Designer Diary 5: Actions In Combat
Join us as we dive back into combat for this week's Designer Diary.
In this update, you’ll learn how your heroes’ abilities create dramatic moments in battle, and find out how fate ties into the teamwork you will need to survive the Forsaken Glade!
We’re also very excited to share another mini for the first time—Dæmonblade!
Ready to reap the souls of your fallen foes, Dæmonblade has a wicked storm inside of her to be let loose on the wandering monsters of the Forsaken Glade.
Actions in Combat
By Sherwin Matthews
Welcome back, heroes. Last time around, I discussed combat encounter design in detail, focusing on the design goals behind how fights are built. If you missed it, you can find it here.
Moving away from the macro-design of encounters themselves, today I’d like to cover what heroes can do in combat!. Whether you’re new to Bardsung, you need a refresher, or you’re a returning veteran, you’ll find this update interesting—I’ll be covering some key changes to the game from the previous installment!
What Can the Heroes Do?
During your turn, heroes make two actions. Although there are some situations where you’ll be able to make interactive actions with a particular element (such as opening a treasure chest or following the rules on a card), the main actions you’ll be making most of the time are moving and using abilities.
Movement
Rather than squares or nodes, Bardsung uses a system of zones for movement. Each hero has a movement stat, and they can move up to that many zones from the current position.
Zones are great for maintaining greater freedom of placement while also stopping things getting too pixel-bashy. At the same time they’re great at maintaining the importance of positioning for both heroes and enemies.
Attack Abilities
Abilities are more varied and complex—they’re where your hero’s identity really starts to shine. All abilities are either attacks, or skills. Let’s talk about attack abilities first, as there’s a lot of exciting design in there!
Ability cards are easily one of the most complicated cards in the game, so let’s break it down together, one piece at a time, working from left to right along the top row.
First up we have the attack symbol. This simply indicates the card is an attack, rather than a skill.
For returning players, note that there’s no longer a differentiation between physical and magical attacks as we saw in Bardsung: Legend of the Ancient Forge. We decided this element added an extra layer of complexity to all abilities, but only for a handful of enemies. We still want flavorful enemies, but we’ve achieved that elsewhere in their design this time around.
Next is the attack range for the attack, measured in the same zones as movement.
Following that is the damage die, used to determine whether you cause a critical hit or not after hitting the enemy. The higher number of faces this die has, the more likely it is to equal or exceed the target’s toughness.
After the damage die is the attack modifier, which is also new. In Forsaken Glade, the attack modifier is added to the attack roll when determining whether the attack hits the target or not. Previously, all attacks had a characteristic, and the hero derived their modifier from that.
Why the Changes?
Three reasons: As I’ve mentioned before, decoupling characteristics from abilities gave us greater capacity to make abilities feel more flavourful from each other, and give them more avenues for upgrading.
It’s also easier for you to read—rather than getting one piece of data from the ability card and one from another, the player can simply read the ability card.
Finally, characteristics no longer exist in the game!
Fate Costs
The final disc is blank. That’s because it’s where fate cost is listed if the card has one. Basic attacks like this one tend not to require you to spend your fate when using them, but more powerful abilities do, taxing your resources.
Bardsung is a game where you have to work together as a team, managing the ebb and flow of battle and assisting each other by replenishing each other’s fate in order to use all your abilities and prevail!
More Symbols!
Let’s move down to the next row on the Ember card, which shows the type and effects of the attack (such as pulse, area-of-effect, and so on).
For the attack type, another new symbol awaits! This time, it’s the symbol indicating that the ability can be used multiple times during your turn (typically, abilities can only be used once per turn).
Next we see something veterans will be familiar with—the hit and crit effects. When you hit an enemy with an attack, the dice rolls don’t stop. You then make a damage roll to see whether you've pierced the enemy’s hide—if you roll under the enemy’s toughness the hit effects are applied. If you equal or exceed the value, you've inflicted a critical hit, and apply those effects instead!
In the case of the Ember attack that’s either the burn effect, or a wound and the burn effect, respectively. Returning players, can you guess which hero this card belongs to yet?
Finally, we have the special rules for the attack—not all attacks have these. Special rules vary widely, but as these are now standard-sized cards with larger text and symbols, they’re all easy to read.
The final symbols at the bottom are straightforward—the one on the left indicates that this is an active ability, requiring you to use an action to resolve it (instead of passive, which means an effect is always in play). The one on the right indicates that this is the level one version of the ability, and it hasn’t yet been upgraded.
Skill Abilities
Attack abilities have a lot of details to take in, so I’ll quickly touch upon skills and then leave you to digest everything I’ve said.
Here we can see the four corner symbols are the same as those on attack cards. Beyond that, skill cards are far simpler to read with fewer moving parts. But don’t be fooled into thinking of them as less powerful!
Attacks are more direct, but skills are where the powerful combos and overlapping buffs hide. By creating stacking effects upon hitting an enemy or when spending or generating fate, players can really start to produce some tremendous results.
Bringing the Party Closer Together
Abilities really change the feel of how a hero plays, and help define how they fit into a party—will you be spending more fate than you generate, and need the assistance of others? Or will you be the key support hero that holds everyone together?
Abilities are a big part of our design goals around teamwork—understanding how you can help each other excel through your attacks and skills is key to mastering the game. Attacks always seem most direct, but skills are where the powerful combos and overlapping buffs hide.
By creating stacking effects upon hitting an enemy, or when spending or generating fate, players can really start to feel that they’re mastering the game and produce some tremendous results.
That’s all from me for now. Next time around? Enemies!
Come and chat with Sherwin and the rest of the SFG team in the comments below, and on the SFG Discord servers here.
And if you’re not already following on Gamefound, make sure you do that now!
