Enemy Intentions

I've been spending so long on character creation and itemization that I haven't worked on what players will actually be fighting in a while. Now that I've made a full circle back here and have had a lot to consider, it's pretty awesome for me to see how it has all tied together within the pre-established mechanics, resources I already have available in the code, and new things I've learned how to do.

If you are unfamiliar with how Declarations work:  Players and Enemies act within different groups on initiative. Enemies always go first, but they need to declare what they will do 1 round before they do it. This is meant to give a level of transparency to players so they are aware of what they are fighting against. It makes combat failure or death feel more fair because the rules were always on the table. Clarity of information is the most important thing here. After that, it is up to the players to best decide how to deal with a scenario. The dream here is that an enemy is able to declare it is shooting an arrow South at the start of its turn and a player pushes it into a position where it shoots it's allies.

There are two modes for a creature to declare their actions (Pressing F12 while having tokens selected will switch between the modes for the DM). One mode automatically declares everything and another lets you manually select from all of their available options, as well as write in a custom one. Ideally automation is used for large quantities of simple enemies and a boss may be taken more direct control of by a DM if they desire.

There is a lot going on within this system to make preparing for a session as easy as possible for me -- the main goal of taking this long before running another campaign. Instead of having to decide on all of a creature's declarations individually, it has a bunch of tools to streamline the process. It automatically draws from ALL of the active skills and attacks the creature has access to based on the macros on the token. So, simply by going through the same character creation process as players and automatically assigning skills to a creature token, they will declare them in combat and utilize the same tooltip to help convey what that skill does within their declaration. Its got some neat other features like;

Probability: Declarations have a simple system for the probability that a declaration will be called at all.  This is to avoid a creature constantly declaring its most powerful ability and beating players into the ground with it. Each creature has a 'max' amount of declarations they will make and they never repeat the same one.

Target: There is a simple array of options on what the overall target goal for a creature may be. This includes calling out specific players based on random selection or proximity. Each individual action used to call a target before, but I find it makes way more sense to focus one creature against one target no matter what actions it has available.

Move: From the example above, This is actually something that is  'Always Declared'. It is reserved for things which are basically a passive ability that sets the enemy apart from others. There's some really cool things you can indicate here to force players to adapt to how they will deal with individual creature types. For example; an ooze creature could spawn an ally every single time they receive damage -- so players are informed they must try and kill the creature with a high single source of damage to not become overwhelmed.

Weapons: If an 'Attack' is declared with their equipped weapon, the same tooltip will be available that the random item generation uses to convey what loot does. This means you can see the enemy's attack pattern, damage, and any properties carried through their weapon like applying Poison on hit. This is as simple as generating a weapon on the enemy...and letting them use it the same way a player would. Adjustments to flavor it into a 'Bite' or 'Claw' are all minor adjustments.

Adrenaline: Skills that are added to a token tagged as an 'Enemy' remove the Adrenaline cost from the ability and the tooltip. Because actions are being declared at random, can be prepared for by the players, and are dictated by probability -- it started to make sense that they should be ignoring this resource limitation that players have. Adrenaline builds up every round to allow for potent abilities and I want to avoid a situation where the absolute goal above all things is to kill enemies as quickly as possible before they can attain enough Adrenaline. Offense is usually the best defense anyway, I'd like to not completely bake that into every single encounter design. That's not to say that some enemies will not scale with their passive declaration the longer a battle goes on, but it should not be expected as a standard.

Extra Information: There are some divination spells that tie into how enemies are made to directly give even more clarifying answers to player questions. The spell 'Foe Diviner' will target an enemy and prints out a list of all of their exact resistances and vulnerabilities to specific damage types and status effects. I can make one that prints out tooltips for all of their active abilities which might be declared. There is also still a social skill which may only be used a certain amount of times per day equal to skill level where a player may have any question answered about a creature, just incase there is still some fringe bit of information they feel they are lacking.

Interacting with Intentions: Aside from simply playing around what options a creature is attacking with, once a creature has declared something you don't like, there are some mental manipulation spells which allow re-rolling their intentions. There is some more work I can possibly do here to allow changing specific declarations...or maybe even cursing an enemy to add a useless or beneficial action into their pool of choices.

Universal Intentions: If a human has enough Burn applied to them, they will declare the need to extinguish the burn from themselves so they stop being on fire. This makes burn a powerful damage over time option, but also has the chance of reducing the action economy of foes.

Clarity has always been very important to me and this degree of it is something I never thought would be achievable for my originally 'small homebrew tabletop' project I expected to spend minimal amounts of time on. It is a lot of extra prep work for a DM to make sure all the clarity already exists before an encounter, but the payoff is worth it for the type of combat experience I want to create. Now that declarations tie back to character creation and skill generation, that amount of prep time has even been drastically cut down. A lot still needs to be custom made for each enemy, but the avenue to accomplish that is all laid out and ready to be used. 

Sorry for the lack of posts lately! Life be like that sometimes. Soon I'd like to have one up with some great new concept arts and lore information!