The results? Telepath Tactics is 275% funded, with 1,733 backers and $41,259 pledged!

I learned a lot from running this campaign, and have enshrined a lot of what I learned in an article over on IndieRPGs.com. Head on over there if you’re curious to hear some of my strategic advice for running a Kickstarter campaign.

As you might imagine, the first half of this month–i.e. when the Kickstarter campaign was still going on–was taken up by nonstop marketing and talking about the game and its world. That’s just the nature of running a crowdfunding campaign. I managed to do some fun interviews, and Destructoid ran some very complimentary articles on Telepath Tactics. (That last bit was a huge personal coup for me, since I’ve been trying to get covered by Destructoid for years.)

Meanwhile, this past weekend was C2E2, where I helped Kelly Wallick conduct the first-ever expansion of the Indie MegaBooth outside the confines of PAX (via the much-smaller Indie Minibooth). Randomly, China’s Xinhua news agency got footage of me talking to people there. The whole affair was much smaller than PAX East, of course, but still loads of fun!

Yesterday marked 14 days from the end of the Kickstarter campaign, meaning that Amazon Payments has now finished collecting everyone’s pledges. After accounting for Amazon’s cut, Kickstarter’s cut, and pledges that didn’t go through, we’re left with $37,161.75–about what I expected we’d get. I now must wait another 5-7 business days before the money actually transfers to the Sinister Design bank account, and I can start funneling money to artists and kick production into hire gear.

I’m itching to get back to developing the game, but I still have a bunch of Kickstarter backer rewards to send out. Last night saw the first of the backer rewards go out; now I only have 19 more reward tiers to go. Um, yeah.

Despite everything, I did somehow find time to get a few things done on the development front over this past month. Namely:

• I’ve retained a new artist, Julia Buge (a.k.a. Votali Obscur), to take care of graphics for the game’s assortment of items and equipment. She’s a good artist, and I’m looking forward to seeing her work here.

• Lorne Whiting has begun work on new tiles and destructible object graphics needed for the game. I’ve got the first shipment of new Castle tiles in from him already, with lit windows, tapestries, and 2-tile-high stained-glass windows.

• I’ve added in support for equipment. Equippable items can be placed in one of 8 possible slots: weapon hand, off hand, head, neck, torso, back (for cloaks /capes), feet, and one miscellaneous “accessory” slot.

• To support attacks granted by equipment, the game now features attack dependency.  This keeps characters from using weapon-dependent skills and attacks when they don’t have the appropriate weapon equipped.

• Items can now have race, class, and level requirements. An item may use any of the three in any combination. These can be applied to both useable items and equipment.

• You may recall me mentioning that there’s support for directly modifying character stats in addition to creating and modifying custom variable values. Before, you had to modify them by a set numerical amount. Now, however, I’ve added in four script actions which allow you to modify those values by reference to the values of other stats and custom variables. For instance: say you want to create a custom Intimidation variable equal to the hero’s Strength plus Psy Power. The new SetValByStat action will let you do that with no problem. (The three other new actions: SetValByVal, SetStatByVal, and SetStatByStat.)

• You can now add custom objective reticles to the battlefield using the AddObjectiveReticle dialog script action. This lets you choose both the reticle’s coordinates and its color.

• You can now change battle conditions on the fly during battles using the ChangeCondition dialog script action. This can affect everything from win conditions, weather, lighting to various settings like fog of war.

• The game now supports tiles that heal or restore energy to characters who spend a turn standing on them.

• The game now supports attacks which create a replacement character upon character death. (For instance: a Chrysalid-creating attack, an attack which turns the target into a statue, etc.)

• The game now automatically keeps track of certain stats during battle and tabulates a score for each player at the end. The current scoring formula is spelled out here, though it’s subject to change based on testing and player feedback. The scoring rubric is based on all of the following for each player: total enemies killed, total characters lost, total damage dealt to enemies, total damage taken, total items grabbed, total items dropped, turns it takes for the battle to conclude, and (of course) whether the player actually won.

• Bug fixes. I’ve fixed a lot of bugs over the past week; but based on feedback from people playing the alpha, I still have a few left to fix before I get back to adding in features.

So, to sum up: things are looking really good! I probably won’t be able to shift into high gear with commissioning art assets until next week, and development is going to be a little choppy until I get all of the Kickstarter rewards out, but I’m feeling increasingly confident about our progress on the game with every passing week.

In the meantime, people who missed the Kickstarter have been asking if there’s a way to support the game. The answer to that is “yes.” As of right now, if you’re looking for a way to help out Telepath Tactics, please upvote us on Steam Greenlight. Every vote helps! And who knows: there might just be an option to buy into the Telepath Tactics alpha coming in the not-too-distant future…

Barring some unforeseen disaster, the game is now guaranteed to have all the art and music it needs, and then some! Needless to say, this is a huge relief for me, and I’m just generally delighted with the outpouring of support I’ve seen from people over this game.

In other news, I went to PAX East and somehow lived to tell about it! In 3 days, I gave away something like 700 business cards, handed out 150 Telepath Tactics buttons, got 380ish people signed up on the Sinister Design mailing list for information on Telepath Tactics, met Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins, had approximately 6 or 7 spontaneous media interviews with reporters from sites like RPGamer and Destructoid, and consumed four throat lozenges to keep from losing my voice.

I am now officially “broke as a joke,” as the saying goes, but the experience of being in the Indie Megabooth was pretty epic. I regret nothing!

Now–with all that miscellaneous “news” stuff out of the way, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about substantive changes in the game since our last update!

• enemy AI has seen some improvements. (Notably, the enemy will now break down your barricades if you try walling in!) There is still work left to do; among other things, I haven’t gotten around to putting in defensive routines yet, and I still need to optimize the whole thing at some point.
• there are new character attack animations in the game! This is my favorite of the bunch so far:

• There are new battle conditions for single player campaign maps. You can now add additional armies, change army colors, set alliances for the various armies (which the AI will behave appropriately with), and (this is arguably the coolest one) you can independently set each army to be either CPU-controlled or player-controlled. Which is to say: if you’ve been hoping for support for local co-op campaigns, it’s now here!
• I’ve added more functionality to the game’s dialog scripting system. There are now scripts that let you change a character’s class, give a character experience points, play a character animation, remove all items from a character’s inventory, and add a spray of particle effects somewhere on the battlefield.
• You can now directly modify, check and display 29 individual character stats in dialog (everything from character level to dodge percentage to whether a character has used a turn-ending attack this turn).
• You can also now trigger dialog via character stats. (For instance: you can have a dialog sequence that plays whenever a certain character is found to have reached level 2, and a separate one that plays if a character reaches 10 Strength.) Combined with the ability to modify character stats in dialog, this means you can script custom dialog to let the player choose stats to improve when certain characters level up; and combined with the ability to change character class, this means the engine now supports class promotions as well!
• The Telepath Tactics Public Alpha Demo has been updated. It’s now a short stand-alone campaign with cut scenes, and is just generally a lot better than the old one.
• I fixed a huge number of bugs.

