Simplify

Hey folks! Matt C. here with a big update. Proper game design nonsense, this post is.

We ran a couple of playtests, one in person three weeks ago and one just this last Friday and a LOT changed between them. A couple of seemingly-unrelated problems turned out to be related and I think we have good solutions for them that we tested on Friday. It went ok. 😀 So let’s talk about these changes and why we’re excited.

Curve of Bells

Biggest change, and one that has far reaching implications, is; we’ve ditched dice with funky symbols on them in favor of…just 2d6. Normal dice. Regular D6s. We’ll see how long this lasts, but so far it’s working well, though only one test so who knows?

Our old die system counted successes (🗡️) with many facings having multiple successes on them. (🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️). We did this because we wanted outcomes to be A: random but B: less wildly unpredictable than a d20 system where even the lowly D8, classic damage die, has one result (8) that’s eight times greater than another result (1) even though both those results are equally likely.

That is annoying and makes RPGs very swingy, and then you need more HP and other mechanics to tamp down on this crazy swinginess and I believe this is a major contributor to what we call Slog.

Previously in our game you rolled one die when you were performing an action (The Action Die!) and if you were proficient with whatever stat you were using, you also rolled The Proficiency Die. These dice had successes on them, just in different distributions. Originally these dice were a d8 and a d6, and then a d12 & a d6 I think? And then they were each a d12 just with different results on them.

Every time we tested, James would tweak the values to dial in the right experience until eventually, even though the Action die and Proficiency die had different ranges of results, it was looking like a pretty classic bell curve. Also! You almost always rolled both the Action and Proficiency die!

At this point it became obvious to James that we could just use 2d6, normal numbers on them, same dice you have at home. Ditch the idea of an action die and a proficiency die. Long ago I had said “If we can do all the things we want with the regular dice people already have? That would be good.”

But the focus was on “making the best game we can” and if that meant dice with weird symbols on them (🗡️) so be it! But now it seemed like we were heading to 2D6 anyway. 2D6 is a very popular solution in RPG design, maybe the second most popular after the d20/percentile dice (Champions, which I played for many years, is 3D6 I believe) so it’s not like this was some kind of revelation, it just became obvious we could get where we wanted to do with this well-worn solution.

So! 2D6 it is for now! And you crit on an 11 or 12. Simple. This is what we tested Friday and it felt really good to me. You’re still not rolling to hit, just generating damage, armor still absorbs, so the bones are the same, but shit got a LOT easier to explain and everyone was able to use their own die roller. I had Fantasy Grounds running in the background and it took about 10 seconds to make some macros for rolling.

We still have Banes and Boons, but these are D3s right now. Just a d6 divided by 2, but you can buy actual D3 dice which are just six-siders numbered 1-3 twice, and anyone can roll a d6 and divide by two. And we’re toying with the idea of swapping them for d4s? Dividing By Two isn’t hard but it is another step and not everyone is gonna have actual d3s around. If we can do it with regular dice….

However! Going with Normal Regular Dice meant we were losing something else as well….

⚡

Surges, aka the lightning bolt symbol (⚡). This was a big part of the design! They gave us lots of cool ways for characters to do bonus things on their turn, but as soon as we added Stamina (a shield-bar type mechanic where your character has Stamina and Health and when you take damage it comes from Stamina first, which unlike health auto-refreshes at the end of the encounter, and which you can spend to take an extra maneuver on your turn) it started to feel like A Bit Much.

It meant we had your Class Resource, which we still like, Stamina, and Surges. Three different resource economies! Who thought THAT was a good idea?!

Well, we did, but we were pretty suspicious that all of these would survive and, indeed, we think Surges just fell by the wayside.

Instead what we want to do is give players more things to spend their class resource on! That’s a big part of testing right now. Making sure all classes are generating A: a lot of their class resource B: in different interesting ways that reflect the fantasy of that class. We feel pretty optimistic about this.

But once we ditched the idea of using our own custom symbols on the dice, that meant trying a game without Surges and that was this last Friday and we didn’t miss them even a little. The 2d6 system was just more streamlined, straightforward, easy to teach to new players (we had our head Moderator, Lord Durok in this playtest for the first time and he seemed to grok everything almost immediately) and fun. It meant we could stop thinking about the dice. Shit just worked!

It does mean we yearn for more cool things to use our Class Resource on? But we already got a few of those and things seem to be trending in the right direction. It’s possible we might bring Surges back? But I can only see that happening right now if we decide each class having its own unique resource to manage is a pain, and they would be better replaced with some Universal Resource like Surges, but right now I don’t see that happening. But! The future is uncertain!

Who’s Turn Is It??

We also overhauled how counter-attacking worked. We did this for one reason, but it had the added benefit of making it easier to track whose turn it is. In case this is your first RPG Dev post, or if it’s just been a while and you’ve forgotten, our game currently does not use classical Individual Initiative where everyone rolls and combat proceeds in order from highest roll to lowest.

Instead each side rolls a d6 and whichever side wins gets to choose a PC or a Group of enemies to act, from among those characters who have not already acted this turn.

That last phrase, that rider: “from among those characters who have not already acted this turn” caused some problems with some players. It was occasionally difficult to remember who had acted.

Well, we thought that was a UI problem. If you just had like a coin you flipped to indicate that you’d gone? Like the wooden dowel at a Brazilian Barbecue place, that would help. And it wasn't a huge problem, not everyone was losing track of this all the time.

However! Things got pretty weird once counterattacking and critical hits entered the discussion.

Countering and Static Damage

As a refresher: armor in our game reduces incoming damage. That’s working great and we like it.

And! If you block all incoming damage from a melee attack, you get to counterattack! This is just a normal attack but, in the previous design, it still meant you were rolling dice. And you could crit on a counterattack, and critting in our game means you get an extra action. And we like that!

