Difference between revisions of "Combat"

Revision as of 06:30, 27 December 2020

AGE and Mantles

MCM's combat system (referred to as csys for short) uses the AGE 2.0 system as its basis, and so uses several functionalities core to the AGE modular framework. Ours is, in fact, the progenitor of the "core" version of AGE 2.0 and its various java-based functionalities. The most core concept to the AGE system that is necessary to understand is the "Mantle" paradigm, explained as follows.

A "Mantle" is a single, full, cohesive package of combat statistics and abilities that contains all the necessary parts to be thrown into the combat system and run a fight, roughly analogous to a "stat block", "combat sheet", or "loadout". Mantles individually contain everything a player needs to interact with the csys, and as per their namesake, can be donned, removed, and exchanged, to allow for a player to represent entities other than their own character in combat, primarily for the use of scene and plot runners.

All character bits have a private player character Mantle which represents the character itself, which is applied for inside of the character application. Mario wears the Mantle of Mario, Cloud Strife wears the Mantle of Cloud Strife, etc. This Mantle is effectively their personal combat sheet, and is already made to be customized and keep track of upgrades and injuries. All players also have access to a list of public, staff-created Mantles that can be picked up on the fly for use in scenes as needed. For instance, a scene runner with a character with low combat power may temporarily don the Mantle of a tremendous boss monster to present a challenging battle for a large number of combat-focused PCs. These Mantles are impermanent and "owned" by the system itself.

A character comes with their personal Mantle when they are first created. When you feel the need to try on another, use <mantle list global> to see a list of all available Mantles. From there, use <mantle claim global> to pick one from the list, and add it to your personal list. Your personal list can be viewed with the <mantle> command, where your claimed Mantles can be managed, or dropped with <mantle release>. Finally, select a Mantle to load with <mantle load>. The next time you ready for combat, you will don the selected Mantle. Using the >reset command will load the Mantle you currently have claimed.

It goes without saying that in all scenes where you are participating as your character, that character's Mantle should be the one loaded and applied. Public Mantles exist to spoof other kinds of characters as needed, primarily for GMing purposes. Mantles added to your list are effectively copies of the public template, and can be used non-exclusively. Unlike your personal character Mantle, they are non-customizable, and cannot be upgraded, but they also don't take any time to recover from damage. A player may have any number of Mantles claimed, and may use any number or combination of them in a scene, so long as they're clearly being used to the benefit of RP.

Combat Profiles

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The central aspects that comprise the Mantle of a character or entity are their Archetype, their Quirks, their Signature, their Stats, their Weight class, and if they are a Player Character, their Assist and any Enhancement bonuses they may have. These elements together comprise a character's full combat ability, and most heavily influence how they will play in combat. All of these elements can be viewed by using the >sheet command. An example has been inserted and labeled above.

1: Archetype: A character's Archetype is roughly analogous to a "character class". It is a large, static package of abilities and bonuses that is chosen or assigned at combat profile creation. For player character Mantles, these as chosen by the player in their application. For public Mantles, these are assigned by the Mantle creator (pretty much always staff). The Archetype typically defines the broad strokes basics of how a Mantle plays in combat, essentially forming the base of their fighting style and initial build options. Once chosen, a player character's Archetype may be changed by the player only on a cooldown. Archetypes are visible to other players.

2: Quirks: Any Mantle may have up to three different Quirks assigned to it at any given time. Quirks are smaller packages, or individual instances, of abilities and bonuses, which are added on top of the Archetype. Some Archetypes are able to also equip a single 2a: Prime Quirk, which is a more powerful type of Quirk with particular limitations. Quirks may be changed at any time by the Mantle owner until a battle has begun, taking effect when they next >reset, without an application or any special rules, meaning that players are free to use them to customize their character as they wish. Quirks are a core tool by which players are able to put their character's own unique stamp on their Archetype, prepare to fight other Archetypes they might have a tough time with, or explore different playstyles and put original twists on existing ones. Quirks are invisible to other players.

3: Signature: Any Mantle may additionally have a single Signature assigned to it, in the same manner as Quirks. A Signature is a much more powerful option than an individual Quirk, and typically has an active, player controlled component to it. Signatures may be changed at any time a Quirk could, meaning players are likewise free to customize their character and experiment as they like. Signatures are the most robust means by which players can "season their combat experience to taste", granting them a great amount of leeway to emphasize their favored aspects of their character's playstyle, diminish or eliminate the aspects they like least, or open up new ways to play them entirely. Signatures are invisible to other players, but almost always announce themselves in combat.

