Diving Into The Design Philosophy Behind Crit Success!

Hello all!

I recently got a few essays I wrote about combat design published, one that was more about table-top style combat and one that is more in line with computer game style combat design. In truth they were both about one thing: how combat systems affect the player experience. The two extremes I looked at this through is integer or whole number based math, and floating point or decimal place based math.

There's a lot of things that these two fundamental philosophies do to the game experience that can have nothing to do with what you intended. It affects things like accessibility, fun, and how interesting it is to play a combat system.

Critical Success is mostly about the combat. The spells are half & half about combat and plain situation management, the items are all made in terms of the actions they give you which is mostly useful in combat. In truth, the game doesn't really care about when and how much you do things unless you're in combat. So while combat is a big part of the game, the app, the rules, it is only a small part of the game's actions. I wanted this game to let you know all the possible ways to solve something and make you less scared to try the weird choices because it's assumed you will mostly succeed if you try it. The combat is about how you resolve two people with ultimate agency wanting different outcomes.

It needs to be easy to understand and easy to create a strategy because it is you, the player, imposing your will on the game world. I don't want you being confused about what you can do when or what is likely to be a better strategy.

That said, this game is meant to be deadly. High risk, high rewards, high stakes.

Needless to say this was all also done with high hopes. That's why I spend so much time thinking about other systems, how they affect the player experience. What it even means to be a table-top game and what would make a fun, narrative generating, interesting, accessible, and ultimate tabletop experience.

I'm not sure if I've achieved any of that with Critical Success, but I hope I'm moving in the right direction.
If you want to read more about these systemic combat system problems I was diving into you can read by article on Integer Based Combat Systems and my article on Floating Point Based Combat Systems on Gamasutra by following those links.

Thanks for reading and thanks for playing!

Brandon