What's Cooking

I've been putting together the core of the mechanical system over the past week or so. Here's what the design looks like.

Your status, which is the object that tracks a characters mechanical state, is made up of 6 items.

1. Stress - how much temporary damage you have taken. Stress can be erased fairly easily. This is like the hidden "Armor" stat in the new XCOM game.
2. Injury - how injured you are. Injuries are serious and require time to heal, and may confer negative aspects or disadvantages as well.
3. Time remaining in this turn - How much you can still do.
4. Stats - the basics like how strong are you, how fast, smart, etc..
5. Aspects - things that are true about your character. Aspects are often associated with effects and abilities.**
6. Advantages and Disadvantages - temporary marks that can be consumed in various situations, and act as flexible indicators of the ebb and flow of combat.

Aspects break down further into Abilities and Effects. Abilities allow you to do things, when certain conditions are met, and Effects passively change the way that things happen, or change your stats over time or in response to actions.

Abilities are defined thusly:

1. Verb - Move, Attack, Maneuver, Defend, what have you.
2. Targets - A list of participants in the Ability, and how those participants may be selected or inferred. Targets include a filter which is a range and a list of aspects, so abilities can be restricted to targets that meet criteria based on aspects.* 
3. Configuration - what actually happens when you use the ability.

Advantages and Disadvantages might be unfamiliar, but if you've played Spirit of the Century or another FATE game, they're somewhat analogous to Fate Points or Free Invocations. The idea is that they're a form of currency, similar to Fatigue in Descent, that can be used either in defense or offense, or to move further on your turn.

Advantages and Disadvantages will play into the combat system along with Stress and Injury. When you take damage, it is first applied to your stress. When you are out of stress, damage rolls over to Injury. When you take a hit, first any Disadvantages on the defender are consumed to increase the strength of the hit, and then any Disadvantages on the attacker are consumed to decrease the strength of the hit. Then, only when you take a hit that would injure you, any Advantages on the defender are consumed to reduce the strength of the hit.*** In addition certain abilities will allow you to spend your Advantages in various ways, or convert them to movement.

So that's what I've penciled out so far. Right now I'm in the middle of implementing Abilities and Targets. I'm pretty pleased at how flexible it feels, and how it allows the UI to automatically infer and suggest targets for the player to select. That should also allow us to define lots of abilities, and then surface only the ones that are legal at a given time. Which, I hope, will give the game a rich, context-sensitive battle system, more similar to a tabletop RPG than to a 'video game.'

*This makes it necessary to have implied aspects like ENEMY, in addition to the normal ones such as "On Fire."

**Our aspects are basically FATE aspects, broadened to include stunts and de-normalized. (they don't all need to be equally powerful or impactful, and there's no particular limit on the number you'll have.)

***This is all subject to playtesting and feedback of course. It might be a good idea to limit the number of boosts that can be spent in an exchange, or the number of boosts from the same source. We shall see how it plays.