4: Stats: All Mantles have four base stats: Power, which represents the character's ability to deal large amounts of damage, Precision, which represents the character's ability to consistently apply and maximize their damage, Endurance, which represents the character's ability to resist damage, and Mitigation, which represents the character's ability to reduce their exposure to damage. Stats are visible as a collection of descriptive tiers: Poor, Mediocre, Average, Decent, Good, Remarkable, Great, Superb, Excellent, Incredible, and Perfect. These descriptive terms largely represent the balance of how and where a character invests their basic capabilities. They don't account for Archetypes, Quirks, buffs, debuffs, or similar modifiers, and they don't strictly correspond to a fixed value; one character's Average Power may usually deal more damage than another character's Good Power. These terms exist to give an idea as to the character's raw stat pool and how they've chosen to distribute it with what weight. Selecting various Archetypes will automatically readjust the distribution of a character's stat pool within certain bounds to fit the Archetype, which can some adjectives to visibly increase or decrease as individual stats shift over or under measuring lines. Typically "Incredible" and "Perfect" stats don't exist without an Archetype reallocation; most stats on most characters are within a step or two of "Decent". Stats are invisible to other players.

5: Weight: All characters also exist within one of several Weight classes. Weight doesn't correspond to any one specific function or bonus, but subtly influences the character's combat performance in a general sense. Higher Weight classes represent greater increases to a character's combat power, but Weight is assigned independently of all other combat traits, and thus does not summarize a character's total strength. In short: there are powerful Lightweights and weak Heavyweights. A character's Weight class may potentially change, as major events redefine their role as a character concept. Weight is visible to other players.

Light: Lightweight characters are typically members of the underdog class of their theme. This can mean non-combat characters, but it just as often corresponds to highly competent characters who work harder than others for their wins, due to their theme's inherent cosmology, mechanics, scale, etc. Badass normals, shounen rookies, survival genre heroes, and fighters from low-combat series, are common examples of Lightweight characters.

Medium: Mediumweight characters are typically the bulk of protagonists, and tends to be the most common Weight class occupied by players. Medium Weight represents the main combat cast of most themes, and is most often used for characters with relatively matured power, who are regularly challenged but still get by with their fighting ability. Medium Weight indicates a character who is well-suited to combat within their theme.

Heavy: Heavyweight characters are typically the movers and shakers that are responsible for making events happen. Their stories tend to turn away from daily challenges and foes, and towards what they do to the theme as a whole and how the theme deals with them. Action defines Heavy Weight more than raw power, so it's very common to find main villains and boss characters in this class, and rare to find even the most overpowered ensemble heroes.

Superheavy: Superheavy Weight is only achievable by Heavyweight characters using +keeps. No character sits at Super Heavyweight as a base state. It exists to maintain the consistency of the Keeps system, without allowing Heavyweight characters to become Bosses at the press of a button.

Boss: A Weight assigned to specific Mantles by staff, mostly for the purpose of plots. Boss weight typically represent entities that are more theme fixture than character, and provides a space for beings that aren't meant to be casually challenged by individual characters. Boss Weight is essentially "intentionally overpowered", and it can be assumed that something weighted at Boss is a big deal. Though Boss Weight Mantles are theoretically beatable by sufficiently powerful and lucky characters with significant sacrifice, they mainly exist to be fought as tough fights for large crowds at important moments in TPs.

6: Assist: Player character Mantles come with an Assist, which is set and reset identically to an Archetype. The Assist only comes into play when the character is grouped up into a Party, whereupon the benefit of their Assist is applied to all other members of the Part. Assists are a potent force multiplier that allows for multiple PCs to overcome tough foes, take clean victories over middling NPC opposition, and even to go toe to toe with powerful boss enemies.

7: Enhancement Rating: Player character Mantles can also benefit from Enhancement bonuses. Through creating roleplay and pursuing character growth, a player can increase the Enhancement Level of their characters, usually representing that the character's power has grown or evolved to a new stage or height. A character gains an Enhancement rating, ranging from +1 to +10, which serves as a total pool of maximum Enhancements they can equip at any one time. Enhancements themselves are equipped just as Quirks and Signatures are, and serve the purpose of small, incremental bonuses to give a character some further wiggle room in their build.

8: HP: Hit Points. Players of video and tabletop games should be familiar with these. If your HP are reduced to zero, you lose. If your opponent's HP is reduced to zero, you win. Characters have 1000 HP to start with, though this may be raised or lowered by many different factors. On MCM, Hit Points are not "Meat Points". Hitting zero HP doesn't mean the character is mortally wounded. Strictly, zero HP only means that the character has been roughed up enough to cede the fight; we assume no character is exactly eager to die in a skirmish over a bank heist. The amount of HP you have left when you finish a fight factors into Consequences, which are detailed later, but it should be said that any damage short of a Consequence threshold probably isn't anything more than superficial to the character (though what counts as "superficial" may vary). HP is visible to other players as a percentage of your maximum. In addition to a character's "raw" HP, some of their HP bar might be converted into other forms.

