June 12, 2024

Valiant Horizon Tactics Devlog: Healthless* and Stamina

Here's the first two devlogs for Valiant Horizon Tactics! I'll post more here as they arrive as well.

Healthless*

Healthlessness¹ is the big thing that kicked off the design, before it was connected to Valiant Horizon. What does RUNE look like without health? Enemies mostly die in like 1-2 hits anyway, can we avoid tracking actual health?

How We Avoid Tracking Actual Health

The basic concept, lovingly ripped off from Aaron Joliffe's (not out yet) NULL/CIPHER which was itself riffing on Spencer's ideas about removing Health in a LUMEN game, is that a Strike is an attempt at defeating an enemy. If it's not Blocked, it does exactly that. If it is Blocked, however, a Strike removes a Block. (The player doesn't get taken out immediately on hit; rather, you remove a Trait, and you only get taken out when you get hit with none to remove.) It's like everything has 1HP and every attack deals 1 damage, but sometimes you or an enemy can gain a temporary 1-2 HP. The big advantage to this is that you simply don't have to track anything round to round for most enemies: they either have Block or they don't, they're either defeated or they're not.

The Asterisk in Healthless*

The complication to this comes with Qualities/Defenses. (I've wavered a bit in the text as to nomenclature.) Most of these serve the purpose of adding Block when certain conditions are fulfilled. As an example, here are three that get used for normal enemies in the default Region:

• Armored: Gain Block at the start of the round. If this Block gets used, don’t gain it next round.
• Evasive: They gain Block this round if they move 2+.
• Hard: They gain 1 Persistent Block at the start of combat. (Most Block goes away at the end of a round, Persistent Block...well, persists, hence the name.)

So there's 3 ways of dealing with these, of which the first 2 are also present in NULL/CIPHER:

• Some weapons have Piercing or Accurate, which simply negate Armored or Evasive Block. One Power simply negates one Block before Striking. Done and done, no frills, pack the right tool for the job and it will make your job easier.
• Each quality has a way of dealing with its Block in a "puzzle" fashion: Armored and Hard need you to hit the enemy multiple turns in a row, Evasive needs you to stay in the enemy's ideal range or close to it so they don't move.
• If you don't want to do either of those, though, there's a third option: Brute force. It's just Block, after all. Get a combination of factors that allows you to Strike a target twice in a round so you can bypass the first Block and then Strike them. This is the deviation.

Expression vs Strategy

The reason for this addition is that I'm trying to thread a very particular needle because of my own very prickly and particular priors. My operating theory is that there is bound to be tension in any combat-ish TTRPG with enough mechanical weight between what I'm going to call expression and strategy:

• Expression is acting as your character would act, embodying that presence in the game, and having it reflected back onto you. LUMEN games are usually great about this: there's a lot more finding out how you do something rather than if you do it and finding out what else happens along the way as a result.
• Strategy is the more board-gamey side of things. The game is built such that we need to do X, so we're going to do X. To defeat X enemy, you'll need Y, so you should have Y. The goal is victory, however it's defined.

My goal is to make a TTRPG, not a board game. (I'm not much of a board gamer, truth be told.) I would reckon it's extremely easy for any given solo TTRPG to slip into something extremely board-gamey. I think one major step towards securing it as a TTRPG is that expression needs to be encouraged to some degree. (This is why I kept in some of the more important VH elements in the core rules, like determining how you got here and who your Soul Crystal belonged to! I think putting your own spin on that, even when so much of the game is predetermined by scenarios, is a key form of expression.)

Let's wheel back around to the original point. Puzzle-y approaches are very strategic in nature: they have one basic answer, in this case sometimes with a "skip" granted by pre-preparation. For what I'm doing here - and especially given that it's tied to Valiant Horizon, which is itself a very expression-forward game - I don't want to force that layer on anyone. I'd like them to not feel like they have to do one of two very specific things to win a fight. (Obviously they do still need to Strike enemies in some manner, so it's not like...fully free-form.) They're going to still have to figure out how to achieve extra offense within the context of what they want to do, but that's something that almost any playstyle can spec into eventually, albeit with some risk - and it's easy enough to swap between the three methods of dealing with it based on your enemies. Basically:

• If you're prepared, you bring the tools to deal with it; or
• If you're tactical, you solve it; or
• If you're determined, you push through it.

And ideally all of those are valid ways to approach anything in the game.

Stamina

Stamina is a resource I bolted onto both the RUNE engine and the NULL/CIPHER healthless idea for Valiant Horizon Tactics. It's a very major change to how a RUNE-like does things.