Now, that list might not seem quite as long as it was in previous months, but that’s mainly because I spent a ton of time fixing bugs and whipping the demo into shape in advance of the Kickstarter campaign and PAX East. “Fixed bugs” may be the smallest entry in that list, but it’s by far the largest in terms of time spent! So it goes.

I still have a ton of work left to do on Telepath Tactics, but the success of this Kickstarter means that I’m going to actually have the resources to do it all–and that’s an exciting prospect to me. Stay tuned, folks–there’s more to come!

P. S. I know I’m posting this on April 1st, and I know that I usually post something fake and satirical on April 1st, but this post is legit. I just didn’t want to miss the window for posting my March update!

I will now preemptively answer your questions using my astounding psychic powers:

Wait. Didn’t you already run a Kickstarter?

Yes: it did not succeed. Thus, Kickstarter being what it is, no one was charged and I received none of the funds. So I’m trying again.

Why is the goal so much lower?

I’ve streamlined my funding priorities for this game to arrive at a base goal that covers only the bare essentials. I go into this in greater detail here.

What has changed in the game since last time?

Based on backer feedback, I added some of the character attack animations, improved the AI, improved the interface, fixed a ton of bugs, added dialog tree support, created an actual dialog editor, extended the dialog scripting system for modders, and made lots of other improvements.

Should I back this game?

Sweet mother of Jehoshaphat yes! In fact, why are you still on this page? Go back Telepath Tactics!

This is a really great opportunity for the game, seeing as the gaming press tends to converge on the MegaBooth and, you know, actually cover the stuff shown in it. So that’s good. (It’s also good from an expense standpoint–but that’s another issue.)

Speaking of game development expenses and ways to address them: the Telepath Tactics Kickstarter is coming in less than a month! I’m taking a somewhat different strategy this time around, timing it to take advantage of PAX East (and what I hope will be a corresponding uptick in publicity from being in the MegaBooth).

Despite my current limited resources, I’m still pushing forward and making needed substantive improvements to Telepath Tactics:

• You can now create ice bridges by using Cold element attacks on water tiles. This was a feature I’d been wanting in the game for some time; all in all, it took less than an hour to add. Have a look.

• The map editor now includes a new dialog editor that makes it easy to create your own dialog trees and edit existing ones. I’ve also extended the dialog/scripting system with new triggers and script actions to ensure lots of flexibility to create interesting branching conversations and branching campaigns. Of particular note is the fact that you can now define, modify, check and display custom variables in dialog. This allows you to model money, shops, character relationships, or just about anything else you can think of during the course of a campaign. You can see this stuff in action in the video below!

• I’ve been making a lot of improvements to game interface in anticipation of releasing an updated demo. I’ve replaced the ugly beige dialog box with a somewhat nicer looking placeholder graphic, and have reworked my whole approach to the battle GUI. I’m looking to hit a sweet spot between useability and minimal screen clutter–unexpectedly, this led me back toward an implementation reminiscent of the combat GUI window from Telepath RPG: Servants of God. You can see the new interface design below:

• I’ve rewritten the code which establishes panning bounds for the game’s maps to avoid showing black space on larger maps when in fullscreen mode, and minimizing the amount visible on maps which are smaller than the size of the screen. (More details on that here if you’re curious.)

• Benn Marion has made some much-needed tweaks to the title screen art, and it’s now looking awfully nice:

• Composer Ryan Richko is now working on the Telepath Tactics soundtrack. My favorite track he’s sent in so far is a sinister, ambient piece called “Evil Lurks.” Give it a listen!

• Attack animations are now coded into the engine itself. Whenever you attack with a character, the game now checks for an animation specific to the attack being launched. If it can’t find one, it instead loads a default animation (which you can define on a character-by-character basis). The attack animations for the Swordsman, Cavalier, Cryokineticist, Bowman and Healer are currently in-game and working; the others are still being created.

• Also, we’ve got some lovely death poses underway for the game’s various characters. Here are a few finished ones:

In short: work on the game’s animations is progressing slowly, but it is progressing. However, I’ll be able to speed things up dramatically with successful Kickstarter funding.

Speaking of which! The Kickstarter will launch on or about March 14th. Make sure you’re following us on Twitter and on Facebook–we’ll be posting announcements when the time comes, and we’ll need your help to spread the word! Thanks for reading; I can’t wait to kick this thing into high gear.

Why the comparison with The Battle for Wesnoth in the first place?

There is an argument to be made that this isn’t even a legitimate question to ask. Even if the games were similar, what would be the harm in having more than one game in a similar style on the same platform? Ask this sort of question of virtually any pair of similar games, and it sounds transparently silly. “We already have a ton of Fire Emblem games. Why do we need Fire Emblem: Awakening?” “We already have the Diablo series. Why do we need Torchlight?” The answer is obvious: variety. For someone who enjoys the core experience of these games, even the relatively small differences between Diablo and Torchlight, or between Fire Emblem: Awakening and its predecessors, are sufficient justification for the new games’ existence.

But let’s set that aside for a moment and talk about Telepath Tactics and The Battle for Wesnoth specifically. I was actually confused when people first started asking what the difference was; it is only a slight exaggeration to say that this is like demanding to know the difference between Risk and Chess! These games are about as different as two games in the same subgenre can be.

After giving the matter some thought, it occurred to me that there are some similarities between Wesnoth and Telepath Tactics that people may be seizing on. Both games are turn-based strategy RPGs; both occur in fantasy settings; both are cross-platform; both support custom campaigns and modding; both have a robust map editor; and both support multiplayer.

I suspect that some people get as far as these features, then decide that the games are nearly identical. However, this is a little like observing that The Usual Suspects and The Godfather are both violent dramas about organized crime available on DVD and Blu-Ray, and then concluding that they must be more or less the same movie. Of course, two works can share superficial similarities while still offering wildly differing experiences; as we shall see, this is precisely the case with Telepath Tactics and The Battle for Wesnoth.

The Differences

Because there are so many differences between these two games, I’m going to organize them in list form.

1. Level of Randomness.

This is one of the more striking contrasts between the games, and one that should become obvious almost immediately when you sit down to play each. Wesnoth is heavy on randomized results; Telepath Tactics is not.

In Wesnoth, nearly all attacks have a 30 – 70% chance to land, and most units attack multiple times in a row when you order an attack. Consequently, the results of any given attack command vary wildly based on what Wesnoth’s random number generator spits out. (There is so much randomness in Wesnoth that it actually has automatic, turn-by-turn save scumming built into the game!)

By contrast, Telepath Tactics uses randomness sparingly. The RNG comes into play only in select circumstances.

This leads to wildly differing experiences. Wesnoth is analogous to Risk, in that it is a game that is largely about playing the odds; Telepath Tactics is a more chess-like experience where you’re thinking ahead, constructing a defense, and trying to seize on weaknesses in your opponent’s positioning of units.

2. Scope.

The Risk-Chess analogy also extends to the scope of the two games. Wesnoth is the more macro-focused of the two, with battlefields that span enormous geographic areas containing dozens of different villages. As with Risk, control of different areas directly correlates with your ability to keep hiring troops; and as in Risk, a lot of the challenge in Wesnoth comes from trying to grab as many of these resources as possible as quickly as possible without overextending yourself. Victory is usually achieved by starving your opponent for unit-generating resources rather than through tactical victories alone.

