Sing, O Muse, of the wars between the stars.
Sing of the clash of light, the hum of the blasters
The sith speed sith speed sith speed super sith speed sith speed super sith speed
The all too 5/1, the future foreseen
Sing, O Muse, of a game that is a board game, a card game, and a minis wargame all at once.
This is a post about Star Wars: Epic Duels, the game that formed the core inspiration for the experience loop of combat in Against the Fall of Night.
As you might guess from the name, Star Wars: Epic Duels is a Star Wars boardgame in which players take on the roles of characters from the Star Wars universe. Each player selects a character, but each character also comes with one or more secondary characters attached to them. For example, if you play as Darth Vader, you also control two Stormtroopers; if you play as Han Solo, you also control Chewbacca.
Your actions are determined by a deck of cards, unique to your character choice (Darth Vader has their own deck, Han Solo has a deck, Obi-Wan has a deck, Yoda has a deck, and so on). These cards are your actions. You start the game with some cards in your hand. On your turn, you get to roll a die to see what movement you can do; you might be able to move all characters you control some squares, or move only one character some squares. Then you can take two actions, which in short, an action is to either play a card or draw a card (or you can discard a secondary card to heal your main character, if you have no secondary characters left, but in general, it's either play a card or draw a card). Cards are either basic or special. A basic card has two numbers on it; one for attack and one for defense. Special cards might have attack, defense, both, or neither, depending on what they do.
The most important part, though, is the overall flow of gameplay. To make an attack, you choose an attack card, but do not reveal it. The defender chooses a defense card and reveals it, and then you reveal and compare your attack. If the attack value is higher than the defense value, the defender takes damage equal to the difference; if the defense value is equal or higher, nothing happens. You don't know what the attacker has in their hand, but you know generally what's in their deck. For example, Darth Vader has a special attack, All Too Easy, which has an attack value of 3 if defended against or 20 if not (which is enough to one-shot any character). So when Vader attacks you, and All Too Easy hasn't been played yet, it can be using a card as a defense that normally you wouldn't bother with.
You may also notice the way that this interacts with hand economy; if multiple people attack the same target, that target is going to run out of cards to defend with. In a 1v1 duel there will be a flurry of activity as you both attack and defend, then a break as you both draw cards to refill. This is a gameplay pattern that strongly matches lightsaber duels in Star Wars, with a flurry of activity followed by an exchange of quips or high-altitude chase or other event. It's also fundamentally an exciting and fun experience.
So what can we take from this for RPGs?
First, movement is important, and forcing choices with it can be valuable. In Epic Duels, you don't control your movement; you roll the die each round to see what your available movement options are, and then you do the best you can with what you get. In most RPGs, this kind of uncertain movement would be simulated with checks to see if you get to do the movement you want, and you don't move if you fail. Making it more like Epic Duels would give you move control and more options, by letting you know at the start of your turn what your movement options are. In Against the Fall of Night, movement isn't randomized, but you have to pick between Half Movement or Full Movement, which occur at different times in the round. The thing that they share is the knowledge at the start of the round that you need to plan what you want to do with your movement, and different goals will require adaptation to circumstances.
Second, the back-and-forth gameplay of attack-defend is exciting both to experience and to watch. Many RPGs have the problem of players not paying attention outside their own turns, because nothing happening will affect them and it's not interesting to watch. But by adding a back-and-forth comparison mechanic, we can recreate a higher energy event that's more interesting for everyone involved, which results in higher investment both from the active player and from the players watching. In AFN, I took away the blindness of the mechanic; the attacker's information is revealed to players before they choose their defense, and this is because it's a GM-player split instead of a player-player split. Because non-player attack options are theoretically infinite, instead of coming from a known deck like in Epic Duels, the way to get back the excitement of 'is it All Too Easy' is actually just to tell the players 'it's All Too easy, what are you gonna do about it'. If a monster threw that out there unprepared, it would just be a surprising gotcha, but if the player knows that this will kill them without defending, it lets them make interesting choices.
Finally, the hand economy lets us have an organic and organically interesting mechanic for ganging up that reflects how boned you are trying to fight 1v3 without needing to adjust numbers or do anything complicated. In Epic Duels, if you're outnumbered like that, you're going to get your cards ground down and you're going to die unless you can counterattack and defeat them very quickly. In D&D-like games, it doesn't matter, you're just going to compare your HP pool to their HP pools and if you have 3x their HP, you're still in good shape 1v3. This made its way into Against the Fall of Night with the attack point/defense point economy, instead of hand economy; you have a certain number of points to attack or defend with, and if you face multiple enemies, you're going to let more things through than if you faced only one, either by using weaker defenses or by not defending at all against some attacks (not defending at all is bad. You don't want that.) But by doing so as an economy choice, instead of a numerical modifier, it's intuitive, organic, and requires no additional effort in resolution.
And that's why Star Wars: Epic Duels is in the Appendix N for Against the Fall of Night, and my design theories in general.
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