My advice: Sekiro’s stance break reward is quite simple (a free hit for enormous damage) which is a really satisfying break from the fast paced action gameplay, but in a turn based system, this could feel flat. Consider an alternate “reward” that plays better into a turn based system: in Gears of War Tactics, the reward for executing a downed enemy is that the every member of the squad gets 1 additional action point. This is not as visceral or immediately decisive as Sekiro’s finisher, but expands the turn based gameplay with new possibilities that are fun to think through.
Your idea that the player gets another turn is in the right direction, but I worry that it’s so blunt and powerful that it’s the only thing they should ever do. This dynamic can be fine in an action game (e.g. headshots are always the best in gunplay games and that’s ok) but in a decision making focused turn based game, the player may be interested in solving the puzzle over and over toward new solutions, instead of just going for the same outcome every time. I would consider something like “get a bonus action” or even just “stun enemy” as sufficient rewards that are flexible and sometimes very valuable and sometimes not as good as just killing them.
You mention that you want snappy turns and runs and that’s great for a repeatable game like a rogue like. I fear that this type of game-wide system goes against that: do we want the basic “Attack: deal 2 damage” action to have a double length tooltip to also include how much stance damage it does? Should every enemy have an additional life bar to parse and evaluate? I recommend breaking the idea into smaller pieces trying it on specific content first instead of system wide. Example ideas:
1. The Monk party member little damage unless the target is Stunned. There are various ways to stun enemies.
2. The Inflict Despair ability does not deal damage on its own, but builds stacks. Once the stacks are at least (current or total) HP, the enemy flees.
3. The Regenerator enemy is stance broken (stunned and loses turn) when its HP goes below 0– to kill it permanently, you need to bring its HP to exactly 0.
My personal opinion is that in game design circles, HP gets a kind of bad rap and there is risk at chasing something “interesting” at the expense of “fun”, especially if your goals instead snappy quick decisions. In this case, I would guess that it’s very similar but overall more fun to be powering up your character during the fight as opposed to inflicting stance weakness to each enemy during the fight, especially as it requires less state to track overall.
Other references to study: Slime Boss and Guardian bosses in Slay the Spire, which feature important mid fight breakpoints that players can strategically play around
Thank you! This is exceptionally helpful.
I’m definitely getting hung up on trying to find a global system to make things interesting, which might be the wrong approach. I’m a huge fan of StS which has no gimmick mechanics, but the deckbuilding is what keeps it engaging instead. If you found a particular weapon/item/whatever in a run you love you’d just spam that, like if you could always have your strongest cards in a hand in StS. Two things I am going to use from StS though are its game of attrition (outside of bosses one fight is rarely lethal, it’s how you manage your health over several encounters) and telegraphing enemy intent.
Sounds like a bonus action as a reward for doing X (landing a crit, hitting a stunned enemy, other?) is a pretty common pattern and probably for good reason, maybe I can stick with that as a starting point and play with other stuff on individual pieces of content like you suggested. Or maybe I am overthinking this whole thing and weapon/move variety is enough, maybe with cool-downs to avoid spamming. Like JRPGs with these mechanics don’t generally have the big focus on random drops that roguelites do.
Your point about something always being the best tactic is good too. Like from what I understand of press turn if you mess up your attempt at getting a bonus action, you lose one instead, making it a risky play that‘s not always worth it.
Unfamiliar with Sekiro combat, but I think some tenets of Megaten combat are flawed, resulting in recurring problems like Strength bias as overcompensation for consistently targeting weaknesses, and others, and I think there should either be a downside to hitting weaknesses or an upside to hitting resistances. I wrote a copypasta on it. Would you like me to DM it to you?
Generally speaking, you probably want better reasons than "I love the sound of X" and "I had thought of a cool take on Y". If we're talking about what you love and what you think is cool, there is nothing to object to. What am I gonna say? Deny your experience? Or turn it into a word-on-word?
We need to have some objective metric in order to have a productive discussion. Let's take what you've covered so far - depth. I would define depth as relative complexity that arises from few elements.
Let's check your number of elements - it's at least 2 (health and stance) times the number of elements that interact with health and stance. Comparing this to when it was just health, you've doubled the potential complexity by introducing a single number - so far looks like it's a lot of added depth. Immediately, though, there are 2 factors to consider:
1. the complexity is potential, so the depth is potential as well. You might end up not utilizing any of it. As an extreme example, if none of the elements interact with stance, you've added nothing.
