Illeria's core gameplay loop, and does combat need to be more interesting?

Weekly updates:

This was a busy week for personal reasons, though I did get 3 playtests in.  I'm also rethinking removing animated creatures.

Today's post is more thinking out-loud than usual.

Last week I said:
"Honestly, part of [wanting to keep summoned creatures] is that the rules are just so interesting, and I worry that a game with just melee combat, archery, and magic would be too boring (which, as I write this makes me worry that the game might not be interesting enough)."
This stuck for me.  I wondered if Illeria could be an interesting enough game if there were just melee fighters and archery, or if that would be too dull; if it was the later, I wondered if Illeria was a bad game.  Right then I watched a video explaining the concept of a core gameplay loop, which helped spur on my thinking.  

A core gameplay loop is the basic thing a player does repeatedly.  In board games, I think it is basically the turn.  For example, in Slay the Spire, you draw cards, and then decide how to allocate your energy to playing those cards (balancing hurting monsters, defending yourself, and empowering yourself for future turns).  For The Resistance, you send teammates on missions, and use the results of those missions to figure out who the spies are.

What is the core gameplay loop of Illeria?  You pick a character, move it around a board, and perform an action (typically roll dice to attack enemies, though perhaps pick up loot or use a power).  This is the same as D&D, Frostrgrave, and most wargames (except that in most wargames, you move and attack with several creatures at once).  

What worried me is that the "perform an action" part of the gameplay loop might not be interesting enough on its own.  I personally find that rolling dice to attack enemies is usually the least interesting part of any wargame.  For example, I sometimes watch Let's Play videos of Warhammer Fantasy, and I often skip through large fights, because they are just so tedious ("I have 10 characters fighting, so I roll 21 dice to hit, and I reroll my misses, then I roll 16 to wound, then you make 10 armor saves; next, my character goes... then my other character... now my horses...").  And I find games that are little more than rolling dice to be really boring.  For example, Guerrilla Miniature Games does Let's Play videos on lesser known games (e.g. Dracula's America, or Wild in the Streets), and many seem like they are just rolling dice (which is sad, since the theme of the games is often fascinating).

I've tried to make the melee and archery in Illeria fast and simple, rather than interesting, because I don't want them to be what Illeria is about.  I use a pretty standard system, like in Hero's Quest - the attacker rolls dice to determine how many times they hit, then the defender rolls dice to block hits, and unblocked hits deal damage.  

Some games do have really interesting "do action" parts.  I like opposed rolls in Infinity, where attacking an opponent often triggers a counterattack.  I like how in Blood Bowl your turn ends once you fail a roll, which forces you to prioritize the order you do things.  Spellcasting in Warhammer Fantasy is interesting, because both players have a limited number of dice, and using them often carries risk, so there is strategizing about every roll.

And I did try to have interesting subsystems in my game.  I think my spellcasting system is innovative: to cast a spell you need to roll above a certain number, and if you fail, the spell blow ups in your face.  But, each time you cast a spell, future spells are harder to cast.  This creates an interesting dynamic where spells are a limited resource, but in a softer way than most: in most games, you have a discrete amount of magic resource (e.g. spell slots in D&D, MP in Final Fantasy) which you can use freely until it is gone; in Illeria, you never really use it all, but you also don't know if casting a spell will prevent you from casting your next spell.  Controlling summoned creatures is also meant to be interesting.  Creatures begin with a certain number of control points, and every turn they lose some (randomly determined); once they are gone, your creatures are lost.  So, there are important decisions for how many resources you spend preserving your control points.

Then again, many games have boring combat systems, but succeed because the most important part of the game is not about rolling dice.  X-Wing is perhaps the best example of this - the combat system is plain, but the fascinating point of the game is about moving ships.  And I could say something similar about Kings of War and Necromunda.  I guess I just like games about movement.  

