The Gaming Den

Ok, Banner Saga is a video game that is free to play on Steam right now if you don't mind only playing the MP cage-fighting bit.

It's a turn-based game with squares like Final Fantasy, but the interesting bit from a game design point is the combat mini-game.

You have a number of stats, but the two main ones are Strength and Armor. Damage is calculated by subtracting the defender's Armor from the attacker's Strength score, and then applying the difference as damage to the defender's own Strength. If the Attacker has less Strength than the defender's armor, there is then only a chance to do some damage (min 1, but all kinds of damage can be boosted 1-1 by spending Willpower points, a limited resource based on unit class and how well the battle is going).

There are also attacks that damage just Armor, thus setting up future attackers for bigger hits. This is offset by the fact that as the battle continues, units tend to take damage from attacks to Strength and their attacks get smaller because their Strength determines their hitting power. Armor attacks always hit and do a fixed amount of Armor damage based on class.

Every unit's class also gets special powers that do things, like Archers who get to do extra damage if they haven't moved and the defender has lost a lot of armor.

The number's tossed around are very small. The beefiest guys have maxes of Strength of 16 and 16 Armor (and not both since they trad-off) and the smallest have 8 Armor and 8 Strength.

So this system creates a relatively interesting tactical game as you run around squares, using abilities and Willpower for more powerful attacks when needed.

Could this be adapted for an RPG?

I don't think it could be adapted for an RPG (except in broad terms like "damage equals whatever the attack beats the defence by" and wound penalties affecting your attack). There isn't much to work with there, so it'd likely end up feeling too simplistic, and (as with all wound-penalty things) would risk being very deterministic with death spirals.

Though if all you meant was "could it be a simple enough core concept", then yeah, I guess. I mean, put everyone on the same RNG with no exceptions, have damage = attack-defence, chuck in wound penalties, give people willpower to boost damage and have willpower increase whenever you take an enemy out or whatever. Sure.

It could probably make a decent system for a tabletop wargame though - that thrives on simplicity, and you can make a big deal about the resource management.

A problem with damage reducing death spirals is that they can end up taking a very long time to reach completion even after the outcome is determined. In particular, that mechanic sounds like it would suffer from that tremendously, as you could get into situations where both sides were doing 0-1 damage per attack, but one side had twice as much remaining health and therefore had victory essentially assured. Nevertheless, hammering through 4 hit points at 0-1 damage per attack is a slow torture that is going to take 8 rounds of action resolution and declaration to resolve.

it really seems like a very poor fit for the needs of table top.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:A problem with damage reducing death spirals is that they can end up taking a very long time to reach completion even after the outcome is determined. In particular, that mechanic sounds like it would suffer from that tremendously, as you could get into situations where both sides were doing 0-1 damage per attack, but one side had twice as much remaining health and therefore had victory essentially assured. Nevertheless, hammering through 4 hit points at 0-1 damage per attack is a slow torture that is going to take 8 rounds of action resolution and declaration to resolve.

it really seems like a very poor fit for the needs of table top.

-Username17

That's avoided with the Armor-damaging options and with your Strength being your health and damaging stat.

So let's say you have two guys, but one has 10 Armor and 9 Strength and the other has 9 Armor and 4 Strength. They both have too little Strength to do any real damage to the other because of the armor (1 point with a miss chance, base damage increased with Will).

Then the first guy does an armor hit that always hits and everyone can do and does 3 Armor damage. The second guy is now 6 Armor and 4 Strength, and the first guy's 8 Strength hits will always hit now and will reduce the second guy's Strength by 2.

So three rounds total from a position of "neither one of us can hurt the other reliably" which is already an edge case.

I suppose you could get into a situation where two guys had 10 Armor and 2 Strength and it would take six rounds to finish because of the time spent using Armor attacks, but in practice that kind of situation would be a black swan event that would require you to get damaged by a high Strength unit in the beginning of a match (because they won't have high Strength for long), then ignored the rest of the battle by anyone with auto-damaging abilities, and then having the both sides kill the other sides at the same time and only leaving one unit on each side.

Oooh, neat, the battlesystem's out now? I should check my kickstarter emails. Strength vs. Armor reminds me of Dom3 initially the way it's described, but the ability to reduce armor through damage over time makes a pretty significant change to the dynamics.

Err, couldn't you also avoid death spirals by making it much easier to flee?

