#119 – Reskinning "Attacks" as "Action Points"

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I suspect this is going to be a short discussion because it is ultimately inspired by some recent Reddit posts and discussions that I've had with other Palladium fans about various house rules. This one is I just wanted to take a moment to talk about something that I have found has made my own games so much easier to run in the area of comment management. And it's such a change, such simple, small change that is almost entirely cosmetic and that is renaming attacks per melee to action points.

So that's like the hand to hand skills, the amount of attacks each person tends to yeah. Get from their Rccs. Okay.

Because if we go back in the day to older Palladium books, characters had different numbers of attacks than they do now. At some point again, I'm not a historian here, but at some point I remember people started saying the phrase two for free plus hand to hand. And I don't know where that two for free came from because there were so many games that we played where you didn't get two for free.

Yeah, palladium fantasy has one.

One, when we moved into Rifts and your hand to hand skill did not give you four, it gave you two or one or something. I don't know when that started. I don't know where that assumption came from. Perhaps somebody who listens has a little bit more information there. Anyway, ultimately what it means is that over time, the amount of attacks per melee that characters got, got bigger, which ultimately resulted in the amount of attacks people spent in a single round of combat got bigger, which drags time things. So I took inspiration from honestly. It was, I believe, divinity original sin. It might have been one of the fallout games. Anyway, so many video games that are turn based, no shadow on Returns, I think was the one that I was thinking of when I started doing that. Because your actions that you take, such as shooting, reloading, aiming and so on, all take a number of action points and you look at your action point pool each round, you see it right in front of you there on the screen. And at the bottom of the screen you have little boxes of all of your quick keys. But each one has a number of AP that it takes. And some of those aren't a tax. In fact, most of them aren't a tax. They're things like use a healing item, aim, go into overwatch and so on and so on. And I got to thinking that at least with Rift's Ultimate Edition, again, if you turn to page 361, the page which all of you by now should have bookmarked that table and that little section where it talks about aim shots and call shots. That right there is built into the system of method for spending your action points like a video game.

So I have both of these open, and I just wanted to go and look at the creep you were just talking about. So butts addition, hand to hand basic two attacks per melee, plus two to pull, roll with, punch faller, impact ultimate Edition hand to hand basic four attacks per melee round, plus two to pull, punch, roll with punch fall or Impact. It's literally a double expert, starts with four expert in, but starts with two martial arts two and four, hand to hand, two and four. Like it? I don't know. But there is an interesting change here in Ultimate Edition is it says Actions starts with four attacksactions.

This is the ultimate in.

The ultimate edition. Yeah. So what you did, if I recall, was to make carrying over happen and to make holding and to make all kinds of different things apply to what an attack was.

So the way that I implemented it, now the way I describe it to people is all you got to do is rename attacks to action points. Change nothing else. Just change the name. That's it. Because so many things in the system uses an attack, uses an attack, but a player doesn't think like that. A player looks at it and goes, okay, well, I have eight attacks per melee, and this one's my most powerful attack. That means I'm going to spam that eight times. That's how it ends up being. But if it's presented in a way as these are your action points, you need to hold some of your action points for defense. You can also spend your action points to make your shots count and so on and so on. It's just 100% a matter of perception.

Oh, I see what you did there. So what would be your mechanic for the rare always dodge automatic dodge? Automatic dodge.

That's his own mechanic. It doesn't even require action points.

Okay, but a normal dodge would, would you say?

Yeah, a normal dodge, one action point.

So what would you propose as an action point? Let's say I'm there and I'm standing against Squint Eyed Willie, the gunslinger, and I am in the New West, and, well, we're standing in the street, we're both loaded, and we're going to draw.

Okay?

So it's my thing. I draw. Is that an action?

Depends. If you don't have your weapon drawn and you don't have a quick drawability, then yes, that's an action point. One action point to draw. Okay. Bam. That's knocked off the screen. Cool. You hit one to draw a weapon.

Okay. Now, I am a bad shot. I don't have great skills, so I begin to walk forward while pulling the trigger.

Walking forward is no penalty because palladium doesn't make you spend actions to move right, but if you do move at a certain speed, it provide penalties to other actions that you take.

