Saturday Morning Adventure Dev Diaries #1: Positioning in Combat

Okay here we go. I'm jumping into pondering about some of my ideas for my next big project Saturday Morning Adventure. I thought I would start out with my ideas regarding how positioning may work in combat.

First of all, let's talk about the (theoretical) game board. I don't want to track distance in combat. Like a lot of older video games, the game board will be simply split into the "friends" side and the "foes" side. For now I'm going to refer to each of these sides as a "territory". Most combat encounters will just have the two territories, but I'll probably include rules for running multiple at once. Each territory will also have up to 2 possible positions, lead and rear. Characters in the lead position are up front, facing the opposing territory directly while characters in the rear position are hanging back, focusing on either support or ranged attacks. I'm worried I'm getting caught up in my words here, so I'll give a quick visual example.

Here the light green represents the lead position, while the dark green represents the rear. We have a typical adventuring party facing off against a group of orcs. The key difference between front and rear positions is that while you are in the rear position, you cannot make melee attacks. But fret not, you also can't be targeted by them either. So in this example Aron, the fighrer in the rear will have to rely on ranged attacks but is safe from the enemy orc's swords. Characters will be able to change position on their turns of course, letting you fall back if you're taking too much damage from the enemy's melee attacks. Additionally, there must always be at least one chracter on each side in the front position - if all of the chracters in the front fall back to the rear, the rear becomes the new front as the enemy advances.

So thats a quick summary of how I plan to make distance and positioning work in the game. I'm still trying to find a good way to describe it succinctly, it always ends up sounding far more confusing than I think it is when I put it into words. Obviously I plan to expand upon this system in the future, but that really is the gist of it. The core motivation behind this system is to avoid tracking position and distance extensively. Hopefully this just gives everyone less to keep track of while preserving at least a little tactical decision making.

That's all for this little update. I really enjoyed writing this post, I really find this kinda thinking during the planning stage where I'm not too bogged down in details a lot of fun. I'm planning to get another post out in a couple days giving an update to a couple advanced classes for the Modern Manual, I hope to see you here then!