I've been thinking a lot about the Ladder, and what draws me to it as a solution for a combat system, and I think a little detour into Guild Ball may be illustrative.

So Guild Ball uses free movement. This means that a model doesn't have to be aligned to any grid; distances are given in inches and are generally tool-measured to ensure choices made are valid. This is very common on the wargames side; it works better with the hobbycraft focus most of them have.

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Several of the subsytems I've added or considered have to do in some way with representing combat. This is because combat is such a major part of how D&D expresses its rules, so more knobs in that area makes it easier for me to emulate the feel of D&D, even if I'm opting for a different mechanical expression.

To that end, I'm interested in something that can be used to show spatial relationships for the purposes of range and combat interest, and which create an opportunity for players to use a miniature as a marker if they choose. Currently I have a pretty simple Zone system written up, which allows for terrain effects, multiple melee engagements, varying weapon ranges, and a sense of positioning. Some version of this will be around regardless - arguably Blades already has it, informally if not explicitly, in that these sorts of things can be true in the fiction even if they're not directly called out by the mechanics. Defining them gives a hook for other rules to hold onto, though.

On the more extreme end I'm considering what I've been referring to as a "ladder" system. Basically, I like the idea of there being some kind of more granular tactical movement, but I'm not a fan of being forced into battle maps or miniatures use - the latter can be fun to have but the former are always a ton of work to structure correctly and make look decent. As a result, I started looking for a system that abstracted out absolute position to more of a measure of positional advantage. The best framework for that I've encountered is dogfighting rules for airplane-focused games, and the first one that came to mind for me was Tachyon Squadron.

Basically, each zone would be represented by a series of bands, and individual engagements in a zone by lanes within that zone. Actions are resolved from top to bottom, with the set of actions allowing for different sorts of incidental or focused attacks based on relative position on the bands, and different types of movement. This sort of system would add a lot more interest into combat encounters, and consequently give me more options for designing combat effects, and does so without needing anything more than a reusable printable worksheet or graphic. The cost is that it puts more of a wall between resolution of combat and noncombat encounters, which may screw with the game's flow and risks being overkill.

I have yet to write a formal adaptation of Tachyon Squadron's rules for this use case, but it's something I'd like to test out. Even if I don't end up using it, "abstracted positional advantage combat system" is sure to keep rattling around my skull the way Origins, Abstract Weapons, and Die Ratings have.

One thing I'm currently struggling with is what to do with Crews. For my first draft, I entirely cut them - I didn't feel I had a good, executable idea and I don't feel they're load-bearing, but it is something I want to spend some cycles on mulling over.

My best idea so far is what I've been calling "Module". Each Crew-style party playbook would be built to push the game a little toward a subgenre of dungeon fantasy, and would be themed to be reminiscent of classic D&D adventures. There'd be a "gritty amoral mercenaries" playbook, a "mystery investigators" playbook, one for treasure hunters and hexcrawls and gothic horror. This seems a little bit like Girl By Moonlight's series rules, but it strikes me as pretty mechanically daunting to successfully pull off.

My last post I allude to damage; this is something I've added to B&B mostly as a means of differentiating weapons, giving me an excuse to have Bestiary stat blocks for adversaries, and giving the GM a bit more direct of a fight-pacing mechanic. The basic idea is that Damage may be an effect of a successful Threat roll, and will be the combined value of any two non-d20 dice (or three, for a Vicious weapon) from a roll. This is then compared to a Defense value the adversary has; for each time the defense divides fully into the damage, the adversary takes 1 stress. I've tried to set the value to mean a "standard" adversary takes four average attacks to defeat, but this is a starting point and definitely needs playtesting to nail it in - four attacks may be too much, and I may have miscalculated how much stress a typical attack will inflict.

