This was originally going to be a discussion of just the enemies but the combat and dice but before we can even approach that, we must first have the place where it’s going to happen.
Because where it happens is half the challenge.
So, before we get into this, let’s talk about the design issues I’m trying to address with what I hope is a more holistic approach to TTRPG combat:
So, with those goals in mind, he’s what I’ve figured out so far.
So, as discussed in “Combat Math” earlier and elaborated upon a little in “Bullseye!”, we’ve already got combat that’s meant to feel different overall, hopefully maintaining an identity while still making sufficient intuitive sense for people who don’t know the game or even TTRPGs in general.
That’s for later, probably, but I still think the basics work.
Not going to go into all the abilities the different playbooks have on them, but of course that’s where a lot of the stuff is gonna shine, but as it is I’m at least satisfied enough with the basic mechanics that I don’t feel like they need a massive overhaul because they exist mostly in service of everything else here.
So, when I say “tactics lite”, what am I trying to say?
Mostly I’m talking about the kind of dense set of mechanics in games like Pathfinder and D&D where there’s assumed to be a big old grid which is roughly analogous to a comprehensible and concrete space and things like placement relative to an attack or the way you move into our out of combat with any given enemy are all significant. The question for things like “can I aim this blast such that I don’t catch my friend in the blast?” implies a certain amount of tactical rigor.
I’m sure people who play Real Actual Wargames would roll their eyes that the relatively simplified tactical concerns introduced by those two popular heroic fantasy games could be described as containing tactical rigor, but for the purposes of this design, that’s what we’re doing.
Now, what would a game with few or no tactics look like?
As ever, PbtA (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, etc.) or FATE games come to mind because they’re meant to be a lot more “theater of the mind”, more fiction-forward, more interested in everyone getting to describe what happens than mapping it out on the board. In those games, you don’t really risk hurting your friends if you’re not careful because the possibility only exists if you fuck up and even then, it’s a whole other thing. I imagine White Wolf/Onyx Path’s storytelling games would also fit into this, but I haven’t really played one in a while and don’t remember what kinds of battleboard tactics we got up to when we played them.
So, as this game really is an attempt to square the circle of these two styles of game, finding a place between mechanical and fiction-forward combat, what do I mean when I say “tactics lite”?
In this case, it means that there should still be an option for some kind of physical or artistic representation of a battlefield but rather than count it down by squares, we have one area that’s where the players start the combat and then draw out other areas for them to fight in which represent different ‘sections’ of a battlefield.
Sure, it’s a bit more loosey-goosey but it means that we can have combat moves which affect multiple distinct or semi-distinct combat areas (hereafter called “zones” because “zone” is honestly a really fun word even as it’s no more or less descriptive than ‘area’ or ‘block’ or whatever else I might call them) or have abilities which cause enemies or allies to move into or out of certain zones without having to get into any ‘real’ increments.
Ideally, a battlefield would be broken up into basically-evenly-sized zones, but for things like a fight inside of a castle, that might not work in the same way but even that can be explained as representing the fact that big beams of energy might be stopped inside castle walls or what-have-you.
So instead of measuring things in 30/60/120 foot ranges (as is common in D&D5e), we can instead measure things in the number of zones it can cross: can you do a line-of-sight teleportation? That’s probably about 3 zones and as long as you don’t cross any extras along the way, that’s probably fine.
This is the other side of “tactics” vs. “tactics lite”: a tactical game will care deeply about that specificity, but this one is about getting some of that flavor without getting too into the weeds. It’s about empowering the players and the Narrator to go a little above and beyond because that feels good and makes them feel clever. Besides, all of these characters are GOING to die, anyway, so let ‘em have some fun while they're still here.
So when I talk about making these things meaningful, what do I mean?
I mean, ideally, that we can put things into the game that will allow a PC to alter the weather or give the party a heads-up about the weather in the coming days and allow them to plan accordingly and have that confer an actual advantage, either because they’re able to plan for it or because they can disrupt other people's plans.
