Game Design (IV):Healing, surges, dying

Longtime readers will know that the topic of healing surges is of significant interest to me, having proposed not one but two different solutions to improve the game experience of players running out of healing resources. Though I’m satisfied with how the previous rules played out,they were designed according to an important restriction I usually follow in these cases: to change the game as little as required to do the job. Since my current RPG project not only allows, but actually encourages trying out more innovative solutions, I have looked once more into the subject and come up with the ultimate ruleset for healing surges (or so I hope). The result is a streamlined system where surgeless characters can keep adventuring (at their risk!), surges become more interesting as a player resource, and getting knocked out of combat gets a new (and painful) meaning.

Problem statement

In my opinion, the one glaring problem with healing surges in D&D 4E is how the game handles a character running out of surges: by effectively ending the adventuring day for the character and, more often than not, for the whole party. Leaving an adventurer behind for an entire encounter (or more!) could be an interesting strategic challenge, if not for the fact that it unfairly punishes the player to skip a session or, even worse, to sit there unable to participate. Hence, a very common answer to this scenario is to just call it a day and find a place for an extended group rest.

Another problematic aspect of surges that I hadn’t touched on previous articles is they don’t work very well as a game resource. That is, they are important for characters, but there is no real way for players to meaningfully interact with them. Encounters cause player characters to lose hit points, and they must spend surges to heal them back (unless they prefer to stop adventuring, or to die). Apart from characters with very minor wounds worth less than a full surge, there is no incentive to hold back on healing or to save surges for later, nor is it possible to significantly reduce HP/surge loss outside of becoming extremely efficient at defeating encounters.

On a related note, I don’t like how dying characters are treated in the game, either. Any amount of healing will bring back an agonizing hero back to action, as if nothing had happened. Fallen comrades that somehow remain unattended are threatened by death saving throws, which is to say, not very much. Death saving throws are a strange mechanic, disconnected from the rest of the game, and way too slow to have any effect in combat encounters that last five rounds on average, if not less. But what kills it for me is that, as long as you don’t get killed, it doesn’t matter how many death saves you have failed, nor how much damage you have taken while down. There is relatively little immediate risk, and no long-term impact at all.

Rest in peace

The first change I propose is to replace the rules for healing characters during short rests with the following:

Healing in a Short rest: During a short rest, any player character can spend a healing surge to regain all hit points. A player character with no healing surges regains hit points up to his bloodied value at the end of a short rest..

Also, in the description of healing surges, add the following:

Running out of Healing Surges: A player character with no healing surges left cannot use daily powers nor action points. If an effect causes that character to lose a healing surge, he takes damage equal to half his bloodied value instead.

Nice and clean. Healing during rests becomes much more efficient than in the middle of combat, and players can keep adventuring after using their last surge, though at a significant penalty. The game now offers a legitimate option for players to cut down on surge expenditure, by minimizing in-combat healing. However, that may be easier said than done, particularly after considering the rules in the following section...

Rules to die for

Replace the following rules related to dying characters with the text below:

Characters reduced to 0 HP: When a character takes damage that leaves him with 0 or less hit points, the character is knocked prone and dying, and must make a Death Saving Throw.

Death Saving Throw: Some game effects require a character to make a Death Saving Throw. The character makes a saving throw: on a success nothing happens, and on a failure, the character loses a healing surge. A dying character rolling a result of 20 or higher becomes stabilized.

Healing a Dying Character: A dying character that receives any amount of healing becomes stabilized. In addition, the effect of healing on that character depends on the character’s current hit point total:

• If the amount of damage healed is equal or greater than the character’s negative hit points, the character’s hit point total becomes equal to the amount of damage healed. The character is no longer unconscious, and is weakened until the end of his next turn.
• If the amount of damage healed is less than the character’s negative hit points, subtract that amount from the character’s negative hit points. The character remains unconscious.

Coup de Grace: When a character targets an adjacent unconscious enemy with an attack, the attack is considered a Coup de Grace against that enemy. In Coup de Grace attacks, missed attack rolls are treated as hits.

Other death-related rules are left unchanged. Notably, dying characters still roll death saves each turn.

The main goal behind these rules is to have characters dropping below 0 HP really matter. Note that actually dying during combat no more likely than before, but there are other new, important consequences for getting knocked out. First, the mostly irrelevant death saving throws become integrated with healing surges in a way that feels very natural to me. If the previous section gave players a reason to use less in-combat healing, this set of rules compensates it by providing a very strong incentive to heal characters with low HP. Incidentally, spending actions to stabilize allies without spending surges is now a thing, though still far from ideal.

Side Effects

A common consequence of introducing the kind of deeper rule changes described in this article (as opposed to the more surgical approach I have preferred to use before) is that something, somewhere, is bound to break. What follows is a list of game elements that are negatively affected by the new rules, and need a revision to work. Readers are encouraged to point to other similar items that I may have missed.

