Pulling It All Apart, Putting It Back Together

This might be the most Noodly Design post yet! Major, major revision to how things work in our nascent RPG and I want to write this up now while it’s all fresh in our minds.

This post is a summary of some VERY headache-inducing meetings we’ve had over the past few weeks as it became more obvious that something we thought was Basically Working and solved was NOT in fact solved, OR basically working. That's when the headache’s start. Literally sitting in design meetings AUDIBLY groaning and saying “ARGH why can’t anything be easy?!”

But before we get stuck in, I should point out: it’s impossible to recapture every thought, statement, argument we had getting here. This post is not a word-for-word repeat of the weeks of discussions we’ve had about all this and it should not be taken as such. There is a real limit to how much you can learn about game design, and our actual process, from reading these posts. Because there is a limit to how much I can capture in any post or livestream.

In other words, my ability to EXPLAIN these problems and our proposed solutions is not the same as the ACTUAL problems OR the work we’ve done trying to solve them. So be aware that there may be some “translation” errors in this post where I am unable to fully capture all the work we’ve done and thoughts we’ve had.

But we want to keep you up to date, we want you to see, as much as possible, the real actual process of wrestling with design and that is this. But remember, this is a map of our meetings and thoughts and work. And the map is not the territory.

Anyway! Big meeting today and you are getting an update written literally moments after the meeting ended! Big problems that we think we have solutions for. First problem!

Class Resources Out Of Combat

As you know, your class has some Resource (Fury, Insight, Ferocity, Clarity, Eloquence, Focus, Discipline, Coolant) that you manage over the course of a combat. It lets you do extraordinary, heroic things. Longer a battle goes, the more of this resource you have, and so the more epic the battle is. Battles get cooler the longer they go.

This is working. It is fun.

But what happens to your class resource out of combat? Like D&D, our game is about fighting monsters. But it is not ONLY about fighting monsters. The Talent has “Telekinesis” which is NOT an action you take in combat, it’s just a class feature. “You can lift and move things with your mind” is what it boils down to. And you can spend Clarity (or accumulate Strain if you have no clarity, the Operator is probably going to have something similar with Heat and Coolant) to boost this during combat.

So how do you boost it OUT of combat? Well, the obvious solution was: your Class Resource persists between encounters. You don’t lose Clarity unless you spend it, so after a monster fight, you’ve got some Clarity to spend if you want to rip a door off its hinges with your mind!!

This was not working. 😀 It was a huge pain in the ass. It created annoying problems we were spending a lot of time trying to design around. Like players trying to keep enemies alive after the end of the battle just to “farm” them for resources. Gross.

But we need SOME language, some concept of how you can use your combat abilities outside of combat. If the Shadow has a short-range teleport they can use IN combat, it would be pretty ridiculous to just rule “no you can’t do that out of combat.” But if that cool shadow-teleport costs Insight (the Shadow’s class resource) doesn’t that mean I need to “keep” my class resource out of combat? Otherwise, yeah we’re just saying you can’t do that cool monster-fighting stuff when you’re not fighting monsters. Also gross.

Also, we expected adventures to also work like encounters writ large. Where the closer you get to the end–the dramatic finish, the epic battle against the Scion of Orcus–the cooler stuff you’re doing. So, presumably, that means I have MORE access to my class resource toward the end of the adventure. So surely SOME of my Fury MUST persist across battles? Otherwise how exactly do we start the battle against Count Rhodar von Glauer with a lot of resources??

?!?!?

Healing

Also, how does healing work? What governs or limits how much you can heal? In combat, this seemed like a solvable problem. Most healing abilities just restore stamina. A very few restore Health, and that’s how we limit how much health you can get back.

But does that mean OUTSIDE of combat you’d just use that ability as much as you wanted and instantly reheal back to full? What happens if you take damage outside of combat, like…a trap? No initiative, just…BOOM! You triggered a trap, you took some damage, that’s it. Do you have to go back to Rivendell? Just to heal up from taking some damage out of combat?

Or does the Conduit just burn Virtue to heal you, thereby defeating the purpose of hanging on to your class resource outside of combat? Ugh.

In order to understand our solutions, I think you need to know what we assume about “taking a rest.”

How We Want Resting To Work

We think it’s better if the players aren’t thinking in terms of “I need to sleep for eight hours to recover all my spells and hit points.” It’s a kind of explicitly gamist thinking I’d be happier if we could avoid and, ideally, replace with something better. That’s what a Rest Scene is for!

A “rest” in our game is a type of scene. It is not just “sleeping.” Or “spending the night doing nothing.” Your character does those things automatically, they are not worth commenting on. Normally nothing dramatic happens when you sleep, so let’s skip it.

Instead, “resting” is what happens in Rivendell. It’s “Going Back To The Inn.” It is returning to (or finding, or creating) a place of safety. When you go Out Into The World you are gradually becoming more ready, more battle-hardened, more “on.” They might all be rested after Rivendell, but I am way more afraid of the Fellowship when they’re all on edge and hungry and ready for danger in the bowels of Moria than I am when they’re all fat and happy and full of lembas bread as they leave Rivendell.