This will not just encourage but necessitate the kind of interest in the kind of game I’d want to run, where the players are encouraged to be curious. Curiosity for its own sake is great, but how many times have you been curious about the fight to come or about what some weird old sage at the edge of town is raving about and had it come to exactly nothing? Being able to have an advantage on the battlefield is one hell of a reward for it (more about rewards, aka explorations, later on).
But to move out of weather effects, we can also have effects for different kinds of terrain. For example, imagine towering peaks crisscrossed with bridges, where no matter what there’s going to be some more caution being shown in just getting around (even as we have to go a bit more imaginative about it). Think about that and think about the difference between fighting in an open field vs. a forest vs. a cave vs. a building. By making different kinds of things modular (and therefore easy to combine for specific effects like a castle sinking into a swamp or a burning airship), we can section off different kinds of terrain zones and make the battlefield interesting in and of itself.
And while it does increase certain kinds of overhead, it’s something ideally easy to make notes of or just plain MARK on a map. “Okay, but if you go into the heart of the whirlwind, you have to roll above a 9 to get out; think you can?”, “You need to use your action to get into the locked building, it’s not just your movement”, etc. Again, it makes these things mechanically meaningful and creates space for interesting battlefield decisions without adding a ton (I hope) of complication.
It also means that, as needed, we can add new terrain effects as the battle changes character, for instance if someone’s summoned up a big ol’ fuck-off lake of lava or if you’ve just killed a few dozen people in a zone and it’s getting hard to run around because you keep slipping on all the corpses you’ve piled up.
Which brings us to:
So here’s a thing and I don’t know how widespread it is, but whether it’s because it’s not engaging or because I have ADHD or some combination of the same, I hate running large-scale combat in 5e. This is a problem because I think large-scale combat is fucking sick to do as a PC. All the opportunities to use reactions, the big ‘hell yeah’ of tossing a fireball or wading into a sea of low-level enemies with a big fuck-off sword and just ending one or two enemies before I have to grit my teeth and stand in the middle of the horde, dodging out of the way or turtling up and hoping none of them can make it past my character’s armor. Does make me long for Great Cleave in 3.5 where if you dropped something, you could take a step and carve into something else and if you dropped them, you could take another and another and another.
But waiting for the five, ten, fifteen, thirty, however many baddies to each have their roll is a pain in the ass, particularly when most of them are going to have broadly similar or even identical attacks and then the rock-star villains, the ones who are fun and have abilities? They don’t get lost per se, but they lose some of their distinctiveness. It sounds cool to have a general rock up with a small army which they send against you, but in practice? Rather less so.
I’ve often adapted a version of “the bar fight”, a swarm monster representing, well, a roving bar fight or a chunk of monsters. My twist was that their attack or damage dice dropped as the number of enemies depleted or sometimes there was a saving throw the PCs would have to make to shrug off or avoid the damage altogether. And while it’s not exactly as good as a visible bar fight or a big mob of goblins on the board, it gets a lot of the flavor out there.
And that’s where I’m starting with your basic enemies.
I say ‘basic’ because my big solution here is to break enemies down by ‘tiers’ which roughly correspond to their defense and number of abilities. Might go deeper into them later but for now, we’re looking at the Tier 1/basic enemies.
The basic enemies, usually referred to as “The Mob” represent your average, nonheroic members of any given population. That might be your perfectly normal, non-dire, non-rabid wolves or the average townspeople in front of the Evil Overlord’s castle who will give their lives for their Evil Overlord for one reason or another.
So, how they work is that they have a low defense and a really low damage die (probably 1d6 with a bonus depending on where in the story we are and whatever home court advantage they might have). On their turn(s? Probably just the one, but...), we make a combat roll on each PC and do the damage accordingly. This is basically the attempts of your average people when they’re up against Big Damn Heroes.
“I don’t think I’m going to enjoy carving a swath through a town of just, like, people, tho”.
Probably should have thought of that before you decided to embark upon a mission of violence that would put you in conflict with the creatures guarding all these mystic gewgaws you adventurers are always going after.