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Shield HP: Shield HP absorbs half the damage from all attacks, the remaining half going to the character's other HP. Shield HP automatically recharges all by itself, recovering by 20 points after each defense by default. When Shield HP is depleted to 0, the Shield breaks, and no longer recharges. When a character obtains Shield HP, it comes with a maximum their Shield can fill to. The deeper the Shield bar, the easier it is to keep Shields up for longer, and gain the most value out of its steady recharge.

Armor HP: Armor HP is much sturdier than normal HP, requiring two points of damage to deplete one point of Armor HP. Armor HP cannot be healed by conventional means, but it absorbs Peril HP damage, instead stripping down to normal HP. Gaining Armor HP is more expensive to obtain than greater max HP, but is much more effective in lowering damage below various thresholds.

Peril HP: Peril HP is much more fragile than normal HP; every one point of damage depletes two points of Peril HP. Peril HP bypasses Shield HP and strips Armor HP back to normal. However, any Peril HP left over from an attack is automatically recovered on the character's next turn. Inflicting Peril HP is a strong means of overcoming a powerful defense with a followup attack.

Fade HP: Fade HP depletes on its own. A character's total Fade HP halves itself at the end of each of their turns. Fade HP bypasses Shield and Armor HP, but it sits at the bottom of a character's HP bar, and is only directly damaged once the character runs out of all other HP. Fade HP damage will cause the character to lose HP every turn regardless of the result of any further attacks, making it a valuable tool for winning difficult fights of attrition.

9:Drive: Drive represents a universal concept of attacking resources, whether it be a character's physical stamina, magical reserves, ammunition and gear, tactical positioning, or any combination of elements that suits them. Drive is spent to launch attacks. Retaining high levels of Drive provides passive bonuses, while scraping low levels of Drive begins to penalize the character. Bottoming out on Drive is a loss condition, as the character has spent all their resources and can no longer continue fighting. Characters have a default maximum of 100 Drive, and begin with 70, which is broken up into thresholds.

100-81: Primed The character gains a Moderate bonus to Mitigation and Endurance.

80-56: Ready The character gains no bonus and suffers no penalty.

55-21: Lagging The character suffers a Minor penalty to all stats.

20-1: Overextended The character suffers a Solid penalty to all stats.

<1: Wavering As Overextended, and the character loses 20% of their max HP after each attack.

-25: Spent The character loses all remaining HP. Their attack aborts, and the character is defeated.

By default, characters recover 5 Drive each time they defend, meaning that Drive constantly refreshes throughout the fight. Managing Drive can be as technical or simple as the player pleases, however it should be understood that it is undesirable to drop to the Overextended tier or below unless you have a plan that justifies the very large penalties. It should also be understood that certain sources of Drive can temporarily push total Drive over the 100 cap, but the next time the character gains Drive, it will be reduced back down to 100 if still over, and so staying over cap is not possible. Drive is visible to other players.

10: Hype: Hype is the resource used to use 10a: Pushes --unique actions that modify attacks and defenses, and apply special effects. Pushes consume Hype, so Hype can be considered a sort of “special bar” or “super meter” in video game terms. Some Pushes consume their Hype and activate instantly, while others enter an activation queue to be triggered by an attack or defense, whereupon the total Hype of the queue is consumed. By default, a character regains 2 Hype each time they defend, after the attack is resolved. By default, characters have a maximum Hype of 10. Hype is invisible to other players.

11: Unique Resources: Specialist and Savant Archetypes may have access to a unique, Archetype-specific resource that they manage in combat for additional flexibility and control. These displays appear only when the character has the corresponding Archetype equipped.

12: Adjectives: In lieu of filling space with reams of numbers and math equations, AGE uses a ladder of Adjectives to indicate bonuses, maluses, and most things that affect stats and mechanical resolution. Adjectives feature most prominently in Archetype and Quirk selection, but appear in core combat facets too. Though these terms don’t feature precise numbers, they are universally consistent with each other. A Minor bonus is always the same amount of bonus, it has the exact same relative impact as a Minor malus, and both have exactly the same less impact than a Moderate bonus or malus.

The ladder of Adjectives, from least to greatest impact, goes:

Minor
Moderate
Solid
Significant
Major
Superior
Massive
Extreme

Core Concepts

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1: Attacking: Players take turns attacking each other with the >attack command, formatted as >attack <target>=<level#>/<Type>:<Description or Title> Attacks come in five levels, which cost different amounts of Drive, and deal correspondingly more damage.

1/Light: -5 The character regains 5 Drive.

2/Standard: 10 The character loses 10 Drive.

