Avoidance vs Mitigation (Patreon)

Hey folks, Matt Colville here with what I think will be a short update, but a big deal. We just ran our first playtest of a new die mechanic only slightly permuted from what we’ve already talked about, but that slight permutation should make a big difference.

The test went well, we may do some more internal testing, but I expect that will go well, and then it’ll go to the testers. So what did we change, and why?

When Last We Left Our Heroes….

Ok so you know how the game used to work right?

Attacker rolls 2d6 plus some relevant attribute determined by whichever ability you’re using.

Armor reduces incoming damage. Heavy armor imposes a minor penalty on your Speed.

If you reduce the incoming damage to 0, you get to retaliate.

Retaliation used to be a flat 3 damage, then we switched it to 1d4. Why? Well, people liked rolling. It feels more interactive…because it is!

Why This Wasn’t Working

I mean, it was sorta working, we shouldn’t overstate the case. It wasn’t unplayable. But it meant certain classic archetypes were having a problem archetyping. The problem comes down to the difference between Avoidance and Mitigation.

Any sufficiently robust Fighting Monsters game is going to have some version of Avoidance and Mitigation. Avoidance lets you avoid damage, mitigation lets you withstand the damage you couldn’t avoid, and all characters have a little of both.

In classic d20 fantasy, the way you avoid damage is having a high Armor Class. Armor and Dexterity both add to this. This creates the “I miss, next” experience we’re devoutly trying to avoid.

Then, the way you mitigate damage is through some combination of a high Constitution and choosing a class with a big hit die.

In our game, you mitigate damage by buying armor. Armor reduces damage.

But how do you avoid damage? Ah…well…you buy armor! The more armor you have, the more damage you avoid. Your Agility factors in there! But the main value that matters is what armor you’re wearing.

This was not working. Shadow players got frustrated that, while there were ways to increase their retaliation damage…they couldn’t retaliate! They didn’t want to use Heavy Armor, because of the speed penalty (and also, why is a Shadow running around in Full Plate?) and so they never got to retaliate. Armor was BOTH Avoidance AND Mitigation and so it wasn’t possible to be good at one, and not the other.

This sucked. You should be able to avoid damage without buying armor. There ARE things we could have done like…just give the Shadow a shitload of Agility. But then the math of our game gets super wonky. Or we could have given the Shadow a special rule where they get to add…double their agility–or more!–to their defense when wearing no armor.

But I am very skeptical of design like that. Sometimes it works, there’s a ton of it in d20 Fantasy and people don’t even notice it, but I think a better design wouldn’t NEED to patch classes like the Shadow that way. It feels like a kludge to me.

What to do?

The Solutions

We changed a couple of things and I think they’re gonna work. Still tons of work to do on the REST of the game, but I have this feeling like we’re close to the core die mechanic here.

First, Armor is now Health! 😀 That was Jason’s suggestion, he’s not a designer but he’s played a LOT of games, wargames, board games. James and I were talking about the Armor problem, which was really the Avoidance problem. And Jason just said “Guys, a lotta games, armor just gives you bonus health.”

My jaw hit the floor. “Armor is health” I said. “Yeah. You want more health? Buy armor!” James also had a very positive response to this suggestion.

This prompted a short discussion about whether that meant you needed to repair your armor. “This ain’t that kind of game,” I said. You can imagine your character spends part of their Rest repairing their armor if you want, but I don’t think a Heroic game like this should be worrying about that stuff. “It just works” is the idea. It’s just a flat bonus to health, and you treat it like the rest of your health. It recovers just like the rest of your health. Yes, this means if you take your armor off, you lose that health. Of course it does. But unless armor doesn’t matter in your game, you’re gonna lose whatever bonus armor grants when you take it off.

I immediately loved this idea. It’s clear and straightforward. It means Armor matters, and it means we can support a robust variety of armors. And I think it gives more different classes a reason to buy armor if they want.

Now I expect there will be some tradeoff. This game isn’t about tracking small amounts of gold, so everyone can “afford” Full Plate. Under that model, why WOULDN’T everyone buy Full Plate? Well I dunno but it’s going to be some combination of: Armor Proficiencies (The Talent is not proficient in Heavy Armor, makes sense) & high armor brings a corresponding debuff, probably to movement. Characters start with 8 speed and I don’t expect even the heaviest armor to impose more than a -2 on that. So it’s not like…+8 health comes with a -8 speed penalty. No. Light armor probably has no move penalty.

Ok so Armor is just bonus health. We like that.

