Well, been a minute, but that’s just having a brain that sometimes likes to douse itself in various petrochemicals and then play with matches, so what better way to get back into the swing than to talk about the kinds of design questions which pop up when trying to put together a game built for combat which also dovetails with the existential panic I’ve been feeling as the weeks went by and no design got did: failure.
A lot of games have various flavors of fail-state, in Chorus, that’s going to be illustrated by first a single character’s Resolve (read: ability to keep fighting) being reduced to 0 or the Resolve of the entire party being similarly reduced. This is complicated because, frankly, I don’t know every possible way to run a game, but I do know one thing: it’s baked into the story that we’re telling that none of the player characters will be dying until they opt to make a spectacular sacrifice near the end of the game.
That’ll be the subject of another Design Principles entry later on. We’re not there yet.
So, then, with death off the table but the possibility of failure being one I want to keep on the menu, let’s shake off some rust and do that thing we do and ask some design questions.
This is mostly for this discussion, but I’m starting here in case I have a good thought while running through this all.
At the moment, I’m calling any given character falling below 0 Resolve merely “falling” or derivatives. We’ll capitalize it to “Falling” so it’s that little bit more obvious what we mean in this discussion. Hope that works, anyway.
At any rate, by keeping Fall as an alternative, no matter what it’s called by the players, we can avoid the d-word (”death”) in the rules when they’re more fully written; particularly since death is not a thing we’re going to do figuratively or by half-measures. Even if there is a possibility of some kind of supernatural intervention in an epilogue (the rules for which are for much later), I think it’s important that when you fall in battle, you’re understood to be unconscious or injured, because when you die, you’re done. Period. End of.
Much as we’re using Schism to stand in for the trauma of being a doer of industrial-scale violence, when we bring up death here, I want it to feel big enough that you have to consider the fact that no matter how noble or cool the speech from the last big boss monster you slew, they aren’t getting back up, just like your character won’t.
It’s a fiction-based thing and built around a lot of people engaging with the pretend world, but dangit, that sort of thing can matter and when your character does or doesn’t heroically sacrifice themselves for those they love, I want it to hit. When your friend is putting away their playbook for the last time, I want it to hit.
So that’s Falling. Simple, fits in with extant language, but can get a game-specific use that we can use for later.
So, the big thing: if the characters get to keep on being alive even after they drop at the hands of enemies who are motivated by presumably-noble things, why should they worry about it? There’s no XP in this game, there’s no individualized stats as such, and we’re not gonna just toss out that cool “Signature Weapon” mechanic (later) at the drop of a hat, are we?
No. Not gonna make people go on a quest for a whole new magic weapon. Can’t stop a Narrator from doing it, but that’s gonna be homebrewed. There’s gonna be a lot of questing for magic weapons at the start of the game.
Originally, I’d thought about just having a lot of penalties and stuff that would be layered on your character after the fact, another thought was to have some rolls to wake back up, another involved a lot of kinda-complex systems for characters protecting their now-unconscious friend that might go into some kinda optional-rules errata later on, but for all this is a short game, there are reasons we aren’t going whole-hog on tons of penalties or rolls to wake, so let’s go through ‘em.
Rolls to Wake
This has the most in common with something like D&D 5e’s “death save” mechanic and isn’t something I’m against on a conceptual level (the drama of trying to will yourself back to your feet is not lost on me) and is another thing I might put into some kinda optional rules assortment after the main text of the game is written, BUT for all it creates something for the Fallen to do (thus keeping engagement up), I’m against it because for all I do find that drama exciting, the drama for the rest of the table is lost because there’s definitely something to the gutpunch of going down and then watching the rest of the party struggle without whatever it was your character brought to the proceedings.
Much as it could make for some good drama, the finality (even if it’s not all that final) of it all with Falling in battle is too good to undercut and keeps the tension up about whether to heal your friends, whether to advance or hold steady, etc. It affects the mindset and tactics people are gonna have going in and I like that.
