Evolving Battles (or tabletop for Skype)

Evolving Battles(Or Tabletop for Skype in a sense): An Evolving battle is a form of combat in which the players use a mixed of Skill rolls, Utility talents and Combat talents. (Grapple rules can even be thrown in there (*cough* Shameless promotion of Cuteless *cough*))

There are three main types of Evolving Battles.

Movement Focused.
Terrain focused.
Challenge focused.

A movement Focused battle would be Group A chasing down Opponent A and B down a street while throwing attacks at each other. These battles are usually more flowy, often times with things either getting in the way of the players(NPCs trying to sell them stuff, over turned carts, flying magical ants) as well as the enemy combatants running for there lives.

A terrain focused battle would be all combatants slowly freezing to death or being buffeted by a strong sandstorm.. this is more self explanatory but could also include things like drowning fights or a cave that's about to collapse.

Challenge focused is combat that involves players solving puzzles such as, ok I need to defeat this creature and to do that I need to attack him while also kicking down this pillar at exactly the same time.

HP is another important factor in any of these challenge types as obviously a pony that has been burned, stabbed and hugged all at once is going to be weaker and slightly more creeped out then the pony who first enters the battlefield, thus giving penalties (Up to at least five though maybe more) to any of the skill checks tried. (But the question is how would this work with Heal skill vs Healing combat talents.)

shameless promotion:

What's this Cuteless thing you keep referring to? It helps when shamelessly self-promoting to include a shameless link too.

Links just for you Princess Stairc (Joking please don't kill me. Cuteless is my skype name if that clears that up )

https://ponytales.forumotion.com/t500-grapple-rules-for-pony-tales

This doesn't sound like it fits the vaunted combat/SP split. But I don't like that split, so please continue.

I can't believe I'm the one saying this, but this idea might be overcomplicated... Notably, there is nothing preventing 'chase down the foe' type battles, and I've actually sent one your way before. Timed battles also are perfectly viable. 'Puzzle battles' might be slightly more difficult to implements, but things as they stand DO still allow for the use of utility talents (I personally allow use of the free action to mess with the field, if your after those sorts of puzzle bosses, a simple suggestion to try it - as well as making sure the DM remembers to describe the playing field - should be sufficient...)

I guess what I'm after here is that, while I can appreciate the spirit of the goal, I'm not sure that its current absence is actually because of any part of the rules themselves... And trying to write up specific rules for more complicated fusion combat sounds like it would be extremely difficult to do particularly well.