Monster Energy (Patreon)

“So, we’re all agreed that the monster book for our RPG will use all the same principles as Flee, Mortals!” This is what we said at the end of a meeting when we were planning the BackerKit campaign for the MCDM RPG before we had even finalized the layout for Flee, Mortals, our fifth edition monster book. We would convert some of the books stat blocks for our game, add in a bunch more, and bada bing, you got a monster book. Oh sweet summer MCDM employees.

It’s James again. I want to talk about a process we’re (hopefully) nearing the end of, and that’s monster R&D for our RPG. We thought we’d use many of the exact same principles from Flee, Mortals for our game. Things like minions, action-oriented creatures, and the actions and traits of many monsters would be more or less the same. Many people love what we did in Flee, Mortals! (thank you for that, by the way), and we enjoyed doing it. Give the people what we all want!

BUT a straight up Flee, Mortals! conversion plus a bunch of new monsters was not meant to be. Fear not, we are keeping many of the same guiding ideas that made Flee, Mortals! a success. We want monsters who make running, preparing, and playing the game fun. We want a variety of different monsters across levels to challenge heroes. We want the Director to feel like a tactical genius without a lot of effort. We want combat to be full of fun, memorable moments that make the players say, “What the fck is that?” and, “Holy sht we barely f*cking survived!” and, most importantly, “That ruled.”

The challenge for us is that we need to find some new ways of doing some of those things. Our game is different from a standard d20 fantasy RPG. Monsters always deal damage with their attacks. Initiative isn’t randomly determined at the start of a battle. Matt covered a lot of this in a post about monsters back in May. I’m going to talk about what we’ve done since then.

But First: Minions

Before I dive into the update, I need to tell you a little bit about how minions worked in our May playtests. If you’re familiar with Flee, Mortals! or fourth edition D&D (or many other RPGs), you know that minions are creatures meant to die quickly and be effective in large numbers. It gives the heroes the feeling of taking on a whole horde of zombies or demons without the Director having to track a zillion different Stamina pools, triggered actions, and more.

In Flee, Mortals! minions died if they took damage from an attack or failed saving throw, or if damage met or exceeded their hit point maximum from a successful save. If a 30-damage fireball spell deals damage to a group of minions who each have 5 hit points, all those minions are going to die, because even a successful save for half damage exceeds their hit point maximum. You could also overkill minions by dealing damage to one that was more than their hit point maximum and then overflowing that damage to another minion within reach. You could do this multiple times per attack, resulting in lots of minions dying when you score a critical hit against them!

I tried a few different iterations of minions for our game that were similar to Flee, Mortals! but the instant damage of attacks meant that a minion always died when targeted with an attack. You can’t miss, so minions were barely a threat. “That’s okay! I’ll just add MORE minions to an encounter.” That’s too swingy. If the minions act BEFORE the heroes, they’re devastating. “Well, what if we try saying that you have to deal damage equal to the minion’s health to kill them, otherwise you don’t?” Ah, crap. I just reintroduced the null result into our game. “Maybe you can’t overkill minions. You can just kill them one at a time!” The problem is that area attacks are still devastating (or nothing if you include a minion damage cap), because those also always deal damage. “What if I just say minions are low health creatures who can combine attacks?” Now tracking their health is a pain in the butt.

I took a step back and decided to stop trying to convert Flee, Mortals! minions and instead thought about what minions are for in a game about fighting monsters. They make the heroes feel awesome because you fight a lot of them at once, and they’re threatening in large numbers. They should be easy for the Director to run and die quickly. Area effects that damage and multitarget attacks should be more effective against them than single attacks, but it’d be cool if a single target attack could kill multiple.

At the same time, I thought about how other games run minions. Star Wars: Edge of the Empire and 13th Age have minions with pooled health. That’s really smart! A zombie minion has 5 Stamina and 5 zombie minions together share a Stamina pool of 25. If you deal 5 damage to a zombie, they die and the pool drops to 20. If you deal 10 damage to a zombie, that zombie PLUS another one dies, and the pool is reduced to 15. If you use an area attack that deals 3 damage to 5 zombies, the zombies take 15 damage total, three in that area die, and the pool is reduced to 10. Basically for every increment of 5 damage (equal to the minion’s Stamina maximum) a zombie dies. If you kill a secondary zombie beyond your reach with an attack, you get to describe how you take them out by hurling a dagger, or kicking another zombie’s head at them, or the force of your blow causing the ceiling to partially collapse and brain the second zombie. It’s cinematic stuff!

This solves a lot of the problems we were having. Area attacks are very effective, single target attacks can kill multiple zombies, and the strength of the attack you use against the minion still matters AND always does progress. No null result, but no guaranteed result either. You can attack a minion and NOT kill any (unlikely as it may be) but still reduce the overall health pool and make progress on minion destruction. Add in a little advice about how to track Stamina pools for the Director, and now we’re cooking with bacon. We’ve been testing this for a bit and it seems to work well! Each member of the design team and many of our testers have run this version of minions and enjoyed it.

