The Return of the Resistance Roll (Patreon)

Hey hey. Ho ho. We’ve got resistances to roll. It’s me, James, here to update you all about the state of effect resistances (ya know, the stuff that lets you not be dazed when someone tries to daze you)!

When last we updated our intrepid Patrons, we had noted in our first round of Patreon playtest feedback that resistance rolls had slowed down the game a bit, and people didn’t love that. Since then, we’ve tried a few different options for managing conditions throughout the game. I want to talk about what we tried and why and where the game currently stands. But first, let’s talk about the reason for having resistances in the game.

Why Have ‘Em?

Why have effect resistances at all? It’s a good question. Not all games bother with them. If a wizard casts a spell to daze you, well they used a spell slot to do it, so now you’re dazed. Sorry not sorry.

While that can be fun in some genres of games where spell slots are precious and therefore you have to decide if it’s worth blowing one to do a cool thing at the expense of not being able to do OTHER cool things, the MCDM RPG ain’t that kind of game. We got heroic resources and monster abilities for days.

In fact, because our game is heroic and tactical, the heroes and the enemies they face do more than just deal damage. In order to fit the fantasy, we have a decent number of conditions and unique effects flying around during any given battle. That’s fun (provided it’s simple to track)! What’s not fun is feeling like you don’t have a chance to stand against being dazed or set on fire or knocked prone. While people seem to love automatic damage, they’re less cool with automatic weakened (or prone or bleeding). I totally understand why. Heroes and many of the epic monsters they battle should stand a chance of resisting being knocked down or frightened or being dealt a bloody wound.

We knew we had to have resistances in this game, and once the power roll came along, we set about trying to find some good solutions that would work with this new core mechanic.

Power Roll Alone Not Good Enough

The first thing I hoped would work (but knew would likely fail) was that the power roll itself could be enough of a form of resistance. If the attacker rolls low, then they just deal a little bit of damage and no harmful effect to their target. Let’s use the conduit’s Terrifying Smite as an example.

Costs 1 Wrath: Terrifying Smite

In a burst of holy light, your appearance morphs into your foe’s greatest fear.

Keywords: Attack, Magic, Ranged Type: Action

Distance: Ranged 5 Target: 1 creature

Power Roll + Intuition:

7 or lower: 6 holy damage

8-10:8 holy damage; frightened 1

11+: 13 holy damage; frightened 5

The numbers after the frightened condition indicate the condition’s value. At the end of a frightened creature’s turn, they roll 1d6 and reduce the condition’s value by a number equal to the result. When the value drops to 0, you remove the condition. Giving conditions values meant that they could increase in strength when you rolled super high with your attack.

By the way, here’s what frightened means in the current iteration of the game. If you are frightened, attacks you make against the source of your fear with a −1. If that source is a creature, they make attacks against you with an +1. You can’t willingly move closer to the source of your fear if you know where they are. If you gain the frightened condition from a creature while already frightened by a different creature, the new condition replaces the old one.

When we tried this version of the power roll determining everything about the effect, players and Directors didn’t love that their own stats did nothing to help them prevent conditions. They also didn’t love that a value-5 condition could be removed by a lucky d6 roll, so we thought we should tweak the condition numbers a bit. Trying to serve both these issues got me into a little trouble in the next round.

Static Defenses

My next approach was to try and give each creature a list of five defenses (one for each characteristic of Might, Agility, Reason, Intuition, and Presence) that would reduce incoming conditions and effects. Whenever a creature imposes a condition upon another, the ability that imposes the condition notes which characteristic is subtracted from the condition’s value. If a tactician with an Intuition of 1 suffered an effect that dealt them frightened 3 vs Intuition, then they gained a frightened 2 condition.

Not all these effect resistances could just be the low scores that modified dice rolls (which needed to stay low to not influence the power roll odds too greatly). They needed to be higher because I had adjusted the math of condition values based on feedback from the previous version. I wanted heroic abilities (the kind that cost resources) that against a 0 defense would stick around for 1 round (or value 1) if the attack got the 7 or less result and were likely but not guaranteed to stick around for 2 rounds (or value 5) if the attack got the 8 to 10 result and would definitely stick around for at least 2 rounds (or value 8) if the attack got the 11 or higher result. However, I also wanted targeting a strong defense to nullify the effect if the attack rolled 10 or less and greatly reduce the effect of an 11 or less attack result, so that meant characteristic defenses needed to be separate from scores.