Thank God Squintite Willie fumbled his pistol. Because I am a terrible shot, I continue to walk forward. Sadly, this is the old west. I have a revolver. I have missed him with all six of my shots. I continued to walk forward, but now I have to reload.

Well, reloading is an action, okay? However, some guns have their own reloading rules. So reloading a revolver, it's been a while. I know that in some games, reloading a revolver takes, like, one action per.

Pill that you split in.

Oh, that's a bit about you.

But you know what? You just said something there, buddy. You kept missing that guy next turn. Might I show you that? You can spin one of those actions to aim a shot. And you know what? You don't want him to shoot you march. You spend another action to shoot that gun out of his hand.

But what if he gets it together and shoots me? Like, maybe I could lean to the side or something.

Yeah, well, hold one or more of your points aside so you could dodge that.

I like this because it becomes, once again, if you just listen to and I don't know the release order in this, but if you do listen to our perception, one, it becomes less of crunchy, crunchy number, number to telling the story back and forth. And honestly, I like that. I like that a lot better.

It's not even a house rule so much as if it's just I renamed a mechanic.

Because you used to be able well, okay, here's the thing. Did Reloading used to take an attack?

It's always taken one from my understanding.

Okay? So it literally is just rename.

Yes. I caveat by saying that is the way that I've run games for many years. And as we've said before, palladium is one of those systems that you probably learn from someone else who learned from someone else who learned from someone else who learned from Kevin or Eric. So I may be doing it wrong, but I've always understood that reloading a pistol or reloading a weapon is an action, an attack, as they call it.

I want to speak to that really fast because we've been kidding around that for a while. But the honest truth is, is that once you see how palladium is run, it is incredibly simple. It is very intuitive. I swear to God, if they just organized it better, this would be kicking at Wizards of the coast again like it was. Yeah, because it is such a better freaking system.

Honestly, I agree with you. And just looking at the skeleton, the skeleton is better, in my opinion. There's a lot in the presentation that is in need of attention. But the skeleton there, I think, is a better foundation than the D 20 system. And ultimately, it is also a D 20 system, but it's D 20 plus a number versus a thing if you understand Dungeons and Dragons and you can understand Tilladium.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, it tends to be the kind of game that you have to be taught by somebody who already knows how to play because the rules are not presented in a way that are easy to learn. Although I would argue somehow Night Bane pulls it off. I would like to once again refer to that as their perfect game.

Would you say it was a complete role playing game?

It is a complete role playing game, yeah.

I I would like to go further and say that not only is Palladium capable with a reorganization, just to to put it forward to new players of chasing wizards of the coast in a very direct manner of chasing DND down, it is also capable of giving every last little bit from Kids on Bikes to Chaosium to the Cthulhu Mythos Games. It can do every independent game from Battle Tech. And I'm not talking the the war gaming aspect, though. I would like to talk to someone one day about doing a Riffs War game. It can literally do everything any game can do, and it does it with a system that it's better for storytelling. And I love it so. I truly do.

Yeah. And I would hope that dear listener, our love is infectious, tangible, maybe a little greasy.

I spend a lot of time talking with people in in my job.

Yeah.

Just in a one on one basis and, you know, filling up meaningless moments with, you know, something. And a lot of times I will talk about games and they'll they'll talk about, you know, what they're playing and, you know, we'll find something. Because most people have played a game once in their life, like, somewhere.

Oh, yeah, my older brother introduced me to that. Or my uncle got that at a party one time.

Yeah. Do you know that everyone above the age of 30 remembers Riffs? Like, everyone so crazy to me. Like, everyone who has ever played a game remembers Riffs, and I always take great pleasure in reminding them, you know, it's still going. Oh, and those books you have squirreled away. Yeah. You don't have to buy new ones. It's not outdated. That's the beauty of it. How many times have you bought DND? Just curious. Palladium little devil's advocate there.

In the real world, man, there are still people to this day that him and Ha and Stu over the fact that the Riff's Ultimate Edition exists.

And I almost get it. But you don't need it to play it. You can play it with butts. You still can.

You can play it with butts. Folks.

You know what? I think we just found our next T shirt.

It was a previous one when we were talking about the reviews and reading them online, and I wrote down one of the phrases there that I want to get put into a tagline is the old ones have spoken. So we got to change it. We got to get a T shirt. On the front it says, the old ones have spoken. On the back it says, you can play it with butts.