You can see the problem though, right? Counterattacking meant you were rolling dice when it was not your turn. And then, you could crit on a counterattack and act AGAIN and at this point everyone at the table was losing the plot. We all think it’s the Tactician’s turn, because they just went twice and did a ton of cool stuff, but actually it was the goblin’s turn and the tactician was only acting because they counterattacked and then critted.

Now obviously we could add more riders, more conditional statements. “Critting means you get to take an extra action unless you critted on a counterattack which does nothing.” But in general fewer riders like this is better.

There was another problem though. I was working on Weapon Design and I needed an ability that balanced light weapons against heavy weapons. We want people to be able to wield Just Daggers and have that option be about as useful as a Greatsword or whatever.

We’ll do another post soon going into more detail about the current Weapon Design, but I liked the idea of a property for light weapons called Fast. A fast weapon is so light and easy to attack with, that any time someone attacks you in melee? You get to attack them first. That’s what makes the weapon fast: I get to attack you before you attack me.

Now, I never imagined this as being a literal attack roll, that would slow things down way too much. I just imagined it as a quick stab. 1 point of damage maybe. Something you could improve as you levelled up, or with a magic item. But always a static amount, no die roll.

Well, how does that work with Armor? If Armor reduces incoming damage, and reducing incoming damage completely to 0 lets you counterattack, wouldn’t fast weapons just get absorbed by armor and trigger counterattacks?

And what about DOTs like On Fire or Poisoned? Damage Over Time? How does that work? We had something called Piercing Damage that bypassed armor, but I really didn’t want ALL these different effects to be piercing. That made me very suspicious: we invent piercing damage to make some attacks cooler and now we’re using it everywhere!

But I was suspicious of the wrong thing! I was suspicious of “using it everywhere” when I should have been suspicious of the idea of piercing damage!

James cracked it. I wrote all this down and he came back and said “Actually the problem is: what counts as an attack. The act of attacking should require a die roll, and it is this roll that armor reduces. Static damage, like Fast weapons or On Fire, that’s not a die roll, so it’s not an attack. It’s just auto-damage. And we just say that all auto-damage ignores armor.”

That was brilliant and it solved this whole other problem of Who’s Turn Is It? Because now you don’t counter attack you just counter. There’s no die roll. So A: it can’t crit, so no extra action, and B: no die roll. Just static damage on a counter and no one forgets whose turn it is!

We tried this out and it worked great. It didn’t just work great, it felt good. Countering is less spectacular than Counterattacking but it’s also way more straightforward. It achieves the same effect, but with much less interruption of flow. Countering as static damage, and static damage ignoring armor, felt like a real step forward.

It also meant we had lots of ideas of how different classes could have different counters and even the same class might have different counters you pick, and as you level up you get more! We’ll see if we implement this idea, we’re not starved for ideas here and this might be Too Many, but it’s exciting to see the design get simpler and more robust all at the same time.

Gird Your Loins!

The phrase is just a meme, a funny comment someone made, but it stuck because it made us laugh. We’ll come up with some more mundane term for this I’m sure. But one other thing James came up with that helps everyone keep track of where we are in the turn order was giving every class a Resource Generation phase that happens at the beginning of the round. Not individual player turns.

We basically stole this from the Conduit who was rolling the Cosmic Die (since cut, but who knows?) at the beginning of their turn to generate Virtue or Wrath. Well, that was working really well. The Conduit was the only class that actually had enough resources to do cool stuff all the time and actually plan and strategize off their resource generation.

The other classes were just generating their class resource too slowly. So we decided all classes generate some resources, but at the beginning of the round not the beginning of each player’s turn.

So now there’s this clear moment where The Round Begins. It’s that moment where we all get our class resource! And of course we have other ways for each class to generate their resource. Like the Shadow gains Insight anytime they see someone crit or counter, representing the idea that they’re watching their enemies and allies and learning how they fight. But that’s in addition to the resources they get at the beginning of the round.

We immediately started saying “GIRD YOUR LOINS!” Or LGT, Loin Girding Time. That’s a bit more irreverent than I think this game needs, but hey I still like calling the Director’s resource Goblin Points regardless of what enemy they’re running so what do I know?

So You Just Chuck All That Out?

Ah, yeah! Yeah that’s game dev! You start by defining the scope of the problem. Then you throw in every fun idea you think might support that idea, then you start designing, playing, and seeing which parts work with which.

You know, from the outset “not all these ideas will survive,” and maybe you suspect which ones won’t make it across the finish line based on your previous dev experience, but you never know! Eventually the real design starts to emerge from the fog and it becomes clear which parts you need to serve that design, and which are getting in the way.

Sure we throw stuff out, but nothing is wasted. There will be more projects, more games (we hope!) and we’ll have this locker stuffed with old cool ideas we ended up not needing.

Much Simpler, More Fun

That’s it folks! A lot changed! We have what I consider to be good and robust rules for how static damage interacts with armor, and that affects countering, and that solved the Whose Turn Is It Problem, and we don’t use Surges anymore, and we get more resources now and have more things to do with them and we don’t have Funky Dice anymore, just 2d6+/-1d3.

We tested all this and everything went really smoothly. There’s still tons more work to do, like making sure enemies are doing cool stuff that changes the battle and gives the Director lots of fun options, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

There may be things we're throwing out that you were really excited by. Well, we were excited too! But our goal isn't to invent new mechanics just for the sake of doing so, the best rules just work, and get out of the way so we can play and tell stories. And this current iteration of the rules seems to be pointing in that direction.

Next update, I think it’s time to explain how weapons work, that’ll be pretty short. See you soon!