Telepath Tactics is more micro-oriented. As the name implies, Telepath Tactics is focused almost exclusively on the tactical level of play. As with Chess, you’ll mostly spend your time managing a finite number of units to achieve tactical victories. There is resource management, but it manifests primarily in the management of items and energy levels among your characters; you’re not going to be running around the countryside, grabbing villages to drum up money to support an army large enough to overwhelm the enemy.

This difference in focus has knock-on effects that resonate down to even the smallest choices in the mechanics each game features. For instance: Wesnoth uses a zone of control mechanic to keep enemies from easily sliding through small gaps in your defense to capture towns. However, Wesnoth very seldom employs any sort of flanking bonuses against individual units. Telepath Tactics, by contrast, awards a near-universal 50% backstab damage bonus to attacks that hit from behind; there is no zone of control. Telepath Tactics is more focused on good formations and precise positioning; Wesnoth, on keeping control of specific points on the battlefield. Each game’s mechanics reflect its area of focus.

That’s just one example I could pick out of many; in fact, most of the differences you’ll see below can be explained at least in part by the difference in scope between these games.

3. Level of abstraction.

This one is particularly closely tied to scope. Because Wesnoth operates on a high-level strategy plane moreso than a low-level tactics plane, it tends to abstract a lot of things that Telepath Tactics models in detail.

Take ranged attacks, for instance. Wesnoth’s “ranged” attacks aren’t actually ranged at all! Like melee attacks, they only hit adjacent hexes. The only thing that distinguishes them from melee attacks is that they trigger different counterattacks from enemies. Ranged attacks in Wesnoth are abstracted, in other words, not modeled.

Telepath Tactics, by contrast, actually models different attack ranges on the battlefield. Attacks can often hit at variable ranges, with damage falloff occurring as you target further and further away. Elevation effects make a difference in range and damage, while cover and good positioning can thwart a shot from going off in the first place. In short: you’re not just picking hexes to maximize the odds of a good, randomly generated result–to a much greater degree than in Wesnoth, you’re actually playing out that result yourself.

4. Variety of attacks.

Wesnoth’s attack variety is quite limited by comparison to Telepath Tactics. Most Wesnoth units have only one or two attacks, and that’s it. The attacks themselves vary in only a small handful of respects: type, damage, number of potential hits, and (in rare circumstances) a special effect (e.g. poison or health drain). Attacks in Wesnoth are so focused on damage-dealing that even basic things like healing aren’t handled via attacks (healing occurs automatically by keeping units adjacent to a healer).

Characters in Telepath Tactics tend to have a much wider array of abilities at hand: units can begin with up to eight attacks and skills (though most start with one or two), then steadily accrue more as they gain experience. This greater selection of abilities creates a much larger universe of possible moves you can make with any given character.

Further, the attacks themselves have many more dimensions to them. To name a few: element, range, area of effect, energy cost, backstab bonus, sidestab bonus, knockback, various stat-based damage multipliers, status effects*, post-attack effects**, and so on.

* there are more than a dozen different status effects in Telepath Tactics, and attacks are able to impart more than one of them at once.

** certain attacks will end the attacker’s turn after they go off; others will allow the attacker to continue moving afterward; and others will allow the attacker to both continue moving and use another attack!

Many attacks in Telepath Tactics are not about dealing damage at all, but are instead about positioning or energy management. For instance, Shove pushes a character back one space. Though Shove deals no damage on its own, it can be devastating when used against a poorly positioned unit. Which leads me to the next difference between Wesnoth and Telepath Tactics…

5. Environmental hazards.

Wesnoth does not have full-fledged environmental hazards–it just has different hexes that affect movement range and to-hit percentages differently.

In Telepath Tactics, you can damage characters by pushing / pulling / throwing them into water or lava, or by dropping them from high elevations onto lower ones. It’s not just about damage, though. Drop a character far enough, and you’ll stun that character in addition to dealing falling damage; push a character into water or lava, and they’ll have to spend a turn (and some of their valuable energy) swimming back onto land before they can act again.

All of this comes as a direct benefit of modeling the battlefield in detail instead of abstracting it with terrain hexes–and so, incidentally, does the next feature.

6. Manipulable environments.

In Telepath Tactics, you can literally change the battlefield as you play. You’ll build bridges to create new routes across the battlefield; you’ll build barricades to create choke points. You’ll chop through bushes and move boulders. You’ll lay down explosive charges to bust through walls. You’ll destroy your enemies’ bridges and barricades and fight to protect your own.

Wesnoth does not have these features.

7. Squares versus hexes.

Wesnoth uses hexes; Telepath Tactics uses squares. Hexes offer greater versatility of movement; squares make it easier to visualize distance. Each has its advantages.

8. Leveling.

Characters in Telepath Tactics level frequently and improve gradually with each level up, as occurs in a traditional strategy RPG like Fire Emblem or Disgaea. Battle for Wesnoth, by contrast, does not have character leveling as such. Instead, it has a small handful of class promotions with huge gaps in usefulness between them (so much so that the ability to hire new units in battle becomes a pointless money drain midway through a sizeable campaign–your new recruits will die almost instantly to promoted enemy units).

9. Characterization.

Most of the characters under your command in Wesnoth are generic hired troops. Combined with Wesnoth’s brutal randomization, permadeath, and character advancement mechanics, as well as the need to control large amounts of territory in order to maintain a sizeable army, the result is that you will be primarily relying on characterless units, units who you will lose regularly throughout the campaign.

Wesnoth’s single player campaigns usually do include a handful of unique characters, but only two or three of those characters (namely, those who produce an instant “game over” upon death) will be continually developed. This makes some sense: one can’t reasonably write a plot line that relies upon the development of characters who can die before they ever deliver their lines.

Telepath Tactics takes a different approach. All characters are unique, and are developed continuously over the course of the campaign. Like Wesnoth, Telepath has permadeath, but the game’s mechanics are such that you’re unlikely to see your characters get swatted down at regular intervals by The God of Unlucky Die Rolls. Furthermore, when characters do fall in battle, Telepath Tactics treats them as having taken permanent, career-ending injuries–for purposes of the story, they are not dead. Thus, they can continue to participate (which in turn permits the story to be far more character-driven).

Telepath Tactics also comes with the capability to let you create campaigns with true permadeath. In order to preserve characterization in these scenarios, however, Telepath Tactics employs easy-to-use scripting tools that let you change the way character dialog proceeds when certain would-be speakers have already been killed.

10. Items.

The Battle for Wesnoth technically supports items, but it seldom makes use of them during its campaigns. As with its minimal characterization, I suspect that this is simply a side effect of the fact that your characters die regularly in Wesnoth; micromanaging inventories just slows things down in a system like that.

Telepath Tactics, by contrast, features dozens of unique items, and characters have individualized inventories that can hold dozens of them.  What’s more, destructible objects around the battlefields tend to hide items, so you’ll have the option to hunt for extra loot during battles.

