Mechanics: Heroism, Fear and Hatred

I've been moving down the path of character advancement and combat mechanics as promised, and I've made good progress.

I did a lot of background work on aspects and abilities, simplifying them and making them more flexible. As a result I was able to implement s Heroism mechanic, and generic "Fear of ASPECT" and "Hatred of ASPECT" aspects, with corresponding combat mechanics.

I also have a very basic ranged attack, though I'm not happy with it yet. It needs more depth. But here's what we got now:

Dacolo has got himself in a bit of a bind, and he's terrified of Gorgon Boars:

But these are Warriors, not Farmers, and they have Heroism available. Pem is able to use Heroism to get into position with enough time remaining, and then slay the surrounded boar with one stroke. In the combat log, the breakdown notes +3 due to Hatred of Boars. Docolo then pivots and uses a Heroic Attack on the remaining Gorgonoid Boar.

Heroism acts as a currency: you start the mission with 1 heroism (for now), and you can use it to break the rules in different ways depending on your class. Everyone can "get an extra action" by spending heroism (it gives you extra time to act that turn), Warriors can also perform a "heroic strike" with extra damage, and Hunters and Mystics will have signature abilities powered by heroism.

The kicker is (not yet implemented), that when a hero dies a heroic death, all remaining heroes get +1 heroism.

Fear and Hatred are related aspects. For now Fear gives you -1d2 on defense and +1d4-2 on attack, and Hatred simply gives you +1d3 on attack. The idea is that Fear can be acquired as a consequence of taking injury or seeing a comrade die, but that Fear can then be upgraded to Hatred by performing a redemption quest or maybe simply by killing your hated foe.

I'm playing with the idea of variance control. I want the base attacks and defenses to be fairly predictable, but I also want epic moments to arise when a character's background or forgotten aspects suddenly become relevant. So my thought is that the more specific a situational aspect is, the higher the variance should be. We'll see if playtesting bears this out, maybe it will be super annoying.

My other major goal for the missions is creating spatial incentives. What I mean by that is, incentivizing the player to take risky, aggressive moves in order to control certain positions on the board. If board positions are important, then different maps force the player to change tactics to play optimally. If board positions are important, then procedural generation of maps is a huge multiplier on content and replayability.

Descent does this amazingly well with Glyphs and treasure, not to mention other pickups. XCOM accomplishes this via Cover and both also use doors as spatial gates. Descent has additional mechanics, specifically the race-like nature of every mission, to keep the players unbalanced. So I'm toying with those ideas as well.

Fire is the next big goal. I have some good ideas for why fire is important.

• It counts towards surround. (If your back is to a fire, you can't defend as well.)
• Mystics will have abilities that use fire on the board to their advantage.
• Fire spreads light, revealing hidden enemies.
• Fire depends on Debris or it will burn out, which makes Debris distribution important.
• Fire is dramatic!

The main goal for fire is for it to make terrain and position matter more than they currently do.

I'm excited. Relationships like fear have been on the drawing board for over a year, and Fire has been an important combat concept for almost as long. It feels good to finally be implementing this stuff and playing around with it.