This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.
Pertinent to this post, I've also released the beta version of the Catalogue of Friends and Foes, which is this game's bestiary. It's now available to download on the itch.io page through that link. Today I want to talk about how we aimed to calibrate combat difficulty, and the challenges that came with that.
A rough start
My brother always envisioned Rivers & Lakes as very PvP-friendly, seeking to create a sort of "analog fighting game" in the vein of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Thus, the combat rules are designed symmetrically: anything you can do to your opponents, they can do to you.
And so in our earliest proto-playtests, we just made player characters and had them fight each other. Even if one of us was the "GM" and was running an "NPC," mechanically they were identical to a PC, right? And those first few 1v1 fights were tough. They came down to the wire. But that felt right at the time. We had only been writing down our thoughts for a matter of days at that point.
When I started properly playtesting with my main group, the problem still wasn't obvious. Yes, we now had five PCs instead of only one... but the first fight I ran for them was a PvP free-for-all. The fact that it came down to the wire was inevitable. There could only be one victor, so, again, I still didn't question the difficulty.
It was our next fight where I first saw the problem. Six PCs now, facing a gang of NPCs. As we still did not yet have mooks, I just designed six bad guys each following the character creation rules for PCs. They were a rival adventuring party, basically. A fair fight, in other words.
Uh oh.
Five of the six players went down. The final player was on her last legs when she managed to beat the last enemy. It was rough. It was really close. The party had won, but several players had been sitting on the sideline for upwards of 30 minutes. But hey, maybe it was a fluke?
The next fight had seven PCs versus 10 enemies. Greater numbers, but weaker individually, so that both sides would roughly even out. Because, again, that's the target I was aiming for at the time. I was calibrating the difficult to be fair. I think this time there were two or three PCs standing at the end? But that's still, like, 4 or 5 players who got knocked out and sidelined for awhile. Yikes.
So at this point, everyone was suggesting some kind of fix. Do the moves used by those enemies need to be nerfed? Do the players' moves need to be buffed? Should the game include some way for defeated players to still participate from the sideline? Some minor way of contributing? Do we need to add a healing move into the game? For my own part, I was wondering if the players were simply getting punished for their less-than-stellar tactics. They made a few decisions I thought were pretty dumb, and so it made sense that a few of them would get their asses kicked, right?
But after thinking about it for a long while, I realized that the answer was way simpler. Rivers & Lakes is a combat as sport game, yet I hadn't been calibrating the difficulty that way.
Defining our goal properly
I myself have written a bit about combat as sport versus combat as war in the past. I'll be reiterating some things I've said previously, but bear with me.
First of all, when people talk about sporting combat in RPGs, they almost always claim that it's supposed to be "balanced." This is a terrible way to describe it.
The kind of fights that modern D&D, Pathfinder, and similar games expect you to arrange are the exact opposite of "balanced." I mean, think about it for a second. "Balance" means that both sides are equal in weight. A "fair fight." But that's clearly not what you're encouraged to set up in a 5E game. If there’s six of you and six of them, and it’s a fair fight, then you know what that means? That for every casualty you inflict on their side, you can expect a casualty on your side.
Does that sound like any 5E combat you've ever been in? Of course not. You only get that outcome when you calibrate the difficulty for what the Challenge Rating guidelines call a "deadly" fight, maybe. But no fight that's been built to the "medium" difficulty ever looks like that. In D&D, a "medium" fight is extremely one-sided in favor of the players.
Toss the word "balance" from your vocabulary. What makes a fight feel "sporting" in the modern tradition is if:
- The party triumphs (with no casualties of their own, unless it's really epic), yet
- They still feel meaningfully challenged by the fight, and
- They could rely almost entirely on their own capability to achieve this victory, rather than exploiting something "extra" outside of themselves, i.e. they can win without "cheesing" the fight somehow.
And no, neither of these is objectively better than the other. They're both perfectly valid. I find them both appealing in their own way. But in the case of Rivers & Lakes, combat as sport is obviously the better approach because this is a game about playing high-flying mystical Kung Fu warriors.
Getting it right
But even beyond the semantics problem, combat as sport is just way harder for the GM than combat as war. It's notoriously difficult to pull off. Partly this is because D&D's Challenge Rating system isn't great. But in my opinion, the main reason is that you're being asked to thread a very fine needle. I mean, look at that definition I offered above: a fight that's just challenging enough to feel thrilling and taxing, yet still results in a completely one-sided victory for the players. That's a really specific sweet spot!
The nice thing about combat as war is that there's really no way for the game master to get it wrong. The burden resides entirely with the players to "calibrate the difficulty." The whole point of combat is that they're trying to find a way to tip the scales in their favor.
But with combat as sport, you have a narrower target for success. It's not enough for the players to merely win their fights. They also have to feel like they could have lost. You cannot consistently, reliably achieve that outcome without some kind of methodology. A challenge rating system of some kind is basically necessary.