Which brings us to the end of today's episode. Thank you so much.

No, we got more to talk about.

Okay.

You'Re on something here. And the simplicity system, what I normally.

Am, it's why you keep me around. I'm terrible at details, but I'm great at big picture. Yeah.

The simplicity of the system is something that I have a real hard time explaining to people, especially people, of course, that have already made up their mind. But I attest I stand by my belief that the Palladium rule system is simple. It is not crunchy, because to me, the word crunchy is rooted in the phrase number crunching. Crunchy implies something like hero system or groups or role master. Whereas with Palladium, you only ever have to do simple addition and subtraction. That's it. Well, okay, occasionally you have to multiply your damage by ten or 100. But if you can't multiply your damage by ten or 100 I'm sorry. If you think that's crunchy, we got problems.

Here's the thing. It all comes back to the organization. You don't need to change anything. You just need to put it in order. This is how you roll a character. This is how you play. This is what you can play. This is what's going on in the world. Index or Monsters equipment?

Index.

Well, actually, you should put the equipment after character. Jen.

Well, yeah. Again, that's another heated source of debate of the proper structure and order of presentation of items in a role playing game. I've been facing that on my own. Okay, we're 17 minutes in hand. This is now Candid, episode number 100 or whatever. I have published role playing games, and I am still struggling with completing the publication for my third game, which is way late. I kick started it. It's latest. Fuck. It's complete. I just haven't got the pieces put together for it yet. That is art editing and so on. Anyway, one of the things that people often talk about is the idea that a role playing game should be structured in a certain way. Like, you have to put the character creation at the beginning, and then you have to put the gear section after the character creation, and then you have to do this, and then you have to do that. But then there are examples of games out there that do it differently. There are games out there, and the biggest one that comes to mind is Burning Wheel. Say whatever you will about Burning Wheel and its creator and God bless you.

Matthew.

You have no idea what I'm talking about.

I don't.

Burning Wheel presents everything in a structure that the author decided was crucial for you to understand the concepts of the game. If you were to read it from COVID to cover. It is not presented as a reference manual. It is put forth as a this is how to learn how to play the game. And I love that. It's rare, but it happens. So that's something I've been struggling with, with reorganizing the section of my game. Palladium, unfortunately, just throws it all out.

Like I said, it never has suffered from a lack of good rules. Amazing imagination. Just the sheer scope of what they try to do is so far beyond what anyone else tries to do that has never been it has literally just been editing. This goes here. This goes here. When you're looking at this, you'll probably need this. So let's put them nearby, carrying the.

Candid conversation a little bit forward. And dear listener, you might want to skip this part if you're tired of this conversation in the real world. Matthew, have you paid attention to the Ogl hellabaloo?

Oh, yeah. What do you mean? Wizards of the coast is doing this again. Oh, yeah.

So this episode may or may not age well. It is going to be released three, if not four weeks after the point that we are recording it because of the way that we record our episodes. So some of this might not be evergreen, but which I suppose is about.

Five days since they issued the, oh, no, we're not doing that. We'd never do that. We value our creators or basically the exact same form letter that GW put out last year.

So rather than completely date ourselves with discussions that have already been had now, four or five weeks ago, I want to use that as the springboard for talking about how it could benefit Palladium if they were to take this as inspiration to do what you and I and our listeners and so many other people in their discussion forums and fans have been wanting for so long, which is to publish a system reference document that combines everything into a quickly referenceable core mechanical system.

Yeah. So are you talking just like, a master index?

Okay, so one of the things that made Dungeons and Dragons third edition so revolutionary to the industry was that they published an Srd. They published the rules for free online hypertext format HTML website. Anyone can go to it and reference the rules right there. You didn't have to actually buy the game to get the rules.

Okay.

And that right there is why there are so many goddamn DND clubs.

Yeah, there's a lot of games that have done that since they may have been the first, but like, Warhammer does that, I think. Battle? Well, those aren't really but yeah, still, I mean, there are other games that put the rules out there for free.

Pathfinder does it now. The system from Modifias does it.

Wait, are you telling me Pathfinder does something that DND does but better?

Yeah, it's fancy that. Fancy that. I I never.

