Designer Diary 3: Challenge Yourself | Bardsung Forsaken Glade
Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade launches October 22nd on Gamefound! Follow now to get the terrifying Overseer free with your pledge.
Ready for the next challenge, heroes? Join lead game designer, Sherwin Matthews, for an up close and personal look at the new challenge system in Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade.
Find out how fate management ties into the new system, which elements from the Ancient Forge will reappear in the Forsaken Glade, and how challenges can now involve your whole party!
You’ll also get an exclusive glimpse at one of the heroes who’ll be entering the Forsaken Glade—the Firesoul!
If you missed the last Designer Diary where we covered hero backstories and design, you can find that here.
Building a New Challenge System
by Sherwin Matthews
Here Comes the Hotstepper
Welcome back, heroes. Before we get into the new challenge system, let's take a look at a returning hero archetype from the Ancient Forge—the Firesoul.
A sorcerer specialised in not only hurling fireballs at her foes and generating fiery conflagrations at a snap of her fingers, Firesoul can also manipulate the flames she stokes for a variety of effects, such as pushes, board control, and even healing.
After all, who else would you rather have with you in a highly combustible environment like a forest?
Why Update the System?
Challenges aren’t new to the world of Bardsung—in the Forsaken Glade, you’ll once again encounter a wide array of traps, puzzles, mysterious riddles, and fun NPC encounters. Like before, challenges require you to succeed on a test, i.e., beat a target number (TN) by rolling a d20.
However, this time we’ve expanded on how those tests work. Previously, the d20 was modified by a hero’s characteristic modifier. That worked well, but could lead to heroes either not having the appropriate characteristic modifier and having to roll a hard TN, or trying to level up all their characteristics equally for tests they might not encounter.
This also hindered our team’s design space when setting the TN for tests—we didn’t want to create impossible tests players would struggle to answer, or be too punishing with penalties, but we still needed ways to create difficulty that felt good to overcome. Simply put, we wanted a mechanic that had more depth and created more fun.
The new system has a greater spectrum of difficulty, more rewards (and penalties…), and more flavour. And we didn’t stop there—we wanted to bring your whole party into challenge tests, rather than just whoever happened to be resolving it, so they felt like events for your whole table.
Finally, I also wanted to add a dash of resource management, because that absolutely is my jam when it comes to games (something our Resident Evil community will no doubt attest to).
A tall order? Well, let’s talk about how we achieved it.
What's Familiar and What's Fresh?
It’s worth noting the following only applies to events that actually involve tests. The way you’ll encounter challenges whilst exploring remains the same as in the previous Bardsung game, as do event and NPC interactions that don’t involve tests.
Challenge tests continue to provide players with target numbers to hit, and we’ve kept the timing step system as the previous game, with Instant, Delayed, and Sustained event types.
…and that’s about where the similarities end! To find out about all the new features, I’ll talk you through an example.
Overgrown Path is an instant card, which means it gets resolved the moment it’s drawn.
The next symbol indicates how many heroes can be involved in the test. The player that draws the card always resolves it with their hero, but if the value here is higher, and there are other heroes on the same or an adjacent tile, those heroes can assist the hero in making the test too.
Next up, we have a proficiency symbol (a term which some of you will remember I mentioned in the last diary) which is a type of activity each hero is particularly good at. Each test has one of these, indicating that if the hero involved in making the test has a matching symbol, they can add an extra die when resolving the test.
The target number (TN) follows the proficiency symbol. Veterans will no doubt have already noticed this number looks quite a bit lower than what they’re used to.That’s because challenge tests are now resolved using a six-sided die (d6) rather than a twenty-sided die (d20).
That’s not the only change to the dice. The final value is the number of successes required in order to pass the test. Well done if you saw this coming when reading about the number of heroes, or proficiency—challenge tests now involve the heroes rolling a pool of dice, instead of just one.
And this is where things get interesting.
Managing Your Fate
When a hero attempts a challenge, they roll three d6 and attempt to score results equal to or higher than the test’s TN on each die. If the number of successful results are equal to or higher than the number shown on the card, the test is passed.
In a test like the one shown above, rolling 4, 5, or 6 on three separate dice isn’t terribly easy, even if you’re rolling an additional die from your proficiency.
But remember how I mentioned fate in the last update? Well, any heroes that are in range to assist the hero taking the test can spend a point of their fate to add an extra die to the pool too, increasing the number of dice used and thus the chance of success.
Why not simply throw all your fate in each time? You can! But do you want to? Fate is a limited resource—once a hero has used it up, they’ll have to find a way to replenish it again.
And without any fate left you’ll be relying on sheer luck to pass challenge tests, and you won’t be able to use your hero’s signature abilities, or any of the other bonuses during combat, which I’ll talk about a little later on.
We’re very happy with the system—it provides an advantage for heroes that have matching proficiency rather than a penalty if they don’t, and not only does it give players a chance to stack the odds in their favour (and you’d better believe there are hero abilities that interact with the dice pool during these tests too…), but there’s always a chance to pass, even if the heroes are fresh out of fate.
This means fate is still a group mechanic, but in an entirely new way. Rather than the heroes sharing a pool of fate and discussing how best to spend it, you now each have your own little stash, and need to negotiate who spends what, when.
Who do you want to send ahead to explore, in case a challenge card is drawn? Do you exhaust your own fate first and leave the others fresh, or is it better to spread the cost around? Will you leave other players to fend for themselves, so you can be better prepared for combat?
The choice is up to you, heroes.
That’s quite a bit to digest for now, so I’ll hit the pause button there.
But don’t worry. I’ll be back soon with more designer diaries for Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade, covering what heroes are up to when not solving puzzles. The burning heat of battle, the adrenaline of narrowly avoiding certain death, the rush of seeing your enemies defeated. Combat!
Got questions? Hit the comments below, or come hang out with us in the Steamforged Discord.
And if you’re not already following on Gamefound, make sure you do that now!