I wonder if adding too many interesting subsystems could ruin a game?  Like, King of War's magic system is pretty plain (basically just another form of archery); I wonder if it would be better or worse if it had Warhammer's magic system.  I think maybe worse, because it would add to the complexity, and adding that might make the core fun part of the game less prominent.  

This is one where I'm still at a loss.  I guess that deep down, I think I should aim to have Illeria be interesting enough to be fun with melee fighters.  But, I do like flavor that comes from interesting subsystems, and I think they add, rather than take away from Illeria.  This is something I'll need to ponder more...

Ending animated creatures

Weekly updates:
I finished making the first draft of the main section of my rulebook.  I set up a game in roll20 to play with friends (I still need to contact people about playing).  I played one game with Sarah, though none on my own.  The game went okay, though it has me rethinking Soul Touch (I think I'll still keep it, but maybe not make it a demo-game ability).  I'm going to try to play today.  I'm also getting itchy to add new abilities, which will hopefully motivate me to playtest.  

Ok, for today...

Illeria is a skirmish-level game, meaning that you bring a party that has four to seven characters.  There are a lot of great things about this, particularly the low bar to entry.  However, it means is that you can't bring a horde of weak characters, which is a play style that I really like.  To fix this, I wanted characters to be able to have minions.  

I originally envisioned two types of minions: summoned creatures and animated creatures.  I wanted them to feel different to play.  Summoned creatures were meant to feel like wild creatures that they could lose their mind at any minute and attack their owner.  This made them a high-risk-high-reward strategy: they are strong, but if you lose them they may come after you.  Animated creatures were meant to be 100% loyal, but a little clunky.  In earlier versions of Illeria, you had to choose particular attack modes for them (such as targeting one character, or going after the nearest enemy).  Eventually I decided that was too many rules, and just made them act like other characters.  Either way though, these were meant to be a lower risk strategy: animated creatures would not be as strong as summoned creatures, but they would never turn on you.

A drawback I've noticed for either type of minion is that beginners to wargaming struggle to play them.  Basically, most new players can handle a team of five characters (which is 10 when you consider both worlds), but if each character controls three minions, then that becomes 20 miniatures (40 in both worlds), which ends up being overwhelming.  Sarah has been one of these people, and she's often suggested I remove them.  I've also wondered if the reason I don't have trouble is because I made this game, and I've wondered if more experienced players would struggle too.

Both kinds of creatures have always made the game harder to make.  First, they require their own set of rules to control.  Second, they become harder to balance; for example, explosive attacks are much more damaging, but four weak minions can bog a strong character for a long time.  It has become a running joke between Sarah and I that her advice when I have a problem is to get rid of summoned and animated creatures.  I've often been given the advice, "Kill your darlings;" i.e. that one needs to be open to eliminating one's favorite parts of the game if it will make the game better.  But it has been really hard.  Honestly, part of it is that the rules are just so interesting, and I worry that a game with just melee combat, archery, and magic would be too boring (which, as I write this makes me worry that the game might not be interesting enough).

That said, a couple weeks ago I decided to get rid of animated creatures.

What finally did them in was the new way I'm implementing differences between the two worlds.  In earlier versions of the game, both worlds worked about the same, so it made sense that you could have magical creatures in both worlds from turn one.  However, in the more recent version, the physical world is devoid of magic until you take actions to link it to the spirit realm.  I've struggled a lot with how to make animated creatures work in this setting.  One idea was that the animated creatures would start in the spirit world, and the player would need to send them back and forth.  Another idea was that the player would start with deactivated animated creatures in the physical, and would need to activate them.  Both of these created problems, and I found myself needing to make up new rules to fix them.  Eventually I just said, "enough is enough," and entertained the idea of taking them out.  I found that this simplified my game significantly.  Part of what spurred this on is my goal to be done by May.  Maybe if I'm way ahead of schedule, or if I release expansion rules, I can put them back in.  But for now, they're gone.