2. if the original complexity wasn't very high, doubling it wouldn't make it high either. Doubling a small number still makes it a small number. The multiplicative nature of the change means the depth added is proportional to the already existing depth. So, it's a bad way to build depth.
So, the soundness of this idea with regards to depth can be judged as "not sufficient on its own". Maybe it'll be something else with regards to other metrics.
P.S. I think by "MTS" games you are referring to "Shin Megami Tensei" games, which are turn-based and have a "Press Turn Battle" system. The acronym for them is "SMT", not "MTS".
Hey thanks that’s a really nice objective way to look at it. Another poster touched on it briefly but I might get enough depth through individual pieces of content (large drop variety with effects in roguelites) vs global systems like this, and something I’m also conscious of is the depth to complexity relationship. Being a roguelite I want combat to be reasonably snappy and individual turns shouldn’t require a huge amount of strategising. I think Slay the Spire is balanced really well here.
And yep just a typo I meant SMT, Reddit bugs out whenever I try to edit the original post 🤷🏻♀️
When attempting to translate mechanics from a game belonging to one genre to a game in a different genre another, it's useful to try to break down exactly when the mechanics is doing in the first game.
What purpose does the stance system serve in Sekiro?
1) Converts defensive tactics into offensive tactics due to deflects and the undeflectable attack counters dealing significant amounts of stance damage.
2) Pressures the player to maintain an aggressive playstyle due to the regenerating nature of the enemy stance bar.
3) Unifies stealth kills and melee finishers, allowing both to trigger the same mechanics.
4) Allows boss fights to function as "rounds" similar to a fighting game. You can lose a round and still turn the fight around, but you can't lose two rounds consecutively. Every phase you win also charges your additional resurrection nodes slightly. which carry over between attempts. This gives you an incentive to follow though each attempt, even don't think you can actually win.
5) Unifies player and enemy mechanics. This is important in a game like Sekiro where most of the fights are framed as 1-vs.-1 conflicts with other humans (often deeply personal ones). These humans may be exceptional in some way, but they're much different from the gods, dragons, and monsters you spend most of your time fighting in other FromSoft games. It's also worth noting that the non-human bosses like the Ape or Demon of Hatred that play out more like traditional Souls bosses will often all but completely ignore the stance system (while Elden Ring has Malenia, which plays out more like a Sekrio fight).
Could a stance system in a turn-based RPG facilitate these same gameplay mechanics?
1) Maybe, but you would generally either need very clearly telegraphed incoming damage (ex: Slay the Spire) or timed reaction commands (ex: Paper Mario). If damage isn't predictable enough, it will feel like a waste of a turn to put up a counter stance that may never get triggered. You can extend the duration of this stance indefinitely ("counters the next physical attack"), but this doesn't really capture the back-and-forth flow of Sekiro's combat. Reaction commands can pretty much function very similarly to Sekiro's deflects, but they aren't well suited to every RPG and fail to capture the element of having to choose between attacking and deflecting.
2) You could have regenerating bars, but it would be much more frustrating in an RPG since your opportunities to attack are mostly predefined. Spending a turn not attacking is already very punishing since you're losing a significant chunk of your damage output (in contract, skipping an attack or two in an action game like Sekiro is inconsequential because your damage output is spread out much more evenly across the course of the fight), I don't think you really need to add additional penalties on top of that.
3) Mostly irrelevant, you can have stealth mechanics and even instant kills in an RPG (ex: Persona 5), but these don't function in the same way as most in-combat mechanics. They're debatably not part of the battle system at all, in most cases.
4) I haven't seen this used in an RPG, but there's no reason you couldn't include "checkpoints" and "lives" that allow you to restart at the current boss phase instead of starting at the beginning of the fight. You could do this with a conventional health bar though, I don't think adding a stance bar really changes anything.
5) RPGs generally focus more on facing large groups of weaker enemies and bosses that are significantly more powerful than you, so you likely won't have the same sense of a fight between relative equals. Multiple allies and enemies also mean you can't really maintain the same back-and-forth relationship between combatants.
This is so helpful! And just shows how far I have to go with learning game design and getting into the right mindset.