Anyway, you said something about a system.

They do, like, Kodan and Star Trek and other stuff, and they have an Srd out there. These are rules online for free, linked, indexed. You can click on the things that take it to page references. And they're out there for people who want to use those rules in their games. But you know what else they serve as and this is the crucial point for me and then where I'm getting at with Palladium, they serve as a point of reference and final decision. Yes, this rule functions this way. No, you can't do this.

It's like all his introductions. No, like a radical statements, like a.

Completely canon only the mechanics, please. Skeleton of the system.

Okay. What do you think would go in this combat system? What do you mean, combat system?

How to do skills.

Okay. And perception. Probably saving throws.

How to do saving throws the standards of saving throws the standards of character creation. But the character creation system needs to be rewritten so that it incorporates the concept of non human characters. Unfortunately, the core character creation system of every goddamn Palladium system ever assumes that you're playing a human, that it just does. And sometimes people have a difficult time adapting the races and Rccs that they have released to that system. So yeah.

Yeah, I do think that that is not to go tangent of a tangent of a tangent, but I think it's odd that being a thinking, sentient being is also your trade. Like, if you're nonhuman.

Yeah.

The the RCC versus OCC and the inability to do both.

Oh, my God. Yeah, that's the confusion behind the classification of those terms is again, that's another epic argument similar to perception.

Stay tuned for next week, folks.

Oh, God. I'm not touching that one for a long time. We'll get so much hate mail.

Male as male is male.

Yeah. I want to see an Srd, though. I wanted to see them take the system, or what some people refer to as the system Bible, the source of truth.

Yeah. The point of reference you can point to, believe it or not, with something that has been doing that since the 80s. No, the excuse me. The early 90s is HackMaster kenzer has the the master documents from Jolly R. Blackburn. The people who bring you nights, the dinner table.

Do they publish those?

You can if you are a GM. They actually have these secret knowledge from beyond the realms of men. And if you are a licensed member in good standing, which I believe is $5 a year, you get access to that document.

That's a good way to do it. $5 a year.

That was back then. I don't know. It's probably public knowledge now, but I mean, they used to have that. They used to have this whole arbitration system. It was a whole cool thing.

All right. I am not yet convinced that anybody from palladium still listens to this. If you are a palladium person and you listen to this, please send me a message online with the words bob weep, grana weep, mini bomb.

Mini bomb.

That will confirm that you listen to this. If you do, if you have Kevin's ear, or if you are Kevin, please just put it on Srd and let people publish stuff. Let people put games out that link back to your game, because it will only benefit you in the long run.

And we would love this game to, like we think you're going in a very good direction with some of these new changes you're making, but this is part of joining that future, and we want to see this continue. I think you do, too. My shelves are bowed with the amount of books you've put out, so I think you're kind of taking it seriously.

All right, I have a five by five Ikea expedite cubby shelf. The square cubby is perfect size to put most board games. Anyway. I got a five by 512-34-5123.

Yes.

Five x five. The thing is almost as tall as I am. No, it's taller than I am. It is amazing. I have five full cubbies dedicated to palladium. And now, just this week, I have opened up a 6th for my overflow and my additional Rifters.

Yeah. I have found the filing system to be very interesting. We should even talk about that one of these days. How do you file your Platy? It's core, right? It's like core. Do you start at risk? Which version, dimension or world books next? Or does the conversion books light in there? These are the real questions that people want.

I was just about to go in and diatribe about this, and we saved that for another episode. How to organize your palladium book.

We're fans. Well, honestly, the thing is that it goes by system, right? I mean, it's because you have your heroes. You have your Teenage Ninja Turtles, you have your padium fantasy.

If you've got all a fantasy, more than one shelf of Ikea. Yeah, I know this for a fact.

Yeah. Here's the thing. At a certain point in Paladium, you start measuring your stack in feet or yards, not by shelves. And it sounds like you said it was a five by five. And it's taller than you, which, assuming it's a square five x five, means it's at least 6ft wide. So you have roughly 6ft of books more. Yeah. So you're closing in on your height in Palladium.

Yeah, no, I'm over my height. Just stacked.

It's a good feeling.

It's a good feeling.

Organized.

When you're moving. It's not a good feeling.

