Tombs of Telleran - Creating Sticky Combat
Hello everyone and belated happy new year!
During the holidays I’ve been experimenting with combat stickiness in Tombs of Telleran. “Combat stickiness,” you ask? Let me show you what I mean with an example.
The player uncovers an enemy they do not want to fight right now, or at the current location, By simply walking away the player can at any time disengage and drag the enemy to another position; for the cheap cheap price of a couple of turns. This makes the decision of where to engage enemies somewhat unimportant, which I do not want. I would like combat to be sticky in the sense that trying to run away or move the melee somewhere else comes at some sort of cost. Where you engage the enemies should be consequential and running away should be a decision. To this end, I have tried a few systems, and the remainder of this post contains my reflections from playtesting them.
Attack of Opportunity
This idea is a classic and very common in both table top and video games. This lets actors get a free attack on adjacent enemies if they step out of melee combat. This basically locks you and other combatants in one spot, since giving away an attack is pretty punishing. So it certainly accomplishes the goal. However, it also felt unfair in combination with telegraphed attacks. When a telegraphed attack shows up and tells you “move out of the way”, that basically forces an attack of opportunity unless you have breath left to use dodge. So it isn’t a great fit for Tombs of Telleran.
Movement Breath Costs
The idea here is that each step when in combat costs a small amount of breath. This system makes stepping away from an enemy cost the same resource you need to swing at them, so moving out of the way slows down your action economy. On the plus side, you are able to move without being hit by a punishing attack of opportunity. The same system is used for enemies, so all actors have to plan when their breath runs out and they need to recover, which can be done by passing a turn. This creates an ebb-and-flow cadence to the combat, which is interesting.
Momentum
A third idea I played around with was to have each turn in enemy threat increases damage dealt. This one tries to create stickiness not by punishing leaving combat but by rewarding staying engaged. I like the philosophy behind this, but after thinking more about it, it is clear to me that the reward for staying engaged in combat has to be something that does not directly feed into the combat encounter difficulty. If you become stronger the more turns you stay engaged, the difficulty of the enemies will be variable, making balancing hard. And if you ever need to escape, you will lose your buffs, making comebacks much harder.
Conclusions
I think the “movement costs breath” system has been the most successful. It punishes the player for moving but does not make it impossible. How successful you are at running away from combat will be determined by the breath of your character and the enemies chasing you, which, in a way, emulates a speed stat while maintaining the predictable “one move per turn” system. I have playtested it a fair amount and will keep it in the game for now.