Mechanics: Tactical Combat – Part I – Attrition

Since my game has no combat, this is the first article I’m writing that is not related to my game. Nonetheless, someone asked for my help with this, so I’m going to do my best to try and help.

The topic for today is thus balancing RPG combat, and specifically the issue of attrition. Though the term is used with a negative connotation to talk about shallow game systems, it is actually a critical concept in game design.

Before we begin though, what exactly is balance in a computer RPG (not going to even lick real RPGs this time)? Because RPGs are generally not played player versus player, I’m going to focus exclusively on the player vs environment aspect. In such a case balance refers to making every significant choice

It’s worth noting that sufficiently complex RPGs cannot be made immune to player stupidity. That is to say, a player that is trying to fail will always find the means to do so. In general, it’s best to disregard this issue, as it has more to do with difficulty than balance. Balance is thus about the viability of choices. In a properly balanced RPG, all character creation and party composition choices are viable in some situation. That is to say, no ability is ever useless, no party member is ever worthless. But there is more to it still. The goal of balancing shouldn’t just be making options viable, it should be about making the player want to choose and subsequently use them.

The mechanical goal of RPG combat design is, after all, providing the player with so-called fun. And enjoyment of a combat system generally comes down to two things. Exploring systems and then exploiting systems. The first refers to the entertainment the player experiences by trying out various options you provide for them. The second, to the enjoyment of finding ways to use the system elements in an aware and proactive manner. That is to say, seeing what works for you and then using it to slay your enemies with new efficiency.

Before anything else though, let’s get back to attrition. The idea of attrition comes down to victory and defeat conditions for the combat. Generally, there is some resource (usually called health or something like that) the player character must deplete on the enemy units while making it as hard as possible to exhaust this resource on their own characters. Basically: murder them before they kill you. The name and context of the resource can change, and you can have systems with different resources that form multiple different conditions for victory and/or defeat. This resource usually serves as a margin of error and the player is thus given more of it than the bare necessity to get by and succeed.

1) Short term attrition

In the more straightforward approach, every battle can be a struggle, the player is expected to be losing resources all of the time and combat often turn into attrition races. Loss of something is not only expected, but it’s also basically ensured.

In systems like this, the player is often deprived of means by which they can mitigate resource loss, instead focusing on the rate of loss and restoration mechanics. Sometimes this might be as simple as having the player regain all, most or at least some of them automatically after battle. Most commonly it ties into something else, however (see section 3).

When designing short-term attrition systems emphasis is often placed on DPS/DPR (damage per second, damage per round) and systems such as these can be effectively managed using simple statistics. Enemies can be designed in a top-down fashion by deciding how much of the player’s resources they should be wasting during a fight, keeping the player’s resources in a constant state of flux.

This simplicity is likely the reason why this system is so prevalent, but also, as mentioned earlier (Mechanics: Probability – Part III – The Peasant, a Tool) top-down design tends to lead to nonsense of one form or another.

2) Long-term attrition

The less straightforward approach, it generally relies on giving the player the ability to walk out of most combat encounters unscratched. The challenge here is not losing resources along the way to confront whatever is waiting at the end of a combat sequence at peak capability.

This, in turn, requires the player to be able to manipulate battles in a way that ensures this, often relying on some form of mitigation (dodging, blocking, stunning, whatever it might be for your game) and then depleting the enemy resources at the right time.

Systems like this are less common, and they are harder to design. Their primary issue is the very concept of long-term engagements. By their design, they allow player error to pile up over time, eventually leading the player to fail, but only after the mistakes were made. This generally means that in cases of failure the player is pushed further back than the comparatively more immediate gameplay of short-term attrition.

Long-term attrition, even though you’d think otherwise due to LoLN, is very prone to breaking under RNG. Every time randomness screws with the player sticks with them for a more extended period of gameplay. This goes further – in general, long-term systems work best with more choice and less randomness, making the player feel like both their successes and failures are their own.

3) Usually, it’s neither… or maybe both?

Of course, a lot of RPGs use some sort of mix of the two above approaches in their gameplay. Commonly this involves different resources being used for the two. Here are some possible examples of how this might be leveraged:

Short-term vs long-term:

• Health vs ability to restore health;
• Physical helath vs sanit/mental health;
• Health vs power advantage (that is to say, the resources needed for the player to tackle later challenges);
• Health vs luck (read: ability to manipulate random outcomes);
• Health vs lives/re-spawns;
• Shield/armour vs health.

 

In such a case the player is confronted with an immediate loss condition they have to struggle with but also an overarching resource problem they are facing between specific battles. Often times the loss of resources can be linked with each other. I.e., healing resources are tied directly into health, but generally, over time, the player can expand a lot more of these resources than the health they must manage in a single combat.

Long-term attrition might also be played through a metagame over something involving the short-term variant. In that case, the context of what the two resources are doesn’t need to be linked.

The gist of this is that an RPG emphasising short-term attrition is handled differently than one emphasising the other variant. I’m not gonna lie, I find a lot of RPGs that overly focus on short-term attrition to not be very appealing in terms of gameplay. The nature of short-term attrition is more often than not treated as an invitation to create a slogfest and tied to grinding.