Designing a MegaGame: 5 - WAR!
I’ll be honest, the fighty bits of games are the parts I’m least interested in. They are very mechanical by nature and tend to be direct conflict. My passions lie around collaborative story telling so I’m much more likely to be drawn to the roleplay-closer elements of a game. That said, many MegaGames do have an elements of direct conflict and Gods of the Ancient World will be no exception. In a lot of ways, the combat drives the story along and gives reason for many other roles to exist. In GAW, the players creating resources will be suppliers of the war game, the Gods will be interacting with the fighting and the leaders will be doing strategic planning that involves the Generals. Therefore, for this game, the direct conflict will be integral.
As you’ve just read, I have a quandary: I’ve explained how important direct conflict can be but in the same breath told you it’s not super interesting to me. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a chunk of my attention because for some players, it WILL be their most interesting element of the game and the role they will chose as a priority. It would be wrong to “tack-on” this important piece of the game.
But it does cause an issue - I’ve not played a huge number of area control/war games so I don’t have a lot to draw from. Luckily, the MegaGame community is filled with all kinds of helpful designers with a large range of designs and passions. So I reached out and gave a high-level overview of my design challenges. Here’s where I began:
I want the combat to be interesting - chucking dice on its own isn’t very interesting.
I want players to take over NPC controlled regions at the beginning of the game and be fighting head-to-head in the second half of the game.
Fighting should involve random elements but an encounter must account for overwhelming forces.
It’s a MegaGame, so it must be simple to learn and fast to play for a dozen players under the clock.
Players must feel accomplished and must feel like they’re contributing to the over-arching story (and not playing in a bubble).
The Gods must be able to sow chaos into the game, but not derail it completely.
An injured force should be weaker.
I have to balance how much intervention the control team needs to do. The more self sustaining, the less control team I need.
So after some lengthy discord chats and noodling through some rule books and YouTube videos, here’s where I am right now:
Each unit will have 4 hit points, each representing a D6. When you fight, you roll dice equal to the number of hit points you have left across all units and your opponent does the same. You get a hit on a 5 or 6 and you compare your hits to your opponents. Originally, I was going to total up the points on the dice but that’s too much math when you’ve got a handful of units each (4 units at full health = 16 dice each for example), that’s why I settled on hits on 5 or 6 and you total the number of hits you have. This is much easier to work out at a glance.
But before you start chucking dice, you each have a very small hand of cards which dictate your tactics - either charge, defend, flank or parry. Each player plays one simultaneously and they have an effect on how much damage you do (winning or losing) and give you bonuses to your dice. Once you’ve played a round of combat and played a card, that card can no longer be used until after the next round of combat when it gets added back to your hand.
99% of game design is recycled material, and this is no exception - I got my inspiration from Fury of Dracula. In that the cards are used in a one-on-one combat but I think it’ll work quite nicely here in a war game.
This card mechanic does a lot of things that hit my requirements listed above:
It adds interesting decisions to the luck of the dice rolling.
I can control the damage given and the damage received.
Players start on the same footing but have some information as to what tactic has already been used thereby balancing the game.
Players can still beat others despite overwhelming odds.
Playing a card out of a hand of 4, chucking dice and counting the hits is fast and easy to learn. It’s also simultaneous which speeds up play even more.
I’m also thinking about creating special cards that can be acquired in various ways to spice up the combat but I’ll talk about those another time.
I definitely need to playtest this a bunch so I’ll keep you posted.