Design Exorcism: ATB

 Imagine if you will...

So first off if you haven't read Paolino's amazing blog post on ATB and adapting it into TTRPGs [GO READ IT NOW] - Not only is the piece really good (and their website absolutely gorgeous) but the rest of this Blog Post is written assuming you already have read it so I don't need to catch you up to speed. It's a pretty breezy read too! 

This is not.

This is an exorcism. Specifically an exorcism of my own idea for ATBs and gauges. First some background:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Status Bar

Some of you know I'm working on a Mecha game called Steel Hearts - In combat Players generate a resource for each other called Synergy (SYN) for each even they roll among their combat dice. It's a resource that can be burnt at any time, and as you'd imagine fluctuates frequently. In the interest of not murdering my Players' erasers we used tokens to keep track of SYN... After two years of play testing we started to realize using token counters wasn't cutting it - Enter the Synergy Tracker:

[[You can find the PDF Here]]

Not only was it able to keep track of this constantly fluctuating resource while still keeping fellow Players informed as to how much SYN you had, there was also enough room for reminder text and keeping track of how many Actions you had left!

This opened up so many design possibilities and alleviated all my worries for how fast this stat could fluctuate up and down. Plus it's super easy to print and make at home! Frankly I'm surprised this kind of Status Bar design isn't more common.

The Status bar feels like a cost effective way to track all sorts of things while still being relatively space efficient. What's better is that if you layout your character sheet in landscape style, the bar can neatly "slot" right in front of it!

Anyways back to JRPGs...

The Bravery Bar

So that's a fun solution for how to track this bar going up! You can actually see you and your allies gaining Action points... Hmmm Action points won't do. Active points? Let's call them Bravery Points. For reasons. And let's bump our absolute max up to 21 because why not? And obviously we'll need to rework some of the fonts and voila!! 

Now just have different classes roll different dice each Round to fill up the bar at different rates! Once it's full you act. Simple as that, right? Done?

Not so done.

See usually when I make a game, I like to try to keep the dice just to D6s... Partially as a challenge, partially because they're easier to find, partially because... [[*looks at collection of d6s*]]... Pretty much just those first two reasons really. 

Besides, the whole random rolling ATB just didn't sit right with me. It feels like the RNG is robbing you of the nail-biting anticipation between turns. I'd hate to upgrade from a d10 to a d12 in speed only to keep rolling 1s. Plus it only leaves a maximum of 6 "steps" of speed (not including flat bonuses). It's not a bad idea by any means, just not my vibe personally.

Why wait until the bar is full to act if there's so many points? Why not be able to spend Bravery Points each round to achieve smaller effects? Sure an Attack may cost 10 Bravery, put moving a singular space on the board? Maybe that's just 1 Bravery. Oh this is grid based now by the way. Chugging a Potion? That's 5 Bravery, and so on.

Let's take another swing...

Now that's a Bravery Bar!

The exact action point distribution would probably need some rejiggering, but the idea should work in concept. Each character now has a "Brave" Stat that determines how much Bravery they get each round. Maybe there's other secret ways of generating it too. After that they can Spend as much Bravery as they have in whatever order they'd like that round... after the monsters go first of course. More on that later...

I also added some aesthetic flairs inspired by the older Final Fantasy games; namely the background gradient, pixely font and of course the naming scheme. (I almost added a pointer finger too!) There's some new mechanics in here, so let's go over that...

• Bravery often gets shortened to BRV - Nice and simple.
• When Players are about to take DMG they roll DEF and Negate incoming DMG. Let's say a DEF Roll is a D6 pool, and each Even rolled is a point of DMG negated.
• As you can tell there's an ESC (Escape) function! Essentially all battles will take place on a Chess Board (eg a readily accessible 8x8 Grid) and to run away from a Battle (eg disengage and leave the Chess board all together) you must roll a successful ESC. You roll 1 d6 and aim for a 6! Failed attempts give you stacking +1s on subsequent attempts (up to +4) and Perks might be able to modify this to be even higher!
• You'll notice Spells, Skills and Basic Attacks are all their own things! I have no idea how these work, but it makes sense to me to separate them. Also we'll get to Breakers later...

Queue glamour shots:

Looks good! Now we've got a non-random ATB system that gives Players a variety of choices in both builds and on a round-to-round basis! Plus it's easy (and fun) to track and lets me quickly see where other Players are at. This bar should probably reset between encounters as most ATB bars do.

Now we're done! Right? 

Right...?

