Making a playable fighting game

Man, so much writing done this week... Somehow. I don't know how it happened, but I wrote a pretty wicked sword martial art as well as first-draft rules for the Asura and Raksha. I feel pretty accomplished, and slightly baffled!

I'm working on some of the "playability" rules right now. That's been a fun journey.

So, the Effect Chart was the first part of this. Environmental interaction is a huge, important part of making a game like this feel dynamic and epic, while offering real strategic choices to players.

But, they can't be too weighty. Once you start getting into multiple-page-long reams of strategic minutiae (Pathfinder) you risk forcing GMs and players to memorize huge swathes of rules or constantly reference them in-game, which is a sure-fired way to kill your game's flow.

And they can't be purely cosmetic, because then they're just dead weight without any tactical substance. A fighting game without meaningful tactical choices is a waste of your time. I've read a lot of otherwise good games that hand-waved away movement and environmental interaction as "flavor", shooting themselves dead in the foot.

So they have to ride this line of simple but functional. I thought about them for, oh, about a year before I sat down to write them today. I'm pleasantly surprised with the results.

Attacks have their own "environmental havoc" chart, which tiers them by how much damage they can do to surrounding terrain. This links nicely with the "on-the-fly" scenery-filling espoused by the environment and battlefield rules, which allow GMs to add rules as needed to the descriptions of an environment.

The havoc chart led to "disaster" rules which let GMs model things like rockslides, bonfires, and collapsing buildings (y'know, things that happen when super-powerful characters unleash their magical kung-fu). Disasters unfold in stages, creating dynamic events that change the tactical landscape of a conflict.

For instance, a building starts by canting sideways in round 1, then collapsing in round 2, then finishes by spraying a huge cloud of concrete dust everywhere in round 3. Making the building collapse in round-by-round stages gives players a predictable event to respond to tactically, and presents them with a dangerous challenge that they have to address while fighting. This adds a strategic puzzle element to fights, deepening their variety.

Really large-scale disasters apply to entire areas (such as city blocks or mountain ranges). I've termed them "catastrophes" because I love that word just, so much you guys. Just so much.

The best thing? Players don't really need to think about these rules except in intuitive terms. "If I hit the building hard enough, it'll collapse. Do I want that to happen?" That's a pretty instinctual way of considering these rules, and perfectly workable. It retains the meat of the tactical decision without requiring rules mastery.