This is also one of the bits of the game I'm less confident in - other bits so far have been modified procedures to reach the same end. This one is sort of just adding enemy HP to Blades. Now, that's not totally out there - this is essentially formalizing using clocks for fight pacing - but I do fear it'll get in the way by being formalized this way. I don't want to accidentally encourage fictionless "swing-hit-damage-next" playloops.

In the pursuit of emulating the feel of D&D, another bit I wanted in the game is some kind of character differentiation by weapon choice. I didn't want a huge table of weapons to pick from, though, nor did I want separate damage rolls or rules for things like number of hands an object took to wield or proficiency.

What I settled on is that weapons act as a trait, and the die value of the trait is set by a combination of weight and type. Weight is Heavy or Light - the former pairs with Strength and has higher die values, while the latter pairs with Dexterity. I'm also considering restricting type and range based on weight, but that's not present in the current draft.

Types have varying effects. Powerful weapons have higher base die sizes, Accurate add an extra die to the pool, Defensive adds a die to certain defensive rolls (Push Yourself, in Blades terms), and Vicious lets you count extra dice towards your damage total.

Another bit of Origins tech I'm excited about is what I'm calling Spheres. These are origins representing magical disciplines. They lack starting features and can't be selected like other Origins, and are accessed based on other Origin features. This lets me make various spellcasters feel different while having some consistency in power set.

One of the mechanical bits I'm using in B&B that's been stuck in my craw the longest is Origins. Essentially, the idea is that any given PC is constructed out of three or more chunks, each of which represents a traditional character-building chunk like a race/species, class, background, et cetera. My ideal for this is that each would be structured identically so that mixing and matching was easier - you could make a Human Elf Ranger, or a Dwarf Cleric Fighter, even a Warlock Sorcerer Wizard if you wanted to. This was inspired by the Origins in Gamma World 7e.

For B&B's core mechanic, I wanted to more-or-less use Blades', but have it use a mix of polyhedrals; for one of those polyhedrals to be a d20; and for rolling a 20 on that die to be something meaningful. What I came up with is this;

When making a threat roll (here using terminology from Deep Cuts), you roll a d20 and two Trait dice; traits cover the same conceptual space as Action Ratings and Attributes, except they're rated on a dice scale, from d4 to d12. Some effects can have you add dice, or adjust the sizes of the dice used. Then, you pick the d20 and any two of the other dice you rolled and count the number of dice which rolled 4 or higher; a roll of 20 on the d20 counts for two. 4 is a critical, 3 is a success, 2 is peril, and 1 or fewer is a threat result (again, using the Deep Cuts terminology).

This does have some downsides in relation to Blades' core mechanic - notably, additional threats is a lot less elegant - but I'm a fan of platonic solids and am otherwise pretty happy with it.

As I suggested in my last post, I'm aiming to be a little more "posty" this year, if only to better justify the cost of web hosting. Not quite rising to the level of a resolution - last year's hardly held out, after all - but hopefully I can get a decent streak running for my heartbreaker.

For the uninitiated, "heartbreaker" in this context is short for "fantasy heartbreaker", a handwritten fantasy TTRPG. It's not a compliment, as it refers specifically to games that hew too closely to D&D - they're heartbreaking for perhaps having a good idea or two that are overwhelmed by how otherwise uninspired they are.

Now, I think of my game as being better than that - referring to it as a heartbreaker in my personal notes is a bit of a self-deprecatory dig - but there's some truth to it. See, I'm trying to take the structure of Blades in the Dark and attach a couple D&Disms to it. I want rolling a handful of polyhedrals to happen, for it to be exciting when you roll a 20, for you to make "Saving Throws" and be able to have a Dwarf Cleric. I'll be aping the trade dress of Basic D&D. I'm using the six Abilities, which among some circles would already be a game design cardinal sin.

Anyways, for this year, hopefully I can keep up with posting about this game more regularly. Eventually I'll have the core rules more or less straightened out and I can start on player-facing game elements.

The actual name of this game will be Blades & Basilisks, though I'll be sticking with Heartbreaker as a codename. Here's to the new year.