Code talk: Reactions 1
After responding to comments last time, I came to the conclusion that we should discuss Reactions next. So, here goes:
On Battle Fantasia, our design goals for reactions were essentially threefold:
1) No one reaction should be inherently superior to others; there should be benefits and drawbacks to all of them. (Duh.)
2) We want a tactically interesting system; it should never be a superior tactic, no matter what your build, to spam the same reaction for an entire fight.
3) We want our reactions to capture the feel of magical girl. This wound up being explored in two ways: the non-binary dodge, and the beam vs. beam element common to counterattacks.
To solve the first goal, we've just been mathematically prudent in our design. But the second and third goals have greatly informed the design of our reactions. Let's explore how that's played out.
The Reactions In A Nutshell:
Dodge -- greater risk, greater reward, but not binary in its outcome
Brace -- reliable damage mitigation, but rarely spectacular
Counter -- the potential to prevent or even do damage, but at the cost of mana.
Cracking The Shell:
Dodge: There's a lot of dodging in magical girl anime; makes it easier to justify bloodless combat, in many cases. However, it's also true that Sailor Moon can be wildly dodging her little heart out and still /losing the fight/. (Example, apologies for the dub: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alGCJTq2LuM&feature=player_detailpage#t=1040s) This is, at the heart of things, why our health bar is labeled 'Fatigue' instead of 'Hit Points': we wanted it to be possible to successfully dodge in terms of the narrative, but still take some damage. By describing health as fatigue, it's easy to follow the logic: you may have dodged the blast, but the strain of getting out of the way wore you out a bit.
Getting away from the classically binary dodge ("you dodge, and take no damage" or "you fail to dodge, and take full damage") is a pretty significant change from most conventional csys. If you can take anywhere from between 0-100% of incoming fatigue damage with a dodge, how is a dodge different from a brace?
The answer lies in something we hinted at in last week's post, when we said: "A successful hit (defined as an attack /that deals fatigue or mana damage/ or successfully applies a negative status effect; buffs and heals specifically do not count as successful attacks) adds 10 more, up to once per round."
Dodge has a drastically higher chance than Brace of fully mitigating all damage from a hit -- making it an unsuccessful hit and denying their opponent 10 morale. It also has a drastically higher chance than Brace of taking all damage from a hit. Like we said in the nutshell: greater risk, greater reward.
Brace: If Dodge's advantage is in its potential for extreme success, at the cost of a possibility of extreme failure, Brace is the opposite; it is far less likely to Brace all damage from an attack, but also far less likely to fail completely. Furthermore, since dodge has the added potential benefit of denying one's opponent morale, brace is somewhat better, on average, at mitigating damage; someone who braces a lot will be taking less damage, generally, then someone who dodges a lot. Dodge is far more susceptible to the RNG, for good and ill.
It's worth noting that 'brace' encompasses, narratively, more than just putting your arms in front of your face and passively taking the hit, perhaps skidding back a little or being blown off your feet entirely if you fail; active martial arts-esque blocks, parries, and magical shields are generally braces as well. Want to punch a beam and stop it with sheer awesomeness? Want to cut an incoming attack in half with your sword? That's brace, generally. If there's the possibility of getting through an attack with your own to actually do damage, /then/ it's a counter.
Dodge and Brace Penalties: There are a lot of factors that go into successful dodges and braces. There are abilities that enhance them, attack flags that punish a given reaction (for example, an attack with the Homing flag is significantly harder to dodge), status effects that buff or debuff their effectiveness. But in general, it is very possible to build a character around one or the other -- and, sometimes, very effective. We're not against it as a rule; there are characters who are particularly definitive in one and not the other. What we are against is a fight where you only ever use one reaction, and to prevent that, we instituted a stacking series of penalties. Narratively, reaction penalties are basically representative of being too predictable.
At the beginning of a fight, your Dodge Penalty Counter is at 0. You elect to dodge the first attack; your DPC goes to 1, and if you dodge next time, you will suffer a minor penalty. You dodge the second attack; your DPC goes to 2. At this point the penalty is more severe. This goes on until you finally brace, at which point your Dodge Penalty Counter resets to 0, and your Brace Penalty Counter goes to 1. If you never want to take any penalties, alternate reactions. If you're built for one or the other, you may well still be effective for consecutive reactions, but eventually you'll want to change things up. And you'll definitely want to try to strategize around not having too big of a reaction penalty accumulated by the time you have to deal with a Finishing Attack!
The Counterattack In The Room: We haven't talked about counter much at all yet! And we're not going to. That'll be a topic for a separate post; you guys have enough to chew on for one day. ;)