Now you have the context you need for the rest of this post.

Atomized Monster Debrief

You may remember Matt talking about us trying atomized monsters in his May post. Both he and I really enjoyed running goblins this way, as did a couple testers, but not the majority of folks. Now, testing doesn’t determine the path we take, but when a lot of folks we trust say, “We don’t like this aspect of the game,” it is always worth investigating. I dug into the comments to figure out what was going on.

We wanted atomized monsters to be easier to run. The idea was that you could pick the monster you needed when you needed them in initiative, and we kept them SUPER simple so you could see at a glance what each could do and pick the monster you needed when you needed it. Turns out this is a great thing … if you’re game’s designer. If you’re not, it can create quite the headache.

Testers reported that while they had fun using these monsters, the mental load as a Director was huge. They had to put a lot more thought into preparation, because they had to figure out which monsters synergized together to get the overall encounter feel they wanted, and they had to really think hard each turn about which creatures to activate. On top of that, the players had a lot of effects flying around that needed to be tracked because there were so many non-minion creatures. We had missed the mark. Flee, Mortals! made people FEEL like tactical geniuses, and atomized monsters required you to THINK like one, which is a lot of work and not fun for most folks.

Failing Phases

We decided that atomized monsters were too simple. For our next phase of monster R&D, we had a meeting about the complexity of different monsters based on the number we thought you’d fight. We broke monsters into categories:

• Armies: There are two to three of these types of these non-minion creatures per hero. Goblins, zombies, kobolds, and the like fit this bill at 1st level.

• Bands: There are one to two of these non-minion creatures per hero. Humans, orcs, elves, and the like fit the bill at 1st level.

• Troops: Two or three of these non-minion creatures in the entire battle for a standard party of four or five heroes. Ogres, bears, oozes, and the like fit the bill at 1st level.

• Solo: Boss creatures meant to take on the whole party of heroes alone! Ankhegs and the like fit the bill at 1st level.

This approach combined with our encounter-building rules would allow for mixing and matching. You can drop a trained war bear into a group of goblins or have a dwarf, human, kobold, and ogre team up to take on those pesky heroes. It also told us how complex each should be. Armies should have the simplest non-minion creatures (though still more complex than atomized) and solos should be the most complex. If you build an encounter with a bunch of little creatures, the complexity comes from the variety of stat blocks used. If you build an encounter of two ogres, the complexity comes from the ogre stat block.

For armies and bands, we still wanted to alleviate the mental load of trying to decide which creatures should act when in initiative for the Director so they didn’t have to look at every stat block and we wanted to help them make creatures into effective squads, so we instituted phases. Phases organized creatures into squads and determined which creatures act based on their role when it’s the Director’s turn. Phase 1 is the artillery phase, when artillery creatures act to soften up their foes. Phase 2 is the control phase, when controllers and hexers go to move and whammy the heroes and create favorable terrain for their melee-focused friends. Phase 3 is the melee phase, when brutes and harriers mix it up to chop the heroes down. Phase 4 is the support phase, where support creatures come out to heal and buff friends for the next round and ambushers appear now that they have meat shields to hide behind. Minions and defenders are attached units who act whenever the creatures they are led by or defending act.

Now, we could debate the finer points of which phase happens when or which creatures belong together in a phase, but … it turns out this was a half bust. Testers didn’t like being forced to act in a particular phase. If the heroes closed the distance before Phase 1, the Director really wanted to activate their melee creatures before artillery to give the melee creatures a chance to do their thing before they were taken out. While phases did reduce the mental load, they also made Directors frustrated, which is worse!

So halfway through the testing cycle we lifted the restriction of creatures acting in phases and asked the testers to keep the creatures in their squads but allow them to act in any order from round to round based on whatever the Director wanted. That was much better received! Organizing creatures into squads was helpful and working.

There were some other issues with this approach though. First, there were A LOT of non-minion creatures. Each had such low health that they died quickly and the players never felt like they had to use any of their heroic abilities that cost resources to win the day. Why use Assassinate to kill a goblin when I Work Better Alone will do? It led to some very static and unheroic battles.

Testers also noted how easy it is for many non-minion creatures going at the same time to focus fire and bring a hero down. Even if the goblins are rolling low, that can mean a lot of damage.

Meanwhile, while we were running our own internal tests, Matt mentioned he wanted MOAR GOBLINS on the field without super long Director turns. He felt that two goblins per character wasn’t feeling heroic enough for a battle specifically against goblins. He also wanted to see squads even more organized and working together, and suggested using a stat like coherency to simulate how together they are. We got into a long conversation about goblins and minions as a design team. I ran a test that added coherency to the mix, which meant that goblins in squads made morale tests whenever a member of the squad died. Fail the test, and you go running. It wasn’t exactly a successful test for a lot of reasons (I overloaded the encounter with environmental effects and creatures ailed morale tests and broke way too easily), but it did spark some more ideas. Djordi said that he had an idea that leveraged our current minion rules and used coherency, so that was the next step!

