One of the things that occurred to me as I was working on some of the threat/new combat system for Segira (which I think is going to be significantly better than the old system) and working the old system into the first element of the Rules Reference 2.0 is that it could be useful to model something above individual threats to track how a particular scene or storyline is going.
There's just no way to track whether things are going well or poorly overall, and to easily adjust the difficulty to reflect situations on the ground. There's also no good way for a Threat to apply a situational modifier to characters.
However, I want to remove any randomness from enemies, so I was thinking about having a system called Momentum or something like that, where certain threats can reference a particular value to adjust their damage. This then fed into the idea of potentially having Situations that could occur that would disadvantage players.
For instance, CQC situations limit the effectiveness of ranged weapons, while Firefight situations limit the effectiveness of melee weapons. This allows us to get rid of the old (painful) distance system, and make something more engaging. A particular Threat may modify Momentum (e.g. an enemy officer or that fun BTR that the PCs might have to face), but it can also build abstractly; the enemies that show up once you've sounded the alarm don't need to be manually adjusted for number and individual competence; you just abstract both of these into their Momentum.
Situations basically have Momentum (for instance, in the Segira sample adventure it will now be Momentum that builds as the characters get into trouble, rather than having a die roll; each level of Momentum means tougher Combatants who do more damage), and a number of qualities.
This allows us to set narrative scenes a little better and do other stuff. There's more profound stuff I'll get into tomorrow, because it's past my bedtime.
It also means that I have to add a few elements to the combat system to handle combat situations, but right now I think it's gone a little too sparse as it stands. Status effects as they currently stand are not that dissimilar from threats, though I'm probably going to keep the two systems distinct for now. I'm considering re-evaluating this, though.
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