My Bōgle: Rules Rules Rules

As I've mentioned in past articles, My Bogle is essentially a conversion of the Gladiators tabletop game. In this article and (at least one or two more upcoming articles), we're going to discuss what we used from Gladiators, and what we've had to adapt, add or take out entirely in order to have a rich video game that is not needlessly complex.

Background:
Gladiators was created to be a "user-friendly RPG", and the rule book that was created for it was miniature sized with only about 60 pages in it, just to prove the point that it was really very simple to learn. Everything was based on six sided dice, and the characters only had a few combat related stats:

Constitution - Determined Hit Points and a Strength modifier that adjusts the speed of the weapon used.
Dexterity - Determined Movement Points and an Initiative modifier to help determine the turn order.
Offensive Skill - Used to determine how many six sided dice you got to use when you attacked.
Defensive Skill - Used to determine how many six sided dice you got to use when you defended.

And then your character's chosen weapon would determine the following:
Range - how far away you can be from the enemy and still hit them.
Motion - how much movement would be used up when you attacked.
Damage - how many six sided dice you got to roll to determine how much damage was done if the attack succeeded.

Besides the character's name and experience point, that was pretty much it. The character sheets for Gladiators fit on a 3x5 index card. Of course, that's an over simplification. There's armor, shields, a monetary system, races and classes, but they were all very simple additions to the core attributes listed above.

Combat:
Gladiators combat took place on a hex grid (of varying dimensions). At the beginning of each turn, all of the characters would roll initiative to see who went in what order. Each character would start their turn with full use of their base movement points. Movement from one hex, to an adjacent hex required 2 movement. Attacking used up movement points based on the amount of motion required for the weapon (modified by the attacker's constitution bonuses). In theory, you could move, attack, move some more, attack again and attack a third time if you had enough movement, but generally a characters turn consisted of a move and an attack, or in some cases, two attacks. You determined who you could attack by the Range attribute of the weapon you were holding, so if you had a long sword, with a range of 3, then you could attack a character that was up to 3 hexes away from you.

Once an attack was declared, the attacker would roll the number of six sided dice determined by his Offensive Skill and the defender would roll the number of six sided dice determined by his Defensive Skill, and the winner would be decided in a manner similar to Risk - the highest die roll of each was compared first. If either person was the clear winner, then that was that. If it was a tie, then you compared the next highest die rolls, and so on. There was also a neat little rule about 6's. Any six would first be "rolled up" to see if you could determine a winner. This rolling up effect was also possible for certain types of weapon damage rolls. If the attacker won the roll, they would roll the number of six sided dice determined by their weapon's Damage attribute, and the total of all the dice would be subtracted from the defender's life points. Rinse. Repeat.

Oh, and one way we kept things fair and balanced between teams was to take pre-gen'ed character sheets and then have the teams "Draft" the characters they wanted. This was fairly effective, even if it gave me cold sweats from horrible 7th grade gym class flashbacks.

My Bogle:
When we decided to make a video game using the Gladiators system, we knew that we would have to make some changes (concessions?). While it was easy for a pen and paper type game to mix up the variety of armor and weapons, for example, it becomes exponentially more difficult to do it (well) in a video game. The art work alone could take more than the 6-8 month schedule we were working on. Having a multiplayer online game also meant that in order for it to be "fun" for everyone, we had to come up with a fair way to balance the characters and teams so that someone with a set of decked out/maxed out characters could fight a fair fight against a newbie (not that the newbie would win, but it would at least be fair). One thing that I really pushed for was point and click simplicity, and that meant that attacking had to be greatly simplified. With all this "redesign" it became clear that this wasn't exactly Gladiators, so we stopped trying to fit My Bogle squarely into the Gladiators framework. We would use what we could, but the official port of Gladiators to a PC game would have to wait. This gave us a great amount of freedom for My Bogle, but it also meant that the more we modified the rules, the greater the chance would be that we would "break" the game that had worked so well. It was really quite scary.

Well, this hasn't really been an interesting article, so let me jump into some juicy details about what changes and additions we've made to the rule system for My Bogle that we think have turned out just as good, if not better than the original. Some of these pieces are still a bit of a work in progress, but in general I think we are on the right track.

1. Each type of Bogle will have a pre-genned set of character stats that are based on the Gladiator's system. The stats are calculated as if we had pre-equipped the characters with weapons and armor, and balanced carefully so that no one character type is clearly dominant. We will have at a minimum 6 types of Bogle. We're also working on some unlockable character types.