Can we crack the problem that has so long eluded D&D? Luckily, R&L has a few advantages that D&D lacks, which I believe make our goal of "sporting combat" much more achievable.
The "solo boss monster" fight is notoriously hard to pull off because, even if the boss has way higher HP and damage output than the PCs, they still only get one action per round versus the party's handful of actions. Even when the stats on both sides add up to the same amount, one actor simply cannot exert as much control over the situation as a group can. Legendary Actions help with this, but it remains a major weakness of D&D's CR system.
Meanwhile, Rivers & Lakes can largely factor out this variable because of the Counter mechanic: every attack is matched by a counterattack. Newton's Third Law. There's always an equal number of attacks coming from both sides, regardless of how many members each side has.
For example: if you're all by yourself, fending off an assault from 100 goons, the action economy would still be "even." On your turn, you pick a goon and attack him, and he counters you. One attack from your side, one attack from his side. On the goons' turn, all 100 goons attack you, and so you make 100 counters. 100 attacks from their side, and 100 attacks from your side.
That said, there is still some strength in numbers. A lone fighter up against a group is being targeted by every single attack made by the other side, whereas their own attacks are distributed between all their foes. This obviously matters for damage flow, but it's even more severe for status effects. Two ailments inflicted on one target is much more punishing than one ailment inflicted on two targets. Plus, a group of fighters brings a greater diversity of Kung Fu to a fight. Every fighting style has its gaps, so having some buddies around to patch those gaps is a big boon.
Still, this is not nearly as significant a problem for our game as it is for most other action games, which simplifies difficulty calibration enormously.
Secondly, we don't have to pretend there's such a thing as "objective" difficulty. While D&D briefly acknowledges that context can affect the difficulty of a fight, it nonetheless asserts that a CR 5 monster should be a medium-challenge for any party of level 5 heroes.
But in R&L, one of the basic facts of the game is that difficulty is subjective to the individual. Rather than strict hierarchical power, there's a lot more rock-paper-scissors dynamics at play. A character whose fighting style is a hard counter against yours may be completely vulnerable to my fighting style. Yet that's not to say my fighting style is objectively the best of the three!
Which is to say, our system for calibrating difficulty isn't supposed to account for these kinds of qualitative factors. In fact, breaking the system through clever use of Kung Fu is kind of the ultimate victory. Trivializing a "hard" fight because you knew how to deploy just the right combo of moves to undermine your opponent is the ideal outcome.
Thirdly, the stakes system gives us a lot more wiggle room when it comes to player casualties. See, in D&D, when a PC is defeated, they die. That's a really big deal. It's a permanent consequence, and one that upends the entire campaign for that player. There's a reason people get so heated about the topic of PC death. Thus, we often operate on the understanding that even one PC being defeated is a failed outcome for a fight, which puts a lot of pressure on the GM to "get it right."
But in R&L, that's usually not the case. Why not? Because your life is rarely on the line. The majority of fights have friendly or serious stakes, not deadly stakes. So getting defeated usually just means getting your ass kicked.
Obviously the players still want to avoid this... but it isn't such a big deal if it happens to them. They have to sit on the sideline for a bit, which sucks. But no arguments break out about whether the outcome was fair or right. Nothing is permanently lost. No hard feelings. It's just a brief timeout. If one or two PCs go down but the party as a whole still prevails, then that's accepted as a perfectly sporting and worthy outcome.
Thus, it ultimately comes down to HP
At the end of the day, combat is about attrition. Outpace your enemy's rate of damage output, right? We still strive to make our combat more puzzle-like than that, where victory comes from "solving" the fight rather than merely brute-forcing your opponent into submission. But if we want to achieve that "combat as sport" ideal where the average fight results in a total player victory, it starts by giving the players a pretty big advantage. And HP is the easiest single variable to dial up or down as needed.
I had been giving the bad guys an equal amount of total HP as the party. Now I give them about 50-75%. Voila, all the problems are solved. The game feels way better, players win every fight yet still feel challenged, and combat is much, much shorter. Nobody will be forced to spectate for 30+ minutes ever again, and I've been able to throw Rank 2 and Rank 3 enemies at my Rank 1 players without fear of it being too hard.
My original intention was to obscure what was going on, so as not to scare off any GMs. I spent a long time trying to come up with an intermediary system that would be more accessible, less arcane and math-y and intimidating. Yknow, assign every stat block a point value, give the GM a point budget for each fight difficulty, make encounter building as simple as 1 2 3.
But no matter what I came up with, the math falls apart near the edges, and these derivatives hardly seem any simpler than the real math going on under the hood. And I realized that maybe it's okay to just be transparent instead, instructing the GM to simply work with the qi values directly.
Hopefully I've done so in a way that doesn't feel like you're doing agonizing homework problems.
-Dwiz
Excellent use of that Arrested Development bit.
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