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What is most interesting about 4e fights? Movement, without question. 4e battles move around the board, flowing from this place to that. Forced movement, shifts and alternate modes of movement make where you are in a fight matter as much as what attacks you make. When I build big fights I often focus on what movement can happen rather than how much damage monsters are dealing. Big damage makes a fight deadly; interesting movement makes a fight fun.
4e also has a lot of magic in it, as any self-respecting high fantasy game should. The game supports some basic magical forms of movement in teleportation and flying (which is not necessarily magical in nature). Someone brought up Lodoss War in chat and another form of “magical” movement came to me:
Treerunning.
To some people this might seem ridiculous. Running through trees? In the context of anime or wuxia fiction, this movement makes perfect sense. But…What is treerunning?
Treerunning is a form of movement that allows the creature to move from one tree to another. When treerunning, a creature flies from a current tree to a tree no further than 5 squares away. You can move a number of trees equal to the specified speed. Entering a tree counts as a move, as does leaving a tree. You must be within two squares of a tree to enter it, and you may place yourself on the ground with 2 of your current tree when you leave a tree. Treerunning characters are considered to be 5 squares above the battlefield.
With that keyword what do we get? Ninjas running through trees and wuxia sword warriors. We expect the numbers for treerunning to be low — 1 to 3 — but the characters will still be fast manuevering around the battlefield. It is a bit of verbiage to define, but in a casual game you probably don’t need to be that rigid about it. You’ll see shortly too that this template extends in all sorts of interesting ways.
The first thing many will notice is that this movement is very fast . You move up to 5 squares per point of treerunning. But you don’t put something like this in play in isolation. If players run through trees, can’t NPCs? And, more interestingly, can’t treerunners be “shaken out” of trees?
The enemy ninja is making his retreat through the trees! The party is earthbound and lagging behind. The party wizard shoots a fireball at the tree the ninja is going to leap to next, forcing him to ground where he can be caught!
What is interesting about treerunning is that it puts trees “in play”. Those trees were just hindrances at best. Now, they are another layer to the battle. You’ve added an extra dimension with a new movement type.
Not Just Trees
OK, I understand. You hate trees, amiright? Fine. With some simple find and replace we can get:
- roofrunning
- stonerunning
- firerunning
Roofrunning lets us do some pretty awesome urban parkour fight scenes. Even with the verbiage above, the overall effect is probably less overhead than it would be to have endless athletics and acrobatics checks. Now we only make those checks when players make special stunts or when something really matters. Assassin’s Creed anyone?
Stonerunning and firerunning are great in very specialized environments, but have more limited uses in more common areas. These are OK on PCs, but on monsters? They can turn an encounter into an interesting surprise. Imagine fight dwarf stonerunners. The adventurers expect slow plodding dwarves, but instead get dwarves bounding around them on the stone!
We can extend ‘running’ to all sorts of environments. As we do so we create a free-flowing, agile environment. We build rich movement and even richer potential for counter-movement into our battles just by expanding where the battle can go.
Introducing Running to your Game
The only question is: how do I bring this into my game? There are a number of ways, but a model I like is to introduce it with your monsters. The characters fight a monster who uses the running type on them. the first 1 or 2 encounters with this type the players have no option but to counter. another encounter might let characters burn an encounter to get ‘running for a turn or so. Past that, you might let characters take a feat to get that movement type permanently.
For extremely magical ‘running, you could make it an option available to characters depending on race or culture. Getting back to Lodoss War, it is obvious elves from there should have the option for treerunning. Tieflings might get firerunning available to them, while shadar-kai might recieve shadowrunning, etc.
However you introduce it, adding new movement types can add some pretty unique thrills for your game.
What type of ‘running could you use in your game?
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
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I wrote a whole adventure for WotC (The Best Adventure I never Wrote) based on a parkour race. You need a DDI sub (though it’s probably on filesharing) but you can find it here:
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/duad/20100317
Love this.
I remember seeing one convention game which used sheets of clear perspex on stands to represent the tree canopy above the ground level. Goblins shot from above while the PCs were harried on the ground by bandits. The poor PCs certainly would have benefited from treerunning skill then.
(This is samldanach from the twitter conversation yesterday.)
OK, I like these mechanics, especially for treerunning specifically. The move to get into and out of the tree is really good. Would the trees provide any sort of cover/concealment/other protection? I’m not sure if that’s loading too much onto one ability.
Of course, those same mechanics make it a touch more work to extend to other forms of -running. Does a dwarf need to make a move action to get onto a stone? Is the shadar-kai considered 5 squares above the board when she’s in a shadow? Clearly not. And, of course, stonerunning is awesome, but stone is going to be present in nearly any fight that is indoors or underground. And neither stones nor shadows are quite as discrete as trees, or even fires.
All of these things are fairly easily gotten around with some thought. Maybe the dwarf can only move to outcroppings of stone, like boulders or stalagmites. (Can they also hang from stalactites? Absolutely, because that would be awesome!) That allows the DM to specifically place some on the map.
I definitely want to steal this idea, even for my d20 variant game.