K wrote: I suppose you could get into a situation where two guys had 10 Armor and 2 Strength and it would take six rounds to finish because of the time spent using Armor attacks, but in practice that kind of situation would be a black swan event that would require you to get damaged by a high Strength unit in the beginning of a match (because they won't have high Strength for long), then ignored the rest of the battle by anyone with auto-damaging abilities, and then having the both sides kill the other sides at the same time and only leaving one unit on each side.

It's more frequent than "black swan" events. Archers are frequently the last surviving dudes because they tend to hang near the back, or away from the general melee. It is important to do Strength damage to archers early-to-mid game because they get deadlier later in the battle (because targets are close and have depleted Armor, so they don't need to move and get bonus damage).

So this tends to create an endgame where two or more crippled archers are the only survivors, facing off with high Armor and low Strength. They shoot arrows at each other and they slowly die. That is lame so it must be avoided.

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If one adopted this system, you need to have something that requires people to roll dice. The only randomness in the game is when your Strength is lower than the target's Armor -- in which case you have 10% change of missing for each point worse your Strength is.

It clearly wouldn't be fun to roll dice only when that happens. So you probably want to have a "to-hit" roll for all attacks. This could be based on a new stat and/or other factors like conditional advantages/disadvantages.

To compensate for the chance of missing, Strength values would need to be relatively higher so more damage is inflicted on hits. But that means you need a different way to deal with Armor attacks, because normally they are guaranteed to always hit and always do a set amount of Armor damage equal to your Break attribute. This ensures that those with fucked up Strength can still provide meaningful help to their buddies whose Strength is fucked up a lesser degree.

I agree with fectin--surrender, fleeing, and other alternative loss conditions becoming easier will make the death spiral less crappy.

To add rolls, you could have WoF-style randomized abilities, but that's kind of awkward. You could also require 'checks' to perform certain actions, perhaps by requiring the mage to roll concentration based on the number of enemies near him will add some randomness as well as some more strategy.

infected slut princess wrote:

K wrote: I suppose you could get into a situation where two guys had 10 Armor and 2 Strength and it would take six rounds to finish because of the time spent using Armor attacks, but in practice that kind of situation would be a black swan event that would require you to get damaged by a high Strength unit in the beginning of a match (because they won't have high Strength for long), then ignored the rest of the battle by anyone with auto-damaging abilities, and then having the both sides kill the other sides at the same time and only leaving one unit on each side.

It's more frequent than "black swan" events. Archers are frequently the last surviving dudes because they tend to hang near the back, or away from the general melee. It is important to do Strength damage to archers early-to-mid game because they get deadlier later in the battle (because targets are close and have depleted Armor, so they don't need to move and get bonus damage).

So this tends to create an endgame where two or more crippled archers are the only survivors, facing off with high Armor and low Strength. They shoot arrows at each other and they slowly die. That is lame so it must be avoided.

Nah. I've played a lot and two archers is rare. Most often, people take out archers in the midgame before they get dangerous or else lose the match as their big guys take crazy-high damage hits. The fact is that a lot of units can one-shot them, and they'll do when they have the chance.

Hell, I've even had games where I took out both undamaged enemy archers with a single attack from a Warhawk.

I've never really seen any death spirals longer than four turns and those tend to be forgone conclusions, so I don't even know if "death spiral" is an effective use of the term. Archers have Armor between 4-10 and Strength of 4-8, but most people tend to have around 7-9 Armor, Strength of 7-8, Armor Break of 2, and Puncture so even Archer v. Archer situations can usually be resolved in three or four turns.

Smart players max Strength and Armor Break, so getting two complete idiots with amazing luck where no one took out their near-useless low Strength Archers with bad Armor break, high Armor, and no Willpower is a black swan event. That would extend the battle to 8-9 turns.

You'd honestly have to engineer that situation because it's obvious that Archers need max Strength and Armor Break. The only question is whether you go with medium Armor and high Will or high Armor and medium Will. An Archer v. Archer battle with those guys doesn't last long.

infected slut princess wrote: If one adopted this system, you need to have something that requires people to roll dice. The only randomness in the game is when your Strength is lower than the target's Armor -- in which case you have 10% change of missing for each point worse your Strength is.

It clearly wouldn't be fun to roll dice only when that happens. So you probably want to have a "to-hit" roll for all attacks. This could be based on a new stat and/or other factors like conditional advantages/disadvantages.

That's a terrible idea.

Randomness would make this system less tactical and interesting and extend battle times dramatically. It's really only bad results.