11. Setting.

Wesnoth is a generic high fantasy setting with European feudalism, magic, elves, orcs, trolls, and all the other things that hundreds of RPGs have ripped off from Tolkein since…well, since RPGs first became a thing. It’s all very familiar, which is a blessing in terms of accessibility but a curse in terms of the game having much of anything interesting to say.

Telepath Tactics deliberately avoids the Tolkein trap, opting instead for less familiar environs. The game is set in an island chain governed by a Roman-style empire on the brink of industrialization; however, natural resource exploitation by foreign interests threatens to destabilize the government. There are no elves, no dwarves, no orcs, no zombies; this world is instead populated primarily by original races (e.g. the shadowlings, floating disembodied heads that literally feed on human suffering). Cavaliers do not ride horses; they ride giant mantises. There is no magic; there are only different disciplines of psionics. Telepaths are both privileged and distrusted for their talents. Humans are regularly captured and enslaved. This is a world with its own dynamics and its own problems.

Conclusion

So, to summarize: the differences between Telepath Tactics and The Battle for Wesnoth manifest in

• their levels of randomness (Wesnoth employs far, far more randomization of results);
• their scope (Wesnoth is macro-focused, Telepath Tactics is micro-focused);
• their levels of abstraction (Wesnoth is more abstract, Telepath Tactics models in detail);
• their attack variety and character versatility (Telepath Tactics has much greater attack variety and a higher number of attack options per character);
• the presence of environmental hazards (Telepath Tactics has a strong implementation of this feature; Wesnoth does not);
• the ability to manipulate the battlefield (Telepath Tactics has this feature; Wesnoth does not);
• their use of square versus hex grids (Wesnoth uses hexes, Telepath Tactics uses squares);
• their leveling mechanics (Telepath Tactics uses gradual leveling, Wesnoth uses unit promotions exclusively);
• their characterization (Wesnoth campaigns have few unique characters, and develop only a small number of those);
• their items (Telepath Tactics has a more robust item system, and uses items with far greater regularity); and
• their setting (Wesnoth opts for generic high fantasy, while Telepath Tactics takes place in a more unusual setting).

To put all of this more succinctly: Telepath Tactics is a descendant of tactical RPGs like Fire Emblem and Shining Force, whereas The Battle for Wesnoth is more directly descended from pure turn-based strategy titles. Both lineages offer distinct advantages and disadvantages, to say nothing of very different play experiences.

Personally, I really enjoy playing The Battle for Wesnoth (aside from the occasional moment of pure rage brought on by missing seven 50%-chance-to-hit attacks in a row). I neither want nor expect Telepath Tactics to be a substitute for Wesnoth, any more than Chess is a substitute for Risk. These games have wildly differing scope, mechanics, and narrative considerations. As far as I’m concerned, Telepath Tactics and The Battle for Wesnoth can coexist happily side by side on PC–and goodness knows, the platform is certainly large enough to accommodate both of them.

But enough about that–let’s talk about what’s new in Telepath Tactics. With a second go at Kickstarter on the agenda for mid-to-late March, I’ve been hunkering down and working to improve core aspects of the Telepath Tactics engine.

• Telepath Tactics now supports branching, scripted dialog: which means the game now also supports branching campaigns.

• By far the biggest undertaking this past month has been improving enemy AI in Telepath Tactics. There are already a number of noticeable upgrades–among them:
  • AI characters now grab item sacks lying within reach, then continue their turns;
  • AI characters now intelligently use items sitting in their inventory;
  • AI characters with non-turn-ending attacks now continue moving after attacking; and
  • badly injured AI characters now flee in the direction of a friendly healer if they can reach one.

• I’ve implemented Rally, a feature that simultaneously auto-moves all of your characters toward a point on the battlefield that you specify. (This massively speeds up turns where you’re too far away to engage with any enemy units!)

• I reworked the movement engine to support simultaneous movement for Rally, but this had the serendipitous effect of also allowing me to add in support for AOE knockback and move abilities that move multiple characters and objects around at once. (The most obvious of these is Pull, a new skill that moves both the user and whatever is standing in front of her backward one space.)

• I’ve moved attacks / skills from their own menu into an Attacks Bar that sits near the bottom of the screen when in Actions mode. This makes attacks more accessible for inspection and reduces the number of clicks involved in launching them.

• Other control improvements: since there is no longer a separate attacks menu, I’ve repurposed the A key as part of an alternate WASD camera panning scheme. The M key now toggles between Move mode and Actions mode for whatever character is selected, and the End Turn hotkey has been changed from E to Shift + E to prevent accidental presses when using WASD.

• Telepath Tactics now features a Give function in character inventory that will let you pass items to adjacent allied characters. This isn’t limited to characters under your direct control, mind you: you can pass them to a teammate’s character, or even to characters controlled by an allied CPU player (which is handy, given that CPU players now know how to use items in their characters’ inventories).

• The map editor has been updated with mouse wheel controls. Scroll the wheel to zoom in and out; hold the middle mouse button and drag to pan around the map, even when not in pan mode!

• I fixed a lot of bugs, including a weird one that was preventing the mouse from working properly on computers with touchscreen support.

• Finally–last but far from least–I’ve updated the alpha demo with all of these improvements, plus added in a small taste of the game’s Local multiplayer with 1-on-1 player-versus-CPU matches on a small map with randomized armies. Grab the updated demo here! WINDOWS  |  MAC / LINUX

You can also see many of these fixes and features in action in Telepath Tactics Teaser #10, posted here for your viewing convenience. You’ll want to watch this sucker fullscreen, in HD:

Going forward, there is one more big AI improvement that I’m halfway through and looking to have completed in the coming month: a routine that discourages enemy units from standing on spaces where they can get attacked.

In addition to all of this, I’ve hired another artist to help me make headway on the remaining character animations. I’m limited in how much I can afford to have done in any given month, however; I’ll be relying on the success of the coming Kickstarter campaign to wrap everything up in a timely manner.

Onward!

I’m not too worried about it, though. The campaign was nothing but positive in terms of giving the game publicity, gaining hundreds of new fans, and teaching me about the aspects of Telepath Tactics that people really care about. (Local multiplayer, apparently, is not on the top of the list–not even for the games journalists who were aggressively trumpeting the importance of local multiplayer from the rooftops only a few weeks prior.)

One of the greatest gifts of this campaign is that I am still able to post Kickstarter updates and thereby email all 840 backers. This is huge; it means that I can start a second campaign and notify everyone who backed the first one to show up and pledge again! In short, a second attempt at funding will have a very big head start. Keep an eye out for a second attempt sometime in March.

Running a Kickstarter, I’ve learned, is basically one giant marathon of community interaction, content creation and marketing. I’m still amazed at how much I was able to handle on my own, though my sleep definitely took a hit in the process. Hence, me taking a short break to recuperate before trying again. (There’s no point in me getting burnt out, right?)