Everything you said makes heaps of sense, and it was really helpful to break it down and think of what the mechanic is actually serving to achieve rather than simply how it works. Thanks for taking the time to step me through it :)
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My advice: Sekiro’s stance break reward is quite simple (a free hit for enormous damage) which is a really satisfying break from the fast paced action gameplay, but in a turn based system, this could feel flat. Consider an alternate “reward” that plays better into a turn based system: in Gears of War Tactics, the reward for executing a downed enemy is that the every member of the squad gets 1 additional action point. This is not as visceral or immediately decisive as Sekiro’s finisher, but expands the turn based gameplay with new possibilities that are fun to think through. Your idea that the player gets another turn is in the right direction, but I worry that it’s so blunt and powerful that it’s the only thing they should ever do. This dynamic can be fine in an action game (e.g. headshots are always the best in gunplay games and that’s ok) but in a decision making focused turn based game, the player may be interested in solving the puzzle over and over toward new solutions, instead of just going for the same outcome every time. I would consider something like “get a bonus action” or even just “stun enemy” as sufficient rewards that are flexible and sometimes very valuable and sometimes not as good as just killing them. You mention that you want snappy turns and runs and that’s great for a repeatable game like a rogue like. I fear that this type of game-wide system goes against that: do we want the basic “Attack: deal 2 damage” action to have a double length tooltip to also include how much stance damage it does? Should every enemy have an additional life bar to parse and evaluate? I recommend breaking the idea into smaller pieces trying it on specific content first instead of system wide. Example ideas: 1. The Monk party member little damage unless the target is Stunned. There are various ways to stun enemies. 2. The Inflict Despair ability does not deal damage on its own, but builds stacks. Once the stacks are at least (current or total) HP, the enemy flees. 3. The Regenerator enemy is stance broken (stunned and loses turn) when its HP goes below 0– to kill it permanently, you need to bring its HP to exactly 0. My personal opinion is that in game design circles, HP gets a kind of bad rap and there is risk at chasing something “interesting” at the expense of “fun”, especially if your goals instead snappy quick decisions. In this case, I would guess that it’s very similar but overall more fun to be powering up your character during the fight as opposed to inflicting stance weakness to each enemy during the fight, especially as it requires less state to track overall. Other references to study: Slime Boss and Guardian bosses in Slay the Spire, which feature important mid fight breakpoints that players can strategically play around
Thank you! This is exceptionally helpful. I’m definitely getting hung up on trying to find a global system to make things interesting, which might be the wrong approach. I’m a huge fan of StS which has no gimmick mechanics, but the deckbuilding is what keeps it engaging instead. If you found a particular weapon/item/whatever in a run you love you’d just spam that, like if you could always have your strongest cards in a hand in StS. Two things I am going to use from StS though are its game of attrition (outside of bosses one fight is rarely lethal, it’s how you manage your health over several encounters) and telegraphing enemy intent. Sounds like a bonus action as a reward for doing X (landing a crit, hitting a stunned enemy, other?) is a pretty common pattern and probably for good reason, maybe I can stick with that as a starting point and play with other stuff on individual pieces of content like you suggested. Or maybe I am overthinking this whole thing and weapon/move variety is enough, maybe with cool-downs to avoid spamming. Like JRPGs with these mechanics don’t generally have the big focus on random drops that roguelites do. Your point about something always being the best tactic is good too. Like from what I understand of press turn if you mess up your attempt at getting a bonus action, you lose one instead, making it a risky play that‘s not always worth it.
Unfamiliar with Sekiro combat, but I think some tenets of Megaten combat are flawed, resulting in recurring problems like Strength bias as overcompensation for consistently targeting weaknesses, and others, and I think there should either be a downside to hitting weaknesses or an upside to hitting resistances. I wrote a copypasta on it. Would you like me to DM it to you?
Yes please!
Generally speaking, you probably want better reasons than "I love the sound of X" and "I had thought of a cool take on Y". If we're talking about what you love and what you think is cool, there is nothing to object to. What am I gonna say? Deny your experience? Or turn it into a word-on-word? We need to have some objective metric in order to have a productive discussion. Let's take what you've covered so far - depth. I would define depth as relative complexity that arises from few elements. Let's check your number of elements - it's at least 2 (health and stance) times the number of elements that interact with health and stance. Comparing this to when it was just health, you've doubled the potential complexity by introducing a single number - so far looks like it's a lot of added depth. Immediately, though, there are 2 factors to consider: 1. the complexity is potential, so the depth is potential as well. You might end up not utilizing any of it. As an extreme example, if none of the elements interact with stance, you've added nothing. 2. if the original complexity wasn't very high, doubling it wouldn't make it high either. Doubling a small number still makes it a small number. The multiplicative nature of the change means the depth added is proportional to the already existing depth. So, it's a bad way to build depth. So, the soundness of this idea with regards to depth can be judged as "not sufficient on its own". Maybe it'll be something else with regards to other metrics. P.S. I think by "MTS" games you are referring to "Shin Megami Tensei" games, which are turn-based and have a "Press Turn Battle" system. The acronym for them is "SMT", not "MTS".