I do plan on keeping summoned creatures in, because I think I figured out a way to make them work in a really neat way.  (and as I write this, I've almost wondered if it would be better to eliminate summoned creatures, and give one more chance to having animated creatures jump between worlds)

I think one nail in the coffin as well was that when I told Sarah this, she told me that despite years of hearing about this, she had only just realized that there was a difference between summoned and animated creatures.  So, maybe they didn't really fill in different niches the way I thought.

How I automated calculating point values

Quick update, I picked my initial abilities:
(1) Head Scramble- The character can cause a target to become "shaken" (a condition that makes them unable to use most abilities, and may paralyze them).
(2) Soul Touch- If the character damages their target in melee, they can deal extra magical damage.
(3) Red Magic- The character can cast direct-damage spells.
(4) Shot- The character can make a basic ranged attack.
(5) Call Animals- The character can summon four weak creatures.
I'm also trying to price different stat boosts (e.g. what is it worth for a character to have +1 Armor?).  

Okay, on to today's topic...

In a previous post, I described how I could automate the initial stages of playtesting using computer simulations.  In these simulations, I'd have each ability fight each other ability 1000's of times, to estimate the odds that each wins.  However, let's say my simulations find that Head Scramble beats Soul Touch in 55% of battles, it beats Red Magic in 60% of games, it beats +1 Armor in 40% of games, etc.; what do I do with that?

Probably my all time favorite GDC talk covered this question in talking about balancing fighting games (it was by Alex Jaffe, the same guy who talked about cursed problems).   He talks about the important thing being meta-game balance, i.e. that every fighter (or in my case, every ability) does not need to be evenly matched against every other fighter/ability, but that there are strategies one can play to win at least 50% of the time.  For example, in rock-paper-scissors, the meta-game strategy is to play each strategy 33% of the time.  So, my goal becomes for there to be some meta-game strategy (i.e. one should play Head Scramble X% of the time, Soul Touch Y% of the time, etc.), where every strategy should be played some amount of the time, and no strategy should be played almost all the time.  This idea really jives with another great commentary I saw recently, which said that character's don't have to be evenly matched, but that you need to remove any "Gods" (i.e. characters that always beat non-God characters) or "Garbage" (i.e. characters that always lose to non-Garbage characters).  

How do we calculate the meta-game strategy?  Well, if you have an odds matrix (i.e. the chance each ability beats each other ability), you can do this with linear programming.  As a basic example, let's change rock-paper-scissors so that rock beat paper 20% of the time (rather than 0%).  The best strategy is that you should play rock and paper each about 38.5% of the time, and scissors 23% of the time.*  We can use similar math for fight outcomes, getting the frequency that each ability should be selected.  The unfortunate thing is that the best meta-game strategy pretty much always excludes several abilities.

*The intuition here is that you should play rock more, because it is a numerically better strategy (having no  loss), and because you think your opponent will play rock more, you should also play paper more (because it usually beats rock).  Scissors thus gets left out and chosen less.  

Alex's brilliant idea was that you should see if a character could still be used in a less-than-optimal meta-game strategy.  For example, you could ask something like, "If I only needed to win 45% of games, then how often could I play Head Scramble?" and he'd get a range of between 5% and 60%.  Then, abilities would be "balanced" if the upper limit for each character was at least 5% (otherwise it is never a good idea to play a character, making it Garbage), and the lower limit was no more than 50% (otherwise you should always play a character, making it a God).

A difference in Alex's game is each player had one character, so Gods and Garbage are a problem; in my game, a player can bring one God or multiple Garbage characters.  So, I go a step beyond Alex, to calculate point values of each ability.  For each ability, I alter the odds matrix to increase their chances against each other ability by 5%, and then calculate the new meta-game strategy.  If I find that the boosted ability should be used 0% of the time, then I give it a one-point advantage in the future.  I've used a few different ideas for what a "one-point advantage" should be.  Currently, if a character has an X-point advantage, and its opponent has a Y-point advantage (where X>Y), then at the start of the battle the character rolls X-Y dice, and for every 6, its opponent takes 1 damage (repeated in each world).  I then recalculate the meta-game strategy, reassess advantages, and repeat this process 30 or 50 times (until it approaches an equilibrium).  I then calculate the average advantage of a character with no abilities, and subtract the advantage for each ability.  For example, if "No Ability" typically has a 4-point advantage, and Head Scramble has a 2.5-point advantage, then Head Shot is worth 1.5 points.  

