So, today let’s talk about a thing that can only really apply to games that focus heavy on doing a combat: action economies!
Taken out of gamer language, it’s basically about how much any one player can do for their turn in combat in relation to each other player (including the one running your enemies). It’s part of why, to go to one of the most frequently-cited (and most popular) TTRPGs as an example, Dungeons and Dragons’ 5th edition gets complaints by some people about how long combats can take.
Why does it take so long?
Because every creature on the board gets to roll for an action, roll to resolve the action, roll for their bonus action, roll to resolve the bonus action, roll for a reaction, roll to resolve the reaction. And if there’s enough things on the board, that can take a little. It’ll take even longer if the person controlling that character doesn’t know the effect they’re doing really well or if the battlefield changes enough between when they decided to take an action and when they’re called upon to do it and they realize they have to pick something else to do.
So, we’ve already talked a little when discussing dice math about how Chorusis looking to address this (e.g., making the roll and the resolution the same thing), but we’re going to go through and try to talk through how Chorusis going to try and keep the fighting that is its lamentable centerpiece as interesting as possible without making every fight take an undue amount of time.
Goal-setting time, then.
So with the caveat that Chorusis a game that is about combat in a way that lots of fiction-forward and more explicitly “storytelling” games are not, let’s get into the turn-by-turn systems of violence.
Probably the most controversial of all the design decisions in Chorus, I have opted to do away with the much-beloved initiative system.
For those not in the know, an “initiative” system is how the players determine who goes when. Usually, this is done by rolling a die and adding some kind of modifier. This randomness is not a bad thing, of course! It simulates the fact that each combat is its own creature, unique in substance and flow.
And while that should ideally remain the case for Chorus, I’ve opted to go a different route by simply assigning a space in the turn order to different characters. I’ll have to adjust it later, but at the moment, it’s between 1 and 20, with The Hero being the first person to act and the Enemy Hero being the last. The player characters are placed on odd numbers throughout the array from 1 to 19 and the enemies are on the evens from 2-20 and the remaining odd numbers (there are only 8 playbooks, after all).
I will likely change this a little later on because nothing else functions on a base-20 and while it leaves space to work with, I’m a real sucker for theming.
The purpose of the 20, however, is because I’m assuming most people playing a game like this will have at least one twenty-sided die or access to a tool allowing them to generate a random number between 1 and 20, meaning that‘initiative’ rolls can take place by seeing where in the order the battle starts.
The purpose of this system is twofold: first, it works to entrench the‘roles’ of the characters: The Hero dives in face-first while The Killer hangs back to find their target. And while I can very much understand why this might not sound great for everyone (it’s a work in progress), I justify it by saying it’s a thing that could happen anyway in a game with, like, attribute stats and junk.
This of course, leads to the second thing it allows for, though: because the flow of combat is now at least a little more predictable, there’s now space for characters to find synergistic tactics that can keep on working. It is, after all, a relatively short game so why not let people cheese their way through a series of rough situations?
We’ll see how this all works in practice as opposed to theory, but I just like the idea that when it’s time to cut to the fight, everyone can start thinking about their own stuff and the simple if/then calculations depending on where different enemies fall into the order.
There are, for instance, a number of options for different kinds of enemy and to further limit the amount of overhead, the game is also written such that even if there is space in the initiative order for different tiers of enemies, the more complicated ones are written to only allow one on the battlefield at a time.
So as the complexity of the enemy goes up, their numbers go down.
Not a perfect answer to making it easier to get started, but we’re reducing it by one step, making the process of determining who goes when a maximum 1 roll question.
So, here’s where we get into the meat of things and why I wanted to simplify the individual rolls as much as possible, because each player character’s turn (as opposed to the non-player characters, who work differently) is full of options which will have some kind of effect on them as part of their turn in combat and, indeed, the span between making the choice and making their next one.
It’s been sort-of laid out when discussing how we’re going to build The Hero’s playbook, but I’m going to do so properly here: there are four kinds of option each character has. Three on their turn, one for whenever. Each one should(I can’t promise doesbut is at least intended to) have a notable effect.
