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As usual, we’re trying to solve a problem. That shouldn’t alarm you. Game design is basically thinking up rules, figuring out why they don’t work, and then cutting down, adding to, and tweaking those rules until they do. In some ways, my job is creating problems and then seeing if I can solve them. This week’s problem: Attacks, Effects, Counters, and Defenses.

It’s James. I’m here to talk to you about what I’ve been up to this week in the wonderful world of Orden. When I wasn’t getting PDFs ready for our final 5e releases, I was playtesting our game with the MCDM staff, reviewing tester notes, and having design meetings with Matt. All of these have revealed an issue at the core of the game.

Defenses Too High

Now that we’re doing some more tweaking of the math, it’s clear that Defenses are too high. Currently when one creature Attacks another, one of the target’s Defenses is subtracted from the Attack’s total, and the remainder is taken as Damage. Many Attacks also have a rider that says if the target takes Damage, they also suffer an effect, such as being Pushed, suffering a negative condition, or some other bad thing.

In initial phases of testing, each creature’s Defenses were pretty low, to ensure that each hit felt like it mattered. But lower Defenses meant that those rider effects happened all the time. Some Defenses were so low that there was no way a creature could defend against their effects. Players and Directors didn’t seem to mind when Damage was guaranteed, since no one (other than minions) was killed in a single Attack. They had time to heal before things got bad, and their character’s actions weren’t really impacted by taking Damage unless it was enough to bring them to 0 or lower Health. What they didn’t like was that someone could mess them up in another way and that there was nothing they could do to stop it.

I wanted to see if we could keep everything to a single roll: Attack, Damage, and Effects, so we boosted Defenses. Unfortunately, that swung the pendulum in the other direction. There are now fewer instances of Attacks dealing Damage, which lowers the number of effects and means nothing is unavoidable, but it has two problems. We’re still seeing folks deal Damage on most Attacks, but their average Damage is way lower. Folks are dealing about 3 Damage per Signature Attack at 1st-level. We’ve also significantly increased the value of a Counter, because they happen more often (due to more Attacks dealing 0 Damage) and because they now deal as much Damage if not more than the average Signature Attack. That’s not good! It means standing there in heavy armor blocking incoming Attacks and holding a weapon with the Riposte Quality is the optimal way to play the game. Not super tactical or cinematic.

What To Do?

There are a lot of different ways we can solve these issues, and each one has its pros and cons. I actually detailed four different solutions for Matt.

Fix Everything Individually

In the first solution I proposed to Matt, we tackle each problem individually. We lower the Defenses and the amount of Damage a Counter can do, and then we make it so that more debilitating effects require a saving throw upfront before they take effect. This adds an extra step to some Attacks, but it’s a step that adds some Drama and will likely make the game better overall. An Attack that requires a saving throw as well might look like this:

Under this scenario, all saves have the same TN, probably around 10. That way you don’t need to confer when you roll the save, you just know you’ve done it. It also means that heroes will get very good with some saves as they level up, but not all or even most of them. Powerful creatures, like dragons or liches, might even impose a Bane or two on saves, while heroes who buff their allies, like the Conduit, might grant Boons. Fun stuff!

After talking it over, Matt and I agree that this straightforward solution could work, but that the extra roll could be a little clunky. We won’t know until we try!

Roll To Perform Attacks

You should know up front that we’re not going with this method so that I don’t get you all pumped for it and then let you down.

In the second solution I proposed, we’d do away with Attacks targeting Defenses and instead have a hero roll against a target number (or TN) to perform an Attack. This is a mechanic you see in other RPGs like Call of Cthulhu, ZWEIHÄNDER, and all Powered by the Apocalypse games just to name a few. Instead of rolling against a TN imposed by an enemy’s statistics (like AC in D&D), you roll against a TN imposed by the Attack itself. As you level up, the TNs stay the same but your stats go up, so you get better at executing your older Attacks and get more powerful Attacks that are harder to perform. You can always try to perform an Attack you know and you spend resources to add to the result of the Test you make to execute them.

Every Attack has two TNs. A lower TN, which allows you to deal Damage, and a higher TN, which can increase the Damage and/or add an effect. We want to keep it to one roll, so the Damage here is a static number that can increase based on the TN you hit.

Fail to execute the Attack at all, and your target gets to Counter!

This was actually an idea Matt had brought forth much earlier this year, and I’ve come around on it. It makes the flow of the game wonderful. You never really need to confer with the Director to know if you’ve succeeded. You just look at your sheet and know.

However, the reason I initially didn’t like it is ultimately why we still think it’s probably not right for a tactical game. It could be right for another! This system means that the enemy you face doesn’t have as much of an impact on your Attacks. Sure, they could impose some Banes on rolls or resist certain types of Attack, but it doesn’t provide as many little levers for us to pull as designers when creating creatures to battle. If we throw in lots of adjustments to Attacks for each creature, it defeats the purpose of having a system like this. On top of that big consideration, there is also the small one that this could be too unusual for the audience we’re trying to attract to this game who are used to d20 fantasy stuff. For all those reasons, we’re passing on this method for now.

