I Caught the Mechanical Design Bug
Preamble
For the last year, I've been playing Rise Up Comus's excellent tabletop RPG His Majesty The Worm. Up until then I had been splitting my gaming between 5e DnD and different variants of Monte Cook's Cypher system (especially Old Gods of Appalachia). I had heard of the OSR and NSR only fleetingly via blog posts shared by my friend Omar, but most games in the movement scared me off. Thankfully, HMTW grabbed me by the collar with both hands and shook me awake, so I have been drinking deeply of the cup of blogspot posts and eating the bread of adventure game bric-a-bracs like Knock. So as a long-winded starting point, I have been thinking hard about how to use cards (Tarot, playing, or otherwise) in RPGs.
More recently, like thousands of others, I have been fully taken in by Chris McDowall's game Mythic Bastionland. I'd previously run a little bit of another "Oddlike" game, Mausritter, and the mechanics hadn't clicked until I read and played them in MBL. The condensed stats, the clear and concise action resolution procedure, the immense flavor and style baked into every page, the game is pure tabletop.
Now, to my point for today. In His Majesty the Worm's Challenge Phase (combat, initiative order, what have you), players and the referee each draw a hand. In the game, this hand of cards is used to determine initiative, passive defense, and your scope of actions for the round. An intuitive leap that a lot of people in the game community have made is:
What if we took this hand of cards more literally?
What if the composition of the hand were more important?
Some thoughtful and creative people have used this train of thought to make creative downtime activities, fishing minigames, and great subsystems to integrate to the base game. But, unfortunately for my phone's battery and my retinas, I have played a lot of Balatro and I want to bring some silly Poker mechanics to a core game. I probably won't dig too far into things today but over the last handful of days I've been jotting down some undecipherable notes about how to take some of my favorite elements of HMTW, MBL, and Poker to hopefully compose a fun little Frankenstein of a system that I hope to start playtesting with friends soon. I'm not sure if this will be something sustainable enough to be a full standalone game or more of a diversion, but I can't answer that question by doing nothing.
Get On With It!
As a starting point, I like how fast and decisive fights are in Mythic Bastionland. Characters have just four stats; one is a sort of temporary buffer that recovers out of combat and the other three represent physical stamina, mental stamina, and force of will. Let's say that's a good starting point - it's lightweight, out of the way, does everything we need to for innate character stats. There is no "Attack Roll", hallelujah Now weapons in the Odd family of systems have a damage die ranging, in the words of Chris:
Pick a damage die between a sword (d6) and a naval cannon (d12)
Armor in the system family is a flat buffer based on how many pieces you have. Simple enough.
Fights in HMTW are also typically pretty quick - there is enough action economy in a single round of combat for a side with the upper hand to start dictating terms of peace. HMTW has an asymmetric damage system; NPCs have "H/D" (Health and Defense, not Hit Die!) and player characters receive wounds against whatever intact armor they have left or against conditions ranging from "Staggered" to "Death's Door". Damage is dealt in discrete increments of Wounds (typically 1-2 at a time) when an attacker's Attack action value exceeds the target's initiative rather than the more granular points of damage in MBL or other families of systems.
So here we have two fun and successful models for fast, decisive, and interesting combat systems. One does away with the attack roll and gets right to dealing damage, the other does away with variable damage and focuses on hitting target values. Both decisions have an effect on how players make decisions but I am not the person to talk about that level of theory, I'm just a dilettante.
So if I barge in as an amateur game designer and say "I want to design a fast and decisive combat system, using playing cards, where the value of the Poker hand that you have composed has a direct correlation to how the game state is advancing", then it's time to get to brass tacks. Unfortunately those brass tacks are in another blog post where I'll start actually putting ideas on paper.