Game Design is Chains and Axes

I've been using my favourite tool again.

And it feels good.

The Knights are safe. This time it's the MACs who have been suffering under the hatchet.

I make fun of myself for always writing in sets of threes, so naturally MAC Attack originally had three weapon ranges, three types and three subtypes that could be applied on top of them.

Later on in development I wanted to experiment with some advanced types and subtypes, with the intent being that players would add them into their arsenal after familiarising themselves with the core three of each.

Some came naturally. Others were a little forced, but I think that can sometimes be a good thing.

Forcing yourself to come up with that third thing can lead you to places you wouldn't have naturally found. Extra types were easy, but extra subtypes were harder to balance, as they needed to present both an advantage and disadvantage, all while being viable to combine with each of the six main weapon types and respecting my goal of tactical counterplay.

They changed a lot with each revision, sometimes reworked, sometimes reinvented. While the core types largely stayed the same, the cauldron of advanced variants bubbled away like primordial soup, evolving through the pressures of playtesting.

A thought kept returning to me. Is this too much? Sure, it's fun to say "there are a billion weapon combinations in this game" but after a point it's all bluster. I should look at these and pick the best three of each, chopping them down to the best of the best, avoiding the weirdness of having half of them gated behind an advanced rules section.

So now I'm going to shock you.

I've taken those six types and subtypes and trimmed them down to...

Four of each.

I know. A disgusting number. Why not three?

Because it doesn't need to be three.

I've put myself through the wringer by writing them in sets of three, and now I'm reaping the rewards. This set of weapon types and subtypes feels well tested (albeit not finalised) and each of them has fought for their place at the table.

Restriction breeds creativity, sure, but once the creativity has happened it's okay to turn your axe on the chains that you've made for yourself.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Worse Places to Be

Last week I did this for the positive Landmarks, so let’s look at the negatives. Now, Ruins aren’t strictly negative, but they aren’t as outright beneficial as the others. 

Hazard

BATS. Whichever way you move they’re facing you, like 2D sprites in an old FPS. When you aren’t looking at them you feel them scratching and biting at the back of your neck. When you turn around they’re back in their hung position. 

Curse

Things that throw you off course. Thick woods seems obvious here but let’s go further. Tiny shadow figures jump between the branches, gesturing for you to follow. They only take you deeper into the woods, distances not making sense. If you ignore their guidance they mock and taunt you, but if you follow they’ll just keep you going in circles. 

Ruin

This one actually ties into the Myth, being an overt hint at a Myth currently not in play. A stone mound conceals a huge cauldron sealed shut, apparently in some huge forge. Faint arguing inside can be heard inside. 

Do the Coven break free if the Knights somehow break the seal? Of course! It’s not in the rules for how Ruins work, but Primacy of Action must be honoured. 

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Landmarks in the Artwork

Part of the reason I put so much artwork into Electric and Mythic Bastionland is to act as a repository of ideas when you just need a quick detail.

Landmarks in Mythic Bastionland often call for you to to make something up. You’ll know if it’s a dwelling, sanctum, monument, hazard, curse, or ruin. You might have a prompt from the entries on the bottom of each page. Or maybe you forgot to do that, or the prompt doesn’t seem all that inspiring anymore.

Flick to a random Myth that you aren’t currently using in the Realm and grab some cool imagery, then run from there.

Let’s do it for each of the positive Landmark types.

Dwelling

The specific Myth doesn’t even matter for most of these, so I won’t bother naming them all. Remember we’re just looking for inspiration in the artwork here.

Take the spinning wheel. Wait, is it a spinning wheel? It doesn’t matter, it sparked the idea, so it’s real.

A weaver living out in the woods, their house practically being swallowed up by the encroaching roots and branches. A deer skull hangs above their door.

Now if I was being fancy I could claim that this is all a rich thematic tapestry, and if the group encounter this actual Myth later in the game they’ll feel a sense of mythic consistency in the world.

Hey, it could be true.

 

Sanctum

A Sanctum usually takes one of the Seers detailed alongside each Knight, but here let’s say it’s the Tawny Seer, a colossal owl-like being. They roost atop an isolated tower, sleeping for most of the day. 

Near the tower the stars are visible at day, and the night sky is filled with pillars of light. The Seer can interpret their positions to offer guidance.