3/Heavy: 25 The character loses 25 Drive.

4/Deadly: 45 The character loses 45 Drive.

5/Finishing: 60 The character loses 60 Drive.

Bonuses and penalties from Drive only change after the attack has resolved. In addition to the attack's level, each attack is given a type: Forceful, Consistent, Efficient, or Dramatic.

Forceful: The attack gains a Moderate bonus to Power.

Consistent: The attack gains a Moderate bonus to Precision.

Efficient: The attack costs X less Drive, where X is twice the level of the attack, but has a Minor penalty to a Precision and Power.

Dramatic: The attack has a level-based chance to generate Hype.

1: 0-1 Hype

2: 1-2 Hype, leaning on 1

3: 1-2 Hype, leaning on 2

4: 2-3 Hype

5: 3-4 Hype

The general rule is that Light, Standard, and Heavy attacks can be used interchangeably, balancing dealing damage quickly with not falling into low Drive levels. Deadly and Finishing attacks however, represent very large investments of Drive, and have an element of risk/reward to them. Casually spamming them will result in having a bad day. Likewise, players should expect that most combat encounter will last 4-6 rounds, and that attempting to finish an opponent from half health is very likely to fail.

2: Defending: When a player is attacked, they must choose a defensive action to use, whereupon the attack is resolved. This is accomplished with the +defend command, formatted as +defend target=type. The types of defense are: Guard, Maneuver, Focus, Bolster, and Rally.

Guard: The defense gains a Moderate bonus to Endurance against the attack.

Maneuver: The defense gains a Moderate bonus to Mitigation against the attack.

Focus: Your next attack gains a Moderate bonus to Precision.

Bolster: Your next attack gains a Moderate bonus to Power.

Rally: The defense takes a Minor penalty to Endurance and Mitigation against the attack, but you gain 5 Drive.

After each defense, the defender regains Drive and Hype at their passive rate, up to their maximum.

3: Resolution: The resolution of an attack and its paired defense is considered the end of the attacker's "turn" and the start of the defender's. The first defender of a battle gains 20 bonus Drive, and the first attacker of a battle gains 2 bonus Hype. This specific bonus may push them over their cap.
When an attack resolves, all characters in the room are able to see the actions chosen by both sides, any actively triggered effects that factored into it, the Hit Result, resources gained as part of the resolution, and the Heat of both the hit roll and the damage roll.
Hit Results range from Miss, which deals no damage and typically applies no effects, through Close Call, which deals a moderate portion of the attack's potential damage, Solid Hit, which deals most of the attack's potential damage, to Critical Hit, which deals the maximum amount of the attack's potential damage, though all damage is still mildly randomized. These grades are often referred to as Hit levels. The likelihood of any given result is influenced by the attacker's Precision vs the defender's Mitigation, but the result itself can be changed by a number of abilities. In terms of roleplay, these Hit levels don't strictly mean anything more than how relatively effective the attack was at pressuring or harming the character. A Critical Hit doesn't necessitate a character taking a bullet straight through the heart any more than a Close Call necessitates it grazing their cheek. Use common sense and taste.

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"Heat" refers to the color that the Hit Result and damage value are displayed in. Heat ranges from cool, subdued colors at its lower, to hot, bold colors at its higher end. A lower Heat displayed on the Hit Result indicates the attack had a poor roll, while a higher Heat indicates the attack had a high roll. A lower Heat displayed as damage indicates that the attack did lower than expected damage for its level, and higher Heat displays that the attack did higher than expected damage for its level. The Heat display exists so that players are able judge at a glance how much of an offensive or defensive advantage either character has, both in terms of accuracy and power, when they feel it relevant. Under perfectly average circumstances, the majority of Heat results will maintain a neutral yellow color, however expensive Pushes applied to low level attacks have a relatively more dramatic effect on Heat, and should be noted by players who prefer to pay close attention to Heat.

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4: Pushes: Pushes are various action modifiers and special moves that can be activated by spending Hype. They encompass effects such as buffs, debuffs, Drive gain and drain, healing, damage reduction, super attacks, etc. Any Push can be activated at any time, including right before an attack or defense. Some Pushes have an instantaneous effect and kick in immediately, announcing their result. Most Pushes are instead loaded into a queue, where they will trigger once an attack/defense exchange is resolved. Queuing up more Pushes than you have Hype will result in Pushes at the end of the list failing to activate. Using these Pushes creates a visible notification, which will tell anyone in the room that you have used one, but most don't name the specific Push itself. This allows players to anticipate which attacks and defenses are the most heavily enhanced, without divulging all details. The command >push/list displays the complete list of Pushes, their effects, and their associated Hype cost. To activate one, the command is >push <name>/<cost>, sometimes followed with =<option> in the case of Buff and Debuff.