Each defense was calculated by adding a number (determined by a creature’s class or role) to one or more of their characteristics. A tactician added 3 to their Might and Reason scores to get their Might and Reason defenses. So if they start with a Might score of 2, their Might defense is 5. They also added 1 to their Presence score, and nothing to their Agility and Intuition scores.

Here’s what Terrifying Smite looks like with that version:

Costs 1 Wrath: Terrifying Smite

In a burst of holy light, your appearance morphs into your foe’s greatest fear.

Keywords: Attack, Magic, Ranged Type: Action

Distance: Ranged 5 Target: 1 creature

Power Roll + Intuition:

7 or lower: 6 holy damage; frightened 1 vs Intuition

8-10:8 holy damage; frightened 5 vs Intuition

11+: 13 holy damage; frightened 8 vs Intuition

For unique effects, we could also deploy static defenses by turning them into something akin to AC in D&D. Depending on the ability and result of a roll, a target could suffer a unique effect or not based on their defense. Here’s an example from the harpy stat block:

Alluring Song

Keywords: Area, Magic Type: Action

Distance: 10 Burst Target: All enemies

Roll 2d6 + Presence:

7 or lower: if target’s Presence defense is 0 or lower, suffer effect

8-10: if target’s Presence defense is 1 or lower, suffer effect

11+: if target’s Presence defense is 5 or lower, suffer effect

Effect: The target moves their full speed toward the harpy, ignoring any danger. Their speed then becomes 0 until the start of the harpy’s next turn.

Defenses being static certainly kept the resolution fast and made players feel like their hero had a say in preventing particular conditions, but it led to some other problems. First, condition values had gotten so high in order to make the d6 save at end of turn math work that the game suddenly became about managing and helping your friends manage conditions, which isn’t really what we want the game to be about. Giving up every other turn to help a friend remove a condition that targeted one of their weak defenses instead of kicking major monster booty isn’t heroic. It also seriously bogs down play! On top of all that, rolling a d6 at the end of your turn still wasn’t something people thought was fun, so the whole system for conditions needed a bit of a rethink.

Return of the Resistance Roll

What we’re doing now is not actually all that novel, but after just a bit of testing, it seems to be working. We’ll see if it stands up to more.

For abilities that deal dramatic effects (such as the dazed condition or the harpy’s Alluring Song), we’ve brought back the resistance roll. Instead of having an attacker roll an attack AND a target roll for resistance, we now just have the target make a resistance roll. This is similar to the way many spells work in D&D and other games. You don’t make an attack roll for charm person or entangle. Instead, the target gets a chance to resist the effect with a roll.

The resistance roll is a power roll that the target rolls to determine how well they resist certain abilities. The good news is that the creature using the ability also has their characteristic also factor into the roll in the form of a penalty that is imposed upon the target’s roll. The conduit’s Terrifying Smite for instance requires the target to make an Intuition power roll to resist with a penalty to the roll equal to the conduit’s Intuition score. It’s Intuition vs Intuition!

A high resistance roll means the ability has the minimal effect, and a low resistance roll means the ability hits the target at full strength. Let’s take a look at Terrifying Smite in this version:

Costs 1 Wrath: Terrifying Smite

In a burst of holy light, your appearance morphs into your foe’s greatest fear.

Keywords: Magic, Ranged, Resistance Type: Action

Distance: Ranged 5 Target: 1 creature or object

TARGET MAKES Resistance Roll + Intuition (− Your Intuition):

7 or lower: 13 holy damage; frightened (Intuition resistance ends)

8-10:8 holy damage; frightened (EoT)

11+:  6 holy damage

You might be wondering what “(EoT)” and “(Intuition resistance ends)” mean. Well the first one is easy. EoT means “end of turn,” and that means the condition just ends at the end of the target’s next turn. In the case of “Intuition resistance ends,” you need to make an Intuition resistance roll at the end of your turn to end the effect. Whenever you make an end of turn resistance roll, here are the outcomes:

Power Roll + [Characteristic specified by ability]:

7 or lower: the effect persists

8-10: the effect ends at the end of your next turn

11+: the effect immediately ends

It’s worth noting that many abilities are still straight up attack rolls, many of which still apply minor conditions or effects, like forced movement. It’s just that those more devastating conditions typically require a resistance roll. We make the decision on an ability-by-ability basis.

That’s where things are right now. We’re really putting the power roll to plenty of use so far. There are other methods we could try here if this doesn’t work out. For instance, there are ways to make characteristic defenses and conditions work by heavily adjusting the math, but right now we like the dramatic tension of a target’s resistance roll determining their fate.

More to come!

—James