Bard class - Song of Rest feature: Replace text with “Once per day, during a short rest, the bard may have a resting ally regain all hit points”.

Conclusions

To summarize the changes, healing during rests is now cheaper than ever, but getting knocked out during combat can now drain characters out of surges pretty quickly. I honestly don’t know if this ends up extending or shortening the adventuring day overall - the answer depends a lot on encounter difficulty and party dynamics, though I should get a rough idea when I get to playtest it.

I really like, at least in paper, the new tension introduced for combat healing: you don’t want to use too much of it because it’s a lot less efficient than just resting... except when you get too greedy and the monsters beat you out of surges. Let’s see if it plays as well as I expect.

The following article will consist in a recap of all the new rules, since I now feel I have enough material for a decent round of playtests. After that, I’ll probably go for a revision of character conditions, which should prove interesting. I also need to take some time to catch up with the comments section, which is providing some amazing feedback as of late. Speaking of which... what do you guys think about this new approach for healing and dying?

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Game Design (III): Combat pacing, resource usage

One of the main challenges when working with a tactical combat system is ensuring that players remain engaged and interested until the end of an encounter. In our last article, we discussed how the number of active combatants interacted with player fun, arguing that the current system is prone to relatively long phases of late game grind,and suggested some rules to counter this trend. However, the game model we used in our examples was still incomplete, and missing some important elements - such as characters using different kinds of attacks and resources each turn, and from one encounter to the other. Today we will take a look at this.

Simply put, the availability of expendable resources (as currently implemented) makes the first rounds of a combat even more important and, conversely, causes the later combat phases to take longer and become less exciting. From a strategic point of view, there is no incentive to save resources for the end of an encounter, so whatever special powers a player intends to spend in a given combat will be blown away as soon as possible. As a consequence, most characters will be dealing a disproportionate amount of damage right at the start of combat, and be left with subpar offense later on - which, using the terminology defined in our previous article, will shorten the Optimal Zone and increase the Grind Zone.

A typical combat

We will begin by providing an overview of how attack resources are usually allocated. Generally speaking, a player character will prefer to spend attack powers in decreasing order of effectiveness. This attack priority could be codified as follows:

1. If needed, spend an action point on the first turn.
2. If needed, spend a daily attack on the first turn.
3. Use encounter attacks, from strongest to weakest, until they run out.
4. Use at-wills for the remainder of combat.

This is obviously a simplification, and there are common exceptions to these rules. A negative condition (like weakened or dazed) may discourage the use of stronger attacks for a turn, or prevent it altogether. Players may feel the need to use action points or dailies mid-combat to recover from a string of bad rolls. Some powers are situational, and will be used when a specific condition is met (e.g. enemies are properly grouped for a burst), rather than at a fixed order. An optimized, coordinated party may prefer to delay their best powers, spending the first round setting up enhancements and positioning for a lethal turn 2. But, more often than not, this is a fairly accurate description of how a character is played. More importantly, it is how the game rules encourage players to behave.

An anticlimactic conclusion

My main concern with the dynamic described above is that it leads to unsatisfying combats, from a narrative standpoint. Everybody starts off doing something truly awesome, then continues with more mundane movements, and ends up using their puniest attacks. Even worse, if the fight is somehow not over by the time everybody has used up their cool toys, we can expect a series of long, monotonous turns where not much of interest happens.

This is not how combats usually turn out in fiction, and with good reason. It’s much more exciting to have some back and forth, to have desperate heroes draw from inner reserves, to end with a bang, rather than a whimper. The question, then, is how can we change the game system to make this the common scenario?.

My preferred solution for this is one that does not involve many changes, but that may be a hard sell for players: to impose restrictions on power usage. By preventing action point usage in the early turns of a fight, forcing a turn of recovery between encounter attacks, and limiting daily attacks per encounter, I believe we can greatly improve the pace and feeling of combats. On top of that, we would minimize the chances of ending a fight in the first couple of turns, make the game easier to balance, and actually encourage the use of daily attacks, or even second wind. The drawback, though, is that we are reducing character effectiveness and party synergies, and overall taking toys away from adventurers, which can understandably make some players unhappy. Nevertheless, I think the benefits are well worth the effort.

The time for action

Of all the resources available to players, it is the seemingly innocent action point that has the most damaging impact in encounter rhythm and balance. It basically allows characters to take two turns in a row, which is a very potent tool in the hands of any moderately coordinated party, and it virtually ensures that one or more monsters will have dropped by the end of turn one.

I am a bit torn with this issue, because I really like how action points have been implemented (they are simple, elegant, intuitive, and exciting) except for their power level - and any solution I introduce for the sake of balance will detract from this. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the game as a whole will improve with such a change, even if action points themselves end up with slightly clunky rules.

There are two factors that, in my opinion, push action points over the top: the ability to use them early, reliably, and in coordination with other party members, and their use to dish out multiple encounter attacks (or even multiple dailies) in a single turn. To address the first one, I propose the following rule:

Action point usage: Once during each character’s turn, that character can make an Action Point Check. This is a d20 check with a DC determined by the current combat round (see table below). If the check succeeds, that character can spend an action point that turn, unless he has already spent an action point this encounter.