Behold Squinions

Djordi put together some rules for squads and ran a really great encounter with a bunch of goblins for us. Here’s the general breakdown:

• Squads were made up of minions that leveraged the current minion rules for Stamina pools. Now there are reasons to assassinate instead of use a signature action. More damage kills more minions.

• Instead of there being one kind of goblin minion, there were several and each had a role. There were artillery minions, brute minions, and harrier minions in our test, but there could definitely be more! Each minion squad had minions of one type. Djordi dubbed this version of minions as squinions unofficially.

• When a squad attacks, the number of minions in the squad determines how many targets the squad can attack. Instead of each minion increasing an attack’s damage like they do in Flee, Mortals!, they spread it around. This discouraged focusing fire and still kept minion squads effective.

• Each squad can have a captain, a non-minion, who has a special ability that can give the squad a unique trait, extra damage, or more speed. For instance, the goblin assassin makes it easier for their squad to hide! A captain uses their maneuver and action separately from the minions, but on the same turn. They can also be pretty beefy, giving you reasons to spend those heroic resources.

• All captains can use the bodyguard triggered action, which allows them to reduce and redirect incoming damage to an adjacent minion. It uses their triggered action, so it can only happen once per round per captain.

• You can build encounters with squads that have no captain. Similarly you can have captains without squads. In that case, a goblin assassin can still do cool stuff, they just don’t share the traits.

• Every squad also had a coherency score. When all members of a squad are within a number of squares equal to their coherency score (typically 2), the squad is coherent. If separated from a squad, a minion can’t benefit from their captain’s cool stuff or take actions, though they can take maneuvers to try to get back to and rejoin the squad.

The test went super well! There were a goodly number of goblins, each squad was distinct, and everyone had a lot of fun. We had a debrief about what worked (A LOT) and what we thought could improve. Coherency was probably unnecessary for interesting squad tactics now that minions with roles and captains were a thing. While coherency added a layer of tactics to the game, it also made things like picking or drawing a map where all your squads could be coherent and still have some interesting terrain much harder. It also meant a lot of square counting to make sure each squinion and leader were close enough to each other to be in coherency.

I ran a test without coherency, and the squad rules still worked well. After that test, we talked about different kinds of creatures groups again, and I wrote up this revised list which now included squinions:

This follows the same theory as the old groups. You can mix and match. Squad creatures are more complex than platoon, band, or horde creatures. Hordes, bands, and platoons all have minion options.

Goblin Points Return

We just finished a week of the design team getting together in person for the first time since hiring a producer, Djordi, and Willy. My goal was to run at least one of each type of creature group in an encounter and have each member of the design team run at least once with squads and minions to make sure Matt and Willy liked it as much as Djordi and me from the other side of the screen. We also spent a lot of time tinkering with different class abilities and features based on some tester feedback we had gotten.

Everyone liked squinions, and the progress we made on classes was substantial (more on that in future posts). After Matt ran an encounter, his feedback was, “I want the Director to have some way to do something cool and interesting during the battle the same way you all do when you spend heroic resources.”

We’ve tried a lot of different methods for monsters doing cool stuff. We’ve had monsters with once-per-encounter abilities, we have encounter events (loving called ORCs since each battle has an Opener, Reversal, and Closer), and we’ve tried giving the Director a resource they can use to power their monster’s abilities (sometimes called Goblin Points or Villain Points depending on who you ask). In the past we gave up on a Director resource because it was too much to track, but now with squads … it would likely be easier. Time to test again.

We ran two tests with Director resources, what I’m currently calling Villain Power (or VP … it’s temp name and we don’t need suggestions). VP allows a Director to use special monster abilities or power up regular ones, just like a heroic resource. It also allows them to place new terrain elements (demons were opening portals) and activate events.

VP was generated by the Director’s creature’s dying, which made some good game design sense. We lost the thing that happens in most d20 fantasy, which is that heroes kill enough monsters that the Director’s creatures are no longer effective and have basically lost the battle, but we still slog out a round of combat to finish the fight. No longer was that true, because now those remaining goblins are loaded up with goblin power and able to use their most devastating abilities.

While this was fun from the Director’s side, there was a clear issue on the hero side. I was playing a fury and killed a bunch of demons. It felt epic! Until I looked around the table and saw my fellow players react by saying, “You just gave the Director so much villain power.” They weren’t excited for the epic move. They were scared of what was going to come next now that I had powered up the demons.

What’s the solution? We have several! I’m actually about to propose one for the next testing packet we’re sending out. I won’t share those yet, but we have a lot of good ideas that revolve around the same philosophy we use for players. Heroic resources are earned by the players doing cool stuff with their characters. Villain power should work the same way.

There is a lot more to come!

Ex animo,

James