Where did this come from?

Notably it's also not really a Valiant Horizon idea, it's kind of something that came off of neither game. So what's up with that? One prior that bears notice is that Stamina was in the earliest Total//Effect prototype version I made: it was going to be like 13th Age recoveries/4E healing surges but also usable for restoring used abilities to form a kind of generic "dungeon attrition" resource. It also made it into VH briefly but I cut it early (like, a month into active development/testing) because it was kind of useless there, as it was only for recovering (which people don't do enough for it to be worth tracking). So it's been on my mind for awhile in relation to Valiant Horizon. (It might return in a future Total//Effect game. Who knows, stay tuned.)²

Choice

Now, what do I want it to do here? I want to add choice. RUNE has this thing where once you've got your equipment set, you pretty much know what you want to be doing every round and there's not much in the way of options beyond placing dice depending on what they provide (or don't provide - you can just get skunked repeatedly on rolls). I love the dynamics of "some rounds I have more options than others" but not "I don't really have a choice here other than to stall and wait until the dice stop fucking me over". Overall I want to give people a little more control over things - I want them to have the ability to mitigate bad situations AND tools to capitalize on good ones. I want situations that don't just boil down to the loathed D&D-story trope of "I rolled a 1 so everything went to shit" or "I rolled a 20 so I got everything I wanted", basically. You can see this idea coming in a lot of RUNE content through consumables or runes with 1/battle effects too. So instead of that, I just built it into the game inherently.

Ways to spend Stamina in combat include:

• Each Soul Crystal has 1-3 Stamina-spend abilities. No matter who or what you are, you have at least one! These are usually in the mold of: - When you (Block, Move, Strike, Invoke), spend 1 Stamina to do an extra (Block, Move, Strike, Invoke). - Spend 1 Stamina at the start of the round to gain some beneficial effect. - Spend 2 Stamina at the start of the round to gain some extremely beneficial effect.
• Some Armaments and Accessories have Stamina-spend abilities similar to the above.
• Using Powers. You have to prepare them during rest by reserving max Stamina (or depending on your Soul Crystal, you might get 1-2 "free" Powers: classes with fewer stamina-spend abilities - and therefore fewer "free" Strikes, see that Healthless* entry above - gain proportionally more of these) and using the Invoke action. When you Invoke, you can use any Power you have prepared by spending its cost in Stamina, so if you have 2+ prepared you've got a fair amount of choice.

Characters have 8 max Stamina (and maybe a little less with more Powers prepared as described above, call it like 6-8⁴). Attrition brings Stamina down over time (we'll get to long-term attrition between fights in the next devlog probably, put a pin in that) so in a lot of fights they'll practically have more like 4-6. On average this usually means they can use like 1, maybe 2 per round comfortably in a fight. When they run out, they'll have to rely much more heavily on good rolls and playing defensively, so it behooves them to not just try to blow all of it at the start so much as think about when it can be used best.

Differentiation

What this also does is help to differentiate characters. The RUNE approach of "your character is basically just your equipment" is perfectly reasonable for a lot of games but that felt weird for this more fantasy-ish one: one thing I wanted to do from the outset here was make it so two characters with pretty similar equipment would play differently. One way to do that is to provide a bunch of passive abilities, but it's my constant assertion that nothing slows a game down quite like players tracking a bunch of passive abilities.

Instead I provided those stamina-actives above. This provides a way to steer classes towards different playstyles based on their actions rather than generic traits: the Knight wants to be up close and personal because they have abilities that work at that range, the Bard wants to be very mobile and create its own luck because it has abilities that let it do that, and the Blazemagus wants to be Invoking damaging Powers a lot because its one stamina-ability keys off of that. This could have been done via more Valiant Horizon-esque/RUNE-esque One Use Encounter Power style tracking too, but this way, you only have to track one resource - this was done for both attrition reasons and for flexibility reasons. You're going to get a lot more screwed by bad rolls here than in VH, so adding in some flexibility is good; correspondingly, if we start chipping away at your maximum meter that powers everything, it affects everything you do, and both of those are good outcomes as far as I'm concerned. (Each class also has a you-rolled-a-1 ability, and I could have done more of those, but I'd prefer to keep roll effects mostly in the realm of armaments/accessories.)

I'll get into exploration (and correspondingly attrition) next time I check in, I think.

_{(Originally posted on itch (part 1, part 2) and cohost.)}