Gear is Dead, Long Live Kits (Patreon)

Honestly we should have done this in the first place. I blame myself.

Anyway, hey everybody Matt Colville at your service. This is an update on our current thinking about weapons and armor. You may remember (when last we left our heroes!) that weapons had keywords and those keywords gave you special abilities or bonuses and you could combine weapons, shield, and armor however you wanted.

In fact, in case you’re just joining us and aren’t caught up, or maybe it’s just been a while and you don’t remember how weapons and armor work, let’s go over where we started, where we ended up, and how we got there.

Weapons & Damage

We never liked the idea that your choice of weapon determined how much damage you did. For one thing, mundane weapons do not impart force all by themselves, it’s your muscles doing the actual work, so your stats should be the primary determining factor. But choice of weapon should do something right?

But also the idea that Weapons Do Damage is…it forces players into two groups

In one group are players who have an idea, maybe an image, maybe just a vibe, of the character they want to play and they see the list of weapons as a way to capture that vibe. These folks tend to assume that, since there’s a Big List of Weapons, and it’s a Fighting Monsters game, the DevTeam have made sure that they can pick whichever weapons they think are cool, whichever weapons fit their fantasy or archetype or vibe, and they’ll have fun. It does not occur to these people that there might be weapons on the Big List that are only there because “they’ve always been there” and that, in fact, their choice of weapon would be a Bad Choice. Their character looks cool! But it turns out they are Less Good at fighting monsters than their teammates as a result. And then the grognards at the table sneer at them and say “Well what did you expect?” Because the grognards know there are Right Answers to the question of which weapon you should take.

In the second group are players who see the big list, they know it’s a game about fighting monsters, and they want to solve it. They assume it can be solved! They assume that, if there’s a Big List of Weapons, there must be a Best Weapon For Fighting Monsters. For them, part of the fun (or maybe it’s better to say, one the rewards of playing) for them is being one of the people who know the correct answer. This is also sometimes referred to as System Mastery. “I feel good about the time I invested in learning this game every time I play with someone new, and they make the Obvious But Wrong choice” of weapon or spell or background or whatever, take your pick.

Solving The Game

I had a lot of friends who worked on a big, popular MOBA, which is a kind of video game. :D And something they told me (I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s certainly true that they told me this) was that every “season” (roughly equivalent to once a year but not necessarily) they would “rebalance” all the heroes. Tweak their stats and by definition their performance.

Ostensibly they did this because they’d learned a lot about balance since last season and were tweaking different characters based on this knowledge in order to make the game more fair. That’s why they said they were doing it. And I’m sure there is some truth in this!

But, according to some designers I know, they also messed around with the game on purpose just to give a certain kind of player a new problem to solve.

There is some percentage of players, they said, who only engage with the game for as long as it takes to “solve” it. Meaning, determine (via whatever methods available to them) which hero is Best. Because they assume there is a “best hero.” It does not occur to them that the game might be so complex as to make it literally impossible for any one hero to be The Best or even Best At This Role. That’s not how their brains work. There are many heroes, therefore there must be a Best Hero, and they see their job (really, the game) as an exercise in solving that.

They then play that hero, and only that hero. They sneer at anyone who plays a different hero for any reason, and once they’ve completed this ritual, they move on to another game.

Because they beat that game. They solved it. Doesn’t matter if their conclusion is right or wrong, or even if it’s POSSIBLE to “solve” the game, they are convinced they have solved it, so there’s no more attraction, and they move on.

So the devs constantly mess with the game’s balance, on purpose to keep these players on the hook. To give them new problems to “solve” every year. And, based on everything I’ve heard, this strategy works. It’s very successful.

The MCDM RPG ain’t that kinda game.

Gear 1.0

Armed with the philosophy that Weapons Don’t Do Damage, Your Character Does Damage, we still wanted to let people choose weapons a la carte. I have no real explanation to why we assumed this would be good, except that it’s traditional. And we are well-educated on the different fantasy archetypes people expect will be present in this game and we want to deliver on those archetypes.

We wanted people to have fun choosing weapons a la carte, and we wanted to fulfill all the classic archetypes. That’d be great! Best of both worlds! Now you may be on the point of discovering why our weapon design wasn’t working, but let’s not jump ahead to the end of the mystery.

So we used Weapon Properties. Different properties gave you different bonuses or abilities. These often had numerical values which allowed us to distinguish between very similar weapons. Here’s an example from the first draft of our weapon design.

Now, this seemed very promising! At least to me, at least at first. However, as is often the case with first drafts, I was never certain it was real.

First Drafts

Sometimes you have a design idea that excites you but you’re not sure it’ll work. But it’s exciting! But…this can’t work, can it? Well, maybe! But surely not. But maybe!

You’ve got those Two Wolves inside you; one is driving you to implement the idea, the other is back there howling at how WEIRD your idea is. “This is never gonna work!” I could tell “this is going to be a lot of work to balance,” but until we had something to test, there was no way to know how much time it would take.

