Design Exorcism: Power & Grace

I've always felt art is a bit like exorcism. All these ideas, ambitions, and joys just bubble up inside me and unless I let them out they'll just keep zooming around in my chest. Unfortunately I only have so much to make things, so I'm taking up a new habit: Design Exorcism. If I get an idea, I'll just blog a bit about it! It serves as good reference if I ever end up coming back to it and helps me keep focused on my current projects. So let's dive right into the first one:

Monster Hunter: Stranding

I recently got into Wild Hearts, a genius (if criminally under rendered) spin on the classic Monster Hunter formula. Within the first few minutes the game impressed me with some of the most compelling dialogue I've seen in non-narrative focused video games maybe ever? (The line "War calls for soldiers, not hunters." and the dialogue to follow is some of the rawest shit I've seen in a Monster Hunter type game - The bar is low, but damn does it work.)

Gameplay wise, you can drop mechanical gadgets and even build structures using the borderline magical Karakuri (a play on the automated puppets of the same name). These structures persist allowing you to build your own path through nature, much in the way that building permanently affects the landscape in Death Stranding. There's something to be said about OSR sensibilities and how one might be able to Strand the OSR before domain level play - Hexes routinely traveled through could create literal paths that make travel faster. Players can construct bridges and portals to whip around the map more easily. Start smaller settlements or camps so they have a safe place to rest in the wilderness. I'm probably doing all these in WILD by the way.

What I'm not doing is the style of Monster Hunter combat on display in Wild Hearts. It's fast, frantic, (a little bit easy,) and much like Monster Hunter, all about reading your opponent and reacting accordingly. I've tried to adapt this once with the "Combat River", a design where-in players blindly assign what moves they're playing in a River Sequence - They can't see the exact attack a monster is using, but they can see what its speed is and potentially react accordingly if they've gotten to know the monster well. That's something I still want to do, but I'd need to build out the roster of abilities which can be a bear of a job. Plus the game really works best when you have the cards, so maybe I'll wait til I get better at art and make something hella proprietary.

But even Wild Hearts' actual combat isn't quite what got me thinking about the system I'm about to talk about, what got me thinking about it was...

Intention

At the end of my first hunt with Wild Hearts' rat-like Ragetail, something magical happened. Instead of the monster simply keeling over and my ears getting gloriously blasted with the Quest Complete theme, the monster collapsed (still very much alive) and all music silenced. I cautiously approached the wheezing Ragetail only to be prompted with "L2 Final Blow". To my surprise, Wild Hearts used the DualSense's haptics to apply just a bit of pressure against the left trigger, adding a sense of commitment to the input. In a hushed whisper my Hunter murmured "Gomen" (EN: "Apologies") before dealing the final spectacular blow and bowing to the now-dead opponent. Damn.

Something about that really stuck with me, as did the game's system where smaller monsters can either be Pet or Slain for different unique loot. Wild Hearts, it seemed, really wanted to hammer home these are living things you are hunting (granted it has no non-lethal trapping option for larger monsters that I've seen yet). While it may sound pretentious and vaguely orientalist, the first thing my mind jumped to was Karma. More specifically the Jainist version of Karma - One where Karma is a kind of filth that builds up on the soul through actions both good and bad. Especially actions with intention. And you could feel it in that heavy press to finally take the life of another living thing. ((I am not a Jain, nor an expert and this is a bit of a half baked reading. However, as this is a Design Exorcism I wanted to trace where my brain was at and how it connects things. Also there used to be like a paragraph tangent in here about Sekiro and its Suras but this already getting hella off topic)). I'm of the opinion that acting with intention and want feels like it can "weigh" the soul down. Whenever I get thinking of soul stuff I think about how balance is usually touted as a thing the soul and self needs. And thus a combat system popped into my head:

Power and Grace

Imagine having a bar across the top of your character sheet. On the left side of the bar Power counts from 10 to 1 left to right, a zero in the middle and on the right side Grace counts from 1 to 10. When taking certain actions or using certain special attacks, you must "use" Power or Grace, thus moving your "Center" to either side of the bar. Some powers will get even stronger depending on where you're at in the bar. Ex: Seismic Slash deals extra damage equal to your current Power.

Meanwhile when a Monster Attacks, your reactions are limited to what you have in the Bar (either Grace or Power) - Maybe these correlate to universal actions (Power is a block where Grace is a dodge), or maybe they're Monster specific - Ex: The Wildheart's tail swipe that it telegraphed before your turn requires 3 Grace to dodge... Did you remember to move your bar into Grace or are you stuck in Power because you wanted to deal more DMG and thought this'd be the final blow?

Additionally after each action I think it could be cool for Hunters to accumulate Intention, which can be unleashed in devastating Damage bursts BUT which also leaves them increasingly vulnerable to DMG ((we'll see how greedy Hunters might get)).

And that's the gist of the idea! I'm sure I could build it out eventually, but it feels like a kinetic dance and a balancing act, a bit like how Wild Hearts' combat feels. What do you think? Am I on to something? Should I pursue this sooner than later?