Combat in Games 1: Chance and Control

Ah, combat in games - quite the chestnut! If you decide to make a game where one piece can remove another piece, you are entering an age-old discussion of how to model combat in games. To simplify it right down, here's the way I see the two extremes of how it is usually done:

Controlled combat: If I move my rook on to your pawn's space, I defeat it. This is always the case, and both players know it. This leads to very analytical, often abstracted games.

Chancy combat: If I attack your warrior with my wizard, I roll a handful of dice. The resulting numbers determine how successful I am. No one knows quite what will happen. This leads to more surprising, visceral games.

I have often heard game designers and reviewers say of chancy combat that it is more realistic because combat in real life is never a sure thing. No one knows for sure who will win a fight or a war, there are always random elements. I agree with this, but I still find that chancy combat in board games often leaves me cold. I think the reason is, that while I am more than happy to accept uncertainty in fighting, I still want a strong feeling of control. Let me explain: If you were to watch a fencing match as a spectator, and the unknown underdog wins, this may seem somewhat random to you - it was unexpected. But to the underdog himself, who trained hard, focused well and made clever decisions all through the match, it would feel anything but random! And as game players, I think we should feel more like the fencer than the spectator. Dice rolling can often smooth over decision points and reduce the success of combat into one random moment.

Now having said all this, when I first started designing Pack of Heroes - I whacked dice into the design without even thinking! Superheroes fighting and dice seemed like the obvious match! I tried quite a few mechanics for using dice in combat. The one that stuck around for the longest was putting a simple combat results table on each card to show how a die result would effect the power in question. For example, here's an old prototype card for Bazooka Boy:

Ain't he cute!
(Art by the amazing Chris Morphew)

The idea of this card is that Bazooka Blast is a very chancy attack to use. On a roll of 1-5 it does nothing at all. But on a roll of 6, it does 4 damage! (Which in the scheme of the game was very powerful).

This simple system allowed me to get some interesting twists into the game's combat, but of course it also has a big flaw. Every use of a power becomes its own random moment. Every time you try and fire your bazooka, it has a 5 in 6 chance of doing nothing. You could even try and shoot it 20 times and just be really unlucky! The combat in the game came down to dozens of these random moments, and there was nothing connecting these moments to each other across the game. Surely a bazooka which hasn't triggered 4 or 5 times in a row will know its just got to work soon!

It was my frustration with all this that eventually stalled the design. I pretty much put the game in a drawer for two years! The game just wasn't that satisfying for me to play multiple times. Plus, I figured there are so many good games with dice combat out there, why make another one? Well, the thing that got the Pack of Heroes prototype back on the table was coming up with a new diceless mechanic for combat. It brought a good balance of both control and chance back into the game's combat. So in a future post I will talk through this mechanic, and explain how combat works in Pack of Heroes, so stay tuned!