Combat Mechanics Deep Dive

14 Aug, 2025

You could probably tell, but I’ve been sort of nervously procrastinating on coming back to combat mechanics since our second post. I think the round structure is a fine starting point, but we have learned so much now that I have been intimidated by the prospect of making decisions on how to close the loops that we have started in the last couple of weeks.

Actually, belay that – I haven’t been nervous at all and I just made the artistic decision to work on flavor and character generation and other pillars first.

But let’s bring it back to the assumption that we started from:

The value of the poker hand that your character can play directly correlates to something like amount of damage dealt

If we know this to be true and we know what we have designed over the last few weeks, then we can generalize this to:

The value of the poker hand that your character can play directly correlates to the quality or effectiveness of their action taken in combat.

Since we started, we have determined that we have stats that can be depleted, we have talents granted by our past lives, and we have special abilities from our Creditors. I think we trust our instincts from the first few posts and assume that we probably have gear and slot based encumbrance. Cool. Let’s take a moment and revisit some other called shots we made during the post about Past Lives and use that as a springboard for enumerating an initial list of actions we can take in combat.

Explaining the General through the Lens of the Specific

Mediators can heal other players by performing a combination action with them. That tells us that we have combination actions (unchanged in my mental model since the first time we mentioned them) and we have some form of healing action; we called it Patch Up last time. Mediators also benefit from the party having one or more NPCs in the group. Possibly more on that later.

Bruisers can impose a condition on foes in a specific circumstance; we called it Restrain, but it could also be a Grapple, a Trapped Weapon, or an Ensnare. Regardless, we probably have conditions that affect the ability of foes to continue their belligerence. His Majesty the Worm has a great, complete, and intuitive list of “Effects” that we may have to study heavily if we intend to follow this line of thought. The same ability also lets us improve the Rank of future actions against a foe. This follows the logic of our assumption; a higher rank implies a more effective action.

Bruisers also have a talent which lets them perform some type of intimidation which depletes a target’s Clubs stat (force of will) rather than their Hearts or Spades stats. To me, this implies that there is sometimes value in targeting a different stat than the basic “Hit Points” analog. It also implies that there should be standard actions that, at least under the appropriate condition, allow players to affect a target’s mental stats. HMTW has an action called Banter that lets players attempt to break the morale of an enemy combatant and alter their disposition, but that morale usually has to degrade via combat losses before it can meaningfully be tested. I think the themes of our game are going to lend themselves to alternatives to overwhelming violence, and I think that we can design combat in a way that mechanizes this.

Fixers and Bullshit Artists gain access to unique combat actions, which tells us that there is some standard set of actions that any level zero character can perform and some actions that specific characters can perform.

Basis Set of Actions

OK let’s do it. Let’s list a basic set of actions that someone should be able to do in combat.

Full Actions

• Fold. Like in any poker game, you can always cut your losses and fold. In our game, this fully “charges” your armor/defense and gives you some defensive bonus. Last time we picked a standard array that meant a starting character could have 9-14 points of damage between Spades and Hearts, and I don’t think a normal monster is killing a PC in a single blow, so for now let’s say that Fold grants a PC +2 damage mitigation on top of any other defense they have. Folding represents a combination of dodging and blocking.
• Attack. Bread and butter, baby. Punch, slash, stab, shoot, whatever you’re holding. Smoke em if you’ve got em.
• Scramble. I think basic movement and (narrative) repositioning in combat is somewhere between free and a miscellaneous action, more on that later. Scrambling is when you need to get out of a grapple, or safely untangle yourself from a scrap for a breather and a chance to compose yourself. Scrambling is more like a dash/disengage type of maneuver.
• Wrestle. Shoves, trips, grapples. I haven’t figured out yet whether I want this to be a dedicated action or if shoves and trips should be riders for successful Attack actions so this is more of a placeholder.
• Utilize. Catch-all for items with graduated success conditions. This is probably the same action as magic items.
• Rhetoric. Attempt to either confuse or convince the foe that it is not worth fighting. Usually handled as damage dealt to the target’s Diamonds. Probably conditional. Maybe requires Ante-ing points from your own Diamonds?
• Browbeat. Attempt to break the foe’s morale through intimidation or charm. Usually handled as damage dealt to the target’s Clubs. Probably conditional. Maybe requires Ante-ing points from your own Clubs?
• Patch Up. Battlefield triage to either stabilize a character or mend superficial damage through quick attention.

One thing I want “Full” actions to have in common is that they are impactful on the game state; Draw Steel isn’t the first game that said “man, it stinks when you don’t get to do anything on your turn”, but it is the first game design I’ve watched from basically start to finish and their emphasis on “decisions made in combat must advance the board state” was super impactful, especially when I was still running fifth edition. The other thing about “Full” actions is that they should logically lend themselves to Combination Actions, or two players combining their hands to assemble a more effective hand. I think it would be fun for two allied players to say “I really think we can put this guy on the ground if we work together” and then start sharing cards. I really got this idea from mechanics like Aid Another and Counsel in His Majesty the Worm, where players plan fastball specials by playing cards for each other. Why not take that to 11?

