Attack Skills System Ver. 4

I have to re-design the attack skills system of the game.

The first reason is because I lost the most recent version I had, so much of it needs to be recreated anyway.

But the more important reason is because I don't like it.

Maybe that's not entirely correct-- I like the system, I just don't like it enough. This will be the fourth major revision to the system.

Currently I am using a system that is very much inspired by modern MMORPG design, where each character has a variety of abilities that have cooldowns, and gameplay basically revolves around playing a kind of "whack the mole" mini-game with your abilities, popping them as they appear on your hotbar.

What I dislike about this design is that the abilities may have intended synergy, but it's not intuitively understandable by players that they are meant to be used in combos, since there is no clear connection between the abilities.

For example, a Wizard might have an ability to debuff an enemy with a Magical Defense penalty, which is meant to be followed up with a big hellfire attack that has a long cooldown. A player left to their own devices may instead use a less strong attack instead of the big, intended one. This is especially common if the character has several attacks- for aesthetic reasons, they may favor a different attack which may not be as effective.

To help guide the player to playing most effectively, it is better to make it so that the big hellfire attack cannot be used unless the target is under the effect of the Magical Defense penalty. That clearly tells the player the two abilities are meant to be used as part of a combo, and the only logical thing to do is use the big hellfire attack after the debuff.

This design results in "rotations", where the player uses abilities in a pre-set order, a sequence, and at the end of the sequence they start again from the start. So using our example of the Wizard, the first part of the sequence is the debuff, and the finisher is the hellfire attack. Rinse and repeat, and you have a "rotation".

I like this kind of design. The abilities have clear synergy with one another. Synergy is one of my primary design principles, as is clear communication to the player of what the rules are. The best games, in my opinion, are those which don't require any kind of tutorial for the player to know how to play. Like, Pac-Man, or Super Mario Bros. Primitive as they may look today, the intuitive gameplay of Golden Age arcade games demonstrates how smartly designed they were, and appreciation for "easy to learn, difficult to master" mechanics is sorely lacking in today's industry.

Unfortunately, by its very nature a tabletop RPG requires reading the rules, but that doesn't mean I cannot still infuse the value of intuitive rules design into my game.

The only question is how best to handle the change to the attack skills. The question is not only with how to adjust the existing abilities so they have clearly defined combos, but how best to handle the abilities that don't combo; How to make them useful and still have clear synergy.

If this were World of Warcraft, you would implement another resource that is built by using these abilities; for Death Knights, this is runic power, for Paladins it is Holy Power and for Rogues this is combo points. This built resource is then spent to power specific abilities, like a Death Knight's ranged "Death Coil" or a finisher move for a Rogue.

However....

...as my game is a tabletop system, it is harder for players with pencil and paper to track all these numbers going up and down during regular play. I do not want to have a ton of math crunching at the tabletop, as that distracts from play. And I have no talent at programming mobile applications that might best be suited to track such resources for the player.

So, I'm unsure how to proceed at the moment.

In many ways, non-digital game design is much more challenging than digital game design, since you can't just tell a computer to do the heavy lifting for the player.

It takes a great deal more ingenuity to invent new tabletop mechanics that actually improve the experience rather than frustrating players with cumbersome math.