5: Support Actions: Some Archetypes have the ability to support and empower teammates in battle. These Archetypes have access to the >support command, which makes an ally the recipient of that Archetype's special Support Action benefits. If no target is selected, the benefits of >support are applied to your own character until one is. The Support target can be changed in battle, but cannot be changed a second time until the character has attacked and defended again; it isn't possible to cycle through every single character in a Party to give them all the benefit of a Support Action in the same turn.

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6: Consequences: When finishing a battle below a certain threshold of HP, a character receives a lasting malus to their combat performance called a Consequence. Consequences represent that the character has taken a degree of damage that they won't immediately walk off, and are the only real way in which MCM tracks and enforces healing/repair time. Consequences come in three severities:

Mild: When finishing a battle below 35% HP. Automatically applied when Playing for Keeps. Reduces maximum HP to 90%.

The character has one or more minor but non-superficial injuries, resulting in some degree of pain, exhaustion, weakness, or impaired mobility, which hampers them somewhat in combat. These will typically heal on their own even without medical attention.

Moderate: When finishing a battle below 50% HP while Playing for Keeps. Reduces maximum HP to 75%.

The character has suffered serious but non-life threatening injuries, which necessitate some medical attention. Broken bones, severe blood loss, damaged muscles, or other heavily impairing injuries are to be expected. The character should try to avoid serious fighting.

Severe: When finishing a battle below 25% HP while playing for Keeps. Reduces maximum HP to 60%. Prohibits the use of +keeps.

The character has sustained extensive or critical injuries that put them at serious risk and will require prolonged attention to see repaired. The character has likely suffered injuries that came close to killing them, and can expect to probably lose in any real fight until they get better.

Consequences decrease in severity and disappear over time, both with the passage of real time, and by completing scenes. Continuing to RP is the fastest way to clear up a Consequence, because when a character gets into a big fight and takes some heavy hits to show for it, going out into the MUSH and actually playing the result is preferable in every way to sitting in a corner and waiting until they fully heal off-screen, so we reward the former over the latter. We assume that all characters can get access to the minimum necessary healing resources "somewhere or another" in the Multiverse, should they be required.
As an important note, scenes only count towards Consequence timers once they have been closed, so if you're chronically terrible at remembering to hit +scene/finish, improve that habit! If you're going to have lingering Consequences at an important time, and someone has forgotten to close a scene you were in, don't be afraid to contact them (or if they're not around, staff)! Each scene that starts and concludes while a character has a Consequence counts as 1 week of time for the purpose of clearing the Consequence. i.e. Two weeks of real time + two scenes = four weeks of Consequence reduction.

Mild: Expires after 1 week/scene.

Moderate: Downgrades to Mild after 3 weeks/scenes.

Severe: Downgrades to Moderate after 6 weeks/scenes.

Taking further Consequences does not increase their severity, it only refreshes the timer of the existing one.

Playing for Keeps

In most battles, the participating characters have some mutually exclusive goal which they've come into conflict over, but aren't willing to die or be mortally injured for it. No sensible actor, real or fictional, voluntarily fights to the death over anything of less than critical importance to them, and even in the combat-heavy lives of most player characters, these kinds of battles are likely to be in the minority; or to put it in other words, we assume that people aren't nobly spilling their blood and guts all over the pavement to defend the purse of an old lady from an unusually lucky mugger. MCM assumes that as a general rule, player characters fight with self-preservation mind, and will concede the objective when they are persuasively injured, but for those exceptional circumstances in which this isn't the case, the player has the option of Playing for Keeps.

Playing for Keeps is activated by the >keeps command, which comes with a <Reason> field, because each time it is activated, the use of >keeps is logged alongside the pressing reason the character had for doing so. When this command is activated, it indicates that a serious tone shift has occurred, and that a player character is no longer fighting an ordinary Elite conflict, but is so invested that they're willing to put the full extent of their physical wellbeing on the line to win. Different characters will inevitably have different reasons for getting this serious. Some might only Play for Keeps when the lives of their friends or threatened, where others might do so simply out of sheer unthinking fury, and others might do so for a grave insult to their pride or honor. Whatever the case, staff keeps track of this fairly powerful tool to make sure it's being used appropriately, rather than "because the other guy did" or "I just wanted to win". The <Reason> field is visible to staff and logged for this reason; it should be used to clearly communicate the circumstances around Playing for Keeps such that the rationale is obvious. Jokes, memes, references, attack names, five word +summaries etc. do not constitute reasons, and so then have to be looked into by staff.