If a character is allowed to spend an action point outside of his turn (e.g. from a paragon path feature), he makes an Action Point Check. If the check succeeds, the character can spend the action point that way. A character can never make more than one Action Point Check per round.

(Note: A character cannot spend an action point unless he has succeeded in an Action Point Check that turn).

Round- Action Point Check DC
1 - Impossible (no check)
2 - 15
3 - 10
4+ - Automatic

A bit heavy-handed, but it does the job. Note that this means that first-turn action points are completely eliminated from the game, and that action point usage is initially dependent on random chance. Coordinated use of action points is still possible on later combat rounds, where it is much less problematic, and in fact can help parties recover from unfortunate encounters, or speed the cleaning up of the last few monsters.

As for the use of action points to chain multiple encounter or daily attacks, it is addressed in the following sections.

Tiresome Encounters

As I explained above, in a usual encounter, a character will go through all his encounter attacks, from stronger to weaker, and then resort to using at-wills over and over. While functional, this divides combat into two very different phases: an initial phase where characters feel powerful, get to use lots of different tools, and plow through enemies, and a late game where weakened characters struggle to kill each other through repetitive maneuvers. I think it would be much better if we mixed it a bit.

Consider adding a new rule that prevented characters from using more than one encounter attack every two turns. With this restriction in place, combatants would alternate between strong and weak (encounter and at-will) attacks, making encounters more varied and introducing new strategies: controlling effects could be timed to coincide with enemy ‘strong’ turns, for example, and ‘weak’ turns could be spent on (currently) rarely used maneuvers like Second Wind, or repositioning. We could implement this rule as follows:

Encounter Attack Usage: A character that uses an encounter attack power becomes Fatigued until the end of his next turn.

Fatigue: A fatigued character cannot use encounter attack powers. Certain types of powers can also be affected by the fatigued condition.

Notes:

Attack powers not causing fatigue. The following powers do not make a character fatigued, and can be used by fatigued characters:

• Racial Powers
• Channel Divinity Powers
• Magic Item Powers

Non-attack powers affected by fatigue. A character using any of the following powers becomes fatigued until the end of his next turn; these powers cannot be used while fatigued:

• Backstab (Thief Utility)
• Bladesong (Bladesinger Utility)

Augmentable psionic powers are affected as follows:

• A character that uses the most expensive augmentation of an augmentable at-will attack becomes fatigued until the end of his next turn.
• The most expensive augmentation of an augmentable at-will attack cannot be used while fatigued.
• Any other augmentations or unaugmented powers do not make a character fatigued, and can be used by fatigued characters.

This clearly needs playtesting, but my impression is that it should play pretty well. An important point that could be considered a drawback, is that the rule prevents characters from using all their encounter attacks in a typical combat - if we are aiming for a ~5 round fight, any encounter powers beyond the third will often remain unspent. The upside, on the other hand, is that when you do get to turn 7 in an encounter, you still have a potent attack to finish off enemies. Also, this could be seen as an opportunity for players to pick more situational powers, and experiment more with character builds.

Another side effect of this change is that you can no longer use two encounter attacks in a row with an action point, which further reduces the effectiveness of APs.

One More Daily

Though you wouldn’t tell from my efforts to bring their power level to the ground, action points are among my favourite mechanics in the game. The main reason for this is that they are a limited character resource that just works. It’s easy to understand, has a significant impact in a combat and, most importantly, it is set up in such a way that players use it a lot. Key to this success is the fact that there is no reason to hoard action points: a hard limit of 1 action point means that you don’t need to save them for a hypothetical Last Big Fight - the most efficient course of action is usually to spend them at roughly the same rate you acquire them, a point every two encounters.

Compare this to how daily powers are played. Now, party dynamics and player strategies may vary, but the fact remains that the game encourages players to leave daily resources unused. In the vast majority of encounters, the players are expected to win, and the only remaining question is how handily they defeat their enemies. In practice, this margin of victory is measured by resource expenditure: how many non-renewable resources has the party spent, by the end of an encounter? It turns out that there are only two such resources in the game, healing surges and daily powers (also, to a lesser degree, action points, but using too many of these only matters in the very short term). Furthermore, player ability to reduce healing surge expenditure is limited at best. On an average encounter (i.e. one that favours players), aggressive usage of daily attacks may somewhat reduce player HP loss (that is, surge usage), but it’s far from a direct conversion. On the other hand, in a harder fight where player victory is not so clear-cut, using more dailies can make all the difference in the world.

In a player’s mind, then, each adventuring day can be structured as a series of easier encounters that don’t defeat adventurers but wear them down, leading to a climactic final combat against a challenging foe. The challenge in these initial battles is to win while spending as few surges and dailies as possible, so that there are enough resources left to fight the Final Boss.