No. Wait, you spoke briefly of a third book you're working on. Watch yourself for a moment. I have cannibal contagion. I have motoboshito. What's this project? Is this something you're ready to talk about?

Yeah. No. Back 2016. Oh, dear God. 2016. I ran a Kickstarter for the mechanical successor to Motoboshido, and this game was called Gatai Bushido. It is the mechanics of Motobuchido, but retooled for Voltron and the Power Rangers, specifically for color coded battle pilots who can kick ass but then also drive big robots. And then those robots can then combine into a bigger robot. So that's the game.

I love it.

Yeah. Okay. If you want me to hit myself, if anybody out there has seen an anime called Gunbuster, Gunbuster is the anime that Guineax made before they did Evan Gallian, and in my opinion, is superior. Gunbuster is really awesome. This game is my love letter to Gunbuster and Voltron.

I like it. And how would people find this and how can they help support this? And what's 2016, you say?

It was supposed to be published in 2018. Things happened. Unfortunately, a life happened, and then 2020 happened, and then therapy happened, and then medication happened. And now now I say big old smile on my face that the game is written. It's it's out there. It needs people to play it. It is on GitHub Hub. I will link it in the show notes so anybody, if they want, can read and play the game.

Awesome.

In fact, tomorrow fucking tomorrow, I'm starting my first new campaign of it in, like, three years. Oh, cool.

You got some good play testers.

Yeah.

Excellent. Very nice. What were we talking about again?

I think we were talking about Alice's breast. No, wait, that was the last episode. We were talking about attacks per melee and renaming them, right? Yeah, right.

We got 32 melee.

That was a deep subject.

Yeah, dude, we got seven minutes out of that everywhere else. All right, well, do you have anything else to say on a tax per melee?

I don't.

Okay, I do. I like the concept of no free rides and no free lunch. I like that people, and they are the same people we were complaining about in our last episode will attempt to stack on a whole bunch of free things. And I like that attacks being one of the most common ways of finding out how much you get to do during, you know, around I i like that that is translated to action points. The question I have is, and I don't think we got to this at the beginning if you are playing an OCC that has, say, five attacks with whatever hand to hand you have and also has a mechanism that allows you your evasions, your dodges, not the infinite version, but just a little more how would you do that? Would you add just more action points to the pool and allow them to spend them that way? Or do you want to keep that kind of thing with a separate action point? Because action point is like, a real broad thing, and if they're used for that and the OCC has that as a part of it, how do you.

Reconcile this is literally no change whatsoever to podium mechanics. It is simply a copy cut and paste of the word attack with action that's written so it would be handled however Palladium normally handles it. If anything that references one of your attacks would instead be one of your action points. That's it. There's no change. This mechanic that we have talked about now for 35 straight minutes, I'm glad we got some meat out of this topic. It's just a copy and paste or search and replace of one word for another one. That's it.

Yeah.

This is deep. This is very deep.

Cut.

All right, everybody.

Thank you so much for listening to us babble. We will be babbling at you next week on a variety of other topics, which we guarantee we will stick to like glue.

Oh, absolutely. And if you find that our words have inspired you to write to us, then do so, and thank you.

Yeah. You can find us on discord. We're Breakfast Puppies and the Glitter Boys is one of the many shows under the Breakfast Puppies umbrella. We also do what do you have going on? Hammer Crawl.

Hammer Crawl hasn't happened for a while. I've left it open. I want to do it again. Just got to get a good team.

There's bikers biker sites, bars, then. Yeah, that's still gone.

Whenever we can do it. We're a bunch of adults. Busy schedules.

Yeah. Well, thank you, bold and brave listener. I feel like we've come on a journey on this one. And we'd like to thank you for staying till the bitter, ridiculous end, and we hope to see you next time.

These are some of my favorite episodes, the ones where we just ramble on and on about whatever. Someone's going to look at this episode and they're going to see a tax per melee. 40 minutes. These guys got a lot to say about a tax per melee.

Yes, that's what's going to happen.

Thanks for listening, folks.

Catch you next time.

Starships, magic, mystic, martial arts, romance. All of these can be found in a Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher. You might have heard my name before. I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies, and I've recently released my first novel. It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback, and you can get it for free if you have a Kindle unlimited subscription. I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies, and it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Have a good one.

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