That’s the kind of arc we’re trying to capture. We don’t currently have a good term for “the time between Rests” the way an Olympiad is “the time between Olympics” so we just call it The Adventuring Day except we put air quotes around day. 😀

And The Rest

It’s sort of impossible to sum over all the issues we were slowly accumulating over the course of testing, but they all come down to a tension between Fighting Monsters and Everything Else. I mean at one point a few weeks ago I suggested: everyone has two character sheets. One for Fighting Monsters, one for everything else. That should give you some idea how annoying this problem is. 😀

I didn't think that was a GOOD IDEA! I just wanted to think for a while to determine if it was smart or stupid and I wondered if anyone else had ever done that.

It was getting more and more obvious that we needed a better, clearer, more straightforward solution to “what happens to your class resource when combat is over?” And “what are the limits to healing and how do players heal in combat, out of combat, and what does Resting get you?

We had many solutions, but most of them just felt like more bookkeeping, more accounting, more work for the player or Director, not more fun. So we had to keep pounding our head against the keyboard until something shook loose.

Here’s what we got. We think this will work and we’re excited. But! We thought that about the previous version!

The Encounter Clock

We don’t yet know the full implications of this, and we won’t know until we test (we’re scheduling an internal test this week!) but we currently like the idea of an Encounter Clock. We’ll come up with a better name for this, probably. 😀

The first encounter after a Rest Scene, you start with zero resources.

Second encounter? You begin the battle with one of your class resources already. Third encounter? Start with two of your class resource. It caps out at 6, but this is just for first level. This “clock” resets when you take a Rest scene.

With this, we can kill the idea that your class resource persists after the combat is over. Because we don’t need it to, in order for late-adventure battles to be more epic than early-adventure battles.

And now there’s a real incentive to “press on.” Keep going. “We can’t stop now, I’ll start the next battle at MAX FURY!” Or, more narratively “We can’t stop now, I’m mad as hell! If we Rest I’ll be full of carbs and then I start getting reasonable!”

BUT there’s no advantage to prolonging a combat just to “farm” more resources. I’m sure some folks will immediately reach for “ok quick let’s kick a puppy, wait an hour, and kick another one until we start the day with max resources!” But the Director decides what counts as an Encounter and kicking puppies does not qualify and that kind of rule is obvious and would be part of any fighting monsters game in one sense or another.

Stamina is Dead, Long Live Recovery

For different reasons in different meetings on separate issues, we were starting to detect the need for something like a Healing Surge from 4th edition. Or Hit Dice from 5e. Basically, a healing-resource which was also limited, and which you replenish when you take a Rest.

IF we had something like a Healing Surge, which we were calling a “Recovery” before (about three seconds before) we realized we were basically reinventing healing surges, then we don’t need to treat in-combat and out-of-combat differently. Taking damage in either scenario means the same thing; you lose some health and, if you want to get it back, you need to spend a recovery. We think probably everyone will have some ability to “Take A Recovery” and regain some health during combat but it will be very limited. Probably once per encounter. And healing classes allow you to break that rule and use more recoveries during a fight.

We also liked the idea that, at the end of the encounter any excess Class Resource you have turns into Health. We wanted folks to see how their class resource was still helping even once the battle was over.

At this point it started to seem like Stamina was a weird combination of Too Good and also Too Much Bookkeeping. If we use Recoveries, then we can ditch Stamina and just have Health.

We like the idea of spending Stamina to get another Maneuver, but we very much DO NOT like the idea of spending health to get another maneuver. But! You could just spend your class resource! We like that! We’ve known we wanted more and better things to spend small amounts of your resource on during combat and this is a great example. 1 Fury buys you a second maneuver once per turn? Sounds good to me! Is that too good? Then it costs 2 Fury!

Or maybe it costs your Recovery? We got a lot of options now, just gotta dial in what experience feels best and is the most straightforward.

So this seems like a case of; we were going to need Recoveries anyway, and now that we have them we realize we don’t need Stamina. On paper, we liked that stamina gave you this free pool of damage you knew you were going to get back anyway, so why not behave recklessly a little while your stamina is full?

But in practice players don’t really behave any differently, they still want to get stuck in and start doing cool stuff and they know they’re gonna take damage in the process whether we call it Stamina or Health. And knowing any Fury or Focus or whatever you have left over at the end of the battle converts into healing is functionally the same as replenishing all your stamina even if the math isn’t exactly 1:1.

Spending Recovery To Exert Yourself

IF you have Recovery AND it works this way, THEN we can say: outside of combat if you want to “push” yourself and do something extraordinary that would NORMALLY (read: in combat) cost your Class Resource? It costs a Recovery outside of combat.

It won’t be 1:1 like that. It may be spending a recovery gets you…3 of your class resource. Or…half your total, we don’t know yet. That’s something we need to try and experiment with to dial in. But that’s the basic idea.

The Talent could already use Telekinesis outside of combat, but now they can push themselves outside of combat, they way they can IN combat! And other classes with similar abilities can do the same. The Shadow who wants to use Assassinate outside of combat…can! Just burn a recovery. Or two or three or whatever.