There is a problem with this approach. On the one hand, the metric for victory in easy battles is, primarily, the ability to not use the most awesome powers available to a hero. On the other hand, the exciting final battle (when it actually happens, since it’s perfectly possible that a day will end without one) will usually be won or lost based mostly on how players have performed previously (do they have four dailies each to annihilate the dragon, or are they out of powers and surges and basically screwed?), rather than on what they actually do against the Big Bad. It really doesn’t look like a fun dynamic!

All of this leads, of course, to the following rule change:

Daily Attack Usage: A character can only use one daily attack power each encounter.

Exceptions: The following powers do not count towards the limit of one daily attack per encounter:

• Magic Item Powers

With this, dailies become much more similar to action points, with the advantages stated above. An added consequence of the change is that character performance in an encounter is much easier to predict, due to the reduced variability in daily power spending - and thus, much easier for me to create a solid and balanced mathematical framework for the game.

Conclusions

I have introduced a set of changes that sacrifices a bit of player freedom in order to improve the flow of combat. A side-effect of the new rules that I haven’t yet discussed is the fact that it results in a serious disadvantage for player characters, compared to previous scenarios. This will eventually addressed when I get to the full overhaul of the game math, but for now, a game master interested in trying out these ideas should take care in reducing encounter challenge a bit.

In my next article, I will suggest new rules to handle healing and dying. In the meantime, I may post something about the updated game model, though I’m having a hard time writing a compelling text on the topic - in fact, much of the delay in finishing this article has been due to unsuccessful attempts to talk about my formulas and spreadsheets. At any rate, if anyone is interested in checking out the latest version of the sheets, it can be found here.

So, what do you think? 

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Game Design (II): Simulating combat, healing and defending

In my previous article, I set the guidelines for the design of our combat system, and defined key concepts like turns-to-kill and focus fire, illustrating them with some very basic simulations,  We also stated the primary system requirements: finish encounters in 5 turns on average, have players win by a not-too-wide margin, and prevent combats from ending in a boring grind. From this point, I intend to gradually increase the depth and accuracy of our simulations, introducing new elements one at a time and examining their impact in the game math. Today I will take a look at some combat roles, like defending and healing, and discuss two new game mechanics aimed at improving the game experience: monster healing, and last effort.

Simulating a 5-vs-5 combat

Let us begin with our first “realistic” (though still quite simplified) simulation scenario: A combat between five playing characters and five monsters, in which the heroes have the advantage, and win in roughly 5 rounds. We assume that all PCs have the same stats, as do all monsters, and that all damage from each party is focused on a single enemy character at a time. For now, we won’t be considering any variance - instead, all characters hit automatically each turn for a fixed amount of damage. In addition, the effect of overkill damage is not considered - any excess damage after slaying a foe is fully applied to the next enemy in the line.

Assuming that PCs have a K value of 4.5 (i.e. they each kill a monster in ~4.5 turns, and deal damage 1/(4.5) times a monster’s HP per turn), and that monsters have a K value of 5.5, the evolution of this combat encounter would look as follows:

Fig 1 Evolution of # of PCs/Monsters in example encounter
PC K Turns  4.5
Monster K Turns  5.5

The figure shows how many characters remain conscious at the end of each combat round. Turn 0 represents the initial state. In this case, the fight would be over by turn 6, with all monsters slain and 3 heroes knocked down. The spreadsheet used for this exercise can be found here.

This is a very abstracted view of a combat, but there is some valuable insight to be gained from this perspective, for the following reason: the number of active combatants on a given combat round has a direct impact player fun. Though game fun is far from an exact science, I believe the following statements to be true:

• Any player whose character is inactive (unconscious or dead) for the majority of combat will have substantially less fun.
• Combat is more challenging and fun in rounds where both sides have a similar number of active characters.
• It is particularly frustrating to have monsters that are no longer threatening to the players but refuse to die.

Taking these ideas into account, we could talk about an Optimal Zone in a combat encounter, defined roughly as the period where most PCs are active and enough monsters remain for an engaging challenge, and a Grind Zone, or the time where either two or more PCs are out of the battle, or the team monster is too weakened to pose an interesting threat. Ideally, we would want our system to encourage combats with long optimal zones while keeping the grind zones as short as possible.

The figure below shows optimal zones and grind zones for our previous example, defining them as follows: The optimal zone includes turns that start with 4+ active PCs and 4+ active monsters. The grind zone includes turns that either start with 3 or less active PCs, or 2 or less active monsters.

In this example, we can see that the first few monsters drop fairly quickly, whereas the last ones tend to overstay their welcome - that is, we have a relatively brief optimal zone, and a significant grind zone. I want to change this so that the initial kills are delayed, and the final kills don’t take so long - thus maximizing the sweet spot where lots of characters are interacting in the battlefield. However, before I introduce specific mechanics to address this, I need to add a new layer of complexity to my simulated model: the combat roles of defending and healing.

