What is Your Fury Worth? (Patreon)

Another playtest packet is off to our Contract Testing team! What’s changed since they got their last packet? The short version is … a lot!

Hey folks, it’s James. You’ve gotten quite a few updates about resources recently, and this post is no different! You’ll likely continue to see resource updates throughout the development process, since they’re core to the game, but soon you’ll also be getting a lot more content about art, classes, ancestries, negotiation, crafting, and more.

Triggered Actions

In some previous posts, you’ve seen that the Tactician has a Triggered Action called Parry that allows them to reduce the incoming Damage from an Attack against them or an adjacent hero. That action also gained them 1 Focus. The intent of gaining the Focus had been two-fold. First, it was an enticement to pay attention to combat even when it wasn’t your turn. The second was that we wanted heroes to build about 1-3 resources per round to be able to build enough resources to power up their cool abilities. Heroes could gain 1 or 2 resources with Signature Attacks and then pick up another with their Triggered Action. While rewarding Triggered Actions with a resource did do the things we wanted them to do, they also created some problems.

First, the reward of a resource for your Triggered Action started to work against tactical thinking. Everyone wanted to use their Triggered Action as soon as they could rather than wait for a tactically wise moment to do so. For instance, the Talent has a Triggered Action called Again that allows them to rewind time with chronokinesis. Mechanically, it makes another creature reroll an Attack. The Talent would use this on an okay-not-great roll for an ally or a decent-but-not-terrible-or-awesome roll for an enemy. They reroll would often make things better for the enemies and worse for the heroes. Even more dire, then the Talent wouldn’t be able to use Again when they really needed it, like an enemy scoring a Critical Hit toward the end of the round. But the Talent player didn’t care, because they got their resource.

Players would also jockey for who got to go last in the turn order, saying, “Why don’t you go next, because if you do, I can use my Triggered Action, and then I’ll have enough Virtue to use Healing Grace.” While we want to encourage strategizing, everyone fighting for the last position so they can use their Triggered Action before their turn to get resources was at odds with the ideas of heroes springing into action to save the day. We were encouraging folks to be reactive and not proactive in their storytelling. When Matt and I talked about this, he brought up a great point. “If a Triggered Action is good enough, folks don’t need the incentive beyond the Triggered Action itself being cool to pay attention when it’s not their turn anyway.” In other words, getting to do a thing when it isn’t your turn should be the reward. He’s absolutely right.

Our second assumption—that you needed to generate 1-3 resources a round—was actually just a little part of the bigger problem with resource generation.

Not All Resources are Equal

In the last few weeks, you saw us make a lot of different changes to resources. Should they be generated at the end of the round? How, if at all, are they generated out of combat? Should resources disappear at the end of combat? How quickly should you generate resources? These are all questions we’ve been grappling with for months.

This ties into another thing we’ve wanted to avoid since the start of development—all classes playing the exact same way. One of the big criticisms of fourth edition D&D that I agree with is that the classes felt too similar in play. Everyone had at-will, encounter, and daily powers. Sure, those powers did different things, but if I didn’t like playing a class with at-will, encounter, and daily powers, I was out of luck. In a lot of other RPGs and editions of D&D, you have more variety in each class’s individual gameplay loop. Don’t like Vancian-style casting? Play a fighter. Don’t like making a lot of attacks each round? Play a rogue. Want to use some magic and still mix it up in melee? Play a paladin or ranger. Want to zap things all the time and just have a couple spell slots you use to nuke folks with fireballs? Be a warlock.

It’s clear that fourth edition D&D has inspired parts of our game, but from the outset we wanted to avoid repeating the sins of the past and do our own thing. When we first started designing the RPG, we thought of lots of different ways for classes to generate resources. Conduits rolled to see if they got Virtue or Wrath at the start of their turn, Tacticians built their resources by making Signature Attacks, and the Beastheart’s companion earned Ferocity by counting up the number of adjacent enemies. We also imagined everyone would use resources differently. The Reaver (formerly the Fury) builds up their resource during a battle and gets stronger as it accumulates. Then all those resources disappear at the end of an encounter. The talent can roll to see if they manifest a psionic power for free, and if they don’t, they gain Strain and have to manage a harmful resource. The Conduit manages two resources—Wrath to smite and Virtue to heal. We thought there might be classes without resources to manage.

Then as we started testing and designing, we noticed balance issues that any new, untested game has. To correct for these errors while trying to keep true to our goals of having the adventuring day and battles get more interesting as they go on, we slowly started to make all of the classes play the same way. The talent didn’t just have Strain, they built up Clarity. The Reaver didn’t lose Fury after a battle and carried it with them from encounter to encounter the same way a Conduit carried around Virtue. Then we got rid of Wrath, and the Conduit just one resource to manage like everyone else. There were some little differences in each class, but they were too subtle.

We were solving some balance issues while creating a host of narrative problems. It didn’t make much sense that a Conduit or Elementalist could cast a lot of spells in combat but couldn’t spend resources to cast those spells as freely outside of combat. It didn’t make sense that the Tactician and Reaver were carrying around Focus and Ferocity outside of combat, but they needed it to fuel their abilities they might use out of combat. All the while, I’m trying to make sure that an ability that costs the Beastheart 3 Ferocity is equivalent in power to something that costs the Shadow 3 Doom.

I realized we had a big problem over the last few weeks when Matt showed me his ideas for the Elementalist and Operator. They were really cool! The Elementalist uses the same idea Matt discussed in his post about mages. Their elemental-themed spells have a Complexity which determines how many turns (not rounds) it takes them to cast a spell. The class has a resource called Concentration that they use to cast spells faster and maintain the spells they’re concentrating on when they take Damage, but they don’t need to spend that resource to cast their spells. If they have enough time, they can cast anything.