When >keeps is activated, the character who is now Playing for Keeps receives an immediate boost to all their combat stats, and visibly increases one Weight class, for the entire length of the battle. If >keeps is activated partway into a battle, they gain a boost to their next attack and defense proportionate to how many turns the battle has already progressed, so as to enable dramatic triggers to happen in battle without wasting most of the command. Pressing >keeps is a considerable advantage, and will either significantly tilt a battle in a character's favor, or significantly even out one slanted against them, and in exchange for this temporary surge in fighting ability by going past their comfortable limits and prioritizing victory over their safety, the character opens themselves up to much more grievous injury, reflected in the Consequences system. However, it should be noted that this boost in power is not absolute, and users should be warned that it is still entirely possible to lose after hitting >keeps; the tool doesn't exist as a Win Button with drawbacks, but a way to have some control over the narrative of their character, to pick out and underscore pivotal moments, and to have some extra say in the outcome of a battle with important ramifications, so communicate clearly about your intentions before slamming down >keeps and silently expecting the opponent to fold for you.

Ultimately, so long as there is a solid reason for a character to Play for Keeps, any mechanism by which they do so is up to the player. Whether it's a dramatic transformation or simply trying their absolute hardest, all player characters can Play for Keeps. Since Public Mantles aren't meaningfully affected by Consequences, they not have access to this command. Playing for Keeps is a privilege reserved for player characters only.

Fighting Multiple Opponents

Frequently, a character may end up in a situation where they are outnumbered by their foes, either because a squad of PCs is responding to an action they've undertaken, or because the sides of a team conflict are mismatched and someone will end up taking on multiple opponents. The combat system has special functions for these scenarios, as otherwise the outnumbered character would very quickly run out of Drive, and have their HP obliterated by multiple attack per round. The combat system's functions for fighting multiple opponents are broadly and colloquially referred to as "boss" functions, or "bossing", though they may be used equally well in fringe scenarios, such as a round in which a character suddenly engages or is engaged by a second enemy, or a hypothetical free for all where each side is attacking each other side. In all cases however, for all the tools available to the player to function at their full intended capacity, the bossing player should launch all of their attacks on their turn, and wait for all of their opponents to launch all of their attacks before attacking back. There is no need to strictly order who is attacked or defended against first

When fighting multiple opponents, a player uses the >boss command, defined by a grade of /casual, /normal, or /serious, and the number of opponents after. e.x. >boss/normal 3 to fight 3 opponents simultaneously. If no grade argument is entered, >boss/normal is the default. These commands multiply the character's HP, Drive, and Hype bars to correctly handle the extra opponents they're fighting, and inform certain Archetypes, Quirks, and Signatures to expand on their behavior to be equally useful against multiple enemies. Abilities expanded by >boss are usually those that provide a one-time benefit, static starting bonus, which have a limited number of uses per battle, or which have a maximum resource cap, which would rapidly diminish in usefulness against more than one opponent, so it's important not to undershoot how many people you're actually fighting. Most articles that increment in terms, or after attacking or defending, do so once the full number of attacks or defenses have been resolved, so don't skip people.

Boss Situations: In general, a player should use >boss/casual for situations in which there are no real stakes, such as casual sparring, or no reason the boss should win, such as run of the mill PvE encounters. >boss/normal should be used in most situations in which a PC bosses vs other PCs, and important PvE boss encounters that should realistically take some players out. >boss/serious should be reserved for when a PC is bossing with something fairly significant riding on the outcome, such as a branching path in a plot, or for rare PvE fights wherein it's expected that the boss enemy "may actually win", and the plot can continue in a way that is different and still enjoyable if it did. These grades help narrow or widen the gap created by a full Party's combined Assists.

Casual: The player's HP, Drive, Hype, and resources are multiplied to match the number of the opponents, and that's it.

Normal: As above, and the player's passive Drive gain is increased by the number of extra foes, and their passive Hype gain is increased by 25% per extra foe.

Serious: As above, but the player's passive Drive gain is increased by twice the number of extra foes, and their passive Hype gain is increased by 50% per extra foe.

Boss Usage: Due to the amount of resources that a boss can accumulate from being attacked by so many players, we expect a soft level of respect in how those resources are allocated. The combat system is technically balanced such that if the boss were to expend all their resources on targeting individual PCs until KO, their odds of winning wouldn't actually go up, so the act of intentionally focusing on eliminating specific players one at a time should be considered playing in ill faith, as all this accomplishes is forcing certain people out of the fight after getting to play very little. We encourage the bossing player to instead split their resources evenly across the Party as much as possible, with some wiggle room for players who have experienced runs of unusually bad luck. Trying to go soft on fragile characters and go hard at tough characters, or trying to use only strong defenses against powerful attackers and frail defenses against weak attackers, only serves to make everyone's results look the same, and generally suck the joy out of building and specializing a character.