On top of all that Kickstarter stuff, I was also still working on the game over the past few weeks (in part to show backers that I’m quick and responsive to criticism, and in part to help maintain my sanity). Here’s the list of things I accomplished over the past month:

• I released an alpha demo with a short tutorial fight, followed by two full-scale battles.  WINDOWS  |  MAC / LINUX

• An acquaintance, Jared Wheeler, was kind enough to write an algorithm for generating point lights on the battlefields. I integrated his work into the game, and you can see the results for yourself in the screenshot above. Point lights, like everything else, are now defined in a battle’s XML file, so they’re super easy to add to your own battles.

• I added predictive damage displays to targeting reticles so you can see in advance exactly how much damage an attack will do to each target.

• You can now cycle back and forth through your available characters using the mouse wheel.

• There is now an option to turn on panning-by-moving-the-mouse-cursor-to-the-edge-of-the-screen. (There’s probably a proper term for this that I don’t know, but I’m referring to it as edge-of-screen panning.)

• You can now interact with the Rotate button with either a left-click or a right-click; left-clicking will rotate the character clockwise, and right-clicking, counter-clockwise.

• Character movement speed has been increased by 30% across the board for faster play.

• You can now customize character movement speed in the options menu: set it to Normal, Double, or Instant.

• The engine now supports explosion chains.

• I added in a much-needed improvement to the AI (though there remains a lot of work left to be done on the AI front).

• I rewrote the way that dialog is formatted in Telepath Tactics to accommodate future support for branching dialog (and by extension, branching campaigns). Adding full support for branching dialog is next on my agenda!

• Also: I fixed a ton of bugs and updated the manual.

There you have it, folks. On top of all this, a friend is helping me redesign SinisterDesign.net so it looks nicer and more professional. Expect to see the redesign coming soon!

a website that you should visit immediately.

If you don’t know what Telepath Tactics is, watch this:

“Okay,” you say, “the game looks fantastic, but why Kickstarter?” It’s pretty simple. When I first began working on Telepath Tactics, it was to be a short project, a quick and relaxing interlude after the four-year ordeal of developing Telepath RPG: Servants of God. However, the game has since grown from a simple multiplayer tactics game to include a story-heavy single player campaign and extensive mod support.

Self-funding Telepath Tactics’ development has been adequate until now because it was just multiplayer. I needed relatively few assets for that: 22 character classes, a few dozens destructible objects, and a small handful of tilesets.

However, now that Telepath Tactics has a single player campaign, day and night, weather effects, and support for player-created campaigns, we need more content. We need extra character sprites: male and female variants for each character class, for one thing. NPC sprites are important to have as well. We need tilesets that portray a wider variety of locales, and destructible objects to match. We need original sound effects; we need character portraits; we need art for the user interface; we need a full soundtrack. Et cetera!

All of that stuff is awesome, but it takes money: specifically, $23,000. I don’t have $23,000 just lying around to spend, unfortunately, so the next best option is to run a Kickstarter. And so that is exactly what I am doing.

If you want Telepath Tactics to support robust and fully-realized single player campaigns as much as I do, please head on over to the Kickstarter page and pitch in some money. Together, we can make this happen!

Pretty, no?

The biggest substantive change since last month is that the game now supports team multiplayer! Have a 2 vs. 2 match, 3 vs. 3 (if the map is big enough), or something more lopsided (e.g. 2 vs. 1); Telepath Tactics now supports all of the above.

Just as importantly, Telepath Tactics now supports map-specific conditions.

Conditions are basically settings that you can stick in a map’s XML file to customize its function and appearance. Conditions can do a huge variety of things. They can flip on fog of war for a battle; they can tell the AI to remain passive for a certain number of turns; they can even designate certain characters whose survival is mandatory to winning the battle.

This last use means that you can now designate, on a battle-by-battle basis, characters whose death will mean the end of the battle. Using this condition on enemies will essentially turn them into boss characters; using it on player-controlled characters will create heroes that the player must keep alive; and using it on CPU-controlled allies will create an escort mission. (But don’t worry: I don’t have any plans to create escort missions.)

Other conditions are cosmetic in nature, but they look pretty darn cool. There are two conditions in-game right now whose function is purely aesthetic: Global Lighting and Weather.

Global Lighting is a setting that changes the way everything looks on the map without affecting game performance. The game currently has a variety of lighting settings based on times of day (Dawn, Afternoon, Evening and Night) as well as a few special-purpose settings like Overcast (for cloudy days) or Sepia (for those times when you absolutely have to have a flashback sequence).

Weather is the second new aesthetic condition. Currently, the only Weather settings are Rain and Snow, but that will change as I add more goodies.

Here is a short video I put together showing some global lighting and weather used on some multiplayer maps. (Of course, conditions work equally well on single player maps.) As you can see, global lighting and weather effects definitely impact the mood of a map:

You might also notice a couple of other changes in that video: (1) characters now stay facing the correct direction after moving, and (2) character health bars now shrink in real time when the character takes damage.

Finally, what would an update be without bug fixes? I know you’ve been waiting with baited breath to hear this, so here it is: I fixed some bugs. (Somewhere in the back of the room, a girl swoons and faints.)

That’s it as far as changes to the game, folks. However, I do have two big pieces of news to announce!

• Telepath Tactics is going to be at PAX East! If you’re going to be in Boston next March 22-24, come find me on the show floor; I’ll have the latest build of Telepath Tactics available to play, and I’ll almost certainly be giving away some cool Telepath Tactics swag.

• Telepath Tactics is going to have a Kickstarter! I mentioned this as a strong possibility in one of the game’s many pre-alpha teasers, but it’s now official: a Kickstarter campaign is going to happen, and soon! There are going to be some pretty awesome reward tiers, so keep an eye peeled. (And of course, if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll be the first to know when it begins.)

That’s it for now. I’ll be back with more awesome Telepath Tactics news soon!

So is it with games. Exploration, experimentation, discovery: all of these depend upon unpredictability, on gaps in the player’s familiarity with the game. Challenge exists only where the player cannot know exactly how a scenario is going to play out ahead of time. This is the sort of unpredictability we are going to talk about today: since it concerns game mechanics, let’s call it mechanical unpredictability.

Real-time games, as a general rule, have an easy time fostering mechanical unpredictability. Spatial navigation requires accuracy and timing; a real-time attack could miss or hit depending on a player’s physical input. The chance of making a mistake in the heat of the moment adds uncertainty, and thus tension.

Without this sort of real-time interaction, turn-based games must look elsewhere for their mechanical unpredictability. Many developers working on turn-based games mistakenly believe that unpredictability is necessarily bound up in randomness. Indeed, there is an assumption prevalent in the design community that any turn-based game without randomness will feel stale, predictable, devoid of tension.

This is a misapprehension, however. Randomness creates uncertainty, it is true, but so do other elements. This piece will examine a variety of tension-building elements, from the basic die roll to other methods that—quite undeservedly—receive less attention and respect. Each method has its benefits and its costs, though some entail a higher cost than others. We’ll begin with the most obvious, then discuss it in comparison to other methods that tend to get overlooked.

Randomized results

Randomized results are the very first thing any game developer thinks of when trying to add unpredictability to a turn-based combat system, so let’s talk about that technique first.

Randomized results are what happens when you interpose chance between a player’s chosen action and the results of that action. The results are determined by recourse to randomly chosen numbers: hence, “randomized results.”

