Dunecats Combat Boot Camp

Both Paul and myself have done overviews of the rules a couple times, and it doesn't seem to have stuck. That's not surprising considering how wordy the rules for this game are, especially with all the charts and back and forth that can happen just in the rule books.

When I suggested making this topic though, I had just realized something. None of that is information the players need. This thread is here specifically to serve as a knowledge repository for how to use the rules (and use them well) from the perspective of a player. Specifically a player who isn't exactly interested in trying to memorize how all the charts and stats interact with each other.

With that in mind we'll get started with the most important part of the rules from a players perspective.

Actions

You get three of these in a turn, One Dice action, one Movement action, and one Auto action. The order I listed them in is important because you can always use and action to perform a different kind of action that's further into the list.

If it helps, you can picture it kind of like you have 3 slots for actions, each of a different size. The actions you take are inserted into the slots each round. The 'smaller' actions could then be easily placed into the 'larger' action slots, while the opposite is not true.

Another way to think of it is this


Dice action > Movement action > Auto action.


So you have an idea of what each action type is, I'll go over them in general now. In the next few days I'll make a follow up post to list each action by character and type, so everyone has a decent place to check what they can and can't do with a given type of action.

Dice actions

Dice actions are any action that has a chance of to fail, or could succeed to varying degrees. Examples include any kind of attack, social interactions intended to persuade, intimidate, or otherwise influence NPC characters, stealth and sneaking, picking locks, making something, perception checks, and anything else that the GM happens to think would call for it.

Movement actions

Rather straight forward, these are any actions that move your character. Teleportation, Flight, Running, Digging. Several powers have movement options as well, if they're used to move your character they would count as your 'movement' action. Someone else moving your character does not count as your movement action however, even if it's helpful to you. If Lionheart was to move the Haunt using his Telekinesis, it would take up Lionhearts action, not Haunts.

Auto actions

This is where everything else falls. Defensive powers make up a large chunk of this group though it also includes a large amount of utility actions. Most actions where you intend to lift or move something will also be Auto actions.

That's all for now. Please leave any comments or questions in the regular OOC thread. I'd like to keep this one free of clutter (that isn't of my own making of course  )

reserved for action break down

This recently came up in the main run of the game, and struck me as a good second point for this thread.

Hero Points

Hero Points can be used during play to improve your characters performance by adding directly to the various values that determine success or failure. I'll be covering the various ways to use Hero Points while in game in this post, and when each way comes into play.

Dice Actions
When ever your character is performing, or on the receiving end of a Dice Action, you can spend hero points to improve how your character does. The first thing to understand here are the various parts of a Dice Action. There are two sides to each action, essentially the attacker and the defender. Each side has two values. The Attacker has AV/EV, or Acting Value/Effect Value. The Defender has OV/RV, or Opposing Value/Resisting Value. In more detail, these are:

Acting Value: The ability to functionally perform a task. In hand to hand combat this is often Dex for throwing a punch. This is how you land a hit or what have you.

Effect Value: The actual force you can bring to bear if you do manage to land a hit. In hand to hand combat this is usually Str. This is how much damage you can inflict, if anything.

Opposing Value: The ability to prevent someone from hitting you, in hand to hand combat this is also usually Dex. Your ability to dodge, evade, and generally apply 'best defence, dont be there'.

Resisting Value: The ability to withstand a blow once it's landed. This determines how much force has to be brought to bear against your character before damage can even happen, and how much damage will be taken (if any).

Those four values are important to this section because of how Dice Actions are improved. During a die roll you can add Hero Points to each seperate value, up to which ever ability it is your using for each. For Example:

Silas gets into a fist fight at school, he has 4 dex, 1 str and 5 body (he's mildly physically enhanced by his powers) His opponent is a sterio typed jock with 2 dex, 3 str and 3 body. Silas goes first and throws a punch at the jocks face. He really want's to do well so he drops 4 HP into his AV(Dex) and 1 into his EV(Str). His attack would look like this 8(AV)/2(EV). The jock likely doesn't have any Hero Points to spend, so he's probably going to lose this fight.

In that example, Silas spent as much as he could on each value. He could instead have been more conservative and only spend a couple Hero Points on Dex. For an example of defence:

Silas has gone out later that night for a walk and comes across what looks like a simple car chase. When he steps in to stop it, it turns out that the crooks are packing high powered laser weaponry. To defend himself Silas uses his Force Manipulation power to create a device with Skin Armor 9. Skin Armor adds to a characters Body to produce the RV, this gives him an RV of 14. Because of his lower Body Silas really doesn't want to get hurt so he adds as many points to his RV as he can. Unfortunately he can only add 9 to it as his highest rated attribute that adds to his RV is Skin Armor at 9APs. This still makes his defence look like this 4(OV)/23(RV). He'll be really hard to actually hurt this round!

Hopefully that helps with the basics of Hero Points in combat, I'll cover the other uses in a little bit!