The only thing for it in these scenarios is; write it down, test it, revise, iterate, see where it leads. Sometimes it works! But even when it doesn’t work you usually learn something, and that informs the design that does work and that is The Process.

This was our first draft for weapons. It didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but the main one we focused on was the fact that SOME of these properties were perfectly straightforward. +1 damage! +1 Knockback! Very popular.

Whereas other abilities were basically creating new special abilities? Like Fast or Burst. You couldn’t just point to a number on your character sheet, add one to it, and be done. You had to remember the new abilities these weapons gave you. And you had to always remember them. Daggers didn’t give you some cool Dagger Power you could do once per encounter, they let you attack EVERYONE who came at you in melee. Every time someone came at you in melee! So you always had to remember that. Gross.

Gear 2.0

So we iterated. We removed all (or most?) of those abilities and replaced them with more weapon properties that just affected some number on your character sheet. Fewer things to remember, we thought.

Here is where we ended up.

WOW we did a LOT OF WORK on this! 😀 And these are just the properties! The weapons were crazy! You may notice at the bottom we also had properties for spellcaster items!

So let it not be said we have any issues throwing out our earlier efforts if they’re not working. I think the thing that separates a good game from a great game is polish, and literally thanks to you folks reading this and the hard work of our testers, we have the time to iterate on and polish our design.

Well this design let us do what we wanted, you can see some abilities in there that are extremely specific, like Reload for Crossbows and Well-balanced for Longswords and stuff. Lots of abilities that modify countering which is one of the reasons Countering wasn’t working! People were trying to build characters that could counter everything! And that wasn’t what countering was for!

We felt pretty good about this design, players would say “Oh it’s cool that I can….” We could see how magic items could do all sorts of crazy stuff with this system, and we imagined people could pretty easily invent their own weapons.

But here’s what I knew, even as I was working on this and believing in it. “This is going to take forever to test and balance.” Tons of Weapon Properties, many of which have numerical values so each value needs to be tested, not just each property, and then tons of different combinations of weapons and is this really how we want to spend our finite development time?

The real reason we gave up on this was; it wasn’t solving either problem well. We didn’t exactly have a Best Weapon, but we always had a small list of The Best Weapons which wasn’t what we wanted.

AND we weren’t delivering on the archetype fantasies! Well, that’s not true, some of those fantasies, we definitely supported. It will not surprise you to learn we supported those fantasies that the Best Weapons described. Greataxes and Warhammers were favorites.

So, we didn’t want Right Answers, but we had them and we wanted to support a ton of different characters archetypes, and we weren’t. What to do?

Gear Is Dead, Long Live Kits

From the very beginning of this process I had this idea in the back of my mind that a better version of this would be combining choices into what I thought of as “presets.” But it was a very vague idea and I couldn’t really grab ahold of it. I don’t know any other way to describe my thinking here. It was like a fly buzzing around the back of my head and I couldn’t grab it.

Talking to a friend and fellow game dev, I said something like “We should just bundle these choices together somehow.” I think I was imagining leaving the system as it was, and bundling different weapons and armor together into Presets. So you COULD build your character’s gear a la carte, but you would probably just take one of the Preset Combos.

As I was describing this idea, and being frustrated with my own ability to see it clearly, my friend said “Oh like Midnight Suns.”

This is not the first time someone has used Midnight Suns as a point of comparison with our game! It’s a newish video game in which you control the classic Marvel Superheroes in a tactical combat game made by the same folks who did X-COM which is a classic and I basically trust those folks to make a good game.

In Marvel Suns, you choose a “suit” and that determines which character archetype you are. I think? I watched a video and it looked like you controlled famous characters like Captain Marvel so I’m not even sure you even make your own character in that game? I dunno, doesn’t matter.

But my friend starts talking about this and as soon as he says “If you want to play an Iron Man type character, you take the Techno suit.” And I literally said, out loud, “AH HAH!”

Ah hah! That’s it! That’s the missing piece! The names. This is why I was having such a hard time resolving my vague idea into focus. I didn’t have a handle on the presentation. I had this solution forming in the back of my head, but no easy way to think about it, because I didn’t have the language, and now I did.

Kits

So! Kits! I sometimes think of them as “loadouts” but that is WAY out of genre for this game. 😀

Kits are those presets I was imagining. You do not pick weapons and armor a la carte, you choose a Kit. And Kits have names! Like…Panther, Cloak & Dagger, Shining Armor. As soon as we had this idea, we instantly came up with a ton of kits, and we are confident it will be fun for folks to invent new ones.

The Panther kit is; you’re basically Conan. No armor, highly agile, huge, two-handed heavy blade of some kind. Whether it’s a Greataxe or a Greatsword? That’s up to you. This is a critical part of the Kit design. We tell you what category of weapon and armor you’ve got, and you are free to instantiate it however you want.

That’s probably how magic items will work! The Dread Axe, hereditary weapon of the dwarven thanes of Kal Kalavar is a magic heavy blade so anyone with a kit that features that category of weapon can wield it and gain its bonuses. Yes, that means if you take the Swashbuckler kit, then you can’t wield that axe! Of course you can’t, you’re a swashbuckler! But there will be lots of kits that can use each category of weapon and armor. So it’s not that only the Panther kit has the Heavy Blade weapon type.

