So I'm making this phantasmagoric fantasy game with my 17-yo design partner Tovey. Working title: The Demon Tree.
One of the design specs, straight from Tovey's vision for play, is that it has to feature exciting, dynamic, fast, tactical, multi-round and multi-participant fight sequences. Fights can't be over in a single roll or two, like in Apocalypse World, and they can't be a static slog of attrition, like in (some) D&D.
The game's in full-session internal playtesting (already? YES). Our PCs faced a deer-crab demon, a predatory monster from the Place of Demons who'd taken residence near a logging camp in the mountains.
They spotted it through the trees, staring down at them. As quick as they could ready themselves, it attacked: faster than they could expect, impossibly fast, and completely silent.
They learned at once that it wasn't going to be simply hackable to death. Elliot's sword just slid off its armor. Annika's (cursed) sword could cut through its armor, but all that spilled out was an unearthly cold, and the demon was affronted, not wounded by it.
Tovey had a chain that could bind demons, but the demon moved so fast that it escaped the loop they tried to throw around it.
The demon was in the midst of them and they scattered.
Since Annika had actually cut it, it focused on her, driving her back. In parrying with her powerful sword, she sliced the tip off of one of its scythes, but again: just cold poured out and the demon was more intent and enraged than hurt.
Behind it, Meri used one of her enchantments to try to fling Tovey's chain over it again, but no luck: it was still too fast.
Meanwhile, Elliot gave up on his sword and took out one of his magical items, a blindfold that inflicts blindness permanently.
Annika was hard pressed, but Elliot was behind the demon. He managed to dive in and loop his blindfold around its head. Disoriented, blinded, the demon froze —
Just long enough for Tovey and Meri, working together, to loop the chain around it at last. The chain constricted at once, magically, and the demon broke and ran. Tovey whipped their end of the chain around their sword and slammed it into the ground.
With their full strength, using their sword as a tether spike, they were >just< able to hold the demon in the chain. Annika, the only one with a weapon able to pierce its armor, leapt on the demon from behind, driving her sword through its neck and spine (if it had been a deer). This time she felt her sword hit some internal structure, and the demon was struggling for its life.
Meri has an enchanted dagger that spills out whatever is inside. She used it on the demon...
...And along with an explosive blast of icy cold, it spilled out its internal organ: a lumpy stone as big as two fists, nicked by Annika's sword.
The end of the fight!
Since playing, they've separately come to me to tell me just how fun and surprising the fight had been, asking me to explain how come D&D fights never feel like that.
What is this game DOING? they say. How does it WORK?
So what does failure look like? Does the game give players tools to set stakes, or to make failure interesting? When there's a TPK, does everyone just shrug and reach for a new playbook?
@Poljack It's an important question. It's not part of my job as the GM to make sure that my monsters are beatable. The PCs can go up against enemies that simply outclass them, and the game has to work in such a way that it's part of the fun.
So there are a number of mechanics that keep the action in the hands of the players, even when their PCs are losing. You know how much I love these kinds of rules, where the person losing the fight has the most interesting choices to make.
The backstop is, you know how death works in Apocalypse World? It's not identical in this game, but it's along the same lines: for a PC to die, their player has to actively choose it from a list that includes other, non-death options. If there's a TPK, the players chose it for themselves because they wanted their characters to go out that way.
@Poljack Now, these particular rules are based on rules that have been tested extensively, including Apocalypse World's, so I'm pretty confident in them — but testing's the real proof! We'll see how they actually work in play.
@herrold I do, if there is such a transgression! This particular demon just found its way over somehow. If the PCs stick around, maybe I'll delve into its backstory.
Creating a demon is a relatively short series of options and prompts. One of the strengths of this ruleset is that most things' writeups, inluding demons', are freeform text, like traits in Dogs in the Vineyard. To create a demon you mainly just follow some prompts to choose or write its traits!
@lumpley thanks! What'd the physical bits look like while you were playing this fight with your now adult children?
What do player characters risk in a fight, and how does that risk open up, if say they make a leading attack(obvious), while another character makes an attempt at a more deceptive, following attack?
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