Each zone, then, would have a ‘health’ stat on top of whatever environmental effects which describes how many hit points worth of The Mob remains. When it’s at a certain point, we mark the ground as having the “corpse piles” effect on there because when you’re cutting a swath, you make a fucking mess. Why would you do this? Well, because otherwise you’re not going to have the damage you need to do your big, impressive attacks on the higher-tier enemies.
“That’s a terrible reason to do a bunch of murders!”
I know and agree. That’s rather the point of a lot of this: a game which necessitates on narrative and mechanical levels, a certain critical look at how we imagine heroic fantasy in the TTRPG space.
I’m not even in the“D&D is irredeemably bad” category (even as I am absolutely sympathetic to a lot of the discourse surrounding a lot of the bigoted assumptions built into the games), but if we’re gonna do these things, I wanna make a place to continue playing while having that interesting and necessary conversation.
As a brief aside, there will probably eventually be some kind of ‘morale’ system in place for The Mob as watching hundreds of people get slaughtered by some roving maniacs with magic weapons will probably affect things in some way, but I’m just not there yet. Still hammering out base principles.
Higher-tier enemies have their own complications, of course, but now we can sprinkle some of them around the battlefield, knowing that each one will be contrasted against a horde which may as well be as nameless as they are faceless.
Again, each tier of enemy is defined by the increasing number of combat abilities they can have, many of which will be inspired by designer Matt Colville’s “Action-Oriented Monsters” idea, which is the sort of thing I’d been homebrewing into monsters for my home game for a while but Colville’s codification of it as a design philosophy really brought home for me how cool it could make all kinds of encounters, whether contrasted with a mob who exist to force characters to use healing as much as they allow characters to power up their abilities (again, by doing violence).
There are, at present, 5 tiers:
The minutiae of the combat abilities and attributes (probably figure a better name later) isn’t for a description of design and they aren’t quite hammered out yet, so for the moment we’re going to just take as given that each one does something mechanically significant which will create certain difficulties for Our Heroes/the PCs.
The ones I want to talk about at the moment are the enemy Heroes because the “zone effects” are the sort of thing that feels most important with this and is a holdover from a period where things were a lot more “D&D but a little different” in the combat zone and it was played out on hex grids.
A thing I want to do with enemy Heroes is make it so they have the big “level boss” feel to them. They all have certain defeat conditions (not unlike the PCs) and can do things like send out attacks which affect whole zones or change the battlefield beneath the PCs’ feet (hence why I’m talking about The Battlefield as a whole thing). This is inspired by Dael Kingsmill's “Making Dragons Deadly” video because the idea of a boss being able to prepare a big fuck-off attack while also being clearly immune because certain conditions to defeat it have not yet been met (get a gem from a place, perform the Rite of Thundering, whatever) so characters have to find a way to prepare or find the area marked “ruins” and duck behind them so the dragon’s fire breath doesn’t cook them when the zone spends a turn as “on fire”.
In this way, by sort of summing everything up and making the battlefield itself a real mechanical part of the experience (and one which can be affected by the PCs: some of them will also have big old fuck-off super-moves not-unlike a dragon’s breath before the end) and having enemies which function as a part of the field as opposed to just people occasionally frustrated by difficult terrain or half-cover, I think I can make an interesting bunch of combat encounters which all have their own identity both in storytelling flavor but mechanically as well.
As an addendum to that point, it occurs to me that one of my favorite simple ideas I heard about from someone describing some of the Japanese Dark Souls TRPG was that sometimes a character or an enemy could just be “away” and on top of all the other things under discussion here, I really like the thought that sometimes the enemy Heroes would be somewhere off the map but also visible to the players as a kind of omen.
Maybe even introduce a countdown thing as one of their abilities, where if you don’t clear the rest of the field by the time the counter goes to 0, you have to fight this big, mechanically-complicated monster as well as The Mob as well as the other sundry warriors defending this place.