Gamers’ tolerance for randomness in games is very much a sliding scale. Dealing with randomness can be fun and dynamic, and certainly makes for more storied games. Your success based on randomness.. well, that’s a whole lot less interesting. Nobody plays Chutes and Ladders for the hard tactical play, since the only thing you actually do is touch dice and watch your player suffer at random. Still, randomness, especially in combat, gives it more a sense of excitement. I’d like to capture some of that while still giving players as much control as I can.

The monsters are the random element in the game, and yeah, pretty much based off of random encounters in RPGs. Not entirely random; you won’t end up fighting a Vogon Battle Fleet and a slightly vexed chicken at the same time. But each of the monsters do act randomly within their ability set, and there isn’t always anything the players can do about that.

In my original concept for the game, I was building off of a deckbuilder. You would have attack cards you could use in your hand, play some of them, and then the whole lot would shuffle back into the deck to chance another draw the next round. That still basically mean “touch dice, suffer randomness.” None of the cards were meant to be bad ones, but were specific enough that, if you only drew situational cards, then you basically sucked that round and no amount of player agency or tactical brilliance could change that. Congrats, you rolled a number that means your butt is sitting on a chute. Have fun with that outcome, loser!

So, a thought came to me while munging away on creative card concepts: Why not have the player have all their options in front of them when combat begins, but as they play one, they don’t get them back until all are used up?

In a typical RPG that uses magic points, you basically have to ration your MP for meaningful nukes and heals, so that your poor healer isn’t bonking things with a wand for lack of resource points. There will always be some things that you pretty much have to play first, like “defense up” or “attack up” sorts of things, mostly because if you cast that towards the end of combat, then you blow the same MP and maybe get one good wand thump out of it before the last monster drops dead. While I am taking MP out of the equation (because that is boring), I do want to allow players to choose attacks when they want them. But a challenge is designing encounters that don’t always reward “buff up and then smash” face rolling play. If a monster has a purge, and you’ve used up all your buffs until you recycle all your cards, then you done screwed up!

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