Then James and I focused on the Avoidance part. How is the Shadow “good at avoiding damage” without just giving them more health?

We went back to our original idea of: all attacks are an opposed roll. Attacker and Defender both roll 2d6, they add their respective attributes. Highest wins. This would certainly make it easy to let people be good at Avoidance. Just give them a bonus to their defense roll.

This might work if we noodled on it more, but at first blush we detected a problem. Under the old method, if the attacker rolls a 10 on 2d6, they know they rolled well. Under this model, they have to wait and see what the defender rolls. If the defender rolls a 10, 11, or 12, then it turns out the attacker didn’t roll well enough! That sucks! It sucks that a really good defense roll could “steal the fun” from the attacker.

Speaking only for myself, at this point I was starting to feel like this was an unsolvable problem. But we didn’t give up! I just put the problem down and worked on the Career Path.

Working through the problem we hit upon something that might work. Something that seemed obvious in retrospect, which is always a good sign.

Why is the defense roll 2d6?

Right? What if…what if the attacker rolls 2d6 plus an attribute, and the defender rolls 1d6 plus an attribute? Basically, it’s an opposed roll, but we give attackers a +1d6 buff. This is good because we WANT attackers to "hit" most of the time. We want to encourage and reward attacking. Fighting monsters game!

The more we thought about this…the more it seemed like it might work. An opposed roll; 2d6+x - 1d6+y. If the result is positive, the defender takes that much damage. I started thinking of the d6 roll as the Evasion roll. Because “avoidance roll” sounds dumb. 😀

What does this get us?

By pulling Avoidance OUT of Armor and giving it its own die roll, we let classes like the Shadow be good at avoiding damage (Agility adds to the Evasion roll, Shadows are High Agility), while the Tactician is good at mitigating damage (heavy armor) and the Reaver is a little of both (medium agility and high endurance for extra health).

We ran a test of this today, James gave the Shadow a passive where their evasion roll is 2d6 take the highest. And…it worked? It seemed like it worked! It seemed pretty good to me actually.

I think there will always be players who get frustrated if they can’t regularly avoid most damage but this comes down to your choice of class and play style. I played a Talent in today’s test and I never really had to worry about health. Whereas the melee classes absolutely did, but they survived!

So, it seems like the system is working? And it’s fun to roll dice, it’s fun knowing, no matter how well the monster rolls, you can still do something about it. Even if YOU roll badly to Evade, you still reduce SOME damage! And if you do Evade all the damage, each class has a couple of Retaliations to choose from.

All Health

Now, you COULD do everything with Health. That is a thing you could do. Think about the classic d20 Fantasy you already know. The intended design is: all things being equal, you’re gonna miss 35% of the time.

Let’s imagine that means the bad guys are gonna miss twice per encounter on average. And let’s imagine they do…8 damage on average at 1st level. That’s 16 damage (on average) you’re gonna avoid because the monsters missed you. Well, you could just GIVE all 1st level heroes and monsters +16hp, and let everyone hit all the time. You could do that and, apart from the vagaries of the die rolls, it would be the same. Battles would take the same number of rounds. The results would be the same.

So we COULD say “Characters who are good at Mitigating get Health…and characters who are good at AVOIDING get Health.” It would math out the same. But is that fun?

We don’t think so. I think it’s more fun to roll dice. That’s what this all came down to. We realized we could just math the entire system to work using Only Health. Everyone Always Hits, and Everyone Has A Lotta Health. Mathematically equivalent to missing sometimes, and having less health, but we don’t think that’s fun!

We think it’s fun to roll dice, and with this system it feels good for attackers and defenders when they roll well. And it gives us some fun ways to distinguish characters, which we’re always looking for.

Maybe the 1st level Shadow can’t roll 2d6 and take the highest one. Maybe that’s a higher level Shadow ability, maybe low level Shadows just…reroll 1s. Or…add their Reason PLUS their Agility? Lots of ways to make characters Good At Avoidance now!

This is a good sign.

More testing to come! Probably at least one more internal test? Then it’ll go to the testers.

And we got LOTS of feedback from the testers on the previous version (the other branch of the fork. Yes, forks have branches now) so there’s plenty to do. AND we have a prototype of the Soldier Career Path I’ve been working on which…it’s insane, but it might work. Stay Tuned!

Once we have a build of the game where we feel like Things Are Basically Working, and it’s stable and not changing every week, that will be the packet you folks get. And we may be close to that now, but that’s up to the testers so…fingers crossed.

See you folks at the live Q&A tomorrow!