Dungeoneer Adventures: Designer Diary #3: This is not chess
Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 2:02 pm
This is not chess.
Dungeoneer Adventures is not chess.
Chess has been done.
Thomas Denmark and I were sitting in a Thai restaurant in Larkspur, California. Pens were out, food had been pushed aside and the table was covered with paper. Graph paper, plain paper, paper with odd shaped regions drawn on it. Off to one side of the table was a curry stained cocktail napkin on which we had started jotting down our ideas.
There was an issue, a tough issue, and we were madly scrawling our ideas down in the hope of resolving it. Our problem was very fundamental to the game system and involved clarifying how space was represented in combat.
What were we going to do with ranged combat?
Was there magic ranged combat?
Did magic have longer or shorter range than melee range?
Does it make sense to use the melee stat for a ranged attack?
Did it matter?
In the Dungeoneer Expandable Card Game there is usually a single hero and 1-3 monsters involved in any given combat. Their location in a map tile is abstract; all you need to know is who is attacking you. There is no front rank, you cannot hide behind a tree and no one can help protect you from the enemies.
When there is a party of four heroes confronting a dozen monsters in a map tile, it's a bit of a stretch to ignore their relative location altogether. How, for example, could the gladiator protect the wizard from a bunch of wererats while the wizard prepares a spell to take down their captain? How can the assassin sneak around behind if there is no front or back?
For a while we played with a bunch of options. Minimaps, combat between tiles, uneven sized map regions. All sorts of stuff. It didn't work. It didn't feel like Dungeoneer. In Dungeoneer if you have a lot of peril, monsters attack you, if you don't, they won't.
We needed a different solution. We needed something that took advantage of the existing Dungeoneer mechanics, while making party vs. monster combat more interesting. What we came up with, eventually, was formation.
After some playtests, we arrived at one particularly important situation. A paladin and a necromancer huddled up and made use of the formation rules extremely carefully. They effectively shut down the dungeonlord and made the party practically invincible. Thus we came to a realization.
Formation could be exploited.
Formation was broken.
Worst of all, even with formation, party combat was not that interesting.
Darn.
It took a while, but while we were aware of the expression "back to the drawing board", we had to have the courage to go there. After reading an off-hand post by a developer of a not-to-be-named online game, I took the entire section on formation and deleted it from the draft of the rules. When this happened, a whole cascade of changes occurred. All the warrior template abilities had to be re-written, as thy were intimately interwoven with the now defunct notion of formation.
We were stuck. We needed something that could make mass combat interesting. Not only that, but with formation gone, many of the templates ability slots were now full of holes.
One thing I also knew was that we were not going back to a set of rules that had the heroes with different attack ranges and movement types on a grid.
We were not going back to an imitation of chess.
Chess is great.
Chess has been done.
In fact, if you take a look at many of the tactical games out there, you will see that chess has been done to death.
Staring at the now incomplete list of class and template abilities, I had an idea. What if each of the templates, and all three classes listed under that template could do a special thing, a maneuver in combat that the other templates were not as good at? What if any of the warriors (guardians, soldiers and gladiators) could fight for another hero in a melee combat? The following tactic was developed.
Defend:
o Description: When you declare a defend tactic, you interpose your body, weapons or armor between the enemy and a chosen ally.
o Effect: When you defend, you redirect a melee challenge aimed at another hero and fight the challenge instead. You are the new target of that particular melee challenge for all purposes.
Using the defend tactic, for the price of a single glory, each of the warriors could redirect a melee challenge that had been aimed at another hero towards himself. The front rank was born! It was not long after this that the basic list of tactics were finished. Each template has a signature tactic at which it is best at, but as we continued testing, we realized that to allow the most flexibility in combat, any hero could use any of the tactics.
With the new 'Descriptive Tactics' system, the combat phase in Dungeoneer Adventures allows for really exciting and tactically complex battles. But it does not imitate chess.
Not one bit.
Each hero has a nice set of interesting tactical choices every combat round. You never need to keep track of what 'space' you are in, just your choice of tactic. There is no need to even worry about the 'range' or 'area of effect' of a spell.
If the gladiator wants to keep the wererat off the wizard, he can, with a defend.
If the wizard wants to nuke the wererat captain at the back of the pack, he can, with a spellstrike.
If the assassin wants to sneak around at attack from behind, he can, with an engage.
With the descriptive tactics system in Dungeoneer Adventures, you can charge, flank and assault your foes in any number of ways. Anything you can think of doing during your combat phase can fit into the system.
Best yet, as long as you have a glory to spend, you always get a meaningful bonus for describing a combat tactic. Yes, always.