 

Monument

A fortunate pull here, but remember that a monument allows recovery Spirit, so should offer some sort of inspiration.

Veiled mourners scatter petals among a Knight’s tomb surrounded by desolate bog. Flowers peek out of the murk almost immediately, and the sky seems to lighten.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.
If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

UFO 50 and Nostalgia of Structure

A bonus blogpost this week, because it's really nothing to do with tabletop games at all. Instead I'm going to rave about UFO 50. 

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games. 

The framing device is that this is a collection of lost 8-bit era games from a single company. They span dozens of genres and, from my experience so far, the quality is good to excellent, leaning toward the latter. 

Frankly, at the price it’s currently at on Steam, I’d encourage everybody to buy it. We're talking less than 50p per game, and there are some that I'd easily pay £5 for.

It got me thinking about nostalgia of structure rather than form.

Yes, it has charming pixel art and chiptunes, even little era details like Kick Club’s fast food collectables. But for me the whole package feels like a more specific memory.

My young brain was told that sports are good and fast food is good. 

It's the early 90s Christmas when my family got an Amiga 600. It came with one legit game, Captain Planet, but shortly after we’d finished unwrapping our presents my uncle appeared and dropped a carrier bag filled with copied game discs. None of them had manuals, and some of the names scrawled onto the floppies were unreadable. It was a wilderness of games.

Waldorf's Journey feels very Amiga-coded to me

The quality was... variable. For every gem like The Chaos Engine or Cannon Fodder there was a dud like Body Blows or Live and Let Die. There were also a bunch of wildcards in there. Games I’d be fascinated by, and return to every now and then, often trying to decode the game behind their opaque exterior. Stuff like proto-Farcry Hunter and the atmospheric but confusing Syndicate. I was limited by my age and lack of instruction manuals, but I kept going back. After all, I had the games, why wouldn’t I play them? This time I might work out how to play properly. There were a bunch of games where I never got past the first level, but I’d go back and play that first level over and over. 

Daunting but not as complicated as it looks.

This is stark contrast to some years later when I got a SNES. It came with three games (Super Mario All Stars, Kart, and World) and because of their high price I only ever bought one more (A Link to the Past). I played those games to death, right through to their credits. They were super accessible, fantastic quality, and unified by their Nintendo polish.

But I kinda missed that weird bag full of copied floppies. I’d always go back to the Amiga. 

UFO 50 feels like the best of both worlds. It’s an overwhelming heap of 50 disparate games, but the quality is consistently high. They feel at once arcane but accessible. 

This one is a dungeon crawler with Super Punch Out combat

It’s also a notably different feeling to scrolling through my huge Steam library of underplayed games.

If I play Velgress or Overbold or Pingolf for 15 minutes then I’m experiencing the real game for 15 minutes. A lot of games in my steam library would barely be scraping the surface of the tutorial, or at least have me caged in a starting area. Some might even curse me with unskippable cutscenes. Even roguelites, lauded for their casual appeal, often gate their best bits behind successive playthroughs.

I'm going back in now. On my first play of Mini & Max I thought it was an okay platformer with a little twist, but last time I stumbled onto a few things that really shake it up.

UFO 50 has captured my heart. Go and check it out. 

Getting into Pilot Mode

One of the goals of MAC Attack is to put the players in pilot view

This is where they focus in on the active unit, look at its modules, track its heat, speed, and facing, and learn to exploit the same factors in the opposing MACs. Of course you’re looking at the battlefield from a top-down view, but a big appeal of the mech genre is the nitty-gritty feel of piloting a particular machine.

This one needs to keep moving to avoid getting hit. This one runs hot if you fire all its lasers. This one needs to wait patiently for a sitting duck target. This one handles like shit over rough ground. This one absolutely must not let itself get hit in the rear. 

The initiative deck feeds into this. You're never asked “which of your units should you activate first?” 

No! You just pull a card and whoosh, you zoom in on that unit and you're the pilot now. What do you do?

The way I use counterplay in the game also feeds into this, and requires breaking it down into two types.

Strategic vs Tactical Counterplay

(Forgive me that Strategic and Tactical might not be the most accurate terms here, but they are the most memorable, which is more important)

Strategic Counterplay happens before the game starts. Like when you show up with a few anti-tank guns and I show up with an an infantry horde that renders them a bad pick. You bring a melee-focused faction and I take an army-wide ability that makes my units harder to hit in melee. That was a good pick for me. You can think of this as an abstraction of all the logistics, intelligence, and large scale manoeuvring that happens outside of the scope of the battle.