If you have played RPGs for any length of time, you are already intimately familiar with randomized results. The ubiquitous “chance to hit” is a perfect example of a randomized result; so is variable attack damage. These implementations have proven incredibly popular with game developers ever since students first started cloning Dungeons and Dragons mechanics on a PLATO mainframe.

Aside from the fact that these mechanics have a long tradition, the simple fact is that randomizing results is the easiest possible way to add unpredictability to a turn-based combat system. “I ordered my character to attack, but I cannot know if the attack will actually land.” This takes very little effort to implement, but it still hides information from the player, and therefore builds tension fairly effectively.

However, the use of randomized results comes at a cost. As I’ve discussed in the past, excessive reliance on randomized results tends to produce two big problems:

1. Excessively randomized results obscure the likely outcome of individual player actions, resulting in more opaque mechanics.
2. Excessively randomized results take control away from the player, creating a watered-down sense of player responsibility for the outcome of battles. (“That was a bad die roll!” “The random number generator screwed me!” etc.)

In a well-designed real-time game, the player is willing to accept defeat over and over again if the controls are tight and responsive. The player knows that she and she alone is in control of her character. If she dies, it is because of some combination of three factors: (1) she wasn’t fast enough, (2) she wasn’t clever enough, or (3) she wasn’t accurate enough in responding to what was happening on the screen. It’s her fault, and she is likely to accept that fact, soldiering on with renewed determination. Game developers working on action games focus on the importance of tight controls for precisely this reason: because it means the difference between commitment and frustration, between the player taking responsibility for her failure or concluding that the game itself is flawed.

This same principle applies to turn-based games as well, though the “control” at issue is of a different sort. As with real-time games, turn-based games must respond predictably to chosen actions; without that connection, the player will not feel responsible for the outcome.

While predictability hinges on responsiveness in real-time games, in turn-based games, it is largely a matter of determinism. Many turn-based games (particularly those with combat systems built to imitate the D&D model) feature battles in which the player can engage in the same preparation and use the same tactics, but nonetheless get vastly different results based on invisible, randomized numbers outside of the player’s control. Thus, although randomized results create uncertainty, they can also sabotage the sense that a player is responsible for her failures, which is bad.

A simplistic example illustrates the point:

Suppose that Bob is playing an RPG where he controls a party of five characters facing off against a troll. None of his characters have any guaranteed-hit attacks available. Suppose that Bob needs three of his five characters to hit the troll to kill it; also suppose that the troll will almost certainly kill one of Bob’s characters if the troll is not killed on this turn. Bob commands the party to attack.

In a deterministic system, when Bob commands all five characters to attack the enemy, they will all hit. His choices were entirely responsible for his victory over the enemy, and so he is 100% responsible for his ensuing victory.

But let’s say that we have a system with randomized results; let’s say that each character has an 80% chance to strike the troll. In this scenario, four or more characters might miss their attacks despite the fact that probability strongly favors a better result. While unlikely, let us suppose that four or five characters miss. The troll survives the turn, and one of Bob’s characters is slain.

Did Bob command his characters to miss? Of course not; the game chose to nullify his chosen actions on the basis of invisible, randomly selected numbers. Nor can we say that Bob made a poor tactical decision; he made his choice based on what was by far the most likely numerical result (namely, that at least three of his characters would strike the enemy). In all likelihood, Bob can reload his previous saved game, replay this scenario, make the exact same decision, and nonetheless get a completely different outcome. Bob is not responsible for the fact that the enemy survived here, and will be quite justified in assigning at least partial credit for this failure to factors outside his control.

This is one of the perverse realities of probability: although the probability of missing five 80% chance-to-hit attacks in a row is far less than 1%, each individual “die roll” is independent of the others. So in reality, there is actually an entirely probable 1-in-5 chance of missing each individual attack, no matter whether the ones before it hit or missed.

Randomized attack damage, featured by Dungeons and Dragons and many of its closer imitators, just amplifies the problem.

Let’s take our Bob example again. Suppose that each character deals 1d6 damage; if all five characters hit, the total damage will be the sum of five six-sided die rolls. As a general rule when rolling multiple dice, the most likely result is always just a little bit higher than half the maximum possible roll. For example: when rolling two 6-sided dice, the most likely sum is not 6 (half of 12, the maximum possible roll)—the most likely sum is actually 7. Likewise, when rolling five 6-sided dice, the most likely sums are 17 and 18, not 15.

Now, let’s say that the troll has 17 health points left. Let’s also say that the five characters’ attack rolls add up to 16. What were the chances of rolling beneath both of the most likely sums? The answer: just over 39%.

So far, not too bad. But let’s get a little crazy. Let’s say that the troll has only 11 health left. We’d have to have fantastically bad luck to roll 10 or lower on 5d6, wouldn’t we? It seems that we would: the probability of getting a sum of 10 or lower across five rolls is only 1.620%! Couldn’t happen, right?

Of course it can. Remember, every die roll is independent of the others. Every roll carries an even chance of rolling any number on the die, and a greater than 33% chance of rolling a 2 or lower. The 1.620% figure only accounts for the numbers you haven’t rolled yet. So once you roll three 1s and a 3, you still have a dead even chance of rolling 3 or lower on your last roll and getting a sum total of 9. Ultimately, it does not matter that the entire sequence of events at first seemed wildly unlikely.

And though it may be fairly uncommon for your players to get totally screwed in this fashion, this is actually not an especially good argument in favor of randomized results. The fact that it seems so improbable just means that when it does happen, it will feel like the game equivalent of getting struck by lightning out of a clear sky: arbitrary and painful.

The simple fact is that adding yet another layer of randomness in between a player’s tactical choices and the outcome of those choices further distances the player’s input from what happens on the screen. The player thus becomes even more likely to grow frustrated when the game fails to respond predictably to her choices. Although randomized results add unpredictability, they do so while (1) decreasing player control and (2) incurring a corresponding increase in player antipathy. This phenomenon is especially problematic in high-stakes situations, where randomized results can cause the player to face serious consequences (e.g. permadeath) even if he makes the most optimal move.

On top of all of this, excessive use of randomized results also renders a game’s mechanics more opaque. Think back to the discussion about the probabilities of various die rolls that we just had above. Did you find all of that clear and elegant, or did you find it sort of confusing and unintuitive? More to the point: how many of your players do you suppose will understand what’s happening there?

The more you rely upon randomized results, the more your players will have to engage in analysis like this to understand your game’s mechanics. I don’t think it will be too controversial for me to say that it is not exactly desirable for us to force higher order math on players who wish to understand how to make good decisions in our games. There must be a better way to generate unpredictability.

Tactical complexity and second party uncertainty

Luckily, unpredictability is not just a spark that flickers into existence for the moment between issuing a command and watching the game’s onscreen interpretation of it. Unpredictability can also exist on a much broader level. Developers can employ a combination of clever AI and tactical depth to keep turn-based combat unpredictable and wrought with tension.