Defending and healing

The defender role is based on two mechanical pillars: the ability to withstand more damage than average characters, and effects that encourage enemies to attack the defender instead of his allies. If we assume that this “attack magnet” effect has a 100% success rate (which is an exaggeration, but not a terrible approximation), and that the extra survivability amounts to about 50% (in enemy attacks to kill the defender, compared to a non-defender character), adding a single defender to a PC party in our model has two consequences:

• Total party survivability increased by 50/5=10%
• Number of attacks required to drop the first character in the party increased by 50%

The first effect can be compensated by increasing enemy offense by a similar amount (i.e. 10%), to preserve the balance of power between both sides, and the time it takes to end an encounter. Interestingly, if we do this, we find that the second effect still provides a significant advantage to the party with a defender, since delaying character deaths means that the party now has more active characters (which translates into more aggregate attacks) after sustaining damage. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy way to describe this analytically, but it’s easy enough to observe in the simulation.

The death-delaying effect of a defender is represented in the figure below (and this spreadsheet), which shows loss of party characters as a function of attacks received. The blue line shows a regular focus fire scenario without a defender, where the first character drops after the party sustains 20% of the total attacks required to kill it. By contrast, the red line shows the same scenario with a defender, normalizing monster offense to match the increase in total party survivability. Here, we can see that the defender doesn’t fall until the party takes attacks worth 30% of its total survivability, and that each subsequent character loss before the last is also delayed, to a smaller degree.

In terms of our model, character healing works in a very similar way. If we suppose that healing is used as soon as it is needed, adding a healer to a party is the same as increasing the survivability of the first party character to be attacked by a given percentage. An effect like Healing Word gives back about 33% of a character’s HP, so a healer with 2 such powers per encounter would amount to a total of 66% extra survivability for the first character.

It is interesting to note that healing and defending work very well together, since any healing power spent on a defender becomes particularly effective. A party with both a defender and a healer in our example would have a total extra survivability of ((1.5*1.66)-1)=1.5, or 150% that of a normal character.

A case for monster healing

Aside from other important considerations (like adding tactical depth and variety), the existence of defending and healing roles in player parties has an important advantage in how it affects combat development: it keeps player characters active for a greater portion of an encounter, without necessarily extending total combat duration. Now, I’m going to argue how providing a similar bonus to the monster side could be of benefit to the game.

D&D 4E has been designed so that monsters don’t get healing effects. Conventional wisdom says that this is a good thing, since one of the most common complaints about the game is the fact that encounters run too long, and monster healing would only aggravate it... or wouldn’t it? Certainly, that’s what would happen if you just shoehorned additional healing onto the existing game mechanics and mathematical framework, but what if we were talking of deeper, carefully considered changes?

I don’t think monsters should get a general Second Wind ability, nor am I suggesting a new monster role with healing capabilities. That would only extend combats for no tangible benefit, and complicate encounter composition, respectively. What I want is a limited pool of healing that is available every combat, to delay the first monster losses. Below, you can see my first draft of this rule:

Monster Commander: Before every encounter, the Game Master selects one of the monsters (usually the most powerful of intelligent one)as the Commander of that monster party. The commander gains the Commanding Word power:

Commanding Word. Minor Action (2/encounter, 1/turn). Close burst 5. Target: You or one ally in burst. Effect: The target regains hit points equal to 5+ (2.5* its level).

The number is ugly, but it intends to approximate 1/3 of a monster’s HP under the current math. This will hopefully change to something more readable once I update the monster stat block and math (coming soon!), but it should work for now. Overall, the healing effect would be equivalent to that of a low level PC healer: a 66% extra survivability.

Keep in mind that the defending role is already present in monsters, though Soldier monsters are comparatively not as tough, nor as effective, as a PC defender - equivalent to about a 20% extra survivability. Combined with this healing, this amounts to roughly a 100% bonus in survivability for the first monster, considerably delaying the first monster deaths.

Since just want to rearrange monster deaths without increasing the total combat duration, we should compensate the introduction of this rule by either a 15% increase in PC damage, or a 15% decrease in monster HP. At this point I don’t have a clean way to address this, other than changing numbers by hand, but this will be taken into account when redefining the monster stats. This is how our example would look like after introducing monster healing and adjusting PC damage.

A last effort

In the previous section, we suggested improvements for the first rounds of combat. However, these changes still left late-game grinding untouched, as is evident from the figure above: the last three turns in the example scenario have the monsters severely disadvantaged, and should play out as little more than routine cleanup for our heroes... but they still take way too long.

In my opinion, there are two main ways we can improve the grind problem:

• Shorten the agony: Once it’s clear that the fight is decided, end the encounter right away, or at least make the monsters somehow die much faster.
• Make comebacks possible: Introduce a mechanic that makes almost-defeated monsters threatening again, so players cannot be certain of their victory until the very end.

