it won't get that inactive anyway, but if there is a period of inactivity or many popular threads are made in General Discussion we wouldn't have to worry about this topic being bumped to the back pages.- A blog might get more attention, and make it seem like a more serious project.- Also, I could post updates on our progress on a blog, instead of either updating the first post here or adding new posts. A blog provides a good in-focus place to sum things up.I'm kind of tired now and not sure what it should look like, but I think I'll probably start that blog later today.

For Attributes we have Charisma, Dexterity, Intelligence, Strength, Toughness, and Will. How these work exactly isn't planned out yet, but we know:Charisma will help your character interact with others. Bonuses to persuade and bluff rolls, stuff like that, as well as the sense of comradeship that is vital to Toa teams. The GM will also need to keep your charisma score in mind when making NPCs react to your character.Dexterity I think will be used to control the accuracy of most ranged attacks, give bonuses to things like sneak and climb, as well as dodging and some melee skills. I'm not sure exactly what and how, but we'll come up with what makes sense.Intelligence will affect how quickly/how much you can improve your skills, as well as giving you a bonus to things like figuring out riddles and learning languages. A GM should make it easier for a high Int character to deduce puzzles and such.Strength will be used to determine melee damage and other things that would make sense for strength, like being able to move rocks out of the way, carry more things, etc.Toughness affects your Vitality, which is what we are calling Hitpoints, and Endurance. Endurance will be a measure of how much strain a character can experience before passing out (maybe dying in extreme circumstances) while Vitality measures actual physical health.Will will affect the control you have over your inner powers. This includes both being able to control more of it at a time and less of it. Some beings, like Toa, will be able to release all their energies at once, but this will be difficult and the more that is released, the harder it is to control. On the other hand, it takes skill to release a very small, precise amount of energy. Will should also affect Endurance. I'm not certain, but perhaps if Toughness affects your total Endurance, Will can affect how quickly your Endurance is depleted?We don't have a system for movement, positioning, and range yet.Again on the topic of Endurance:Suffering pain will deal endurance damage, as will things that take strong mental effort and/or draw from inner energies. There will be some exceptions to this, such as Elemental Energy - a Toa doesn't faint when he runs out of EE - but most powers will be drawn from Endurance. Kanohi powers, natural Rhotuka launchers, etc, will all use Endurance.On another note, I am considering buying a Premier Membership so we can continue this project on a blog. Do you all think that would work better?