I mean, Strength v. Strength would be boring and dice rolls would liven that up, but there is enough happening in the Strength v. Armor situation where it's a new and interesting tactical landscape to evaluate every turn.

K wrote:
Smart players max Strength and Armor Break, so getting two complete idiots with amazing luck where no one took out their near-useless low Strength Archers with bad Armor break, high Armor, and no Willpower is a black swan event. That would extend the battle to 8-9 turns.

Something about the overall dynamic when I play tends to create Archer fights at the end. I am probably an idiot.

Because I don't actually care much about my Archers stats all that much. There is only one important thing: STUN ARROWS. I use two of those Archers with Stun Arrows, which I use to impair the movement of their highest Strength units so I can get first-strike against them and injure their Strength before they can use their full power on me. Then their heavy-hitters are fucked up and their overall offense suffers substantially for the rest of the battle.

K wrote:
That's a terrible idea.

Randomness would make this system less tactical and interesting and extend battle times dramatically. It's really only bad results.

I mean, Strength v. Strength would be boring and dice rolls would liven that up, but there is enough happening in the Strength v. Armor situation where it's a new and interesting tactical landscape to evaluate every turn.

Hmm. Maybe I need a paradigm shift, because I thought people want to roll dice when they play RPGs... especially with their combat actions.

Taking out dice for combat resolution makes it more like Chess or something, where stuff just...happens. Which is fine, if that's what you're going for. But if you are _adapting_ this system for an RPG, then I would think some dice should factor into combat more often than simply when your Strength is lower than opponent's Armor.

If you _don't_ want to roll more dice during combat, you could actually just port the entire thing over to table-top as-is. You don't really need to _adapt_ much of anything. It seems very table-top-friendly as is. The math is easy to compute. Get your grid/battlemat, put down some counters or miniatures, and play! It's like 4e, but better. Then graft some other mini-games onto it, and MTP the rest. Add some new classes, or expand on the existing ones. Add more unit promotions. Add more abilities. BAM! RPG is done.

How else would you visualize adapting this combat system for an RPG, other than just using it as is? My thoughts are that you would want to ditch the grid and add more dice... somehow.

Chess-like RPGing already exists in the form of spellcasters casting spells, so I think that making melee like that is not exactly paradigm-breaking. It's more like putting Warriors into the spellcaster paradigm.

To make it into an RPG, I'd probably want to ditch the grid too. Losing the tedium of counting squares is only good even if you lose some tactical depth.

The real question would be how to do spellcasting. I expect that as Banner Age updates we'll see a lot more abilities, and we'll see if the overall system is vigorous enough to allow for RPG-like abilities and not just the tactical simulator ones that they have now.

The thing that I've noticed while playing Banner Saga is that you really have to pay attention to the "Str vs Armor" status of both sides.

In general, if you can keep chopping down the strength of your enemies to below what your armor level is, you're going to have a pretty strong advantage; because they'll be inflicting piddly 1 damage to you or they're forced to try and armor-break you again.

I'm not sure if I like the game all that much really. The battles thus far all feel like they followed the same general flow for me.

Zinegata wrote:The thing that I've noticed while playing Banner Saga is that you really have to pay attention to the "Str vs Armor" status of both sides.

In general, if you can keep chopping down the strength of your enemies to below what your armor level is, you're going to have a pretty strong advantage; because they'll be inflicting piddly 1 damage to you or they're forced to try and armor-break you again.

I'm not sure if I like the game all that much really. The battles thus far all feel like they followed the same general flow for me.

Things get more interesting once you've leveled up and have abilities from Rank 1. Rank 1 also lets you move around stats, so that mixes up the tactical options.

I find the Armor Breaking to be the interesting part. There is a dynamic where sometimes you want to max out your attack even when they have high armor in order to force them to do armor-breaking attacks, and there are other times when you want to max break armor to set up the next guy's attacks (archers do more damage when armor is broken, for example).

I wonder if the Armor/Strength mechanic is more interesting because of the Initiative order that they do where it's always them then you until only one unit on a side is left, then in order? That tends to incentivise wounding people instead of dropping them, so this system gets a lot more value out of combining your health and damage into one stat.

Various abilities that ignore Armor or do attacks to multiple units also add an interesting dynamic.

Wounding is definitely encouraged by the initiative order. I've had games wherein I was down to 3 members while the opponent still had all his guys standing; but I proceeded to demolish the opposing team anyway because most of his team was just at 1-2 Str. and those guys were just essentially "wasting" their turns (their only good move was to do an armor-break; but often they can't even do that if you position your team well).