In Episode 3 of the Nerdlab we will talk about the second building block of encounter and combat design. Last week we identified how to ask dramatic questions to our players by creating interesting conflicts and real decision points. This week we will talk about fireballs and crushing blows. In other words: how to design the tools tools our player’s will need to answer our dramatic questions.

This is the first episode since I really published my podcast. Therefore I would like to take the time to thank you for the great feedback so far.

One specific feedback that I got is that people value my project management background. And probably there are more topics that I could transfer to the game development area than I previously thought of. Maybe this can indeed become an aspect of my podcast that makes it unique. We will see.

Today I want to use this feedback to give you a very short tip on how to improve your mental capability. Sounds great doesn’t it? Just imagine that you can buff yourself and increase your intelligence attribute with this simple trick.

Let’s recall what we discussed last week. An Encounter is a resolution of one or more conflicts to achieve a desired outcome by using a variety of different interactions.

Components needed:

Last week was about creating conflicts. Today’s episode is about tools to resolve these conflicts.

Currently there are 4 resolution possibilities that come to my head:

In principle, all of these resolution possibilities are Controllable Character Behaviors. And that is exactly what most RPGs are about. Controlling the skills and abilities of a character and behave in a way you typically wouldn’t in real life.

When I was thinking about the character behavior the players are controlling, I thought of the following aspects and experience I would expect from a character control system.

The list of expectations of a character control system that I have come up with and that by no means claims to be an exhaustive list is:

We have to keep these requirements in mind when we think about creating our skill system. Maybe the experience you want to achieve for your game is different. But make sure to understand what experience you want to achieve with the tools you provide to your players.

This brings us to the question:

I think we need to make sure that our skills are composed of 3 different things:

Therefore, we need to create design space and make sure our core mechanics are able to support a large variety of different character behaviours.

The path I have chosen is the following. My first goal was to figure out how I want my characters to solve the conflicts I present to them. This resulted in the following 4 points I mentioned earlier.

Step 1: Choose actions players can use to resolve the conflicts we confront them with

Step 2: Then I determine the different characteristics of the individual actions and determine their min and max values

Step 3. Add Risk vs reward trade offs

This is how you create design space. Let’s say you have some kind of initiative system. If your fastest action is initiative 0 and your slowest action is initiative 10 you have created a design space between 0 and 10, If you now combine this with let’s say melee vs. range attack you already have 22 different possible skills. And we did not even take into account damage or any negative asptects.

Matching Enemies and Character Abilities:

Stone Golem:

Goblin Archer

The player’s abilities can be differentiated in many ways. For example, designers can add special attributes to some of them: stun, regeneration, damage over time.

Remember that this is all about determining the core abilities of the characters. Special abilities, which differ between classes, will be added later.

It was easy for me to define the core combat tactics and their risk reward trade offs. But it is still very hard for me to find the same depth for the other areas like social combat or the usage of skills. Is a skill just a selection of a skill plus a random number that determines success against a target value? Or how can I generate more depth here? I have some ideas but this remains a design challenge for the future at the moment. What I like is that this approach showed me that my current ideas for social combat and skills do not have the same depth as combat and there is some work to be done.

Closing

Before we finish this episode today I want to give credit where credit is due. There are two articles that inspired me to do this encounter building series. The first one is an article from the angry GM with the title: Four things you’ve never heard of that make encounters not suck. ANd The second one is a Gamasutra Article from Sebastien Lambottin about the fundamental pillars of a combat system. You can find the links in the sho notes.

Today we defined the experience we want to achieve with our player actions. Then we narrowed it down to different action types and their core characteristics. With help of their min and max values we created a design space we can use to create new skills and abilities. In order to create interesting trade offs we also added a list of potential costs or negative effects.

I know, everything I talk about is still very much from a bird’s eye view at the moment. But I think it is important to understand the process of good encounter building.

From my point of view, one of the most engaging feelings a player can experience is to feel smart and proud of his or her cleverness. And a well designed encounter system is the perfect tool to let the player experience this feeling.

That’s it for today. If you want to get in contact please send me an email Contact

I hope you learned something today or got some inspiration for your game .If so, I would be incredibly happy if you would leave a short rating for the podcast on iTunes. This will help other designers to find the podcast and increase my reach. Thank you so much for listening and until next week keep shooting for the moon and nerd like a boss.

Sources:

Gamasutra Article

The Angry Gm