Stacking Penalties
A bit more verisimilitude is brought in if we say that every time you fall in battle, you get a permanent penalty to your combat ability. And while this is a thing I’m definitely leaning toward on some level, there’s also a level where a player who’s not particularly tactical or just has a string of bad luck (sometimes, probability be damned, the heroes can’t roll a successful hit to save their lives) will enter a “death spiral” situation:
They’re already doing not-great but now there are penalties making them do even worse, which increases the odds of Falling in battle, which adds on more penalties, which increase the odds of Falling in battle, which adds more penalties, which [and so on and so forth]
So while there are going to be penalties, we have to figure a way to make them hit without effectively making one character a punching bag for the enemies.
Provisional Solution
While I try to figure out how best to make battle work on a practical level (as opposed to the current theoretical one), I think the current penalty structure will go something like this:
1st Fall - Injury - Permanent -1 to Combat rolls
Wanna make Falling in battle a dramatic thing in and of itself, so we’re gonna say the character gets injured in some way. It’s up to them, after the fact, to describe what the injury actually IS and why it’s gonna be sticking around, but still.
2nd Fall - Scar - +1+[ACT #] Schism
This time, the fallout from Falling isn’t so much physical as it is psychological, so we’re gonna say that the character gets a visible scar somewhere on their body and its presence is messing with them a bit. This is a mechanical thing which DOES have effects, but which is something that’s clearable through normal means.
3rd Fall - Disspirited - Shift down for the first round of combat
Not a huge thing but just something to reflect that combat is a more fraught thing for the character. It’s going to suck but they’ll get into the swing of things.
4th Fall and onward - Old Wounds - +5+[ACT #] Schism
After the 4th big drop, instead of an active penalty, it’s just more Schism, which is clearable, keeping death undesirable without doing a death spiral.
Better Provisional Solution
After talking with my partner, who his brilliant, about all of this, she pointed out that for all these are fine penalties and make Falling in battle something to be avoided and technically meets the criteria I’m after, it’s also the worst thing a game can be: boring.
Honestly, it’s more than boring, it encourages a deeply unimaginative and conservative style of play while not adding anything to the experience. Total Option A thinking. The suggestion became something like “Can’t you use the Schism for something here if it’s going to be a part of things? Like it’s calling to something? It’s a death spiral all its own (since you’re losing a party member and gaining an enemy) but couldn’t you do more with that?”
So, IF we’re keeping the thing where those who Fall can’t be easily brought back (as many other games in this genre do), THEN let’s do something with the core mechanics to make something unique.
It also plays off some stuff I’d been playing with in another, now-abandoned game (which I should put some polish on and put on my itch sometime, maybe?), which makes me a little annoyed I didn’t think of this myself ‘cuz it’s so much A Thing I Like.
Perils of getting all caught up in ‘realism’ and verisimilitude instead of letting yourself go wild. Also the peril of trying to design on your lonesome when other people who are interested in the subject can help you break out of your own narrow mindset.
Anyway, this prompt activated a memory of a bit in the prologue of NieR:Automata where one of Our Heroes, 9S, has been busted up REAL bad and left alone while his adventuring companion 2B goes to fight a big boss critter and has to hold off a bunch of low-level enemies while he gets a copy of 2B uploaded to base.
So while the numbers are still being hammered out, the basic idea goes like this:
On top of everything else, on a storytelling level, this mechanic makes it so a character’s final sacrifice in Act III, where they hold off a small army or what-have-you, can be read as them coming to terms with this inner darkness and using it to defend their friends instead of letting it be a danger to them. May well help bring some tears out if someone opts to manifest this as the character and their Shadow-Self working together.
And since this is all to do with a character’s own Schism, it also plays well into the narrative of the game because Act I makes Schism a lot easier to reduce, while Act II makes it harder, leading to it being a greater danger. There might well have to be times where the whole crew gets together to do something non-combative (possibly giving some bonuses to the enemies, even, because the enemy now has more opportunities to prepare for you) to reduce Schism because it’s even more actively dangerous now. Have to plan not just for the enemy, but for what happens if your allies fall in battle.
So, okay, a quick off-the-dome rattling of the Tiers of effects (which will, in turn, be based off your level of Schism) your characters will be fighting to prevent by rolling against their own... something. Defense+[Act #], probably, but we’ll see.
