Shields and Defensive playstyles

Shields and defensive play are a big part of any good RPG. Their execution however, is critical. When we allow a defensive player too much defense, he becomes unkillable and the game is forfeit from the start. When we allow too little defense, he becomes non-viable and the abilities are scoffed at and ignored. There is a third, and even worse, situation in which the defensive player has too much defense and becomes unkillable, but has too little offense as well: creating a stalemate. Then finally, the worst scenario, is one in which the defensive style character is unkillable, and his defensive abilities are so strong that he absolutely murders the entire field, surpassing even damage-dealing characters. All four scenarios are examples of poor game design, development, and testing. So, this time around we take a look at how we thread that delicate needle of defensive characters, and balance them with others.

One trademark of the standard defensive character is the shield. In Theory, shields have three stats: Damage, Damage Reduction, and Speed penalty. Shields should do a low amount of damage when used to attack, they should reduce damage when blocking, and are cumbersome, thus reducing the speed of the user. But, from a balance perspective this can make shields look REALLY bad. Reducing your speed (the stat you need to defend multiple incoming attacks with), to defend against incoming attacks seems counterproductive.  Actually though, its a balancing factor. The shield based build is centered around only two abilities really, Block and Shield bash. Neither of these abilities has an experience cost and the cheap meta-martial unlocks make them easily upgradable.  This leads the Shield user down three paths: One is to invest experience in the speed stat and plug the hole, gaining enough speed actions to successfully defend against enough attacks to make the shield an extremely strong defensive tool. But this takes away from offensive power, experience spent on speed just to plug a hole made by your shield is not experience spent on offensive abilities. So, our second choice is to spend that experience on offensive abilities instead and have very few actions in combat. We can do both, offensive and defensive skills, but not very many. However, both are really effective. The third path. is to get a really expensive shield: an energy shield. Energy shields are statted to be big upgrades for characters to look forward to, never to start with. They represent the midpoint between these two paths, with no speed penalty, and very little damage, but heavy defensive ability. Allowing the player to invest in offensive abilities instead of plug a speed-hole in their experience. But doesn't that create the fourth-kind of defense character? the kind that cannot be killed and wrecks the field? While an argument could be made, and testing could show that, I anticipate that it wont. Because there is a resource we haven't talked about thus far: Handedness. A shield actively takes up a hand, reducing the wielder to one handed weapons, the highest of which is 6 damage. Which I might add is a pistol and therefore does not benefit from strength. So what about a defensive fighter that doesn't use a shield at all? What if a defensive fighter was dual-wielding wouldn't THAT create the fourth-kind of fighter?

The parry fighter gains big defensive bonuses from wielding more weapons. He can attack with more weapons and deal more damage, has access to more offensive ability, and at first look seems unstoppable. A parry fighter is an extremely strong build if we look at it in those terms, but they have a critically overlooked weakness, and they rely on it to turn the tables on you. A parry fighter is either on the offensive or on the defensive: Never both. He relies on being faster than you (and probably is), so that he has enough actions to parry anything you could throw at him (which he can't actually do until the lower mid-levels). While he is doing this, he isn't spending actions to deal damage. He is spending actions to stop you from dealing damage to him, and prolong the fight. He is disarming you to make you waste actions running to your weapon to pick it up, so he can shift the balance from defensive to offensive. And the whole time he's doing that, there is one thing he's not doing: Damage. A parry fighter will deal lots and lots and lots of little damage, but never very much at a time, and never very often. Making any character with a small-to-moderate amount of healing stop the parry fighter in his tracks. Not to mention magic, without a Thrumming weapon a parry fighter is helpless against magic. And that's assuming that even if they do have a thrumming weapon that magic-users don't have a way around it (they do). So if the parry fighter is so weak to magic, why not pick up the ability to counter-spell? with arcane magic you can counter any spell. This is, again, using experience to plug the hole in a strategy. While it does allow you to throw dice at the problem, the modifiers for a parry fighter on a counter-spell roll are going to be massively out of his favor. But lets say he uses his experience to plug that hole too, he gets enough skill to counter-spell with the best arcane mage. At this point, he has had to sacrifice so much offensive ability that he is entirely defensive (albeit a beast of a defensive character). So then, this creates the first-kind of defensive fighter.... right? Not necessarily, While he has spent so much experience plugging holes, other characters are getting faster, and their abilities are hitting harder. Even a slight misstep for the parry-counter-fighter will mean death.

Defensive characters are a special and unique balance of abilities, numbers, situations, hands, feet, heads, shoulders, knees, and toes. So check out shields on page 63, and the new offensive and defensive abilities to go with them.

Up and coming is still the Lore overhaul and more arena content.