Chess and Go are a fine example for us to look at. As we know, Chess and Go do not have an ounce of randomness in them. Every last move is 100% deterministic in its effects. It is never unclear what happens if your knight moves onto a pawn’s space: the knight takes the pawn. Period. End of story. Likewise, you’ll never sit there biting your nails, wondering what happens when you surround a group of enemy pieces in Go. The pieces are either taken or not taken based on a simple, unchanging rule. The results of the move are entirely predictable.

And yet, matches of Chess and Go can positively drip tension, the end results of any given match wildly uncertain. How is that possible? The answer lies not in what happens after the player selects a move, but rather in what happens beforehand. In Chess and Go, the player faces a black box full of dangerous and unpredictable moves. This is possible only because each of these games sports two characteristics: (1) a thinking opponent and (2) a large possibility space.

As you no doubt divined, the clever opponent is the primary source of unpredictability here. A clever opponent will go out of its way to seize on weaknesses in a player’s plan. The player never knows for certain which move such an opponent will opt for, and therefore has to tread carefully to avoid having her own moves exploited. In order to succeed, the player has to try to guess the opponent’s likely response to each move from among multiple viable options: in short, to outwit him. This is a huge source of unpredictability—and thus, tension.

However, a sufficiently large possibility space is essential to make this work well. I’ll quote Ian Bogost here for a definition of “possibility space”:

In a video game, the possibility space refers to the myriad configurations the player might construct to see the ways the processes inscribed in the system work.

This is somewhat similar to what programmers refer to as the state space, meaning the number of possible states the game can exist in from a game’s start until completion.

A cunning opponent can be hamstrung by an overly simplistic combat system. Consider Tic-Tac-Toe, a deterministic game with (as games go) a tiny possibility space. Every turn past the first presents only a single optimal move. The only option for a clever opponent is to fight the player to a draw. (As Randall Munroe of XKCD puts it: “The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.”) Because the optimal counter to every move is predictable, there is no tension in fighting a clever opponent in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

Chess and Go, by contrast, have massive possibility spaces. On any given turn, there are numerous viable moves; if there exists a single optimal move, it is obscured by the massive number of choices on offer and the unique state of the playing field. This renders the game unpredictable.

I choose to call this phenomenon second party uncertainty, since it concerns uncertainty about what the second party—the opponent—will do. Second party uncertainty differs fundamentally from the uncertainty imposed by randomized results, in that its tension arises not from whether the game will choose to nullify your commands, but from whether those commands are themselves good enough. To analogize to real-time games for a moment: second party uncertainty is the equivalent of playing a hotly contested match of Super Street Fighter IV and feeling out your opponent for weaknesses while trying desperately not to slip up. Randomized results are the equivalent of knowing that the game is going to occasionally not register your button presses. Both offer tension and unpredictability, but one is of a clearly superior variety.

The uses of randomized results

Having just argued so strongly against the use of randomized results, you may surprised to hear that I am now going to discuss reasons to use randomized results.

Much of my design philosophy over the past six years has been a reaction against the widespread overreliance on randomized results I saw in RPGs and turn-based strategy games. My goal was simple: put control back in the hands of the player. A good strategy will work; a bad strategy will not. Period. No more wasting time reloading the game because your characters missed too many attacks in a row.

To that end, I did away with randomized results beginning with Telepath RPG Chapter 2. From that game onward, the Telepath combat system was almost entirely deterministic: attacks always hit, and they almost always did the same damage. Targets with elemental resistance took less damage and backstabbed targets took more, but the damage always changed according to a fixed percentage, entirely predictable to the experienced player.

Recently, I’ve been looking for ways to deepen the system, and that has led me to question whether pure determinism is really the best way to go.

Arguably, the biggest problem with the choice to rely exclusively on tactical uncertainty to promote unpredictability is that the AI must be truly clever and varied, or else the player is eventually going to figure out how it thinks. Once that happens, the player will be able to beat the AI consistently and without difficulty. When the only uncertainty in a battle consists of the choices the AI will make, definitionally, there can be no uncertainty left once the AI becomes predictable.

I first encountered this argument after releasing Telepath Psy Arena 2. It’s a clever argument, but really this is an argument for better AI, not an argument for randomized results. Making attacks randomly hit or miss, or making them randomly deal 1-6 damage instead of just 6 damage, is the proverbial finger in the dyke. It is a cheap solution that does little to fix a glaring structural weakness in the game; a game of craps attempting to stand in for a clever and unpredictable opponent.

A second potential issue is personality-based. For some, failure in a game bruises their sense of themselves as competent people. In their minds, they didn’t just lose because they tried a strategy that didn’t work; they lost because they are intrinsically not smart enough, not good enough. The ego is much too tightly wrapped up in the results of particular challenges, producing a personalization of loss that can be emotionally crushing. The mediation of the dice provides an “out,” a way of walking away from a loss without feeling totally responsible. In short, it’s the flip side of my argument above: determinism promotes a feeling of player responsibility, but perhaps some players don’t want to feel wholly responsible.

Personally, I’m not convinced that this is a good reason to add in heavy randomization. If you aren’t responsible for your loss because the dice intervened in the outcome, then what does that say about the moment when you actually win? Is that victory as meaningful? Insofar as such a thing can be stated objectively, I feel comfortable in saying that beating someone in chess is objectively a greater accomplishment than beating them in Mario Party—or in Risk, for that matter. The more luck victory requires, the less you can say to have achieved victory solely through your own wits.

There are more arguments to look at. David White, lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth, wrote a lengthy post back in 2008 justifying the game’s heavy use of randomized results. (Interestingly, the developers apparently received so many complaints about the randomized results in their game that they felt obliged to stick a link to this post in their game’s official FAQ!)

White’s defense is spirited but flawed. For one thing, White assumes that losing units due to unlucky die rolls is somehow superior to losing units due to poor planning and unit placement. However, if determinism combined with a competent AI makes the loss of units inevitable, then randomized results combined with competent AI makes the loss of units arbitrary. It is the job of the designer to tune the difficulty of battles—randomization of results cannot do the job for him.

Worse, White outright dismisses the interesting tactical situations that a deterministic system can offer. Determinism does not necessarily mean little tactical complexity, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the player won’t have to work out a good strategy. Nor, conversely, do random results equate to tactical complexity: if your game is simplistic, adding randomized results is not going to improve the situation. Tic-Tac-Toe is not going to suddenly become a tactically rich experience if we throw die rolls into the mix.

But then again…maybe there’s something there. What about a game that is already tactically rich but entirely deterministic? Could a game like that be deepened if we placed a wreath of randomized results upon its brow?

To some extent, I think the answer is actually “yes.” Consider this: in a purely deterministic game, the player’s contingency plans will hinge solely upon possible enemy responses. There is never a moment where the player has to plan for the risk that his or her own strategy will fail. The possibility space actually shrinks, in other words, because there are fewer possible results when a player implements her plan of action.

That sort of consideration comes about only through randomized results. Therefore, although randomized results are most certainly not a panacea for an otherwise dull turn-based combat system, they can expand the possibility space somewhat by offering up another dimension of tactical considerations for the player to mull over.