Tactical Counterplay happens at the table during the game. You have lots of archers so I avoid a direct charge, advancing through the woods. You’ve bought a superheavy tank that I’m not well equipped to fight at long range, so my mortars drop smoke in front of it, forcing it to stay put or advance into a more vulnerable position. 

For MAC Attack, and perhaps in most cases, I want Tactical Counterplay. Again, this focuses on “What would a good pilot do” more than “Which of these army lists wins?” 

This is a slight revisit of a topic discussed previously, but I’ve had more time to mull it over.

I've been fine tuning the module list to work toward this goal.

An example of where I’d gone wrong is a now-deleted weapon type that I tested out. The gist of it was that the weapon did more damage to bigger MACs, but was useless against Infantry and Vehicles.

Now this was wide open to strategic counterplay. If your force is all Light MACs and Auxiliaries then this weapon is junk. Worse, though, if you bring a bunch of Heavy MACs, because you like big bots, then I’m coming in with a huge advantage. There isn’t really a tactical answer to it other than “Keep away from that giant threat”. 

I already had a weapon type that executed this idea in a more tactically interesting way. Piercing weapons let you roll additional attacks for each hit you cause, meaning it’s very effective against easy targets, and less effective against difficult targets. Big MACs tend to move more slowly, because they consume more heat to rush or jump, so by nature these weapons already tend to favour attacks against heavy MACs. 

But the important thing. If you bring a force of heavy MACs and I have a load of piercing weapons, you can respond to this by, at the very least, not standing still and giving me easy targets. You might even rush or make more use of cover, anything that makes my shots more difficult. You can make tactical decisions to counter my counter. 

Active vs Engaged

We’re going down another tangent here, but this still connects to my goals around Pilot View. 

The Active Player is the one taking their turn right now. 

The Engaged Player is the one currently engaging with the rules.

These aren’t always the same.

I don’t want module effects that need to be remembered by a player when they’re not currently engaged.

So Plates are fine, because their passive effect occurs when the non-active player is engaged, specifically when the active (here, attacking) player says “Okay I hit modules 3, 4, and 6” and the non-active player (here, the target) looks at their MAC sheet to see what’s actually been hit. In that moment the non-active player is engaged, so we can expect them to notice that their Plate has been hit, triggering its effect.

Cloaks are not fine, because their effect (harder to hit at a certain range bracket) occurs when that player is unengaged, specifically when their opponent is adding up motion dice and modifiers to calculate the Target Number of the attack. In this moment the non-active player is unengaged in a mechanical sense. Even if they’re still paying attention to what their opponent is doing they aren’t necessarily looking at the specific modules of the MAC being attacked.

For this reason I’m chopping and changing a lot of the hardware modules to allow for Tactical Counterplay and for effects that occur when that unit’s player is Engaged. 

The current version of Cloak (pending testing) allows the unit to set its Motion die to 6 when it doesn’t Move, making itself harder to hit at the cost of limiting its own attacks. This is a nasty pairing with Guided weapons (which ignore your own Motion when you attack) but there are some pretty clear tactical counterplay options available (keep moving, drop Markers on the unit, forcing them to move or become an easy target, or bait them into moving with a juicy target of your own).

As always, this is a case of preference, not purity. I reserve the right to break my own rules, but keeping them in mind is bringing MAC Attack closer to where I want it to be. 

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Again and Again and Again

First I want to talk about some videogames.

ADOM does this cool thing where the overworld is (mostly) set in stone, but all of the dungeon levels below are randomly generated. So you're improvising a lot in the dungeon, but you learn the layout and secrets of the world above.

Teardown does this cool thing where you need to, say, break into a safe and then get away, but you get unlimited time to wander around the map preparing your run, including breaking down walls and stuff. The timer only starts when you set off the alarm, typically by grabbing the thing you're stealing. If you manage that you can try again with secondary objectives to chase after. Missions also revisit maps, so you get to know them pretty well.

Outer Wilds does this cool thing where you're living out the same 22 minute time loop over and over, each time exploring the solar system and learning a bit more about each planet. It's a great feeling heading over to a planet after you've learned a few of its secrets to see how far you can get this time before the sun explodes.