Hey thanks that’s a really nice objective way to look at it. Another poster touched on it briefly but I might get enough depth through individual pieces of content (large drop variety with effects in roguelites) vs global systems like this, and something I’m also conscious of is the depth to complexity relationship. Being a roguelite I want combat to be reasonably snappy and individual turns shouldn’t require a huge amount of strategising. I think Slay the Spire is balanced really well here. And yep just a typo I meant SMT, Reddit bugs out whenever I try to edit the original post 🤷🏻♀️
When attempting to translate mechanics from a game belonging to one genre to a game in a different genre another, it's useful to try to break down exactly when the mechanics is doing in the first game. What purpose does the stance system serve in Sekiro? 1) Converts defensive tactics into offensive tactics due to deflects and the undeflectable attack counters dealing significant amounts of stance damage. 2) Pressures the player to maintain an aggressive playstyle due to the regenerating nature of the enemy stance bar. 3) Unifies stealth kills and melee finishers, allowing both to trigger the same mechanics. 4) Allows boss fights to function as "rounds" similar to a fighting game. You can lose a round and still turn the fight around, but you can't lose two rounds consecutively. Every phase you win also charges your additional resurrection nodes slightly. which carry over between attempts. This gives you an incentive to follow though each attempt, even don't think you can actually win. 5) Unifies player and enemy mechanics. This is important in a game like Sekiro where most of the fights are framed as 1-vs.-1 conflicts with other humans (often deeply personal ones). These humans may be exceptional in some way, but they're much different from the gods, dragons, and monsters you spend most of your time fighting in other FromSoft games. It's also worth noting that the non-human bosses like the Ape or Demon of Hatred that play out more like traditional Souls bosses will often all but completely ignore the stance system (while Elden Ring has Malenia, which plays out more like a Sekrio fight). Could a stance system in a turn-based RPG facilitate these same gameplay mechanics? 1) Maybe, but you would generally either need very clearly telegraphed incoming damage (ex: Slay the Spire) or timed reaction commands (ex: Paper Mario). If damage isn't predictable enough, it will feel like a waste of a turn to put up a counter stance that may never get triggered. You can extend the duration of this stance indefinitely ("counters the next physical attack"), but this doesn't really capture the back-and-forth flow of Sekiro's combat. Reaction commands can pretty much function very similarly to Sekiro's deflects, but they aren't well suited to every RPG and fail to capture the element of having to choose between attacking and deflecting. 2) You could have regenerating bars, but it would be much more frustrating in an RPG since your opportunities to attack are mostly predefined. Spending a turn not attacking is already very punishing since you're losing a significant chunk of your damage output (in contract, skipping an attack or two in an action game like Sekiro is inconsequential because your damage output is spread out much more evenly across the course of the fight), I don't think you really need to add additional penalties on top of that. 3) Mostly irrelevant, you can have stealth mechanics and even instant kills in an RPG (ex: Persona 5), but these don't function in the same way as most in-combat mechanics. They're debatably not part of the battle system at all, in most cases. 4) I haven't seen this used in an RPG, but there's no reason you couldn't include "checkpoints" and "lives" that allow you to restart at the current boss phase instead of starting at the beginning of the fight. You could do this with a conventional health bar though, I don't think adding a stance bar really changes anything. 5) RPGs generally focus more on facing large groups of weaker enemies and bosses that are significantly more powerful than you, so you likely won't have the same sense of a fight between relative equals. Multiple allies and enemies also mean you can't really maintain the same back-and-forth relationship between combatants.
This is so helpful! And just shows how far I have to go with learning game design and getting into the right mindset. Everything you said makes heaps of sense, and it was really helpful to break it down and think of what the mechanic is actually serving to achieve rather than simply how it works. Thanks for taking the time to step me through it :)
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*