I have opted for a mixed approach that hopefully combines the best of both worlds. Lo an behold:

Last effort: Whenever a character starts a turn, if the majority of characters in their party are bloodied, dying, or dead, that character becomes desperate until the end of the encounter.

(Desperate is a new character condition, defined below)

Desperate: A desperate character gains:

• A +2 bonus to all attacks
• A -2 penalty to all defenses
• For each of the character’s attacks that hits but doesn’t crit, roll 1d20. On a roll of 19-20, the attack becomes a critical hit.

Note that this is mandatory, and applies to both monsters and PCs! The overall effect should amount to a 25% increase in offensive output, and a 15% decrease in survivability (assuming a 65% hit rate). Desperate provides a significant advantage to the losing side, which usually won’t be enough to turn the tide, but should make the last turns much more exciting. It also speeds up the end of combat, particularly when both sides are desperate, and introduces a new layer of strategy by providing an incentive to save up strong attacks for late in an encounter.

This is how our example scenario looks like with both the Monster Commander and Last Effort rules:

That is all for today. In our next installment, we will look at combat pacing and resource usage. Read More......

Game Design: Basic combat math (I)

Having stated my high level goals for the new game, it’s time to get my hands dirty and do some actual design work. The first point in the agenda, then, is the mathematical framework of the combat system. Easy enough.

I believe that game combat should, by default, favor the player characters while still providing a credible challenge, last long enough for heroes to use most of their toys, and minimize dead turns or turns where a player is left without interesting choices to make. To address these points, we need to pay special attention any factors that affect encounter duration, power usage, and the balance of power between player characters and monsters. Overall, the work process will have the following steps:

1. Set general goals for the combat system

2. Define game stats for a fixed-level scenario

3. Define stats for scenarios with characters of arbitrary levels

4. Test a lot

5. Iterate previous steps until satisfied.

Today’s article will focus on the first step, meaning that we won’t be assigning any concrete values to character stats. Instead, we will talk in terms of combat length, number of participating characters, and number of turns it takes to kill a character. We will start by assuming generic stat lines for characters and monsters, leaving the effect of roles and customization for later.

Introduction: Encounter duration and focus fire

With this in mind, let us define the main concepts used in this approach:

• K (Turns to kill) - The number of game turns that a character A takes, on average, to kill a character B. It depends on A’s accuracy and damage, and on B’s defenses and hit points, among other factors. To calculate it, divide a defender’s HP by the attacker’s average damage.

• T (Encounter turns) - The number of game turns required to end a combat encounter, on average. It depends on the number of characters on each side, and their K value (i.e. the turns they take to kill each other). Our initial analysis will focus on pure damage only, and more complex effects like negative conditions will be considered later.

A major point that needs to be taken into account is that, except for some specific scenarios, K is not equal to T. That is, the actual encounter duration is different (more specifically, longer) than what one would expect, based on analysis of isolated characters. To understand this, let us first take a look at those scenarios where K is, in fact equal to T.

Consider a combat encounter where Joe the Hero (character H1) faces Gork the Orc (monster M1). For simplicity, let’s assume that both character and monster have 3 hit points, and their attacks occur simultaneously, always hitting for 1 damage. Clearly, in this scenario both combatants would always achieve mutual annihilation by turn 3. The K value of our characters, 3, is equal to the encounter duration. If we extended this basic scenario to have three heroes (H1, H2, H3) facing three monsters (M1, M2, M3), all with the same stats and using the same rules as before, and assuming all combatants have some strange code of honor forcing them to fight one on one, we end up with three pairs of duelists that self-destruct on the third turn of combat.

However, this weird duel behavior is not how combats usually go. The most effective tactic, and thus the one that most parties resort to, is to focus fire, i.e., to have all characters in a team pile on a single unfortunate opponent until he drops, and repeat the process until the combat is over. The tactic advantage of focus fire is that, once an enemy drops, the damage output of the enemy team decreases. If we go back to the example scenario, and have both teams use focus fire, we will have a fight where each side gradually loses combatants, as shown in the following figure.

Two things of note here:

• As the combat progresses, it takes longer to kill an enemy

• The combat ends in 5 turns, even though all characters have a K value of 3.

As we can see, the existence of focus fire has an impact on combat duration. This effect will vary with the number of characters in an encounter, and their relative strength. Another important implication is that combat duration cannot be easily determined through simple formulas, but will require some kind of simulation - though we will try to simplify this requirement as much as possible. Finally, it must be noted that the use of focus fire is not a binary proposition: these examples show characters first spreading their damage as much as possible, and then perfectly focusing their attacks, but real combats usually fall somewhere in between. The ability to focus fire better than the opponent is, in fact, a critical factor for success in a tactical combat game like the one we are proposing.

System Requirements

The combat system will need to meet the following requirements:

• Average combat duration of 5 turns. When both sides are of similar level, I expect the combat to be over in about 5 turns, so that players can spend most of their per-encounter resources without falling into repetitive grinding. This duration may rise to about 6 turns for greedy parties refusing to spend daily resources, or go as low as 4 turns (or slightly below that) if the heroes go all out on daily attacks and action points.