The Operator is our mech class appropriate for the 1970s retro-future of the Timescape. Matt’s idea is that they have a resource called Power that they don’t spend. Instead, their Power grows slowly over the course of an adventure, and they can allocate (and reallocate) it to different parts of their mech frame (head, back, chest, legs, and arms). Need to scan another creature for weaknesses quickly? Divert all power to the head! Need to power the beam cannon on your chest? Move some Power from your arms to your chest.

Both of these class designs were fun. My initial reaction was, “Hell yeah!” but at the back of my mind, I thought, “We’ll have to change how these work to bring them in line with our other classes.” It made me sad. Why was I thinking that way? If we “brought them in line” that would kill what made them unique and fun to play. Plus, the system I wanted them to fit in wasn’t even working narratively. It was time for a rethink.

The reason we talk so much about game balance is because we’re trying to hit an ideal level of fun for a group of players. We want classes in our heroic fantasy RPG to be balanced in terms of their power. If one player gets to be Superman while the rest of us are Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Ma Kent, the game is really only fun for the first player. However, if one player is Superman and the others are Wonder Woman, Batman, Zatanna, and Cyborg, then we’re all more likely to have fun.

I was trying to balance the power of classes by having 1 Focus be worth the same as 1 Ferocity, which are both worth as much as 1 Virtue. That seemed like the most straightforward way to do it, but what I was really doing was recapitulating the same thing many folks didn’t like about fourth edition D&D—I was making all the classes play the same way. I was sacrificing a lot of cool gameplay and narrative sense to make it work. Gross.

The truth is that classes can have the same power without generating resources the same way. There is no reason 1 Concentration and 1 Power need to equal 1 Fury. We just need to make sure that the Elementalist isn’t more powerful than the Operator or Reaver. That is mathematically more complicated, but it’s going to result in a more fun and interesting RPG.

Now the Narrative Makes Sense

Once we let go of the idea that all resources are equal, the design space opens up to better support each class’s fantasy. Class resources and abilities help make a hero unique while Victories inspire everyone to keep adventuring. Purely martial classes, like the Tactician and Reaver, can build up resources quickly in combat, faster than anyone else, because they lose those resources when combat is over. Focus and Fury only power abilities that make sense in combat, mainly Attacks. Victories are important for them because every Victory a Tactician or Reaver earns increases the amount of Focus or Fury they have at the start of a combat encounter in addition to also boosting the effectiveness of some of their abilities.

Now you might be thinking, “Isn’t this making all martial classes the same?” To which I say, the Tactician and the Reaver are indeed similar, but they won’t play the same because of how they spend and generate their resources. Each gains resources when they make an Attack, but a 1st-level Tactician wants to spend Focus as fast as they gain it, because their only option for using Focus is to spend it before the encounter ends. The Reaver can spend their Fury to do some big moves, but if they hold onto their Fury, their Speed increases and they deal more Damage. The Tactician is a Focus-spending machine, while the Reaver holds onto their resource and waits for the right moment to unleash it.

Additionally, the Tacitican gains 1d4 Focus at the start of their turn if they aren’t Bloodied. The Reaver gains 1d4 Fury if they ARE bloodied. This also makes them play quite differently, because Tacitican makes calculated decisions and keeps themself protected with lots of armor while the Fury hurls themself into battle, savoring each point of Damage they take until their Health is reduced to half. Don’t worry, the Tactician also gets some cool stuff if they ARE Bloodied, like a bonus to their Parry.

These martial classes have other cool stuff they can do anytime that just works. They’re not just here for combat! Everyone can jump a number of squares equal to their Might score for free and then make a TN 9 Might-Athletics Test to see if they can increase the distance of that jump to up to twice their Might score, except for the Reaver, who can just always jump a distance of up to twice their Might score without a Test. That’s useful in and out of combat.

Not ALL martial classes lose resources at the end of battle and build them up through Attacking, but the two we have developed so far do. The Operator is a martial class, and they’ll use Power as described above.

It does make sense for classes that wield supernatural powers, like the Shadow, Elementalist, Talent, and Censor, to keep their Heroic Resources from encounter to encounter. They generate their resources more slowly during combat and have ways to generate them outside of combat.

For instance, after a Rest, the Conduit has Virtue and Wrath set to their maximum. They spend Virtue to heal and Wrath to smite. During an adventure, the Conduit regains spent Virtue and Wrath whenever they earn a Victory (which you can get in and out of combat) or please their god in some way (the specifics of which are determined by the Conduit’s deity). The Elementalist also has the maximum amount of Concentration after a Rest, and they regain some when they achieve a Victory, but the maximum they can have and what they can regain is smaller than the Conduit, since they don’t need to use Concentration as often as the Conduit reaches for Virtue and Wrath. The Elementalist also doesn’t have the extra opportunity to regain Concentration by appeasing a deity. The Talent no longer manages Clarity and only gains Strain if they roll high on their Manifestation Test. Victories and Recoveries allow them to remove Strain.

Will this work? A little bit of early testing seems to suggest it is a move in the right direction, but we’ll know more once our contract testers have had a chance to play. They have the latest versions of the Conduit, Elementalist, Reaver, Shadow, and Tactician. We’ll see how their tests go and continue our own internally. In fact, I got one in about an hour I need to get ready for!

If this new model works, it means that we can design classes to fit the fantasy we want them to serve instead of demanding that they fit into our system. It also means a lot of testing and dialing in to make sure classes are balanced. That’s how it should be. And thanks to Victories, we have given our heroes a reason to keep adventuring. Seems like the core is really coming together.

Ex animo,

James Introcaso

MCDM Lead Game Designer