Hitman does this cool thing where it has a comparatively small number of densely packed levels, and it's pretty easy to complete the mission (typically kill a couple of targets) but you're incentivised to replay each map over and over, killing the targets in new ways and exploring every corner of the map. Sometimes I just follow people around to see what they're doing.

Shenzhen I/O (and most other Zachtronics games) does this cool thing where completing each puzzle is usually straightforward, but then you're rated on various factors like cost, speed, space efficiency, so the real game is in going back to tackle the problem over and over, chasing the cheapest, fastest, or most efficient solution (typically not all three).

These are all tapping into that feeling of doing something you've already done before, but doing it a bit differently.

I don't often get that feeling when I run and play TTRPGs.

I tend to prepare dungeons with the assumption that the players will stumble through them once and then move on. Even with larger (dare I say mega-)dungeons I probably nudge players into new areas for each delve.

In my current Traveller campaign we've been playing for 9 months, jetting around The Beyond sector, a vast hexmap of space, and we haven't returned to a planet even once after leaving (though some of that may be down to the mess my players tend to leave behind them).

I feel like I'm missing out on the joy of doing something again, but doing it a bit differently.

I have an idea how I might explore that. Let's see how it pans out.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Is Imbalance a Problem?

This is even more of a stream of consciousness than normal, sparked by a recent playtest of MAC Attack.

With some handy unit cards

When we finished the game my friend asked:

"Why would I ever take a Short ranged weapon? I'd just make every weapon in my force Long ranged if I was building a new force"

Of course, we need to test this out, but for the time being it's given me food for thought.

Some context: In MAC Attack you have Short weapons (Max range: 9") and Long weapons (MIN range: 6"). There are also Arc weapons but ignore them for now.

Both weapon types cost the same, there are no other restrictions on their use, and they function identically beyond simply having a minimum or maximum range.

As you might imagine, if we're fighting on a big flat desert then Long weapons are the order of the day. Likewise, if the battlefield doesn't have any open stretches wider than 6" then Short weapons are going to dominate. For this discussion, let's imagine we're on a more balanced battlefield.

In fact, let's pretend my friend is right. Let's work on the assumption that Long is broadly a better choice than Short for most scenarios.

Is that a problem?

I've discussed before that the purpose of balance, for me, is to preserve interesting choices, not to make everything equal.

Now, at the very least, we can say that the choice between a minimum range and a maximum range still feels like a choice. The advantage of not having a minimum range is that you can collide and brawl with your target as well as shooting at them.

Better yet, if my friend wants to create a force of exclusively Long weapons then I'm absolutely going to double down on Short weapons and rush inside his minimum range to dirty box him with impunity.

Easier said than done, I suppose, as the quirks of the initiative deck mean you can't always put every MAC where you want them to be.

Engaging at Shorter range also means there's less chance of an annoying obstacle blocking the line of sight to your target.

So maybe the answer is to include a mix of short and long weapons on each MAC. I deliberately left a "sweet spot" between 6-9" where both Short and Long weapons can attack for this very reason. Could equally lead to some inefficient turns when you don't have the right target at the right range, though.

For another angle, what could we do it we wanted to make them feel more equal?

How does Battletech, an obvious inspiration for MAC Attack, handle this? It actually uses range quite differently. As well as defining a weapon's minimum and maximum range, weapons break down their range into subcategories of short/medium/long range, with medium and long providing penalties to hit. With a 2d6 system like Battletech these penalties can be hugely significant, so having a longer range generally has the side effect of making the weapon more accurate at common engagement ranges. Totally different to what we're dealing with here.

Previously in MAC Attack, Short weapons provided a bonus to hit, but that had some undesirable side effects. Piercing Type weapons (more effective when you have an easy shot) felt like a little too much of an obvious synergy with Short weapons (make your shot more likely to hit), and I wanted every combination of range, type, and subtype to feel viable. It was also one more modifier [shudder] to remember when calculating your target number to hit.

I could give Short a longer maximum range, but that risks making the distinction feel irrelevant.

I could Long an even more restrictive minimum range, but I don't want things to end up feeling too restrictive.

Or maybe it's fine as it is.

Back to the playtesting table I suppose.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.