Trapped in an MMO Blades Hack: The Combo System.
So while I’ve mostly been basing the system for Blades in the Database (name is a work in progress) off of Blades in the Dark, I thought I’d raise for discussion the combo system I have incorporated into my version of the game.
So, here it is:
When you make an action roll, you roll dice of a specific colour relating the attribute that the action roll is under (Green – Speed; Red – Strength; Blue – Willpower), equal to your action rating. You must consider 3 things after making a roll:
1. Did you succeed? Just like in blades, you succeed on a 4-6 and receive complications on a 1-5.
2. How many success dice did you roll? What colour are they? Save these dice for later in your Speed/Strength/Willpower pool
3. How many failures did you roll (1-3s). Sum the values and add this to your Threat value.
Players now have 2 sets of abilities, ones for outside of combat, and ones for inside of combat. Combat Abilities cost dice from the pools you have saved from previous rolls and are rolled using these dice. This simulate the cooldown and mana costs of abilities from the game.
This can cause ability chains, as you could roll a 4-6 on an ability dice pool and get to keep the ones you rolled! This means the bigger the dice pool, the longer the potential chain of abilities but the greater the potential threat gain.
Example: Emberblade is an Assassin playbook and wants to use his ability “Assassinate”. To activate Assassinate, Emberblade needs to use 2 of the Speed dice and 1 of the Strength dice they saved from previous rolls. Emberblade rolls these 3 dice and gets a 6 on the Strength die, and a 4, 3 on the Speed dice. He succeeds without complication on using his ability, and gets to add the two successful strength and speed dice back into his saved pools. He also gains 3 threat due to his single failure dice which is considered “spent” and does not return to his saved pools.
By expending 3 dice of the same colour from your saved pools, you can create a Combo Chain.
3 Speed causes your next action roll to have successes explode. (You keep all 4-6s you roll even if they explode)
3 Strength gives you +1d to your next resistance roll and you can regain 1 armour or special armour box.
3 Willpower gives you bonus effect for your next action roll, and for the next two rolls from other players in your party, you gain saved dice equal to those that they saved and of the same colour.
More on Threat in a future post!
The idea of combos, threat, creating a limited resource like an MMO is really interesting. I love it when mechanics evoke a specific experience like that.
I’m sticking at one point:
“2. How many success dice did you roll? What colour are they? Save these dice for later in your Speed/Strength/Willpower pool”
Do I count the successes for every color every time? Or, am I only rolling 1 color at a time so it’s easy to sort out? And multiple colors only come into play when you use a combat special ability?
Cass K So in my version of the game, there’s three attributes: Speed, Strength, and Willpower (similar to Blades’ Prowess, Resolve and Insight). Like Blades, these attributes are composed of 4 actions each. These actions roll one specific colour depending one what attribute they fall under (Green is Speed, Red is Strength, Blue is Willpower).
When you make an action roll, at any time (downtime, freeplay, mid-score, during the use of an ability etc.) you save any dice that come up as a 4 or greater into your pool. You can save a maximum of 6 dice at any one time.
So if I roll a hypothetical action that is under the speed attribute, any successes will always be green. Same for Strength actions always being red and Willpower blue.
When you roll an ability, it takes a combination of these so you could be rolling one colour, 2 colours or all 3 colours at once; saving only the colours that are 4+ on the roll.
As a rule of thumb (for now at least):
– Abilities which use Speed dice need accuracy, exploit weaknesses, or move you.
– Abilities which use Strength dice affect you physically, making you tougher, invisible, cloning yourself, etc. or unleash a powerful blow.
– Abilities which use Willpower dice are imbued with magic in some way.
Ok! I think how you end up designing the character sheet will help a lot with making the tracking feel intuitive.
I do wonder if some rolls might start feeling like a lot to track? Are you also going to keep position and effect mechanics? It might be worth simplifying some other mechanics to balance this extra step.
Cass K I’m keeping position and effect. They’re the core of a Blades in the Dark game. It’s essentially the same as regular blades, you just have to build up dice pools to use your powerful abilities.
I’m planning on having a sort of domino track on the character sheets where you can track your combo chains.
Have you playtested this yet? It’s like John says, some things that seem complicated on the page are simple in play! And man, I love chaining, tumbling, dominoing mechanics like this. Collecting those combo points would feel super exciting I think.