BASTIONLAND
A BASTION OF ODDITY
We d n e s d ay, 1 1 O c to b e r 2 0 2 3
The Myth of Balance
MYTHIC BASTIONLAND QUICKSTART IS HERE!
This has everything you need to run the game, the full rules section, and 12 Knights and Myths to get
you started. Also filled with amazing art from Alec Sorensen.
This one accurately shows how it feels to return to Twitter in order to promote an upcoming
Kickstarter.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I previously wrote, balance isn’t about making things equal, it’s about preserving interesting
choices.
So I’ve been doing a lot of balance tweaking to Mythic Bastionland recently, especially in the use of
Feats and Gambits.
Feats are special things that Knights can do at the cost of losing d6 points in a specific Virtue. When
you hit zero in any Virtue you’re Exhausted and can’t use Feats.
Gambits are special combat actions that an attacker can perform by discarding an attack die
showing 4 or higher. Stuff like disarming, dismounting, pushing, pinning, or just an extra point of
damage.
For Feats, a few things came up in testing that I wanted to try to fix:
Some Feats felt extremely useful, especially the one that lets you discard attack dice
against you. You basically needed to learn to use this one if you wanted to stay alive, and
in some cases there were very clear situations where using this Feat was a no-brainer
decision.
Some Feats felt very niche in their use. One granted an indiscriminate Blast to your
attack, making it essential against Warbands and large groups but you’d never use it in a
duel. Because each Feat is tied to a specific Virtue, which are rolled at random, it can feel
bad when you realise your high score is in the super-niche Feat, and your low score is in
the absolutely essential survival Feat.
Having a very low score in any one Virtue meant that you were at a high risk of becoming
Exhausted and losing access to all of your Feats, even if you had a high score in the
Virtue that Feat used.
So here’s what’s changed:
The defensive Feat that previously removed enemy attack die now rerolls them, keeping
the new result. Now it’s a bit more situational, best used when that enemy d10 rolls a 9 or
10, instead of an absolutely essential cog in the system that every player would expect to
use multiple times per battle.
The Blast effect has been rolled into the Smite Feat that grants extra damage, giving you
the choice of which effect to gain. So now there’s just one Feat for both variants of “do a
big attack”. Replacing this is a new Feat that interacts with the Gambit system (see
below).
Dropping to 0 in a Virtue now only prevents use of that particular Feat, and comes with an
additional downside. 0 Vigour is now Exhausted meaning you can’t attack after moving. 0
Clarity means you’re Exposed. 0 Spirit means your attacks are Impaired. You still really
want to avoid dropping to 0, but doing so doesn’t prevent you using the other Feats.
Gambits raised some of their own issues in testing.
By throwing a Smite onto your attack, granting an extra d12 attack die, it was quite easy
to dismount or disarm somebody, both things that can be hugely impactful on a combat.
In a joust the former might even end up earning an instant victory. Similarly, it felt a bit too
easy to just shatter a wooden shield at the start of a combat.
Sometimes players want to try a disarm or dismount manoeuvre, but their specific
weapon just wasn’t very likely to cause the result. They could Smite to increase their
chances but it felt a bit at odds with the idea of a Smite as a more powerful attack.
It felt a bit odd using Gambits to push or pin strong enemies. Naturally the GM can just
say “no, the ogre is too big to push” or grant the target a Save, but I wanted some stronger
guidance in place.
And again, here’s what I’m trying out:
Gambit effects that directly affect the enemy give the target a Save, and weapons and
shields are just trapped, not disarmed or broken. However, if you use a die showing 8+,
instead of the normal 4+ required for a Gambit, then it’s a Strong Gambit and you bypass
the Save or attempt a stronger effect such as breaking shields and disarming weapons.
This means large weapons are much more suited to perform strong gambits, especially if
you add in a Smite, but even then it’s not something you can count on occurring. A
Smiting Knight with a Poleaxe (d10) is just below 60%.
A new Feat, Focus, lets the attacker use any die to perform a Gambit, instead of requiring
4+, giving a Clarity Save to avoid Fatigue. This means the high Clarity Knight is more
effective at spotting and exploiting the more subtle opportunities, but the high Vigour
Knight is still more effective at smashing shields and dismounting enemy Knights.
Even with the added complexity of Gambits I think it helps that none of these effects feel
essential and you only really need to think about this little subsystem if you want to do
something fancy, otherwise taking the Bolster effect to cause extra damage when it
makes sense.
Again, this is a bit of a call to action. Just because your game doesn’t lean into “game balance” in the
traditional sense doesn’t mean there aren’t balancing issues you should be keeping watch for.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site
the week after its original publication.
If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.
Chris McDowall at 10:30
No comments:
Post a Comment
‹ Home ›
View web version
About
Chris McDowall
View my complete profile
Powered by Blogger.