The design challenge therefore becomes finding a good balance, one that (1) forces the player to form extra contingency plans while (2) not sabotaging her sense of control. This means implementing randomized results in a very controlled and deliberate way atop an otherwise deterministic base.

It is no trivial matter to tinker with a successful, well-balanced deterministic combat system in this way. I have been thinking for months now about how to do so successfully in my latest title, Telepath Tactics. For the sake of providing an example, I will now talk about the areas in which I have added randomized results to the Telepath combat system, and discuss my rationales for doing so.

     Use #1: Negative status effects

The most conspicuous of my concessions to randomized results lies in the use of negative status effects. Negative status effects are a common feature in turn-based combat systems. They lend depth to RPG combat by creating secondary objectives (e.g. cure poison as soon as possible to minimize damage) or by changing the resources at various player’s disposal (e.g. muted characters cannot use magic until cured).

Despite their utility, negative status effects have been almost entirely absent from Telepath titles up until now. “Craig,” you ask, “why would you create a strategy RPG that excludes such a useful and obvious tool for increasing tactical depth?” The reason, quite simply, is that previous Telepath games employed a combat system that was almost 100% deterministic. Most negative status effects, in turn, are simply too powerful to use in such a deterministic environment!

Consider an attack that imparts “Frozen” status, for instance. If this status effect hit 100% of the time, Cryokineticists and Frost Spriggats would become game-breakingly powerful. Imagine going up against an opponent with an army composed entirely of characters that freeze your units solid for 2-3 turns on their first attack; there would be almost no way to successfully engage them. This same problem applies to Sleep, Stun, or any sort of common RPG status effect which prevents a character from acting.

Even a milder status effect, like “blind,” would become overpowered in a deterministic system. Not only it would take effect 100% of the time, it would necessarily cause the hit rate on physical attacks to drop all the way to 0%! Blind would essentially become an automatic Render Physical Attacker Completely Useless card.

The solution I chose was to make negative status effects take hold only some of the time. This limited application of randomized results turns negative status effects from a way of automatically crippling the enemy into a gambit you can try–and for which you had best have a contingency plan in case of failure!

     Use #2: Dodge chance

The second concession I made to randomized results concerns the ability of characters to dodge attacks. I did this as a way to help balance the units, enforce specialization, and raise the stakes when dealing with a few, particular classes. The Assassin, for example, is specialized in getting behind enemy lines and taking down weaker characters. Without a chance to dodge, the Assassin would be dispatched quickly almost every single time; giving the Assassin a significant dodge chance makes dealing with one much more of a tactical challenge.

I also give units an automatic, very high dodge chance when an attacker is blinded; this represents a compromise scenario with the Blind status effect, a negative status that would otherwise be overpowered, as we discussed above.

This is significantly different from most RPG combat systems. Most combat systems with a chance to hit impose a substantial probability of missing attacks against all enemies. Further, even those which do not force characters to frequently miss attacks will oftentimes set a maximum attack accuracy somewhere around 95% to account for the chance of a “critical miss.” (In practice, all this accuracy limit does is institute a chance of missing so low that it calls to mind our lightning strike scenario: the player will have no reason to expect it, and he will be profoundly unhappy when it occurs.)

The implementation I use in Telepath Tactics is far more circumscribed. Rather than a typical “chance to miss” system, it is a “dodge chance system.” The difference lies in the game’s base-line assumptions. There is no such thing as missing in the game–by default, any character’s attack will always hit the target. It is deterministic by default. This use of randomized results is a deliberate exception, representing particularized tactical dilemmas to spice up the game at key moments rather than simply dumping randomized results into every combat interaction in the game.

Just as importantly, the game provides several ways of circumventing dodge entirely. Blinding the target or slowing the target will prevent it from dodging (although, of course, there is always a chance that these status effects will themselves not succeed). Mental attacks, in turn, can never be dodged under any circumstances.

Much as with status effects, the use of units with dodge is merely a gambit: a player must be prepared in case the gambit fails, and the opponent should plan ahead by availing him or herself of strategies to counteract it. In this way, it deepens the tactical experience without significantly undermining player control.

     Use #3: Line-of-sight, gun-based systems

That about covers it for Telepath Tactics. However, there is a pretty big elephant in the room here, folks. There are some combat systems that consistently need to rely on randomized results for–at a bare minimum–hit and miss calculations. I am thinking specifically of line-of-sight combat systems with highly lethal projectile weaponry. (Think Fallout, Jagged Alliance or X-Com.) A deterministic core would very quickly turn these systems into a mess because of the lethality of the attacks involved. Everything I said about negative status effects being overpowered in a deterministic system applies here as well. These games get a pass.

Randomization beyond results

Randomized results are not the only potential use of randomization in a game. Randomization can also be a valuable tool to build tension by creating unpredictable starting states for various scenarios. Card games provide a great example of this principle. Even if you know your opponent’s deck, you will never know what cards lie in his or her hand. The deck is shuffled: the hand is chosen at random. Consequently, the player faces some uncertainty about the options available to her opponent. This builds tension and makes a turn-based encounter more gripping.

In a spatial turn-based combat system, unpredictable enemy unit composition and positioning under a fog of war mimics much of the effect of a randomized hand of cards. The player must scout, or else take the risk inherent to issuing orders with incomplete information about what enemy characters the opponent has at its disposal. Other elements of the battlefield can be randomized as well: loot drops, spaces with healing or defense bonuses, and environmental hazards, to name a few.

Crucially, these each add unpredictability to the scenarios the player faces, and not to the results of individual player commands. The player is never compromised in his ability to control his characters; any random chance the player confronts in this way, the player has the opportunity to respond to and circumvent.

There is one other, major way that randomization can be used to foster unpredictability. You may recall me mentioning earlier the dangers of relying exclusively on clever AI to provide unpredictability in a game. No matter how clever an AI’s programming, if its decision-making process is consistent from game to game, sooner or later the player is going to figure out how it thinks and learn to outwit it over and over again. The opponent will become predictable, in other words, and the game’s tension will plummet.

This is a great place to employ randomization: add a random modifier to some of the AI’s heuristics that change its priorities from battle to battle, or even from turn to turn. Also good: add a random coefficient to the scores the AI assigns to attack targets: small enough that the AI won’t make ridiculous decisions, but big enough that its target priorities will be difficult to predict from attack to attack.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here. Though this might seem like a lot of stuff, I’m sure that I’m just scratching the surface. After all, randomized results occur at a very specific moment: randomization can occur literally anywhere else in the game. As long as (1) the randomized elements impact the player’s optimal strategy, and (2) the arrangement of those elements is not immediately revealed to the player, you have an implementation of randomization that is ripe for tension-building.

Conclusion

There is a whole world of tools for building unpredictability. I would like to see turn-based combat systems–particularly those in RPGs–start focusing on a greater variety of these, and stop using randomized results as a crutch. Randomized results have their role, but I’d like to see them used more deliberately. Like special sauce on a burger, randomized results can add spice; just make sure the player still gets to taste the meat.

Craig Stern is an indie developer currently working on the turn-based tactics game Telepath Tactics. He is the founder of IndieRPGs.com, and can often be found rambling in short, 140-character bursts on Twitter.