Five Point Combat is a video/board game battle system I'm developing for use in one or two of the games I'd like to create in the future. Originally I was thinking it would only be used in real-time games, but now I'm developing an adaptation for turn-based systems.
I got the idea for Five Point Combat from Rock/Paper/Scissors and Magic The Gathering. I always liked the way that Magic has five factions. Each faction has two allies and two enemies. The allies are the neighboring colors and the enemies are across.
In the end, Five Point Combat is simply rock/paper/scissors with two extra options. I'm not the first person to think of this. It was even featured on the Big Bang Theory.
The problem with rock/paper/scissors/lizard/Spock is that it's totally redundant. Adding the extra two options brings nothing to table and only serves to needlessly overcomplicate the game. Instead of 3 interactions you now have 10. However, this is obviously part of the joke so we'll have to let it slide. Interestingly enough, it does have the advantage of producing less tie games because there are five options instead of three.
Each ability in Five Point Combat soft-counters one ability and hard-counters another. In effect, this dynamic ensures that each ability will be hard and soft countered by the remaining two abilities. Unlike RPS, rounds are not independent of one another. This combat system is designed to designate a winner by tracking hit points lost by the loser over multiple rounds. Your character will lose more life if you get hard countered over soft countered. These logistics are ideally implemented in a role playing game, a fighting game, or any other system where health/tempo points are tracked over time.
It doesn't have to be five points. It only has to be an odd integer greater than 1. Rock/paper/scissors has three. A seven or even nine point system could be created, but it would be very convoluted. With seven points there would be a hard, soft, and medium counter. With 9 points there would be 4 tiers of counters... and so on. It's not necessary to go past 5 points until the method is tried, true, popular, and requires more complex interaction. Until then, I'm working on five points. Each point is an option or a skill one can employ.
It doesn't matter what the names of the options are. Well, it does matter, just not in the context of the technical mechanics. Technically, all that matters is that every option only gets hard countered and soft countered exactly once. The names of the abilities are simply there so the players can justify why one skill logically counters another. Truth be told, it's a lot harder to balance the logic than you would think. Just look at RPSLS.
Even in basic RPS, paper beats rock. Does this make logical sense? Not really. However, rock beating scissors and scissors beating paper makes perfect sense. Choosing the logical counters is easy in the beginning, but you're often locked into a matchup at the end that doesn't make any sense.
At first I came up with something genaric like:
Clearly a riposte should hard counter an attack, but the interactions between so many defensive abilities seemed convoluted and boring. So I swapped out parry for lunge and changed attack to slash. I tinkered with the counters but I still felt like I was missing something. I decided to table the idea and come back to it later.
Here I am some months later. I've been bored at work the past few days and have been trying to brainstorm a solution to this problem, while getting paid my insulting wage for a mindless job. Surprisingly, I'm actually pretty happy with what I came up with.
The first idea I came up with is that perhaps each ability should have a tiered aggression level.
Once I came up with this I realized that it doesn't make sense for each move to do the same amount of damage. Why would an overdefensive move take as much life away as an overagressive one?
Now that more aggressive skills do more base damage with a multiplier, it stands to reason that defensive abilities should mitigate damage to make up for the lacking damage.
These numbers are arbitrary with no testing behind them. They are simply placeholders until I can estimate better ones. In fact, off the top of my head, here's an even better solution:
| Damage Dealt | Damage Received |
|---|---|
| 120% | +20% |
| 110% | +10% |
| 100% | 0% |
| 90% | -10% |
| 80% | -20% |
It should also be noted that these numbers are to be used in a role playing game (likely turn-based). If I was making a real time fighting game I might do it completely differently.
The system starts to take shape when the real descriptions of abilities are superimposed over their generic counterparts.
At first I came up with:
1 > 2 >> 4
2 > 5 >> 3
3 > 1 >> 5
4 > 3 >> 2
5 > 4 >> 1
This simplistic notation maps the relationships of abilities. 1 > 2 >> 4 means that Charge soft counters Lunge and hard counters Riposte. The first ability is the one we are looking at. The second one is the soft counter and the third is the hard counter. It almost like playing a game of Sudoku because every column has to have five rows of the unique numbers 1-5.
What I liked the most about how this one turned out is that the balanced attack slash ended up countering both the overaggressive ability and the overdefensive one. This made logical sense to me. It was also nice that riposte countered lunge and slash, the two abilities one would associate with swordplay. I would say the pairing that makes the least sense is charge soft countering lunge, but as I said before, the logic is extremely harder to balance than it looks. I challenge you to come up with better logical counters than these. 5 SBD if you can convince me that you came up with a more balanced 5 point map.
These abilities imply that the user is carrying a sword (or at least a melee weapon). However, the names of new abilities can simply be overlaid on top of the old logic. You could change reposte to parry. You could change Deflect to Block or Redirect. I would give a beast abilities like rush, jump, swipe, hunker, sidestep. As long as the logic remains the same, jump (lunge) still counters slash (swipe). This got me thinking about elemental abilities.
What if your character is a wizard? Perhaps the same combat model can be applied here as well:
I thought this was a good order in the context of most aggressive to least aggressive, but do the counters hold up? It turns out they hold up better than I had hoped.
At first I was annoyed that water only soft countered fire.
Then I realized with enough fire you could evaporate the water, so it made sense.
Earth absorbs Water and becomes heavy, eventually turning to mud. This counter also made sense to me.
Lightning hard counters Water, the perfect obvious outcome.
Like Water, Earth is also conductive. "Grounding" a live wire implies putting it in the Earth where it travels to the iron core of our planet.
I'm reminded of a game of thrones quote here:
When the mountains blow in the wind like leaves.
Wind cannot move Earth.
And another from Smokey the Bear:
Only you can prevent forest fires.
Don't forget to cover your campfire with dirt before you leave the campsite. No amount of fire could hurt Earth. In fact fire may even create a stronger lava monster! Look out!
Wind countering water can be justified in several ways. Boats catch the wind to navigate through water. A hovercraft uses air to repel water. Air is lighter than water and exists above it. The idea here is that water is slower than air and can be manipulated by it because they are both free-moving particles. Adding wind to water gives you a hurricane.
The counters to Lightning are the weakest link and required me to do some serious mental gymnastics. If one seeks to control lightning they must be able to ionize the air. If you control the wind you can redirect the ionized air particles.
Heat has an effect on airflow. Hot air rises, and this rising air creates a vacuum that needs to be filled with yet more air. This is why fire is a weak counter to lightning's ionized air particles.
Wind cannot hope to defeat fire. Adding wind to fire only adds oxygen to it and allows it to spread and grow out of control. This is one of the more solid counters from a logical justification standpoint.
I was very surprised that all the counters made logical sense. I was even more surprised that the weakest link Fire > Lightning was also my previous weakest link Charge > Lunge. Must be a curse! Skill 1 soft countering Skill 2 is necessary but hard to justify. Although, my justification for Fire > Lightning is starting to grow on me so maybe I'll get over it and stop looking for the perfect answers.
This is just a little taste of what I'm going for in the game I want to create on the blockchain. I want to create an open-source project that anyone here can help me develop, and get paid doing so. At first I was afraid to just throw my ideas on the blockchain. We are conditioned to worry about scarcity and intellectual property. However, the blockchain is creating a new paradigm where cooperation trumps competition. We can all ascend together instead of stepping on the backs of the less fortunate. I look forward to the future, and this is not a statement to be taken lightly.