The Enemy Round

Of course we need to figure out how enemies slot into all of this. After all we can't give every individual mob their own bar. That'd be a lot. After chatting a bit with Paolino, they'd said every enemy actually could have their own ATB bar because the system in their head skipped over the more grindy random encounters [[see their very good blog post on random encounters]] and skipped right to the juicy boss fights. Which fair enough. But I like a challenge! (And those juicy random encounters)

My goals with this were two-fold:

• Make a system where I can have plenty of enemies on the field. Bosses, solos, swarms, all co-existing in a cacophony of "We need crowd control."
• Make a system where these Enemies can have variable "speeds" and will only act on certain rounds that Players can learn to predict.
• Make a system where Players have some ability to pre-empt what Enemies will do at the start of the next round if they've fought this enemy before.
• Keep things easy to track and relatively simple.

My solution? 

The Moon Tracker:

The Moon Tracker has 4 "Phases" each representing a fresh Round: Dark, Waxing, Full and Waning. Certain enemies can only Attack on certain Rounds (ex: Maybe the Wolves only attack on Waxing and Waning, while our Necromancer attacks on all but a Dark). I'm calling it a Dark Moon instead of a New Moon to avoid people getting confused about it being a "New Round" as opposed to the much clearer "Dark Round."

The moves enemies have available to them is dictated by the Moon Phase, meaning that Players can pre-emptively defend if they play smart. For instance: The Necromancer always unleashes a Death Blast on the Full Moon Round. This blast hits all Targets within 3 Spaces of it, so players would do well to run away or activate some Guard unless they want to take a serious hit. 

Figured out why Enemies go first in a round yet? This way the Player phase is just as much about punishing your Enemies as it is weighing whether to fight harder or go on the defense for whatever damage is coming.

The Moon Tracker resets every encounter, letting prospective designers create a kind of rhythm to every encounter. Ice Trolls only attack during the Waning phase but hit like a truck. Think you can DPS them into the ground before that happens? Bomb-Bombs will attack right out of the gate in the Dark Phase so I hope you positioned yourselves carefully at the start of the fight... Oh yeah there probably would need to be starting position rules... Hmmm...

It's also apparent that with the right design, combat could even be totally GM-less as each enemy may have a roll table of moves based off each of the Moon Phases. Similarly maybe Player Skills gain certain boosts if they're cast in accordance to different Moon Phases! Or if are empowered if the battle lasts for more than a full Cycle!

Alright well that about does it! Now I can finally go to be-

>> LIMIT BREAKER <<

ATB is fun and all, but you know my favorite bar that fills up in a Final Fantasy game? That's right; Limit. For anyone who hasn't agonized about what Materia to equip let me break it down. Limit is a mechanic I largely associate with Final Fantasy 7 and it goes a little something like this:

• Limit can be cashed in for incredible Limit Break moves that are unique to each character and can wildly shift the tide of battle.
• Limit builds up as you deal DMG to enemies, sustain DMG yourself or take an action to charge your Limit.
• Limit is a bar that does not drain between fights or fluctuate up and down as frequently as ATB or even Health.

In other words; It's a perfect fit for tokens that you accrue over the course of a long expedition and can dump into huge abilities! We'll call each of these tokens Shatter. You can get Shatter in a few ways:

• Each successful combat encounter grants 1 Shatter.
• Each time you take at least 1 DMG from the enemies in a Round you gain 1 Shatter.
• Each time a Cycle passes in combat (eg at the start of a new Dark Phase) you gain 1 Shatter.
• Skills and Abilities you cast will generate a set number of Shatter for each of your Allies.
• You can spend an Action to gain 3 Shatter

Once you've collected 10 (?) Shatter you can cash them in for a BREAKER. Ever wonder why I have you add your Bravery before the enemies go? Well it's because a BREAKER happens before the Enemies act on a round. BREAKERS are hugely powerful moves that can fully heal parties, deliver thousands of blows to opponents or even summon Demi-Beings. However they obviously leave you incredibly vulnerable after using them, as the Enemy will functionally get 2 Rounds to strike against you unless you'd saved some extra Bravery.

My thinking is you could track Shatter with Poker Chips or (perhaps more fittingly) little multicolored crystals!

To tie this all together thematically you could call the game Bravery Breaker or something where you play as Heroes who are diving into Dungeons not to save big magic Crystals but to shatter them. Said Crystals are the result of Magitek and were made by kingdoms of old to wage war. IDK it's like a metaphor for weapons proliferation or something.

Anyways, that's beyond the scope of this exorcism. For now feel free to use these files [[both Affinity Publisher 2.0 and PDFs]] to mess around with some ideas! All I ask is for clout and that you use it for good... And to not judge me for my poorly labeled layers...

ATB feels like it really could be something cool on tabletop! But that's somebody else's problem now! Me? I'm going to bed...

[[EDIT : So I woke up to the revelation that 4 Moon Phases just isn't enough in my opinion. I think 6 would be a good round number, especially because you can do fun stuff with rolling a d6 for a random moon phase or something. Just call the new phases "First Quarter" and "Third Quarter" or "Glowing Half" and "Fading Half" or something.]]