As noted last time, it’s been a while since a lot of the best, most interesting design stuff happened and, well, life sometimes gets away from you. I’d want that to not be the case, but life and brain chemistry have their own ideas, don’t they?
So, a quick housekeeping before getting to the meat of the matter:
Mostly that I’ve branched out my “pay what you want” offerings on my itch.io page to now include a small game using the Powered by the Apocalypse system that I hammered out in a week as part of 2023’s Goblin Week. It’s cheekily entitled Untitled PbtA Goblin Game. It was going to be Goblins! Go! Go! Go! but I like a titled that involves the word “untitled”. It’s not the most elegant nor polished thing, but it’s pretty good for managing it in seven days from concept to execution with a few extra hours after the fact to fix a few bits I’d missed. If you’re interested, give it a shot! “Pay What You Want” includes “$0″, after all.
Now, housekeeping taken care of, on to the real purpose of this post:
In a previous post, I talked about a mechanic called “Bullseye!” as a kind of substitute for a critical hit. The gist was “we don’t have a natural 20, so let’s find a way to make something close”. But after trying to reorganize CHORUS’ working draft, I realized it was one of the problems I was having. I can explain why I think it works, insist that it makes sense, hammer the rest of the game around it but at the end of the day, I try to imagine it as part of combat and it’s not fun.
So, what to do?
Well, as always it’s about breaking things down into questions that can be answered.
The first one is a big one:
Normally, I’d put all the other questions that spin out from that one up front, but I want to focus on it for a bit.
Why do I want them?
The first answer is that they’re a part of the tradition I like. I LIKE seeing a big number on the die and that leading to excitement and anticipation because OH WOW NUMBER BIG. It’s not just that the number’s big, it’s also that it means the player and/or their character gets to be the star of this collaborative game for a second. Something cool happens narratively and mechanically (“your blade becomes a swirling cloud of silver arcs in the air, shredding the demon’s armor, doing 98 points of damage!”). There’s a reason that, last I heard, a critical success system is being considered for the next edition of Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast’s TSR’s Dee en Dee, after all, and why Pathfinder’s second edition has (as far as I’ve heard) folded in that concept for various reactive/saving rolls.
But, you know what? “It’s been this way as long as I’ve been here” is a garbage reason to do anything.
However, after thinking about it deeper, I found a second reason, and one that’s probably obvious, but not really one I’d thought about until I faceplanted in my attempt to make a critical success-like thing in my own game: it creates an interesting counterpart to missing. Roll low? Miss. Roll mid? Hit. Roll high? Hit real good. It’s more possibilities while still keeping things predictable. Otherwise it’s just hit/miss. And, sure, hit/miss/hit*2 isn’t much better, but it at least adds a third option to the possibility space and that makes a combat-based game a little wilder.
Which is a big reason why I can’t get rid of it entirely. CHORUS is trying to be “tactics lite” but that still means having some of the tactical combat stuff I like in, no matter how I might try to zoom out to make something simpler. Wholly removing the concept of “hit really hard” or “lucky strike” or, well, “bullseye!” would reduce the complexity, but in so doing, it would remove a lot of the drama that I find to be a lot of fun with a good tactical combat system. After all, if I’m going to say that part of how it all works is about adjusting the shape and number of dice to gain advantages, I can’t really say that I want to remove the randomness of the dice. There’s probably an entertaining game in a tactical combat sort of game without randomness, probably interesting ways to manage hits and misses, but that’s for later pondering.
And if I start pondering that, I won’t move on to the next question:
If we’re going to have something like a critical hit, what should it look like?
Let’s look at the “bullseye” thing. It’s decent, but one of the major problems with it is that it relies too much on what has gone before, on the version I kept with me from when I started playing things in the ‘90s. There’ve been 4 (soon 5) new editions of D&D since then, for pity’s sake! Trying to make something so close to it when I’m trying to do something in conversation with it is a lot of effort toward nothing much at all.
So, okay. Bullseye said “hit this number you won’t even know exactly and you get another turn”. And as far as bonuses go, that’s not bad. But the trigger for it is bad. It’s just bad. And more than bad, when I stopped and thought about it, the reward you got was extra damage. But it’s extra damage with extra steps: except maybe you don’t even get to do more damage because you could miss on your free extra turn! So instead, I just… backed up a little.
I want something that every player can be excited about during these combat stretches.
I want it to be something more than just “extra damage”.
I also want it to help build on the fantasy of the game: not the tragic part, the part where our doomed, tragic heroes become close friends bound together by common purpose.
I’m trying now to split up the “big numbers good” part of a critical success and the “extra turn” thing I was working with because, frankly, I think it’s cool.
The “extra turn” thing? That’s its own mechanic now. It’s becoming a new mechanic currently called “Openings”. It’s not always easy to make happen (or if it is, it requires someone giving up their Combat Action), but it means you give another character that you name at the time a chance to strike twice against a certain enemy. It’s a simple thing you always hear about in action movies of all kinds: “Your defenses are down”, “You’re wide open!”, “I can’t find an opening!”. And now, you can make Openings to other people; set them up so they can go twice. It’s up there with things like the ability to put yourself between your friends and the creatures threatening them as far as things I’ve always wanted to do in a combat-based game.
To make things more interesting (hopefully, anyway), every character will also have an ability they can get that will give them a special thing they alone can do when they exploit an Opening their friend’s given them. Maybe it’s extra damage, maybe it’s movement, maybe it’s moving the enemy; the form will be different for everyone, which I think is fun.
So that’s the “extra turn” part, how about the “big numbers good” part? How to make that do something interesting when, again, there’s three different ways to roll? And it’s even more complicated because every character’s Cursed Weapon and varied rewards throughout the game is going to be giving them steadily-increasing bonuses, so it’s also going to be harder to hit any specific target as the game goes on because the probability’s changing. I also don’t want to gave the reward be just “do more damage”. That’s a hat on a hat. “You rolled high, which means you do extra damage, and your reward is EXTRA extra damage”. It doesn’t sing for me and, more importantly, it doesn’t do what Openings does, which is give you an opportunity to express character on a tactical or mechanical level.
This thought became the new “Violence” mechanics.
The “Violence” roll represents each character’s most basic and reliable attack, the one that does the most damage, but doesn’t offer anything but damage. But then I remember an off-hand comment from one of Matt Colville’s videos (his channel appears in the ludography because he has a lot of good comments and observations) about having a friend who, in the 4th edition of D&D, never used any of his character’s cool abilities and would JUST swing his sword and things started falling into place: Violence is now the bread and butter attack BUT, when a certain numerical threshold is met or exceeded, it does something else as well.
So, the early and unplaytested thought is that, when using your most boring attack, it’s not always boring. Get a total of 12 or more between the dice and whatever bonuses the attack gains from the character’s Cursed Weapon, and activate your character’s special ability. This ties in with the Openings system in that it’s something special for everyone, but is actually a little more fun because nobody needs to do an upgrade for it. No “wait until level 3 to do the thing that makes your class cool”; you have something big and impressive that’s only yours and you get it the moment your character takes the field.
Importantly, that something is never “more damage”, which means more opportunities to have your character be defined by something active in addition to more passive things like the special ability they start with.
For instance, the Hero archetype, who’s better at stepping in front of their friends to keep them from getting hurt, gets the special Violence ability to make Openings for a character in their zone when the Hero rolls high. So now, there’s two mechanical aspects to the Hero before they even start leveling up: they take hits and make Openings. That’s easy to explain to someone and at the very least, it sounds fun.
I guess we’ll see.
Or maybe I’ll be back later to write an even longer thing about how silly an idea Openings and Violence 2.0 was.