I have a Goliath in one of my games and the player loves to use their natural athletics to good purpose. A recent adventure featured roofrunning in a way. The Goliath decided to scout around from the relative safety of the rooftops in hostile territory and we had a bit of rooftop action during a skill challenge that led into the encounter with the PCs starting with the high ground to their advantage.
It will be a fun surprise to send a ‘roofrunner’ antagonist after them in a future challenge.
@GRIM Thanks for the link! That takes a bit different approach from what I’m doing here, but it is definitely fun and people should check it out.
@greywulf I like that canopy idea, and yes treerunning would have been handy. A few players could have taken it “up top” as other players deal from the ground.
@Lugh hey! Yeah, I debated for a good long time on whether to include all the variations on the ‘running template, but I just went with the assumption that people would know what to do (which you’ve proven for me! ) Please steal away! The idea is very very portable.
@4649Matt It sounds like your Goliath might be a candidate for ‘running himself when the time comes. After fighting a roofrunning enemy, maybe he can go through a skill challenge to get access to roofrunning himself! A neat thing is that ‘running could be a unique prize or treasure, a skill gained after one initiates himself into it.
Interesting ides, but instead of adding new movement form, why not Just use tests ?
Heres the Basic ides, moving trough a tree or on rooftop or Stone, or whatever, is considerated difficult terrain.
now add feat that allow to cpnsider thoose as normal (roof runner : allows you to ignore difficult terrain cause by rooftop )
Ans add a feat to ne able to take ten on athletics check, and boom you Have watever you need.
I Just round it note simple to use mechanisn already in place then invent other One.
@Groumy
I think the point was to reduce the amount of rolls needed.
@groumy is a tree actually difficult terrain? How high up do you go? Is take ten going to be enough to cross from tree to tree? If it is difficult terrain, can I normally just walk over the roof without roof runner? The alternate movement I’m suggesting is ultimately simpler than making a lot of different test each time you want to move. You learn an alternate movement rule once, and no longer have to make multiple tests for all your movement. What you’re suggesting here isn’t really equivalent to what I’m discussing here.
@Gamefiend, how would you treat Xwalking? As a speed with a defined definition or a move action power like:
Shadow walk – 2
Move Action
Prerequisite: You must be in dim light or darkness
Effect: You disappear and reappear in another square that is also in dim light or darkness.
Special: You can use this as many times is as noted in the title with the same action.
Oooh serendipity!
I’ve been considering free-running as a core mechanic for a game. Of our two built-in responses to danger – fight-or-flight – we have plenty of rules for fighting but not much in the way of running. Running can be just as exciting as fighting and often more believable. In cinema, chase sequences are maybe even more prevalent than fight sequences but in RPGs so far no chase rules seem satisfying.
The problem may well be that of terrain. To have a good chase you need a large area with lots of choice but also lots of exciting detail (unless your going to abstract the whole thing, which isn’t very exciting). In the past that was a hell of a lot of work that would be used up very quickly.
Computers are here to help us though. I’m sure a map generator could be whipped up to provide believable but fun environments to run through.
In D&D mechanics exist already. We have skill checks like athletics, and ability scores. Even feats and powers could be adapted (any 4E power that includes movement – eg teleport, or sliding underneath a a passing cart).
Your ideas above are great. Things like wuxia style treeleaping seem at home in paragon or epic level play. Heroic tier characters would be involved in more messy Indiana Jones style messing-up-the market shenanigans.
If you suffer an attack that knocks you prone, you should get knocked out of the tree and take damage as you fall, or save to catch a limb on the way down.
You could add the idea of a 3rd dimension by creating different levels in the forest–low canopy, mid-canopy, and high canopy–and granting attack bonuses to those higher in the trees. Ascending or descending from one canopy to another requires a turn.
The thing I love about this is that it encourages lots of fast, exciting movement around the battlefield – and it encourages players to engage with the terrain. Too often I find that players are reluctant to engage with any kind of interesting terrain if it involves a roll (even an incredibly easy one). However, as soon as they have a climb or swim speed they are all over the place. Thank you for adding another tool to the kit.
By reading only the title of this post and not seeing the image or reading anything yet, I instantly thought of Naruto. This is a great concept for a ninja game.
@josiah I would actually use the number on Xwalking as the range. So for shadowwalking 10, you could teleport to a shadow within 10 squares of your current space.
@shilling movement doesn’t get enough airtime in games, agreed. I am a movement junkie though, so I always do my best to make sure to make iit interesting. i also feel like the context of the game can make heroic tier a viable place for this movement. If you play a Naruto game for instance, you definitely need tree-running ASAP.
@A3 it is definitely easy to expand on that. These are those counter-moves that I was talking about that can make the game interesting. Be careful with adding too many different levels. In practical experience, ‘altitude’ I find to rarely add more than record keeping to the play experience.
@Victor yes, that was my main concern. Give players simple tools to encourage use of terrain. Most players want to minimize failure, and the more you roll, the more you increase opportunities for failure. If you can get rid of that, you open up the combat a great deal.
@Jonathan Am I that transparent? And yes, I would love to some sort of ninja game with this sometime.