Onwards to Glory!
Dungeoneer Adventures is not chess.
Chess has been done.
Thomas Denmark and I were sitting in a Thai restaurant in Larkspur, California. Pens were out, food had been pushed aside and the table was covered with paper. Graph paper, plain paper, paper with odd shaped regions drawn on it. Off to one side of the table was a curry stained cocktail napkin on which we had started jotting down our ideas.
There was an issue, a tough issue, and we were madly scrawling our ideas down in the hope of resolving it. Our problem was very fundamental to the game system and involved clarifying how space was represented in combat.
What were we going to do with ranged combat?
Was there magic ranged combat?
Did magic have longer or shorter range than melee range?
Does it make sense to use the melee stat for a ranged attack?
Did it matter?
In the Dungeoneer Expandable Card Game there is usually a single hero and 1-3 monsters involved in any given combat. Their location in a map tile is abstract; all you need to know is who is attacking you. There is no front rank, you cannot hide behind a tree and no one can help protect you from the enemies.
When there is a party of four heroes confronting a dozen monsters in a map tile, it's a bit of a stretch to ignore their relative location altogether. How, for example, could the gladiator protect the wizard from a bunch of wererats while the wizard prepares a spell to take down their captain? How can the assassin sneak around behind if there is no front or back?
For a while we played with a bunch of options. Minimaps, combat between tiles, uneven sized map regions. All sorts of stuff. It didn't work. It didn't feel like Dungeoneer. In Dungeoneer if you have a lot of peril, monsters attack you, if you don't, they won't.
We needed a different solution. We needed something that took advantage of the existing Dungeoneer mechanics, while making party vs. monster combat more interesting. What we came up with, eventually, was formation.
After some playtests, we arrived at one particularly important situation. A paladin and a necromancer huddled up and made use of the formation rules extremely carefully. They effectively shut down the dungeonlord and made the party practically invincible. Thus we came to a realization.
Formation could be exploited.
Formation was broken.
Worst of all, even with formation, party combat was not that interesting.
Darn.
It took a while, but while we were aware of the expression "back to the drawing board", we had to have the courage to go there. After reading an off-hand post by a developer of a not-to-be-named online game, I took the entire section on formation and deleted it from the draft of the rules. When this happened, a whole cascade of changes occurred. All the warrior template abilities had to be re-written, as thy were intimately interwoven with the now defunct notion of formation.
We were stuck. We needed something that could make mass combat interesting. Not only that, but with formation gone, many of the templates ability slots were now full of holes.
One thing I also knew was that we were not going back to a set of rules that had the heroes with different attack ranges and movement types on a grid.
We were not going back to an imitation of chess.
Chess is great.
Chess has been done.
In fact, if you take a look at many of the tactical games out there, you will see that chess has been done to death.
Staring at the now incomplete list of class and template abilities, I had an idea. What if each of the templates, and all three classes listed under that template could do a special thing, a maneuver in combat that the other templates were not as good at? What if any of the warriors (guardians, soldiers and gladiators) could fight for another hero in a melee combat? The following tactic was developed.
Defend:
o Description: When you declare a defend tactic, you interpose your body, weapons or armor between the enemy and a chosen ally.
o Effect: When you defend, you redirect a melee challenge aimed at another hero and fight the challenge instead. You are the new target of that particular melee challenge for all purposes.
Using the defend tactic, for the price of a single glory, each of the warriors could redirect a melee challenge that had been aimed at another hero towards himself. The front rank was born! It was not long after this that the basic list of tactics were finished. Each template has a signature tactic at which it is best at, but as we continued testing, we realized that to allow the most flexibility in combat, any hero could use any of the tactics.
With the new 'Descriptive Tactics' system, the combat phase in Dungeoneer Adventures allows for really exciting and tactically complex battles. But it does not imitate chess.
Not one bit.
Each hero has a nice set of interesting tactical choices every combat round. You never need to keep track of what 'space' you are in, just your choice of tactic. There is no need to even worry about the 'range' or 'area of effect' of a spell.
If the gladiator wants to keep the wererat off the wizard, he can, with a defend.
If the wizard wants to nuke the wererat captain at the back of the pack, he can, with a spellstrike.
If the assassin wants to sneak around at attack from behind, he can, with an engage.
With the descriptive tactics system in Dungeoneer Adventures, you can charge, flank and assault your foes in any number of ways. Anything you can think of doing during your combat phase can fit into the system.
Best yet, as long as you have a glory to spend, you always get a meaningful bonus for describing a combat tactic. Yes, always.
Onwards to Glory!