Devlog #1: Healthless*

_{(This is a companion piece to Gila RPGs/Spencer Campbell’s recent stream about healthless TTRPGs, which is well worth your time if you have an hour to spend and goes into VH tactics a little itself, because the original impetus was based on his idea of healthless TTRPGs prior to this video. It would probably also be good to be a little familiar with RUNE! But I think everything makes enough sense if you aren’t.)}

I recently released Valiant Horizon Tactics! It’s a fork of RUNE that takes it in some different directions: some responses to RUNE gameplay, some stuff from Valiant Horizon I wanted to explore, and some weird ideas and approaches to the same stuff. I’m going to dive a little deeper into its design choices as I work through how I want to go forward.

Healthlessness is the big thing that kicked off the design, before it was connected to Valiant Horizon. What does RUNE look like without health? Enemies mostly die in like 1-2 hits anyway, can we avoid tracking actual health?

The basic concept, lovingly ripped off from Aaron Joliffe’s (not out yet) NULL/CIPHER which was itself riffing on Spencer’s ideas about removing Health in a LUMEN game, is that a Strike is an attempt at defeating an enemy. If it’s not Blocked, it does exactly that. If it is Blocked, however, a Strike removes a Block. (The player doesn’t get taken out immediately on hit; rather, you remove a Trait, and you only get taken out when you get hit with none to remove.) It’s like everything has 1HP and every attack deals 1 damage, but sometimes you or an enemy can gain a temporary 1-2 HP. The big advantage to this is that you simply don’t have to track anything round to round for most enemies: they either have Block or they don’t, they’re either defeated or they’re not.

The complication to this (and the asterisk in the title of this devlog) comes with Qualities/Defenses (I’ve wavered a bit in the text). Most of these serve the purpose of adding Block when certain conditions are fulfilled. As an example, here are three that get used for normal enemies in the default Region:

• Armored: Gain Block at the start of the round. If this Block gets used, don’t gain it next round.
• Evasive: They gain Block this round if they move 2+.
• Hard: They gain 1 Persistent Block at the start of combat. (Most Block goes away at the end of a round, Persistent Block…well, persists, hence the name.)

So there’s 3 ways of dealing with these, of which the first 2 are also present in NULL/CIPHER:

• Some weapons have Piercing or Accurate, which simply negate Armored or Evasive Block. One Power simply negates one Block before Striking. Done and done, no frills, pack the right tool for the job and it will make your job easier.
• Each quality has a way of dealing with its Block in a “puzzle” fashion: Armored and Hard need you to hit the enemy multiple turns in a row, Evasive needs you to stay in the enemy’s ideal range or close to it so they don’t move.
• If you don’t want to do either of those, though, there’s a third option: Brute force. It’s just Block, after all. Get a combination of factors that allows you to Strike a target twice in a round so you can bypass the first Block and then Strike them. This is the deviation.

The reason for this addition is that I’m trying to thread a very particular needle because of my own very prickly and particular priors. My operating theory is that there is bound to be tension in any combat-ish TTRPG with enough mechanical weight between what I’m going to call expression and strategy:

• Expression is acting as your character would act, embodying that presence in the game, and having it reflected back onto you. LUMEN games are usually great about this: there’s a lot more finding out how you do something rather than if you do it and finding out what else happens along the way as a result.
• Strategy is the more board-gamey side of things. The game is built such that we need to do X, so we’re going to do X. To defeat X enemy, you’ll need Y, so you should have Y. The goal is victory, however it’s defined.

My goal is to make a TTRPG, not a board game. (I’m not much of a board gamer, truth be told.) I would reckon it’s extremely easy for any given solo TTRPG to slip into something extremely board-gamey. I think one major step towards securing it as a TTRPG is that expression needs to be encouraged to some degree. (This is why I kept in some of the more important VH elements in the core rules, like determining how you got here and who your Soul Crystal belonged to! I think putting your own spin on that, even when so much of the game is predetermined by scenarios, is a key form of expression.)

Let’s wheel back around to the original point. Puzzle-y approaches are very strategic in nature: they have one basic answer, in this case sometimes with a “skip” granted by pre-preparation. For what I’m doing here - and especially given that it’s tied to Valiant Horizon, which is itself a very expression-forward game - I don’t want to force that layer on anyone. I’d like them to not feel like they have to do one of two very specific things to win a fight. (Obviously they do still need to Strike enemies in some manner, so it’s not like…fully free-form.) They’re going to still have to figure out how to achieve extra offense within the context of what they want to do, but that’s something that almost any playstyle can spec into eventually, albeit with some risk - and it’s easy enough to swap between the three methods of dealing with it based on your enemies. Basically:

• If you’re prepared, you bring the tools to deal with it; or
• If you’re tactical, you solve it; or
• If you’re determined, you push through it.

And ideally all of those are valid ways to approach anything in the game.

~

Next time I’ll get into Stamina and the shift from attrition via durability to attrition via reduction of options.