Once I have the points, it gives me an estimate of the relative values of abilities.  For example, my initial simulations were:
+1 hit point  => 4.8 points
+1 attack => 5.73 points
+1 armor = 6.07 points
shot => 7.33 points
soul touch => 7.0 points
head scramble => 4.2 points
red magic => 5.8 points
call animals => 6.93 points

Thus, this suggests that the abilities are decently well balanced, though Head Scramble is a little weak.  

Like I said previously, I then use my intuition on these.  For example, I think I'm under-valuing Head Scramble, as it's probably a good assist ability.  But, this gives me a first chance to estimate if any abilities are too weak or too strong, and make quick adjustments (before my one-hour playtest sessions).  

Illeria Resolution 2021

If you're reading this, you survived 2020.  Congratulations!!!

I've been working on Illeria for what feels like forever.  For 2021, I'm making a resolution to finish it by the end of May.  By "finished," I want to have a copy that I could send to a publisher (ideally Osprey games).

So far I have:
-A decent set of base rules for the turn, linking, etc.
-Base rules for melee combat, archery, magic, and summoned creatures.
-Code for simulating combat between two characters.
-Flavor text for the "Illeria as a prison island" scenario.
-Drafts of the rules (for previous editions).
-A basic campaign mode (written for a previous edition).

Here is what I still need to do:
-Final tweaking for the base rules, and playtesting with a wider group.
-Create a couple dozen well-balanced abilities.
-Write an updated draft of the rules, which needs to be finalized in many ways.
-Finalize the campaign mode (if I do it).

I think this is doable in five months.  It is at least something to shoot for.

I decided I wanted to go with the "Illeria as a prison island" backstory, rather than "Illeria as a resource-rich outland".  I was torn about it, but after hearing an interesting GDC talk, realized I was torn because both options were good.  I went with the prison island for two basic reasons.  First, it is more unique - the other one was basically another game about fighting over resource in a harsh landscape, similar to Frostgrave and several other games by Osprey.  Second, I have more finished than the other backstory - I currently have a campaign mode and flavor text tailored to that story.

There are a couple tweaks I want to test for the basic rules.  For example, armor saves are currently done by rolling X dice, and preventing 1 damage per roll of 4+; I'd like to see what it feel like if armor checks need a 5+.  I can test these final tweaks either myself or with Sarah.  However, Illeria is almost at a point where I should ask friends for help playtesting.

The abilities are probably the hardest thing on the above list.  My plan is to start with a small list of abilities, maybe five.  I'll test those - first with code, then with games - until they seem reasonably balanced.  Then, I'll add a few more abilities, and test those.  I'll continue this for as long as I can, until my deadline.  This will be a good natural limit for how many abilities to have, and also force me to prioritize the most interesting ones.

On that note, as I wrote about previously, my code is for one character fighting against another (i.e. in one world).  The problem with this is that abilities have different impacts in the spirit world vs. the physical world.  For example, attacks that ignore armor are stronger in the physical world, because all physical-world characters wear armor.  I want to update the code so that the fight takes place in both worlds.

I need to work more on updating the draft of the rules.  I'll need to make a ritual of it, like when I write scientific papers.  I also need to get some advice from my sister (a graphic designer).  She saw the previous edition of the rules, and had commented how back the background art on the pages was.  She's right; and it's weird, because it looks good on the computer, but when printed out, it looks like something a child drew.

The campaign will be a stretch goal, but I think doable.  Worst case scenario, I can cut it.