Importantly, >boss can be adjusted downward as well as upward, without resetting, and will preserve the percentage of damage taken and resources gained or spent when doing so. If a PC has to leave the scene for some reason, or can no longer contribute, the number of opponents assigned to >boss should be adjusted down. If a PC is simply KOed, there is no need to do so. Undershooting the number of players to try and make for an easier fight is an unnecessary kludge, and >boss/casual and use of GM Commands ill do the job better and without complications. Overshooting the number of players to make a fight artificially harder will be squinted at very seriously, and all but definitely involve disciplinary measures if used to gain an edge in a PvP fight.

Applying and Upgrades

When characters are initially approved for play, a large part of their combat toolset is set by staff, partly to the player's specifications, and partly as staff can best judge from the information the player gives us that informs us of the character and contextualizes their role in combat narrative. These aspects set at chargen are relatively set, and expected not to change unless the character as a concept is changed in a very significant way. Anakin Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side and becoming Darth Vader, Magus relinquishing his crusade and joining the side of the heroes, Krillin gaining power from the Dragon Balls, learning techniques like the Kaioken, and becoming part of the main crew; these are examples of character-defining changes that are hashed out with staff, universally as a result of substantial RP arcs, and altered on the back end.

In most cases, a character increasing in power, experience, and ability, is an incremental process. They acquire legendary weapons, learn secret techniques, undergo intense special training, and similar things. All player characters have universal access to the Enhancement system, which exists to allow players to pursue and acquire this kind of power growth within the mechanical realm of the combat system. In some circumstances, staff or facheads may actually suggest player characters to be put up for Enhancement (and notify the player), but in the vast majority of instances, Enhancement Levels are applied for, so the player knows exactly what they're asking for, exactly what they're getting, and can have a clean yes or no.

The application for Enhancement Levels or other upgrades is here: Enhancement Application

Enhancement Criteria: MCM's standards for Enhancement approval can't help but be somewhat subjective, since there are countless kinds of RP that could merit or justify them. As a hard and fast statement however, Enhancements are not participation awards. They aren't given "for going to stuff and being around a while", but are a progress track and grippable, attainable goal that exists for the enjoyment of players who want to make a goal of them. There is an expectation of credible and sustained effort before Enhancements are approved, and it should not be taken personally if staff says "Put in a little more work first".

While a character will most typically gain an Enhancement as part of a planned, roleplayed arc that involves them increasing their personal power, the only valid metric towards gaining an Enhancement is creating content for the community, rather than taking or passively absorbing RP. Our desire is that players who wish to have their characters grow in strength over time do so by creating roleplay for other players to invest in and enjoy, rather than simply pilfering loot from scenes or just training off screen. This results both in a net gain in RP, and a tangible way for other characters to get involved, leading to a greater degree of communal validation and legitimacy to a character's growth, rather than nobody having any reason to care while they power up in a corner. This kind of content creation can come in many forms, such as running a plot, GMing scenes, taking a lead position as a co-runner or director of events, or playing an active catalyzing role that creates scenes which the character is the primary architect or driver of. It is sometimes possible for more than one player to claim credit for content that is a clear joint effort. It is always acceptable for a player to claim credit for scenes they created and ran, but which their character was not featured in, as otherwise prolific plot runners would rarely get the chance, due to their lessened time to play their own characters.

Because we consider Enhancements to be of middling significance, and a luxury rather than a necessity to make a character a credible combatant, we judge upgrades of this kind to be milestones that are there for the enjoyment of building towards and achieving them, and not something anyone needs to stay competitive. Our default stance on borderline RP is a preference towards maintain the integrity of effort and reward for the sake of fun in pursuing them.

Stance on Combat RP

Builds and Matchups: The AGE 2.0 system is designed with a very high degree of modularity in mind, to be tailored to the audience of an individual MUSH. For MCM, our implementation leans heavily towards being broadly fair, and away from a complicated game simulation that rewards mastery and punishes ignorance, and so our AGE csys is tailored to prevent the existence of gimped or overpowered characters, and to prevent players from jobbing accidentally or cheesing out wins, by their OoC mastery. This is an important choice to minimize the learning curve necessary to engage with the community, to establish firm and consistent ballparks for various character concepts, and to provide low-stress fun in combat. That said, we expect a certain minimum of common sense when interacting with the combat system, and we accept usual wins and losses that come from players declining to use any. If a character is obliterated for sitting on 1 HP while throwing out nothing light attacks with a pile of unspent resources and Quirks that obviously don't help them, they've failed the common sense test; the csys has not failed them.