Those moves are:
So, how do we keep these from being boring?
The first thing is what we mentioned when talking about building The Hero: keep the range of unique abilities simple. There’s no question about which weapon, which of thirty spells to use, it’s just those twelve things with a goodly portion of them being divvied up between other things.
And even the basic, no-frills attack matters here because if you want to build up the damage (which, yes, hurts you as per the Schism mechanic), you need to do some regular attacking. So everything has a use and that use builds toward having a moment of cathartic, explosive violence. Even the boring, basic hit gives you something.
But what if you roll bad and miss?
The utility ability comes in. These do a variety of things but the two things they’re meant to do are:
Then comes movement (hypothetically; I don’t plan on locking down the order in which skills are used because that’s not much fun to me), which can provide bonuses to attack next turn, a little extra defense, or even healing if a player just wants their character to stay put for a round.
All of these mean that there’s no move your character can make that’s not in some way working the character toward their goals, even if that goal is just“stay alive for one more round”.
“That’s a lot of extra bonuses and junk to keep track of.”
“Yes. But also not really because it’s just little things after whatever bonuses you’ll already have added up on the sheet.”
More importantly, though, it means the players have at least a fraction of the bookkeeping the Narrator’s going through, which brings us to:
While I appreciate that the term“non-player characters” is usually meant for friendly noncombatants, in this instance I’m using it for the enemies in combat to highlight one of the biggest timesinks in D&D5e (to my thinking): enemy management.
Now, as we discussed in The Battlefield before, we’re working a bit more with behind-the-scenes stuff when it comes to encounter design to hopefully make the Narrator’s experience easier while also providing an interesting series of challenges to the players. But if we were to run the enemies, heinous though they must appear, with the same vigor as we do our protagonists, every battle would be a slog and, not to put too fine a point on it, rob the protagonists of their limelight for a while while we wait for our antagonists to cycle through all their myriad bonuses and abilities the same way the players will.
No, instead the villains of this awful little farce (affectionate) are streamlined. The Mob roll their weak attacks at the start of each player’s turn and then we run down the count of the different tiers. Each one can move and do one thing and that’s it. If they miss, no problem: they’ve got numbers on their side.
Even when there’s only one Tier II fighter and The Mob, there’s still a clutch of enemies in every area who will be whittling the players down.
The enemies get to have quick turns but their abilities are a little more vicious than those of the player characters and built to be a little more painful with bonuses which increase as the story progresses. Not quite in step with Our Heroes, but big enough that they can generally keep pace.
Because, end of the day, the Main Event is always going to be The Hero Tier enemies, which will require a bit more thinking on the player’s part, if only to scramble for cover while taking a shot at the mystic gems creating the shield around the wizard or scurry around to hit the lumbering armored titan from behind.
By creating enemies with fewer options but who have a narrow range in which they can act, we hopefully create opportunities for engaging combat without having to make every turn take minutes while the Narrator runs down the initiative list.
There’s meant to be some complexity with the higher-tier enemies as we start giving them reactive or passive abilities, things to add to them to make them more interesting, like they HAVE to be attacked from a different zone (or cannot be targeted from afar) or my version of damage resistance, which takes the form of actually subtracting the enemy’s Defense value from the damage they take. Not adding any more numbers, but finding more interesting ways to use the ones we’ve got.
There’s a lot of different kinds of tweaks necessary for the enemies, but we’re just at the brass-tacks part of things so... well, we’ll see about building enemies once we have a few more ideas about how that’s going to work.
None of these are, of course, perfect solutions. There are as many forms of ideal TTRPG combat as there are players so it’s hard to try and design for all of them. That said, something where the players can feel like they’re set against some powerful, dangerous, and efficient enemies who will make them feel challenged without stealing the spotlight or overstay their welcome by having us do roll after roll after roll to see what little sections of health the goblin archers are nibbling off their health.
Of course, no plan survives contact with reality but this is how we’re proceeding as we try to make a working alpha build which can then be playtested and mended to reflect what we learn there.