Asymmetrical Game

We’re not going for this route either, but like the one before it, we think this option could be right for another game MCDM makes someday. This one is probably the most radical departure from what we currently have.

I told Matt that we could make this an asymmetrical game where the player characters function differently in combat than their foes. Plenty of games, like Burn Bryte (a game I worked on as lead designer), work this way. The PCs are heroes afterall, so it should be fine to make them special.

In this method, the player characters always do Damage with their Attacks. It’s just a question of how much. All Attacks deal effects. If the effect is particularly impactful, the hero must deal a significant amount of Damage for it to take effect, determined by the Attack they’re using. For instance, the Dazed effect of a Tactician’s Dazing Blow may not work unless the Attack deals at least 10 Damage to the target. The monsters have plenty of Health to keep them in the fight for a few rounds before they are defeated.

Monster abilities work differently. When they Attack heroes, the Director doesn’t roll. Instead, the heroes roll to defend themselves. If the heroes succeed, they defend themself, and the monster misses. We could have each hero have a custom Counter here to avoid the null result, or it could be fine for monsters to have a null result turn. They’re not the heroes, and the Director controls way more than just one character, so it doesn’t feel bad if a monster misses. If the hero fails to defend themself, they take Damage and suffer an effect. This Damage could be rolled by the Director, or it could be a static number if we want to keep rolling to a minimum (or it could depend on the specific Attack used).

We didn’t go in this direction, because we once again thought it wasn’t right for a tactical game. As Matt said, “This is cool! Great for games where the Director is more shaping a narrative, but we want our Directors to have fun the way the players do, and that means rolling dice.” Ultimately, running a monster in this system would feel more like running a creature with a video game script, which isn’t a bad thing, but does make it more difficult for the Director to change and adjust tactics based on what the heroes are doing.

Opposed Rolls

There is another way of doing this that is more radical and would have some ripple effects on other parts of the system. I won’t go too into detail here, because we haven’t even tested it internally yet, but it basically changes each Attack into an opposed roll. When a creature makes an Attack, the Defender also rolls. For instance, an Elementalist might use an Attack called Burn against a cultist. That Attack requires the Elementalist to roll a Reason Test opposed by the cultist’s Agility Test. That’s the only roll required, so we’re still doing everything quickly.

If the Attacker wins (or there’s a tie), they deal Damage, determined by the Attack and weapon or implement they’re using and deal an effect to the Defender. In our Elementalist example, the Elementalist deals 5 Fire Damage to the cultist and the cultist is now also On Fire 3 (Save Ends).

If the Defender wins, they take no Damage and suffer no effect and get to Counter the Attacker. This has the added benefit of making Counters feel more earned, because now the Defender actively did something (rolled dice) to make them occur. (A few testers have reported not liking that Counters “just happen,” and this fixes that. Bonus!)

This possible solution also means that we can control how much Damage is being dealt by specific Attacks and abilities, giving us finer control over the game’s math. We even know that we should make it so that most of the time the Attacker beats the Defender, but also math it so that the Defender still has a fighting chance of success. But the thing we don’t know yet… is it fun?

Certainly we’re not the first game to use opposed rolls for Attacks. For example, the highly-acclaimed RPG Troika! uses opposed rolls during combat in a similar manner. Their system isn’t weighted in favor of the Attacker and also sees the Defender deal the full damage of an Attack if they win instead of doing a little Damage with a Counter like us. That suits Troika! well, but it doesn’t suit our heroic fantasy needs, hence the differences. But will this work at all for our system? Time to FORK!

Fork It Up!

Picture the progress of our system like a line. At some point the line separates, or forks, into two lines. In this case, one line (or tine if we’re feeling forky) is the simpler first solution of sometimes requiring a saving throw, and the other is the opposed roll system I laid out. Currently, the testers and folks at the company who aren’t me are basically working on the first line while I work on the second.

Obviously a change to the game’s core combat mechanic of this scale will have some ripple effects across weapons, armor, certain abilities, and more. I’m not rewriting everything. I’m just doing enough work to get four pregens together, a few monsters, and a few combat encounters. Sometime soon, probably Monday or Tuesday next week, we’ll go ahead and run that test and decide if we should keep working on that version of the game in favor of the other or vice versa. Heck, we could end up somewhere in between and need to do more tests. We’ll see!

Discord Chats

Want to come and talk about this update and others with folks in the MCDM community. Join the MCDM Discord. It’s a jam. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. More to come soon!

Ex animo,

James Introcaso

MCDM Lead Game Designer