Saturday Morning Adventure Dev Diaries #7: Action Economy

In today's Saturday Morning Adventure dev diary, I wanted to go into my plans for designing the action economy in SMA.

It seems to me that the majority of RPGs these days use what I'm gonna call a "fixed slots" system when it comes to their action economy. Every round, each character has the same fixed slots that they can use to perform certain actions. For example, in D&D you have exactly one Action, one Bonus Action, and one Reaction to spend every round. This system works pretty well for obvious reasons: it's simple, easy to balance, everyone gets the same opportunities to act during the round. And while I do think I'm probably going to implement this sort of system in SMA, I first want to at least consider an alternative: action points.

Action Points

In an action point based system, each character would get a number of action points or AP at the start of each round. This number would be determined by their attributes, and could be a fixed number or a random roll. All the available actions an actor can take during the round would have an AP cost, and performing the action predictably uses up some points. At the end of the round, any leftover AP would be lost.

This type of system appeals to me mostly because of the sense of speed it can give to a character with high AP, and it rewards a particular character build in a different way to focusing on strength. It would really an opportunity to make fast characters and strong characters really feel different in their gameplay. Also, it lets you mess around with the action conomy more directly - rather than having to hand out or take away specific action types when special abilities call for it, you can simply add or subtract some AP.

Unfortunately, I don't think this system would really work for the best. For one, it would add another layer of difficultyy to balancing the combat actions of the game, unless you really simplified the system down to fast moves costing 1 AP and slow movees costing 2 AP, but at that point its not much different to a fixed slot-style system. Additionally, it could lead to games where some characters have significantly more "screentime" than others, for want of a better word. If you have one character making 3 or more decisions for different actions in each round while most characters only get 2 - well let's just say I hope you like the sound of their voice.

In all my reading prior to starting work on SMA, I've only seen one RPG system which uses an action point system, that being Runequest (previously featured in dev diaries #3 and #5). And even then, the implementation is fairly specific. Actors in Runequest can potentially have quite a few AP, and all actions in the game cost just one AP. The catch? You can still only make one "proactive action" (an action on your turn) each round, and the rest of your AP can only be used on reactions. This system works in Runequest because reactions are a pretty significant part of the game - they're used for common defensive actions like parrying and evasion. However, it doesn't seem like the right fit for SMA, a reaction-heavy action economy just isn't what I'm aiming for here.

In Closing

Before coming down solidly on using a fixed slot-style system for SMA, I wanna at least do some research into any other implementations of an action point-stlye systems I can find, see if there's anything like this out there that fits what I'm looking for better. I've had just quick look around, and found Pathfinder's "Unchained Action Economy" option, which seems closer to what I was imagining for SMA, so I might end up using something like that. As far as I can tell, it's more or less the same as the regular major action/minor action system, with major actions costing 2 action points and minor actions costing 1.

If it does come down to using a fixed slot-style system in SMA, I think I'll probably use the same basic formula used in D&D, but I want to make a few small tweaks. For one, I want characters to be able to downgrade their action into a bonus action, a houserule I've been using for a while. Yeah I'm aware that D&D is kinda designed around only one bonus action per turn in places, but it just feels a lot more free to me, and enforces the logic that a bonus action is something that can be done faster than a regular action. Also I want to codify free actions as an actual thing. Not having free actions defined in 5e never made any sense to me, especially considering how often they crop up in class abilities.

The next dev diary is on saving throws, and why they're bad and stinky. I hope to see you then!