This emphasizes the need for clearing Schism and taking care of each other while adding a subtle supernatural something to the proceedings. I don’t see this as a flaw because sometimes you just gotta let there be weird, imaginative stuff happening. That’s for the Narrator to contextualize.
The thought of someone having to fight to hold back what is essentially their own personified psychological pain is extremely cool to me. It creates complications, but not colossal ones.
Will probably play around with creating incentives for the Inner Imp and Shadow Self creatures to be as effective as possible (even as they’re relatively easy to knock down) even as the damage they deal results in additional Schism.
But still, this is a GOOD FUCKING DIRECTION to go because it hits all the things I’m after.
It’s bound to happen at some table: for whatever reason, the party gets wiped out by a combination of bad rolls, obtuse Narrator choices (no shade, we’ve all been there), and the vagaries of player characters not managing to stifle their own darkness.
This one’s a LOT harder narratively because Our Heroes are viewed by the enemies as a bunch of roving serial murderers who are absolutely not taking prisoners. And, at the same time, they ARE the heroes of the game, so while there are a lot of options for this, this is usually a Narrator call, there’ll be stuff in the final book discussing the ways to make this work because, frankly, inspiration aside, this isn’t a video game. If the party fails, they don’t get to just start over again and have it be the same scenario.
So the basic pitch is that instead of starting over, failure creates some scenarios which can be bent by the Narrator toward whatever story framework the characters are dealing with. We can base a lot of these on the original individual Provisional Solution stuff from earlier (because I am loath to fully toss any idea if I think it can be decent) but change it so that they represent particular challenges the heroes have to overcome in order to get back to less-hostile territory and patch up before returning to their big, awful quest.
The hook here, which hopefully keeps some of the vibe up from the Falling mechanics, is that the final boss(es?) the party have to beat to get out of this situation will be influenced by the group’s combined Schism, growing more powerful or weird based on the baggage the party’s carrying with them.
Still a work in concept, but the basic outlines look as follows, with new rules popping up for the Tier of the forces to overcome being written later when the Schism numbers are hammered out a bit better. And, as an upside, the Schism the characters got in the last battle won’t have had a chance to be ameliorated because they’re in enemy territory.
1) Left for Dead Behind Enemy Lines
The Party has been assumed to be dead by the enemy forces. They have a chance to patch themselves up enough that they have their full Resolve (less some arbitrary number, perhaps? 10*[Act #]?) and do some sneaking through the fog (which would limit their knowledge of what’s in the next zone) to get back home.
2) Imprisoned!
For their many crimes, the enemy military has imprisoned The Party and now they have to fight their way out through a small horde of enemy military not only to escape, but also to get back their Signature Weapons!
3) Duel With the Dead
On some spiritual plane, The Party must find one another on a fog-covered battlefield and do battle against the ghosts of those they have killed or they will not be allowed to awaken! Those who died with hatred for The Party will have their revenge before they pass on and pray mightily for an opportunity to send their killers straight to Hell!
4) Here Come the New Challengers!
A group of townsfolk hear that their heroes have been captured by the enemy and are soon to be put to death! The campaign takes a pause as everyone makes a new character to go save the old ones! And, depending, this may allow for people to pick new characters if they don’t like the one they had. Or, if they DO like the one they had, offer a way to swap to a different Playbook if they like playing this new one better.
Of course, the ideal is to just plain not have characters Fall in battle, much less the whole team. To this end, as mentioned offhand in Action Economy I, there are ways for every character to restore a little bit of Resolve (possibly more, depending on balancing concerns as we go forward), as well as a few (but not all) characters having the ability to heal others in various thematically-appropriate ways.
But, well, we can’t plan for eternal success; that’s no fun, to my thinking. Instead, we’re trying hard here to make failure interesting, which is as it should be. Failures add spice, add drama, add texture to a story, so while the big ones are things we always want to avoid, we can’t. Hence this whole entry.
But grappling with failure’s part of life, so we wanna be prepared for when it happens.