In terms of PvP, MCM does not subscribe to the idea that automatic win/loss should exist between players. All factors being normal, the majority of battles are expected to resolve roughly around a 40% to 60% win chance, and even fairly extreme gaps in power are intended not to reach 90%/10%. The choice not to display a total power level on characters is intentional, as we much prefer that people simply play with each other, rather than what is often the case where players remotely compare numbers and skate around each other, looking to avoid bigger fish and prey on littler ones. Our csys is designed to make ordinary fights fairly fast, casual, and low commitment for this reason.

Lethality and Poses: As mentioned previously, MCM's csys presumes that damage and injury to player characters is handled with a certain degree of cinematic frequency and logic, and that all PCs are able to access necessary recovery supplies in some way. We don't assign a strict correlation between HP and roleplayed damage, nor demand players pose taking hits highly regulated way. Our default tone for combat can roughly be considered "pulp action" or the more serious end of "cape comics", though players can electively choose to play to a grittier genre if they prefer. We assume that in most fights a character will ever be involved in, they will fight until they have a convincing enough reason not to, usually in the form of hitting 0 HP and picking up a Mild Consequence, but this can also be due to the circumstances they're fighting over having changed, one or both characters withdrawing before any decisive blow happens, or players simply running out of time. Playing for Keeps is the exception to this, as hitting >keeps indicates a tone shift from an episodic skirmish to a serious moment where the character is exceeding their ordinary limits and nominally gambling with their lives.
The sole demands we have for our players here is that they respect the overall genre conventions of what they're playing (i.e. we expect Batman isn't deflecting artillery shells by flexing his abs because they only dealt 100 damage), and that when they take Consequences, they own and play to them. We can afford to allow players the degree of control over combat RP that we do on the principle that a Consequence is a tangible, mechanically incarnate injury, so engage with them and treat them with respect, because playing one out legitimizes the fact that RP that happened.

Dummy Testing: MCM's csys is effectively the foundational installation of the AGE system, and its tech is intended to be partly reusable by other combat systems in the future. For that reason, we aren't going to take kindly to players sitting around banging on spreadsheets trying to reverse engineer its nuts and bolts. This is mainly for the benefit of hypothetical future users who may want to use the tech; the AGE 2.0 system is running on fifteen layers of black magic under the hood to organically balance its many moving components, designed to require minimal staff adjustment to change later, and no need for advanced game knowledge, and so "reverse engineering" the particulars not only isn't going to go very far, but isn't going to help win any battles. Intensive exploratory testing of the system is a huge waste of time, and will be taken as a sign of bad faith. That means running csys battles between a player's alts, sitting in rooms bashing public Mantles as test dummies, or any other use of the csys for something other than RP. Staff can see notices every time the csys is used.

Alchemists: The mechanical minutiae of the combat system are boiled down to a simplified user end experience for a few reasons. One primary amongst them is to lower the barrier to entry for players who aren't big into tactical systems as hobbyists, and to generally provide an intuitive "what you see is what you get" handle on its interactions. That means that trying to sell claims of secret insight into the system or special patented mastery over its mechanics, is behaviour antithetical to the environment we want to foster. Peddling a mythical guru status with all the associated tips and exploits and pro strats accomplishes nothing but making other players doubt their grasp of a fundamentally simple system, and encouraging/spreading a perception of hierarchical system mastery. Helping people out and giving advice is perfectly fine, especially when asked for, but we want to pre-empt the eventuality of combat system being misrepresented as rocket science to the detriment of the enjoyment of other players.

Long Memory: The way that MCM incorporates combat power divides between characters is intentionally within the realm of fighting games and ensemble comics, wherein characters of ostensibly vastly different capabilities come together in some roughly balanced whole where everyone is relevant to some degree. This absolutely means that it is possible for Krillin to defeat Cell/for Peter Quill to take down Thanos/etc. with pretty good luck, and this further means that fights between more evenly matched characters are going to be even less predictable. Nobody should win all their fights all the time. Nobody should lose fights to the same person over and over forever.
This is something that should be understood and internalized by players as a culture, because it indicates how MCM is set up to avoid a calcified pecking order of combat power. No matter the character, who won or lost a fight is a fact that is ultimately transient. It is meaningful in the short term, but it confronts the reality that the loser still has the same solid shot of being the winner the next time they meet. There is a known behaviour when it comes to combat RP in many places, for players to hold these things in "long memory", milking a victory or rubbing a loss in someone's face for months or years. We discourage this kind of thing not only on the grounds of it annoying people and making ordinary fights carry enormous social pressure, but also because it will quite frankly bite you in the ass when they take another swing at you and get a couple of good rolls. Once a fight is a little ways in the past, it should stay in the past. Defining a reputation by a couple of cherry picked wins or losses is poor interaction that discourages people from trying their hand, makes people feel like they're gambling their career on every casual clash, and also just doesn't really work with our narrowly banded power scale.

Commands Glossary

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