How do Full Actions Work?

Full actions are actions whose quality or effectiveness correlates with the rank of the poker hand used to play them. The exception is Fold and its derivatives, which definitionally have a fixed impact on the game state. There are 10 possible hand ranks in poker, but Four of a Kind, Straight Flush, and Royal Flush are so rare that for now we can treat them as more of corner cases. These three combined add up to a cumulative probability of occurrence in 7-card poker of once every 439 hands or so - less likely than a crit confirm on a 20 sided die (1 in 400). That leaves us 7 ranks of hands that we should correlate to outcomes and 7 Full Actions (for now). The center of gravity is weighted heavily toward the first three ranks, but I hypothesize that the ability to combine hands and use character features will shift that pretty significantly (to be playtested). So, call it 49 outcomes of full actions that we need to prioritize playing around. Honestly? Not as bad as I expected! Let’s look at a couple of sample cases and see what types of things we want to parameterize.

Attack

This is our basic action resolution table. What this tells us is that our attacks are parameterized against BD and that certain types of attacks may have Riders. An example Rider is that Unarmed Attacks probably have a BD of 0, but have a Rider that they add in a Wrestle condition. A Big Ass Lead Pipe might have a BD of 2, but a Rider of +3 damage. A poisoned dagger might have a BD of 1, but a Rider of a Poison effect. This is the rough sliding scale that I want to work with here.

Scramble

We said before that Scramble is our "get out of dodge" action. If we Scramble on a weak hand, then we have to successfully make a Save in order to disengage from the fray - and if we do successfully disengage, we are on our Back Foot for the next round. Back Foot is a placeholder for now, but my idea is that it demotes your next full action in exchange for allowing you to, say, break a wrestle. Move allows you to scramble to an adjacent Zone. In Control is the opposite condition, if you have an outstanding Scramble action then your next full action is promoted by a rank. Our critical ranks, 8-10, add an additional Recover effect which may correspond to either recovering a resource or ending another condition.

Wrestle

I'm fiddling with a couple of ideas here. The first is that these physical conditions are, in fiction, rough escalations of the idea of being physically engaged by a foe. Disarm is ranked lowest because that gives us a diegetic reason for why grappling a creature with natural weapons (immune to Disarm) is risky business. The second idea here is that if you get a rank 6 hand, a Flush, you can either Daze the target or you can trigger some set of lower-rank conditions that add up to the rank of your hand. Instead of Dazing them, maybe you restrain them and force them to save vs a Disarm. This feels smooth on paper but testing will hopefully bear it out.

Rhetoric

In my notes, I have Rhetoric and Browbeat structured pretty much the same. I was chatting with Josh about my post on Stats and Action Resolution and I couldn't get over the assonance of "incurring a cost" and anteing up in poker. Attacking a target has a base effectiveness associated with the weapon you are using, but I wanted some actions to be more of a bet against how effectively you think you can affect them. If you are making a Rhetoric or Browbeat action, you have to pony up an associated resource some time early in the combat round in order to attempt to confuse or irritate the target. Then if you have an effective enough hand you can force the target to save against that stat to see if they still want to stay in the fight. Confusion is a placeholder condition coupled to the Rhetoric action; its Browbeat counterpart is Enrage - it could either force the confused target to play with some cards flipped around or with an open hand for a round.

Utilize and Patch Up

I have some notes for these actions, but I think Utilize will be sort of bespoke based on the item. Patch up is a tough one because I am thinking of doing a pretty complete overhaul of stats before I go to playtest, and that will affect how much healing is appropriate for a dedicated action. Basic premise is that you can play a High Card to stabilize someone who is dying, but if you have a better hand you can potentially recover them some resources.

Miscellaneous Actions

Miscellaneous Actions are a bit of a catch-all for minor actions, object interactions, free actions, the things that often get hand-waved. I probably have some homework to do on the cutoff from trivial to worth accounting for, but the idea would be that you need to discard cards from your hand without charging your armor or redrawing, reflecting the reduction in useful action you have on your turn.

Last Steps Before Playtesting

Like I mentioned above, I think I want to retool stats one more time before I go to playtest and I think I want to write at least one or two more level one Creditors so that not everyone is a corporate stooge, a devil, or a ghost. Then, as a part of retooling stats I need to make decisions about what a zeroth level character looks like in terms of HS and RD, but I think that is going to just take making a decision and iterating based on playtesting.

Does this all make sense? I worry that the number of possible gradations is intimidating compared to, say, Draw Steel/PBTA's 3-tier resolutions. Character playbooks here will almost certainly need to have cheatsheets, but my hope is that poker hand ranks have enough of a cultural permeation that it can reduce the cognitive load somewhat.