• The players win... with some effort. Player characters are expected to win same-level encounters, but not without losing a bunch of healing surges and daily powers along the way. Ideally, it will take 20-25% of a party’s daily resources to make it through an encounter - with generous usage of daily powers saving healing surges, and vice versa. Player characters dropping unconscious during combat should be a common occurrence, with about 1-2 KO’d PCs each encounter. Death of individual characters (outside of party wipes) should be rare, but still possible when unconscious party members are left unprotected.

• Every turn counts. It’s easy to fall into the trap of having the last couple of turns in a fight become an unexciting cleanup routine. This happens when the monster team has been reduced to one or two members, unable to pose a real danger to the heroes, but with enough hit points left to require a significant amount of time to actually finish the encounter. We need to include mechanics that make monsters both more threatening and quick to kill once they are in this situation.

In the next article, we will provide a more detailed look at the numbers and stats behind our combat system, discuss the impact of combat roles, and introduce a few rules changes that should make the last rounds of combat a bit more exciting.

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Square Fireballs RPG: Table of Contents

In my last post, I provided an overview of my new game project, Square Fireballs RPG, and a brief discussion of the main features I plan to introduce. Today, I will show something less descriptive, but still important: the first draft of the game’s table of contents. This is definitely subject to change, and it’s quite possible that I’m forgetting about critical sections, if not chapters. But it’s what I’m working with, for now. It looks as follows:

1. Introduction

• Character Stats
• Reading Powers

2. Combat

• Turn Sequence
• Character Actions
• Movement
• Attack
• Character Conditions
• Healing
• Maneuvers

3. Adventuring

• Skills
• Resting
• Rituals (30)

4. Building Characters

• Overview
• Leveling up
• Races (4)
• Classes (4)
• Themes (12)
• Paragon Paths (20)
• Epic Destinies (8)
• Feats (75)

5. Equipment

• Weapons
• Implements
• Armor
• Mundane Gear
• Magic Items (40)

6. Dungeon Master Tools

• Game Math
• Skill Checks
• Monsters (75*75)
• Encounter Generation
• Running Encounters
• Rewards

The numbers in parentheses are the number of options of a given type. As you can see, they are fairly low, considering that all character options but races and classes are supposed to be self-contained: I’m playing around with some ideas to make the most of relatively limited sets of options. If this works as expected, it will make the development of the game much more sustainable, and it might even be possible to build characters without need for digital tools. We’ll see how it turns out.

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Introducing: Square Fireballs RPG

So. I just decided to make the jump and evolve from enthusiast game tinkerer to a creator of sorts. Granted, my first project won’t precisely be an original idea, but it is an ambitious one, nonetheless: I intend to remake and improve my favorite role playing game system as a way to keep it alive and kicking after its lifecycle has ended. This is a work of love and admiration from a fan who has devoted several years playing, studying and, ultimately, obsessing about a great game. My goal is to stay true to the original, embracing its strengths while improving some areas whose implementation didn’t live up to expectations.

Like its predecessor, Square Fireballs RPG will be a combat-focused game featuring deep tactical encounters, huge character customizability and little DM preparation effort. On top of that, I plan to introduce a considerable number of changes, which are listed below.

Combat

• Game math updated to improve monster balance: Same level encounters should present a credible challenge regardless of tier, now.
• Better integration of skills in combat.
• General combat maneuvers are more varied and useful.
• Character conditions revised to be more fun and balanced.
• New rules to improve pacing of combat by regulating resource usage: reduced effect of nova rounds and end-of-combat grinding.

Non-combat interactions

• Reworked skill system with flat DCs and bonuses.
• Ritual system overhaul: Rituals are better integrated with skills and game economy.
• Revised healing rules to streamline surge usage during short rests, reducing bookkeeping.

Character building

• Feat system revision, with a standalone set of feats to cover all player needs. Feat slots are now divided in two categories: greater feats, condensing all relevant combat benefits, and lesser feats, for non-combat effects or  weak/situational combat bonuses.
• Magic Item revision, with a standalone set of items to cover all player needs. The number of simultaneously equipped items will be greatly reduced, to cut down on character complexity.
• New standalone sets of themes, paragon paths and epic destinies, emphasizing openness, flexibility, power uniformity and differentiation of campaign tiers.
• Guidelines for character effectiveness per level, made possible by reworked game math and integrated design of secondary character options.
• Reimagined versions of the most iconic character races (human, dwarf, elf, halfling) and classes (fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric), to play by themselves or alongside existing alternatives.
• In order to achieve a wider variety of viable builds, some of the most dominant strategies will be weakened through global rules: multiattacking powers, stunning and dominating, off-turn attacks. Likewise, some previously underwhelming yet quite common mechanics, like attacks that deal lots of damage dice, will be improved.