We think this will work. And we get to keep that tension of “Well, we’re low on recoveries. We should take a Rest Scene. But we’ll start this next encounter with SIX resources if we press on!”

Now this might mean there are times when you’re making that decision about the Final Boss. And taking a Rest Scene in that moment would mean fighting von Glauer with all your health…but NO class resource!

Well, fine! That’s something that could happen, sure. Still be an epic battle! Just not instantly epic the way it would have been otherwise and frankly we think just normal adventure design will cover this.

Because we’re not talking about just “sleep for eight hours” here, remember. We’re talking “let’s go back to Rivendell.” And that…that is not an easy decision to make, no matter how much you like lembas bread, when you’re deep in the bowels of Glaur Castle and the Lord of Glauer is on the other side of the door. I think we can make that work.

And if you can convert Recoveries to Resources out of combat…you should probably be able to do that IN combat? We think that’s just another use of your Self-Healing. All characters are going to get a One Use “Burn a Recovery to Heal” action and that action will say “Heal X or Gain Y Fury” or whatever. Boom. Very limited, but still useful and it represents the fact that combat is “zoomed in.” Outside of combat, we don’t track time that finely so you can burn multiple recoveries to gain resources.

Under The Hood

So, what's really happening is this: your character buys their class resources with health. It shouldn’t feel that way, that's why this heading is "Under The Hood." It should feel like you're building Fury and doing cool stuff with it while it JUST SO HAPPENS a bunch of monsters are trying to kill you and you’re losing health.

But in terms of the resource economy, you're gaining your class resource while you're losing health and the only question is, does your character lose health faster or slower than some other character and that's mostly down to the choices you make in combat and whether you're a front-line hero.

Then your Recovery is the resource you spend to regain the health you traded for your class resource. Again, it shouldn't feel like that, it should just feel like you need to rest because you just got the crap beat out of you and you're low on health. Classic. And we feel like we have a better definition of what counts as resting, described above.

What this means, then, is that your recovery becomes a medium of exchange. Between the class resource that lets you do amazing stuff, and the health you lose because of the inherent risk of fighting monsters.

With this in mind it became obvious that we could sort of cut to the chase outside of combat. The director has not called action, we are not taking turns using initiative, we are out of combat. So if you need to push yourself and use some ability that would normally cost your class resource, you just spend a Recovery to do the same thing out of combat.

“In combat” and “out of combat” are now just two different time scales. In combat we care about seconds passing. At that scale, zooming in that closely, the rate at which I gain resources and the rate at which I lose health need to be independent. But the output of each encounter is: “I have lost some health, I may need to spend a recovery. If this continues I am definitely going to need to rest when I run out of recoveries.”

Out of combat, there is no such time pressure, there is no explicit threat of violence with the commensurate loss of health you get when you're fighting monsters. So it's better, we think, to just go directly to letting the Talent boost their telekinesis by spending a recovery.

But both activities create a trend toward losing all your recoveries and needing to rest. Which we want and need. Because that decision: press on or Rest, is key to feeling like a hero! Heroes keep going!

Anyway, that’s how we think our game works. No more stamina! You want to buy a maneuver? Spend a class resource! You want to regain health in combat? Use a Recovery! Are there limits to how normal characters can use recoveries in combat, and then healers break those rules? Probably!

Bloodied

Well we all missed Bloodied from 4th edition, so we should not be surprised to find it making an appearance here.

One thing we DID like back when we had Stamina was that “Reality Check” moment that happens when someone says “Well, I’m out of stamina.” This rarely happened because the player spent stamina but it OFTEN happened because they took damage and just ran out of Stamina.

There was no mechanic attached to that moment, it was just an important milestone in the battle. It communicated to the table “we’re getting close to the edge here and I will need healing soon.”

And it sort of sucked that there was no equivalent indicator for the enemies. Without the Bloodied condition, there was no way to “tell” how wounded an enemy was apart from the Director using flowery prose.

So! We’re probably going to have some condition, maybe literally “bloodied” that you get when you’re at half health and so do all the monsters. And this will be printed on your sheet so you don’t have to math it in combat. And probably some class or ancestral abilities will take advantage of this. The Fury gets MORE Fury while they’re bloodied!

That’s All

I mean, that’s enough! I think this is the most “actually communicating the work and headaches that come with Game Design” post we’ve had so far, but probably not the last!

We also got a lot of other stuff done, we have a new prototype of the Mage and Shadow we’re excited to test, and we’re planning on testing ALL OF THE ABOVE, No Stamina, Recoveries, The Mage, The Shadow, Resources Convert To Health At The End Of the Encounter, all that this Friday. Cross your fingers!

Thanks for the support folks! Thanks for being our Patrons, we all really hope you get value out of these posts. It means the world to us. Writing these posts up is actually a lot of work for us, but I enjoy it, I enjoy the transparency, I love seeing folks reading these posts and really thinking about them. Folks show up in our Discord all the time with questions based on these posts, and we often see other patrons explaining our reasoning and intent and that feels really good.

Hopefully this revision goes smoothly, improves and streamlines the game the way we hope, and we’re closer to a Patreon Packet for you all. 😀

Stay Tuned!