2. Each type of Bogle will have a total of 3 levels. When you create your Bogle, they will always start at level 1. They will level up based on combat experience. Each level will cause the appearance of the Bogle to change slightly and it will cause their attributes to raise by a pre-determined amount. The downside to this is that it will effectively "cost more" to play with a higher level Bogle. Let me explain. At the start of the game, you choose which of your Bogle you will use for this battle, but you only have so many "points" to spend. If you are going to have a 12 point battle, then you can spend all your points on, say, four of your level 3 Bogle. Your opponent may choose six level 1 Bogle and three level 2 Bogle. Lower levels are great because they give you lots of warm bodies and therefore a variety of strengths and weaknesses (and tactics), but choosing a level 3 Bogle will mean that you can kick some serious tail. It's all balanced though so that whatever your strategy, there isn't a clear advantage one way or the other.

3. Ranged attacks are decreased fairly significantly over Gladiators. This makes combat animation easier/possible, but it also means that giving a character "Range" is a great tactical advantage. Variety is the spice of life.

4. Runes. These are like mini-power ups. They are collectible "tiles" that are used to increase the stats or abilities of the active character that generally only last until that characters next turn. There are just too many cool things about runes to talk about in this space, but it gives us back all of the combat tactics we had to "simplify" in order to give the user point and click game play... and then some.

5. Attack Attack!! Defend! Gladiators had shields for increasing defense. It also required the user to do a lot of math to figure out if they could move far enough to get in range and still have enough movement left over to attack. Trying to build a shield mechanic that worked in My Bogle was difficult, but expecting our players to do the math for attacking and moving just raised the barrier of entry way too far. It was a challenge to come up with a design that worked, to say the least. What we've come up with is to split "movement" and "actions". Your movement points go entirely to how far you can walk in one turn. The actions that you can take during any one turn are essentially:

- Stand still, and have two attacks (assuming the character you are attacking is in range).
- Move as much as you want and attack once. After attacking, you are allowed to keep on moving, if you still have any movement left.
- Move and defend. Defend increases your defensive dice by 1, so you have a better chance of surviving an oncoming attack. It also gives you something to do when you can't attack anyone :)
Defend ends your characters turn.
- Stand still and Attack once, then Defend. This allows a character with low health and low movement an option to try to stay alive when in close combat.

And of course anywhere along the way you can use a rune or three.

All of this is point and click so where you can move, who you can attack and whether or not you can defend are all perfectly clear. For example, if you move and then attack, you won't have the ability to attack again, or to defend, because you've used up all your actions for the turn. It's about as simple as can be and it's easy enough that it doesn't require a lot of detailed instructions to the user.

We also created some fun additions and made some really important design decisions that took advantage of the fact that we were making a video game.

1. Character stat tracking. One thing we couldn't put on those little 3x5 index cards was how many @sses your character has kicked and how many times he's had his own @ss handed to him. It's just another simple way of adding depth without adding complexity.

2. All the rolls are handled behind the scenes to speed up game play and make it more immersive. You aren't pulled out of the combat by waiting for the roll of the dice. You're waiting for the character to swing and waiting to see and hear the defender's reaction. Will it be a knock out or will the defender live on and have a chance to properly thank you for attacking him?

3. Down with hexes! Long live the hex! Hex movement is great because it's much more accurate than allowing (or disallowing) diagonal movement on a square grid. The disadvantage is that it's a little difficult to work with for the end user and it definitely has a stigma attached to it in the minds of some users. If you see a hex on a map in a video game, it shuts a lot of doors. So we turned to "Chinese Checkers" for the answer. The active character is provided with a "field of dots" with where they can move for their turn. Are they in a hex pattern? Yeah, but it no longer feels hex like. I can't tell you how pleased I am with how this has worked out. It's so much more immersive and yet it still has kind of a simple, boardgame charm.


Okay, wow... to all you that stuck around to read that, there's more where that came from! We've got game modes (you didn't think we'd only do "deathmatch" did you?), characters, runes and more to talk about. But I'll let you rest your eyes and let your brains buzz for a bit and I'll jump back into finishing this game. I hope this has whetted your appetite for My Bogle. If you have any questions or comments, just holler. We'd love to hear from you.
-Andrew Douglas
theoreticalgames.com
andrew@theoreticalgames.com