Thread by @tanyaxshort

Why Every Game Has Combat

a thread with probably unpopular grumbling of a non-violent game designer who's tried and failed to escape making combat-based games many times

ok not every game but you know what I mean. theoretically Moon Hunters would be better and more thematically consistent without combat as its central gameplay -- persuasion or cultural exchange or just exploring would be more thematic. beating up random wild animals is weird.

and Ooblets for example is SO much stronger for not having your cute little friends fight and defeat each other. the dogfighting analogy at the heart of Pokemon remains deeply unsettling and just glossed over for the same reasons Moon Hunters does it:

we wanted a system-driven challenge for individuals AND groups of players that was relatively easy to understand as soon as you picked up the game. that's combat.

consider the number of comabt concepts that have varied definitions across genres and games but have a generally-understood relationship to each other: hitpoints, damage, weapon, armor, vulnerability, poison, piercing, vampirism, ranged, block, dodge, trip, unarmed, etc.

you CAN build a different metaphor. Ooblets has dance-offs.

but then you have to explain a bunch of new elements (victory points instead of HP, beats, warm-ups, hype, fluster, trepidation), but regardless of abstraction, they FEEL more abstract due to unfamiliarity.

Ooblets dance-offs are really "just" a turn-based card RPG combat.

example move: Pilfer Polka, which costs 2 beats in order to steal 4 victory points.

but what is happening in this metaphor? how is my dancing stealing their glory? what kind of polka makes them look bad? huh?

by comparison, imagine a similar move from Slay the Spire -- it'd obviously be lifesteal/vampirism, leeching HP from the opponent. even though it's just as abstract (how did my sword waving around take their blood and put it into me again???), it feels more grounded.

this isn't a knock on Ooblets! it's a design that fits their needs! but my imagined story of what happens during their little dance-off battle is much less clear than my imagined story of standard RPG combat.

ok hold on I know there are some beautiful non-combat system challenges! in TTRPGs especially. Blades in the Dark uses grand heists as a metaphor. but there aren't _that_ many familiar situations that have analogs to all those combat elements I mentioned above. let's just take 1.

poison is heckin' complex in real life. IRL, poison can instantly kill you in some doses or take years to kick in, be a liquid or powder or gas, absorbed by skin or mouth or only open wounds, have various symptoms and treatments, etc.

but RPGs have used them in such a consistent way over the decades that we know what to expect, roughly: some damage over a longer period of time, possibly forever, or until a generic antidote has been consumed/applied.

you don't need to explain almost anything when you label something in a RPG as Poison unless you're wildly different than the standard, since just from observation players will be able to see and interpret its effects.

even better, due to its use in various media throughout our lives, the player can immediately imagine the details of what being exposed to Poison means -- feeling weak, green around the gills, sickly, etc.

to implement a similar-complexity mechanic in a Kissing game for example would be a nightmare of exposition. maybe Drool makes your mouth more Wet for some turns? is that bad? are my lips getting paralyzed? wait, why are we Kissing competitively as a challenge in the first place?

if I were to make a Poison analog in Ooblets dance-offs, I guess it would take away victory points for the next X turns? is it because their shoes are slippery, or until they clean them with a special antidote-analog cloth? ok sure.

ok so my examples are silly but you hopefully see my point (familiarity eases communication, approachability and imagination), which leads to the next point -- if the point is competitive challenge with a winner & loser, uh, maybe combat is thematically resonant after all.

overcoming an arbitrary-but-fair challenge is a unique pleasure, especially when doing so with friends, even fictional friends. in Ooblets dance-offs, it feels nice to see points go up, win, get loot, etc. (and often you praise/admire the loser afterwards! adorbs!)

but that pleasure is mitigated when you first have to spend a lot of time understanding sort-of-analogous mechanics, and imagine competitive-challenge scenarios that are unfamiliar, instead of focusing on the nuances and strategies of overcoming the challenge itself.

it will surprise no-one for me to say that the dance-offs in Ooblets are uniformly "easy" compared to most turn-based RPGs, and thank god. when you have an unfamiliar metaphor and abstract-feeling elements, making the challenge harder than trivial is a recipe for frustration.

the combat in Moon Hunters was also p easy, but in moments when we did make it a bit more difficult, I like to think it was a bit more approachable, since the WAYS it was difficult and the player's strategy failed were immediately evident, since it was using familiar metaphors.

all that to say I'm currently FINALLY working on a game without combat and uh yeah, thank goodness it is unlikely to attempt to have deep strategic systemic challenges for the player to overcome because if it did I think I'd "whoops" a combat core loop again.

the familiarity might not all be trained, either. most mammals play at wrestling and pouncing, and most human toddlers wave sticks like swords. even in an entirely non-violent environment, maybe there would be a draw towards playfighting Combat metaphors, idk.

anyway good luck out there game designers! stuff is hard! we'll do our best!