Encounter preparation

• Greatly improved flexibility in monster selection thanks to flatter game math. Monsters now remain challenging across a wider range of levels
• Mixed-level parties made viable by flatter game math.
• New monster creation method allows quick and easy stat generation, mixing of monster abilities, and random monster generation for encounters.
• Better balance makes it much easier to achieve challenging yet fair encounters for all party levels.

Compatibility

• Base game fully compatible with existing races and classes.
• Adventures and monsters usable after quick stat conversion - tools will be provided to make this as painless as possible.
• Current PC options (feats, items, themes, paths, epic destinies) usable but not recommended, as they break balance assumptions.
• Guidelines to mix and match the new rules with the existing ones.

This covers the most important stuff, though you can expect several minor tweaks and adjustments apart from those listed above. Regarding licensing and other legal aspects, I haven’t consulted a lawyer yet, but the idea is to stay away from GSL and write everything from scratch, likely using a Creative Commons license. From what I have read, this is fair game as long as I don’t use someone else’s IP nor copy text from other publications - which have no intention to do.  That said, if any reader is aware of potential legal issues that could be derived from this approach, I’m all ears.

I’m vaguely aware of the existence of other similar projects currently in development. My position, for now, is to keep this as a purely personal initiative. While additional writing hands would definitely be of use, given my ever scarce spare time, I’d like to keep a tight control of the design process. I will, of course, be very interested in listening to any reader feedback and, if things go well, there will be a need for playtesting... but that is still far away in the future, at best.

To conclude, a few words on the publication medium. For the foreseeable future, all material for Square Fireballs RPG will come in the form of freely available blog articles. If the game ever becomes mature enough, I will also release it in PDF form, possibly for a price. Eventually, i have this crazy dream about making  everything available in a fully linked web database (more like d20SRD than D&D Compendium, if possible), though that would be a ton of work on top of what is already a ridiculous amount of effort, so we’ll see.

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About D&D 4e, D&D Next, and a new personal project

I don’t think I will love the fifth edition of D&D (what is currently known as D&D Next). Sure, I will give it a chance, and go along with the playtest, and do my best to help make it a great game. And, barring some kind of disaster, I will buy the core books, and try to organize a campaign. I’m fairly confident I will be able to enjoy the new game to some degree, but I seriously doubt it will inspire me the same passion that 4E has.

It boils down to this: D&D 4E has the best tactical combat of any game I’ve played, by a mile. It is deep and varied, remarkably (though not perfectly) balanced, and just a ton of fun -beating down monsters and taking their stuff has never been this satisfying. And that's all there is to the game, really:  the mechanics for roleplaying and other non-combat interaction are merely decent, exploration is almost non-existent, and the settings (which I tend to like) are system independent. By contrast, Next is constrained by design requirements that weren’t much of a consideration for 4e, such as pleasing a wide fanbase including hardcore old schoolers, and keeping true to the spirit of earlier editions - which are things that can make it a great, successful product, but that I personally don’t care much about.

The bad news, of course, are that 4E is dying. Granted, it’ll always have a place in our hearts, and we can keep playing it,  but content releases have dropped drastically, and will stop altogether in a matter of months. One could argue that enough 4e material has been released already to cover for many years of future campaigns (and that would be mostly accurate, unless you intended to play at the desolate epic tier), but there s a kind of release that I will be missing dearly: errata. While not everyone is a fan of the rather aggressive errata cycle used for 4e, in my mind it has been a crucial factor in keeping the game alive and constantly improving. Frequent errata has made 4e a much better game than it was at release, but there are still major issues (psionic power point progression jumps to mind) that will remain unaddressed.

Ever since I started writing this blog, one of my main missions has been to support D&D 4E through house rules, making it a more fun and balanced game by improving and fixing what is already there - not unlike official errata. I believe this approach can go a long way, but very often I have found myself wishing for a way to clean the slate for some specific systems, like feats, magic items, or paragon paths. Frankly, I think these parts of the game have become cluttered with too many options of wildly different power levels, and their implementations present some fundamental problems on top of that, so rewriting them from scratch (an idea I already experimented with in the Magic Item Reset) could bring major improvements. One thought led to the other, and suddenly I found myself playing around with concepts for a full revision of 4E... And this (after much digression) is the project I want to present to you today.

So, to summarize: I am working on a full featured game that intends to preserve the awesomeness of D&D 4E, but also to polish it and get rid of its clunkier elements. It should be playable as a standalone, but also remain compatible with the most important mechanical material from 4E supplements: races, classes, adventures and monsters. An option to use isolated modules from my game in regular 4e campaigns would also be provided.

In tomorrow’s post, I will explain in more detail what exactly I have in mind for this project. Keep in mind that this will be a personal endeavor, and thus limited by my (currently very scarce) time to write  - I cant really tell if it will take me months to complete, or years, or if I will be unable to finish it. So please be patient: whatever content I end up producing will be available for free at this very blog.

As for the name of the thing? Square Fireballs Role-Playing Game, of course.

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