Each kit gives you some mathematical bonuses to: Health, Speed, Damage, Reach. And, and most importantly, you get a special action unique to that kit. So the Panther kit might give you the Leaping Cleave ability that lets you jump some crazy distance and slam your opponent and maybe inflict a Bleed debuff on them, I dunno, I just made that up. 😀

But that shows you the power of Kits. It’s a clear archetype and that is hugely valuable to us. It comes with a handful of useful mechanical bonuses, but we can have two kits that grant the same bonuses, as long as they have different Special Actions!

As soon as I saw this I pitched it to James and he said “This could be how we handle Multiclassing.” By which he meant; if you are a Tactician but you want to look like Conan? Take the Panther kit. Want to look like Lancelot? Take the Shining Armor kit.

Can a Talent take the Panther kit?? We dunno. Maybe! There may be good reasons to put kits into categories like Martial or whatever, and the limit which classes have access to which kits? In which case that’s how it’ll work, but for now we’re hoping you can play a Talent with no armor and a ridiculously big great weapon.

Now we don’t need to wrestle with “how do daggers work, and how do we support a character who just wants to wield a single dagger and nothing else, another character who wants to wield two daggers, and another character who wants a longsword and a dagger?” Now we just make different kits and as long as we can think of a cool Special Action to go with it, we’re golden. And we think that’s where we SHOULD be focusing our design. Action Oriented! Forget all these weapon combos, what can you DO?

I still don’t know exactly how Marvel Suns does it, can anyone just be Iron Man by picking the Techno Suit? Well, doesn’t matter how they do it, because now I know how we do it. 😀

And we believe that, once there’s a list of kits and they’ve been tested and are working, people will have fun developing new kits for their game! And it’s going to make character creation a LOT more straightforward and fun. It’s fun to imagine these different combos of class and kit.

Armor

I haven’t talked about how Armor works, because while it was a problem it wasn’t as big a problem, but it was a problem. 😀 We were really pushed trying to find different ways to support different kinds of armor. Armor reduced damage but it was gonna need to do something else too otherwise we’d only have like 4 kinds of armor because, at 1st level, there needs to be limits on how much damage you can ignore before your character becomes functionally invincible. 😀

We originally imagined all armor would reduce movement to some extent, but folks didn’t like being slowed down so we dialed it in and only heavy armor reduced movement and only by 1 or 2, and that seemed to basically work.

But then in a very recent playtest Jason, leader of the art team, said “Guys you know in a lot of wargames? Armor just gives you more health.”

James and I virtually looked at each other across a Discord call and said “Yeah. Yeah that’s what we should have done.” It’s just easier, and people like it. If you take a kit with heavy armor? You get some bonus health. How does it work? It just works. Don’t overthink it. 😀 We spent like 10 seconds imagining maybe that extra health from armor should be something you have to repair? And then we said “No don’t be ridiculous, this isn’t that kinda game.” It just works, you have more health. If, for some reason, you take your armor off? You lose that health, but that’s a dramatic moment, not a tactical decision. Our game isn’t about “how long does it take to put my armor on” OR about catching heroes unawares without their kit. Those things only happen in appropriately dramatic moments.

Armor being Damage Reduction vs Armor being Extra Health is functionally the same. If you subtract 3 damage from every attack for 10 attacks and then Rest, you saved 30 damage. We could just give you 30 health and no DR, and it would be the same. But getting a big chunk of extra health because you took the Shining Armor kit? That feels good and it’s WAY LESS NOODLEY than the old design with Countering.

We still think you reduce incoming damage! It just comes from whichever stat you’re defending with, so if your character has Agility 3, and an attack targets your agility, you subtract 3 from the incoming damage. Your stats should matter!

But that value is never (at first level, and with no magic items) enough to reduce all damage to 0, but it feels good to know your defenses matter.

This solution means your choice of Kit is important. Not as important as your Class, but pretty important. And you are free, within the broad categories of like, Light Armor, Medium Armor, Heavy Armor, to describe your character in whatever manner you think is cool. And you get a cool power that reinforces that archetype! Very MCDM, we think. Feels obvious, in retrospect. Never underestimate the power of bouncing your ideas off a neutral third party. 😀

There’s just…there’s so many upsides to this design that we think it’s a hit even though we’re only now working on the prototype. You, reading this, will have a lot of questions. Well, so do we. But we’re confident we can solve any issues that crop up. But, if we can’t, we’ll come back here and explain why! 😀

We love that we get to do this, and by “this” I mean both work on this game AND share the process with you. I love writing these posts, I love the process of going over the process. 😀

Almost every one of these posts begets more questions because some folks imagine it differently than we are, and we end up with a very robust and fun discussion happening in our Discord. I strongly encourage you to come by the RPG Dev channel! It’s fun!

Thanks for reading all this folks, thanks for supporting us and giving us the chance to make a really good game. Until next time, peace! Out!